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Updated: June 16, 2025
"Well, my aunt, sir, when 'er fowls 'ad the roop, she gave them snuff." "Give them snuff, she did," he repeated, with relish, "every morning." "Snuff!" said Mrs. Ukridge. "Yes, ma'am. She give 'em snuff till their eyes bubbled." Mrs. Ukridge uttered a faint squeak at this vivid piece of word-painting. "And did it cure them?" asked Ukridge. "No, sir," responded the expert soothingly.
Is the book a window, through which I am to see life? Then I cannot have the glass too clear. Is it to affect me like a strain of music? Then I am still more disturbed by any affectations. Is it to produce the effect of a picture? Then I know I want the simplest harmony of color. And I have learned that the most effective word-painting, as it is called, is the simplest.
So far as I can recall, there was nothing particularly brilliant or original in the early sermons or addresses of the young missionary nothing of those wondrous displays of word-painting, imagination, and dramatic power which have made his brother, Dr. T. De Witt Talmage, famous.
The word-painting of Virgil is wonderful sometimes; but his gods and men move through the scenes of passion and strife and pity and love like the graceful figures in an Elizabethan mask, whereas in the Iliad they give three leaps and go on singing.
Are there not in his books more and finer passages of descriptive poetry word-painting call them what you will, than in any other prose book in the English language? 'Not a doubt of it, my dear Claude; but it will not do for every one to try Mr. Ruskin's tools.
It is, as the editor observes, an "effortless narrative," with "no attempt at fine or sensational writing, ... at that modern artifice which they call word-painting," but recording with "vivid exactness" what was seen and felt by the writer and her companions on a journey through regions then little frequented by tourists and unsmirched by the eloquence of guide-books.
The shortest scrap of word-painting, as Thomson's "Seasons" will sufficiently prove, is wearisome and dead, unless there be a living figure in the landscape, or unless, failing a living figure, the scene is deliberately described with reference to the poet or the reader, not as something in itself, but as something seen by him, and grouped and subordinated exactly as it would strike his eye and mind.
The Barowsky Brothers' bank building is the show-place of the district. It is a staring white structure covered with gilt business signs and adorned with abortive minarets that give it an air distinctly Oriental. The entrance hall and the banking-rooms are sumptuous. They recall the Arabian Nights and the word-painting of a circus poster.
When I read that short and simple cablegram, the thought came to my mind that if only the greater number of modern rioters in language were compelled to hoard their words out of sheer necessity for the cable, we should have better results from the attempts at word-painting that now cumber the ground. And this brings me directly to a consideration of Steevens's work.
"Ah, well," said Sylla, with a shrug of her shoulders and a slight elevation of her expressive eyebrows, "I don't think I care much about your Lady Mary; your word-painting has been a little too flattering." "You mustn't condemn her just because she has got this whim in her head. We know her well, and like her very much. We have been brought up so much with her own children, you know.
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