[Transcriber's Note: In this text, words or phrases that were printedin italics are surrounded with underscore symbols _like this_ andwords or phrases that were printed in bold type are set off with equalsigns =like this=. ] A MANUAL OF THE ART OF FICTION Other Books by Clayton Hamilton ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON . . . . $3. 50 net Published by Doubleday, Page & Company THE THEORY OF THE THEATRE . . . . $1. 60 net STUDIES IN STAGECRAFT . . . . . . $1. 60 net PROBLEMS OF THE PLAYWRIGHT. . . . $1. 60 net Published by Henry Holt & Company A Manual of THE ART OF FICTION Prepared for the Use of Schools and Colleges By CLAYTON HAMILTON Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters;Extension Lecturer in English, Columbia University With an Introduction by BRANDER MATTHEWS Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters;Professor of Dramatic Literature, Columbia University GARDEN CITY--NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1919 Copyright, 1918, by Doubleday, Page & Company All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreignlanguages, including the Scandinavian. TO FREDERIC TABER COOPER WITH ADMIRATION FOR THE CRITIC WITH AFFECTION FOR THE FRIEND FOREWORD This MANUAL OF THE ART OF FICTION is a revised and amplified edition of "Materials and Methods of Fiction, " by Clayton Hamilton, which was first published in 1908. The earlier work was immediately recognized as an important piece of constructive criticism and has held its position ever since as one of the leading books in its field. On the tenth anniversary of its appearance, the publishers have asked the author to prepare this annotated and enlarged edition, particularly for the use of students and teachers in schools and colleges. DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY. _Garden City, New York, 1918. _ CONTENTS FOREWORD vii INTRODUCTION xiii I. THE PURPOSE OF FICTION 3 Fiction a Means of Telling Truth--Fact and Fiction--Truth and Fact--The Search for Truth--The Necessary Triple Process--Different Degrees of Emphasis--The Art of Fiction and the Craft of Chemistry--Fiction and Reality--Fiction and History--Fiction and Biography--Biography, History, and Fiction--Fiction Which Is True--Fiction Which Is False--Casual Sins against the Truth in Fiction--More Serious Sins against the Truth--The Futility of the Adventitious--The Independence of Created Characters--Fiction More True Than a Casual Report of Fact--The Exception and the Law--Truthfulness the only Title to Immortality--Morality and Immorality in Fiction--The Faculty of Wisdom--Wisdom and Technic--General and Particular Experience--Extensive and Intensive Experience--The Experiencing Nature--Curiosity and Sympathy. II. REALISM AND ROMANCE 25 Two Methods of Exhibiting the Truth--Every Mind Either Realistic or Romantic--Marion Crawford's Faulty Distinction--A Second Unsatisfactory Distinction--A Third Unsatisfactory Distinction--Bliss Perry's Negative Definition--The True Distinction One of Method, Not of Material--Scientific Discovery and Artistic Expression--The Testimony of Hawthorne--A Philosophic Formula--Induction and Deduction--The Inductive Method of the Realist--The Deductive Method of the Romantic--Realism, Like Inductive Science, a Strictly Modern Product--Advantages of Realism--Advantages of Romance--The Confinement of Realism--The Freedom of Romance--Neither Method Better Than the Other--Abuses of Realism--Abuses of Romance. III. THE NATURE OF NARRATIVE 44 Transition from Material to Method--The Four Methods of Discourse--1. Argumentation; 2. Exposition; 3. Description; 4. Narration, the Natural Mood of Fiction--Series and Succession--Life Is Chronological, Art Is Logical--The Narrative Sense--The Joy of Telling Tales--The Missing of This Joy--Developing the Sense of Narrative--The Meaning of the Word "Event"--How to Make Things Happen--The Narrative of Action--The Narrative of Character--Recapitulation. IV. PLOT 60 Narrative a Simplification of Life--Unity in Narrative--A Definite Objective Point--Construction, Analytic and Synthetic--The Importance of Structure--Elementary Narrative--Positive and Negative Events--The Picaresque Pattern--Definition of Plot--Complication of the Network--The Major Knot--"Beginning, Middle, and End"--The Sub-Plot--Discursive and Compacted Narratives--Telling Much or Little of a Story--Where to Begin a Story--Logical Sequence and Chronological Succession--Tying and Untying--Transition to the Next Chapter. V. CHARACTERS 77 Characters Should Be Worth Knowing--The Personal Equation of the Audience--The Universal Appeal of Great Fictitious Characters--Typical Traits--Individual Traits--The Defect of Allegory--The Defect of Caricature--Static and Kinetic Characters--Direct and Indirect Delineation--Subdivisions of Both Methods--I. Direct Delineation: 1. By Exposition; 2. By Description; [Gradual Portrayal]; 3. By Psychological Analysis; 4. By Reports from other Characters--II. Indirect Delineation: 1. By Speech; 2. By Action; 3. By Effect on other Characters; 4. By Environment. VI. SETTING 99 Evolution of Background in the History of Painting--The First Stage--The Second Stage--The Third Stage--Similar Evolution of