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Through the representative nicety of his themes, through his inordinate capacity for thematic variation and transformation, his playful and witty and colorful instrumentation, Strauss was able to impart to his music a concreteness and descriptiveness and realism hitherto unknown to symphonic art, to characterize briefly, sparingly, justly, a personage, a situation, an event.
I can count on my fingers the number of those who were then, and are still, in the forefront of popularity. Of the others poor Captain Wallis, for instance, is dead and no modern writer, in my opinion, can equal the brilliant descriptiveness of Wallis's articles in the Daily Post.
The old folio editions have been often mutilated by over use; the many later editions in octavo are mutilated by design of their editors; and for conveying any idea of the rough truthful descriptiveness of a book compiled in the palmy days of highway robbery, they are worthless.
Descriptive journalism was then and for nearly half a century afterwards unknown, and the poem by its descriptiveness, by its appeal to the curiosity of its readers, made the same kind of success that vividly written special correspondence would to-day, the charm of metre super-added. Lord Byron gave his readers something more, too, than mere description.
"Now indeed we come to the most difficult part of our task, and it is better to confess at once that anything resembling journalistic descriptiveness must be resolutely laid aside. The greatest things are best told in the simplest words. "Towards the close of the fourth verse, a figure in a plain dark suit was observed ascending the steps of the platform.
"Surely the isles shall wait for thee, and the ships of Tarshish to bring thy sons from afar, their silver and their gold with them, to the name of the Lord thy God, and the Holy One of Israel." "Seek ye the Lord while he may be found." ISA. lv: 6. Isaiah stands head and shoulders above the other Old Testament authors in vivid descriptiveness of Christ.
You cannot detect all the counterfeit currency in the world, severe as the test for counterfeits was in the old West. There is, of course, no great amount of difference between the West and the East. All America, as well as the West, demanded of its citizens nothing so much as genuineness. Yet the Western phrase, to "stand the acid," was not surpassed in graphic descriptiveness.
And penetrating to some yet lonelier place, we find it consecrated to that life-long sorrow, whatever it may be, which is made immortal in the plaintive cadence of the Pewee. There is one favorite bird, the Chewink, or Ground-Robin, which, I always fancied, must have been known to Keats when he wrote those few words of perfect descriptiveness,
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