The View Vertical; And Other Essays

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1920 Excerpt: ... FACES IN FICTION ONE of the greatest difficulties for the conscientious story-writer is the drawing of faces. For many an author story-telling reduces itself to fitting a plot and an environment to a pair of burning eyes, or a pair of subtle lips suddenly visioned forth from chaos. He is not conscious of creating men and women, but merely of explaining their physiognomy. Every novelist walks through life surrounded by a crowd of faces, not only finished in every detail of line and color, but challenging with spirit-life to be investigated. The souls flickering behind these palpitant masks are importunate for the author's veracity, and frequently he feels helpless so to transfer a countenance from his own to the reader's retina that eyes, nose, mouth shall not belie the character they are meant to indicate. A writer needs to ascertain some of the laws and some of the dangers of facemaking if he is to picture to his reader's imagination exactly the same people he has first pictured to his own. The first peril one meets in portraiture is that of so accentuating some one feature as to produce a caricature. On the other hand, impartial attention to separate features often fails to give any unified impression; detailed description either descends to the dullness of a catalogue or misses effecting any picture at all through ignoring one essential fact of the average reader's psychology--lengthy wordpainting, however excellent in itself, misses its aim because sustained visualization is impossible for most people. They lose the picture by their very effort to give it continuous attention, whereas they can keep on reading appreciatively as long as something is happening or somebody is talking, just as most of us are less exhausted by the theater than by an art galle...