lements.

Aside from the fact that a single lengthy description of a person
usually will have less effect on a reader than the same amount of
descriptive matter deftly interpolated throughout the whole story, or
the fact that recurrent descriptive touches as to setting will do more
to give body to the fiction than a single lengthy description, the
writer should consider the mere rhetorical difficulty of descriptive
writing. He must stand or fall by the picture he creates. In narrating,
he has another resource than perfection in expression, for the bare
event, apart from the way it is told, will interest a reader. But a
picture will not interest unless it is a picture. Rhetorical skill is
the sole determinant between absolute success and flat failure in
describing. And it is hard enough to find one or two telling descriptive
phrases without contracting with the reader to supply several pages of
them. Not only is a long descriptive passage of questionable value in
the normal story, even when well done, but very few can write a long
descriptive passage well. The matter of emphasis here comes up again for
consideration. Vividness is not absolute, but relative. One vivid phrase
will seem vivid to a reader, but fifty or a hundred together will not.
The reader will become accustomed to the higher level of expression, and
the whole will fail of its object.

In the course of a story the writer will have occasion to describe
persons and--roughly--things. Descriptive writing is descriptive
writing, but the matters for consideration in describing a man or woman
and a countryside are somewhat different, and will be taken up
separately.

DESCRIPTION OF PERSONS

As I have stated in another place, the writer cannot gain much in
capacity to express through the objective study of examples. He can only
practice the art, seriously and intelligently. But Stevenson's brief
story of an episode in the life of Master Francois Villon of Paris,
poet, master of arts, and house-breaker, "A Lodging for the Night," so
perfectly describes the persons involved that it calls for quotation.
The object is not to display perfect use of epithet, rather to
demonstrate the entire adequacy of brief and pungent description.
Villon, after a short introduction, is discovered in a small house with
"some of the thievish crew with whom he consorted."

"A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from the
arched chimney. Before this straddl