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Updated: June 16, 2025
The Asiatic style represents a permanent type of oratorical effort, the desire to use word-painting instead of life-painting, turgidity instead of vigour, allusiveness instead of directness, point instead of wit, frigid inflation instead of real passion. It borrows poetical effects, and heightens the colour without deepening the shade.
Here we catch our first glimpse of him, in his own word-painting, as a "very queer small boy," a small boy who was sickly and delicate, and could take but little part in the rougher sports of his school companions, but read much, as sickly boys will read the novels of the older novelists in a "blessed little room," a kind of palace of enchantment, where "'Roderick Random, 'Peregrine Pickle, 'Humphrey Clinker, 'Tom Jones, 'The Vicar of Wakefield, 'Don Quixote, 'Gil Blas, and 'Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep him company."
With Tacitus, a field of battle is not an occasion for "word-painting," as we call it; the battle is always first, the scenery of less importance. He tells, what it is necessary to know; but he is too wise to think, that we can realise from words, a place which we have never seen; and too sound in his taste, to forget the wholesome boundaries between poetry and prose.
Presently their conversation drifted to other things, and Paul told her how he longed to see the world and its people and its ways. She had been almost everywhere, it seemed, and with her talent of word-painting, she took him with her on the magic carpet of her vivid description to east and west and north and south.
Valleys that open deep into the earth; mountains that lead the eye far up into heaven; plains that stretch to the horizon's verge, until the rim of the blue canopy seems to rest upon their limitless level; "rolling" landscapes, whose softly-turned ridges remind one of the wavy billows of the ocean. Alas! word-painting can give but a faint idea of these scenes.
Restraint in descriptions of mountains, walls, rivers, and the like, is very important; you must not give the impression that you are making a tasteless display of word-painting, and expatiating independently while the history takes care of itself. Just a light touch no more than meets the need of clearness , and you should pass on, evading the snare, and denying yourself all such indulgences.
Nothing one could say about it can give the satisfaction derived from a visit, and no word-painting can do it justice. A couple of miles from the cantonment, and the broad Jumna is crossed on a pontoon bridge, the buoys of which are tubular iron floats instead of boats. Crocodiles are observed floating, motionless as logs, their heads turned up-stream and their snouts protruding from the water.
The fresh and enthusiastic, though somewhat diffuse, descriptions of country enjoyments in the second and sixteenth Epodes, and the vigorous word-painting in the fifth, bespeak the future master; and the patriotic emotion in the seventh, ninth, and sixteenth, strikes a note that was to thrill with loftier vibrations in the Odes of the third and fourth books.
It affords infinite variety, and endless delight. One necessary element in so-called word-painting is that of time. When a speaker expresses himself in pictures for the imagination he must give his hearers time to see these pictures, and to sufficiently see and appreciate the parts, or lines of them, and the significance of them.
I shall turn my MSS. into French and publish them there. The language lends itself to perfect lucidity, and the Paris press allows men to write as men. Besides, the French admire word-painting, which is my particular vein. The English don't. They like composition. Here an author's pen must remain always a stick dipped in ink.
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