Setting in the History of Fiction: The First Stage--The Second Stage--The Third Stage: 1. Setting as an Aid to Action--2. Setting as an Aid to Characterization--Emotional Harmony in Setting--The Pathetic Fallacy--Emotional Contrast in Setting--Irony in Setting--Artistic and Philosophical Employment--1. Setting as a Motive toward Action--2. Setting as an Influence on Character--Setting as the Hero of the Narrative--Uses of the Weather--Romantic and Realistic Settings--A Romantic Setting by Edgar Allan Poe--A Realistic Setting by George Eliot--The Quality of Atmosphere, or Local Color--Recapitulation. VII. THE POINT OF VIEW IN NARRATIVE 120 The Importance of the Point of View--Two Classes, The Internal and the External--I. Subdivisions of the First Class: 1. The Point of View of the Leading Actor; 2. The Point of View of Some Subsidiary Actor; 3. The Points of View of Different Actors; 4. The Epistolary Point of View. --II. Subdivisions of the Second Class:--1. The Omniscient Point of View; 2. The Limited Point of View; 3. The Rigidly Restricted Point of View--Two Tones of Narrative, Impersonal and Personal: 1. The Impersonal Tone; 2. The Personal Tone--The Point of View as a Factor in Construction--The Point of View as the Hero of the Narrative. VIII. EMPHASIS IN NARRATIVE 139 Essential and Contributory Features--Art Distinguishes Between the Two by Emphasis--Many Technical Devices: 1. Emphasis by Terminal Position; 2. Emphasis by Initial Position; 3. Emphasis by Pause [Further Discussion of Emphasis by Position]; 4. Emphasis by Direct Proportion; 5. Emphasis by Inverse Proportion; 6. Emphasis by Iteration; 7. Emphasis by Antithesis; 8. Emphasis by Climax; 9. Emphasis by Surprise; 10. Emphasis by Suspense; 11. Emphasis by Imitative Movement. IX. THE EPIC, THE DRAMA, AND THE NOVEL 157 Fiction a Generic Term--Narrative in Verse and Narrative in Prose--Three Moods of Fiction: I. The Epic Mood--II. The Dramatic Mood: 1. Influence of the Actor; 2. Influence of the Theatre; 3. Influence of the Audience--[Dramatized Novels]--III. The Novelistic Mood. X. THE NOVEL, THE NOVELETTE, AND THE SHORT-STORY 172 Novel, Novelette, and Short-Story--The Novel and the Novelette--The Short-Story a Distinct Type--The Dictum of Poe--The Formula of Brander Matthews--Definition of the Short-Story--Explanation of This Definition: 1. "Single Narrative Effect"; 2. "Greatest Economy of Means"; and 3. "Utmost Emphasis"--Brief Tales That Are Not Short-Stories--Short-Stories That Are Not Brief--Bliss Perry's Annotations--The Novelist and the Writer of Short-Stories--The Short-Story More Artistic Than the Novel--The Short-Story Almost Necessarily Romantic. XI. THE STRUCTURE OF THE SHORT-STORY 189 Only One Best Way to Construct a Short-Story--Problems of Short-Story Construction--The Initial Position--The Terminal Position--Poe's Analysis of "The Raven"--Analysis of "Ligeia"--Analysis of "The Prodigal Son"--Style Essential to the Short-Story. XII. THE FACTOR OF STYLE 207 Structure and Style--Style a Matter of Feeling--Style an Absolute Quality--The Twofold Appeal of Language--Concrete Examples--Onomatopoetic Words--Memorable Words--The Patterning of Syllables--Stevenson on Style--The Pattern of Rhythm--The Pattern of Literation--Style a Fine Art--Style an Important Aid to Fiction--The Heresy of the Accidental--Style an Intuitive Quality--Methods and Materials--Content and Form--The Fusion of Both Elements--The Author's Personality--Recapitulation. INDEX 227 INTRODUCTION In our time, in these early years of the twentieth century, the novelis the prosperous parvenu of literature, and only a few of those whoacknowledge its vogue and who laud its success take the trouble torecall its humble beginnings and the miseries of its youth. But likeother parvenus it is still a little uncertain of its position in thesociety in which it moves. It is a newcomer in the literary world; andit has the self-assertiveness and the touchiness natural to thesituation. It brags of its descent, although its origins are obscure. It has won its way to the front and it has forced its admission intocircles where it was formerly denied access. It likes to forget thatit was once but little better than an outcast, unworthy of recognitionfrom those in authority. Perhaps it is still uneasily conscious thatnot a few of those who were born to good society may look at it withcold suspicion as though it was still on sufferance. Story-telling has always been popular, of course; and the desire isdeep-rooted in all of us to hear and to tell some new thing and totell again something deserving remembrance. But the novel itself, andthe short-story also, must confess that they have only of late beenable to claim equality with the epic and the lyric, and with comedyand tragedy, literary forms consecrated by antiquity. There were nineMuses in Greece of old, and no one of these daughters of Apollo wasexpected to inspire the writer of prose-fiction. Whoever had then astory to tell, which he wished to treat artistically, never dreamed ofexpressing it except in the nobler medium of verse, in the epic, inthe idyl, in the drama. Prose seemed to the Greeks, and even to theLatins who followed in their footsteps, as fit only for