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Updated: June 16, 2025
The day was Palm Sunday, and the great French historian Michelet has, with his accustomed skill and bright, vivid word-painting, in his short but incomparable Life of the heroine not only of France but of humanity, reminded his readers with what a longing Joan of Arc must, on that festival of joy and triumph, have yearned for the privilege 'to breathe once again the fresh air of heaven. Daughter of the fields, born on the border of the woods, she who had always lived under the open sky had to pass Easter Day in a dark dungeon tower.
Surely when, after having reviled M. Tissot almost personally, he describes his works as painted with "muck, wine-sauce, and mud," it is difficult not to answer with a tu quoque as far as this word-painting is concerned difficult not to see here some morbid and "frightful appetite for the hideous" struggling with the healthy appetite for better things.
Where would then be the place of him who never passes into ratiocination or rhetoric, never passes into excessive word-painting or into euphuism, never speaks so loud as to be heard rather than overheard, but, on the contrary, gives us always clear and simple pictures, and always in musical language?
The first I have mentioned as a specimen of Purcell's "word-painting": there, at one stroke of immense imaginative power, we have the depths of the sea as vividly painted as in Handel's "And with the blast," or "The depths have covered them." Another exquisite bit of painting mentioned in my first chapter is repeated several times: the rippling sea on a calm day.
I rejoice to hear of the new work, and can answer for its excellence. I trust that the English edition of Dr. Holmes will contain the "Astraea," and the "Morning Visit," and the "Cambridge Address." I am not sure, in my secret soul, that I do not prefer him to any American poet. Besides his inimitable word-painting, the charity is so large and the scale so fine.
The reply is made that a large quantity of the most famous passages in Shakespeare are descriptive of scenery, and would not have been written but for the fact that he had no other means of conveying his ideas to the audience. If there be any truth in this, one may be very thankful for the fact which coerced him into his word-painting.
Fine descriptive shades may be attained by taking such selections as Byron's "The Ocean," Bryant's "Thanatopsis," Shelley's "The Cloud" and "Ode to West Wind," accentuating with gestures of the arm and hand every sweep or impulse of the word-painting, letting the curve of the figure described in the air by the hand correspond with what is wanted in the mind by the picture.
So well had she told her story, so perfect had been its word-painting, he was sure that he would recognize every scene. He explored the ivy-terrace leading to his mother's room, he walked up and down under the lime trees, and he sat on the bench still in position under the ivy hanging from the balustrade, and looked up wistfully at the windows of the rooms that had been hers.
We want less word-painting and fine phrases, and more observation at first-hand. Every contributor should be at once turned out if he or she is generally believed to have tried to do something which he or she did not care about trying to do, and anything should be admitted which is the outcome of a genuine liking. People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.
His slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his visage, the apparently painful effort with which he framed his sentences, and, above all, the surprise that spread over his face when the audience roared with delight or rapturously applauded the finer passages of his word-painting, were unlike anything of the kind they had ever known.
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