“But nobody has called attention to the disappearance of another element, as though nobody missed it. We have almost forgotten that descriptions of sunsets, storms, rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys used to be one of the staple ingredients of fiction, not merely a painted backdrop for the action but a component evidently held to be necessary to the art. The nineteenth-century novel was full of “descriptive writing”; a course called that was still given at Vassar when I was an undergraduate. How ...innocent and young-ladylike that sounds, bringing back the push-pulls and whorls of Palmer Method penmanship.We have come a long way from the time when the skill of an author was felt to be demonstrated by his descriptive prowess: Dickens’ London fogs, Fenimore Cooper’s waterfalls, forests, prairie, Emily Brontë’s moors, Hardy’s heath and milky vales, Melville’s Pacific. Yet in their day these were taken as samplings of the author’s purest creative ore, his vein of genius—more even than character-portrayal or plot handling.MoreLessRead More Read Less
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