pedestrianpurposes. Even oratory and history were almost rhythmic; and mereprose was too humble an instrument for those whom the Muses cherished. The Alexandrian vignettes of the gentle Theocritus may be regarded asanticipations of the modern short-story of urban local color; but thisdelicate idyllist used verse for the talk of his Tanagra figurines. Even when the modern languages entered into the inheritance of Latinand Greek, verse held to its ancestral privileges, and the brief taletook the form of the ballad, and the longer narrative called itself a_chanson de geste_. Boccaccio and Rabelais and Cervantes might winimmediate popularity and invite a host of imitators; but it was longafter their time before a tale in prose, whether short or long, achieved recognition as worthy of serious critical consideration. Inhis study of Balzac, Brunetière recorded the significant fact that nonovelist, who was purely and simply a novelist, was elected to theFrench Academy in the first two centuries of its existence. And thesame acute critic, in his "History of Classical French Literature, "pointed out that French novels were under a cloud of suspicion even sofar back as the days of Erasmus, in 1525. It was many scores of yearsthereafter before the self-appointed guardians of French literatureesteemed the novel highly enough to condescend to discuss it. Perhaps this was not altogether a disadvantage. French tragedy wasdiscussed only too abundantly; and the theorists laid down rules forit which were not a little cramping. Another French critic, M. LeBreton, in his account of the growth of French prose-fiction in thefirst half of the nineteenth century, has asserted that this exemptionfrom criticism really redounded to the benefit of the novel, since thedespised form was allowed to develop naturally, spontaneously, freefrom all the many artificial restrictions which the dogmatistssucceeded in imposing on tragedy and on comedy, and which resulted atlast in the sterility of the French drama toward the end of theeighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. While thisadvantage is undeniable, one may question whether it was not bought attoo great a price and whether there would not have been a certainprofit for prose-fiction if its practitioners had been kept up to themark by a criticism which educated the public to demand greater carein structure, more logic in the conduct of events, and stricterveracity in the treatment of characters. However much it might then be deemed unworthy of serious consideration, the novel in the eighteenth century began to attract to itself more andmore authors of rich natural endowment. In English literature especially, prose-fiction tempted men as unlike as Defoe and Swift, Richardson andFielding, Smollett and Sterne, Goldsmith and Johnson. And a littleearlier the eighteenth century essayists, with Steele and Addison at thehead of them, had developed the art of character-delineation, adevelopment out of which the novelists were to make their profit. Theinfluence of the English eighteenth-century essay on the growth ofprose-fiction, not only in the British Isles, but also on the continentof Europe, is larger than is generally admitted. Indeed, there is asense in which the successive papers depicting the character and thedeeds of Sir Roger de Coverley may be accepted as the earliest of serialstories. But it was only in the nineteenth century that the novel reached itsfull expansion and succeeded in winning recognition as the heir of theepic and the rival of the drama. This victory was the direct result ofthe overwhelming success of the Waverley novels and of the countlessstories written more or less in accordance with Scott's formula, byCooper, by Victor Hugo and Dumas, by Manzoni, and by all the otherswho followed in their footsteps in every modern language. Not onlyborn story-tellers but writers who were by natural gift poets ordramatists, seized upon the novel as a form in which they couldexpress themselves freely and by which they might hope to gain aproper reward in money as well as in fame. The economic interpretationof literary history has not received the attention it deserves; andthe future investigator will find a rich field in his researches forthe causes of the expansion of the novel in the nineteenth centurysimultaneous with the decline of the drama in the literature of almostevery modern language except French. As the nineteenth century drew toward its maturity, the influence ofBalzac reinforced the influence of Scott; and realism began to assertits right to substitute itself for romance. The adjustment ofcharacter to its appropriate background, the closer connection offiction with the actual facts of life, the focussing of attention onthe normal and the usual rather than on the abnormal and theexceptional--all these steps in advance were more easily taken in thefreer form of the novel than they could be in the more restrictedformula of the drama; and for the first time in its historyprose-fiction found itself a pioneer, achieving a solidity of texturewhich the theatre had not yet been able to attain. The novel revealed itself at last as a fit instrument for appliedpsychology, for the use of those delicate artists who are interestedrather in what character is than in what it may chance to do. Inthe earliest fictions, whether in prose or verse, the hero had beenmerely a type, little more than a lay-figure capable of violentattitudes, a doer of deeds who, as Professor Gummere has explained, "answered the desire for poetic expression at a time when anindividual is merged in the clan. " And as the realistic writersperfected their art, the more acute readers began to perceive thatthe hero who is a doer of deeds can represent only the earlier stagesof culture which we have long outgrown. This hero came to berecognized as an anachronism, out of place in a more modern socialorganization based on a full appreciation of individuality. He wastoo much a type and too little an individual to satisfy the demandsof those who looked to literature as the mirror of life itself and whohad taught themselves to relish what Lowell terms the "punctiliousveracity which gives to a portrait its whole worth. " Thus it was only in the middle years of the nineteenth century, afterStendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert, after Thackeray and George Eliot, andHawthorne, that the novel found out its true field. And yet it was inthe middle years of the seventeenth century that the ideal to which itwas aspiring had been proclaimed frankly by the forgotten Furetière inthe preface to his "Roman Bourgeois. " Furetière lacked the skill andthe insight needful for the satisfactory attainment of the standard heset up--indeed, the attainment of that standard is beyond the power ofmost novelists even now. But Furetière's declaration of the principleswhich he proposed to follow is as significant now as it was in 1666, when neither the writer himself nor the reader to whom he had toappeal was ripe for the advance which he insisted upon. "I shall tellyou, " said Furetière, "sincerely and faithfully, several stories oradventures which happened to persons who are neither heroes norheroines, who will raise no armies and overthrow no kingdoms, but whowill be honest folk of mediocre condition, and who will quietly maketheir way. Some of them will be good-looking and others ugly. Some ofthem will be wise and others foolish; and these last, in fact, seemlikely to prove the larger number. " II The novel had a long road to travel before it became possible fornovelists to approach the ideal that Furetière proclaimed and beforethey had acquired the skill needed to make their readers accept it. And there had also to be a slow development of our own ideasconcerning the relation of art to life. For one thing, art hadbeen expected to emphasize a moral; there was even a demand on thedrama to be overtly didactic. Less than a score of years afterFuretière's preface there was published an English translation of theAbbé d'Aubignac's "Pratique du Théâtre" which was entitled the"Whole Art of the Stage" and in which the theory of "poetic justice"was set forth formally. "One of the chiefest, and indeed the mostindispensable Rule of Drammatick Poems is that in them Virtues alwaysought to be rewarded, or at least commended, in spite of all theInjuries of Fortune; and that likewise Vices be always punished orat least detested with Horrour, though they triumph upon the Stage forthat time. " Doctor Johnson was so completely a man of his own century that hefound fault with Shakespeare because Shakespeare did not preach, because in the great tragedies virtue is not always rewarded andvice is not always punished. Doctor Johnson and the Abbé d'Aubignacwanted the dramatist to be false to life as we all know it. Beyond allperadventure the wages of sin is death; and yet we have all seen theevil-doer dying in the midst of his devoted family and surroundedby all the external evidences of worldly success. To insist thatvirtue shall be outwardly triumphant at the end of a play or of anovel is to require the dramatist or the novelist to falsify. Itis to introduce an element of unreality into fiction. It is torequire the story-teller and the playmaker to prove a thesis thatcommon sense must reject. Any attempt to require the artist to prove anything is necessarilycramping. A true representation of life does not prove one thing only, it proves many things. Life is large, unlimited, and incessant; andthe lessons of the finest art are those of life itself; they are notsingle but multiple. Who can declare what is the single moralcontained in the "OEdipus" of Sophocles, the "Hamlet" of Shakespeare, the "Tartufe" of Molière? No two spectators of these masterpieceswould agree on the special morals to be isolated; and yet none of themwould deny that the masterpieces are profoundly moral because of theiressential truth. Morality, a specific moral--this is what the artistcannot deliberately put into his work without destroying its veracity. But morality is also what he cannot leave out if he has striven onlyto handle his subject sincerely. Hegel is right when he tells us thatart has its moral--but the moral depends on him who draws it. Thedidactic drama and the novel-with-a-purpose are necessarily unartisticand unavoidably unsatisfactory. This is what the greater artists have always felt; this is what theyhave often expressed unhesitatingly. Corneille, for one, though he wasa man of his time, a creature of the seventeenth century, had thecourage to assert that "the utility of a play is seen in the simpledepicting of vices and virtues, which never fails to be effective ifit is well done and if the traits are so recognizable that they cannotbe confounded or mistaken; virtue always gets itself loved, howeverunfortunate, and vice gets itself hated, even though triumphant. "Dryden, again, a contemporary of d'Aubignac and a predecessor ofJohnson, had a clearer vision than either of them; and his views arefar in advance of theirs. "Delight, " he said, "is the chief if not theonly end of poesy, " and by poesy he meant fiction in all its forms;"instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poetry onlyinstructs as it delights. " And once more, when we pass from theseventeenth century of Corneille and Dryden to the nineteenth centurywhen the novel has asserted its rivalry with the drama, we find thewise Goethe declaring to Eckermann the doctrine which is now winningacceptance everywhere. "If there is a moral in the subject it willappear, and the poet has nothing to consider but the effective andartistic treatment of his subject; if he has as high a soul asSophocles, his influence will always be moral, let him do what hewill. " A high soul is not given to all writers of fiction, and yet there isan obligation on them all to aspire to the praise bestowed onSophocles as one who "saw life steadily and saw it whole. " Even thehumblest of story-tellers ought to feel himself bound, not to preach, not to point a moral ostentatiously, not to warp the march of eventsfor the sake of so-called "poetic justice, " but to report life as heknows it, making it neither better nor worse, to represent ithonestly, to tell the truth about it and nothing but the truth, evenif he does not tell the whole truth--which is given to no man to know. This is an obligation that not a few of the foremost writers offiction have failed to respect. Dickens, for example, is delighted toreform a character in the twinkling of an eye, transforming a bad maninto a good man over night, and contradicting all that we know aboutthe permanence of character. Other novelists have asked us to admire violent and unexpected acts ofstartling self-sacrifice, when a character is made to take on himselfthe responsibility for the delinquency of some other character. Theyhave invited our approbation for a moral suicide, which is quite asblameworthy as any physical suicide. With his keen insight into ethicsand with his robust common sense, Huxley stated the principle whichthese novelists have failed to grasp. A man, he tells us, "may refuseto commit another, but he ought not to allow himself to be believedworse than he actually is, " since this results in "a loss to the worldof moral force which cannot be afforded. " The final test of thefineness of fiction lies in its veracity. "Romance is the poetry ofcircumstance, " as Stevenson tells us, and "drama is the poetry ofconduct"; we may be tolerant and easy-going in our acceptance of anovelist's circumstances, but we ought to be rigorous as regardsconduct. As far as the successive happenings of his story areconcerned, the mere incidents, the author may on occasion ask ourindulgence and tax our credulity a little; but he must not expect usto forgive him for any violation of the fundamental truths of humannature. It is this stern veracity, unflinching and inexorable, which makes"Anna Karénina" one of the noblest works of art that the nineteenthcentury devised to the twentieth, just as it is the absence of thisfidelity to the facts of life, the twisting of character to prove athesis, which vitiates the "Kreutzer Sonata, " and makes it unworthy ofthe great artist in fiction who wrote the earlier work. It is not toomuch to say that the development of Tolstoi as a militant moralist iscoincident with his decline as an artist. He is no longer content topicture life as he sees it; he insists on preaching. And when he useshis art, not as an end in itself, but as an instrument to advocate hisown individual theories, although his great gifts are not taken fromhim, the result is that his later novels lack the broad and deep moraleffect which gave his earlier studies of life and character theirabiding value. Stevenson had in him "something of the shorter catechist"; and theScotch artist in letters, enamored of words as he was, seized firmlythe indispensable law. "The most influential books, and the truest intheir influence, are works of fiction, " he declared. "They do not pintheir reader to a dogma, which he must afterward discover to beinexact; they do not teach a lesson, which he must afterward unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; theydisengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintances ofothers, and they show us the web of experience not as we can see itfor ourselves, but with a singular change--that monstrous, consumingego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must bereasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so servesthe turn of instruction. " This is well thought and well put, althoughmany of us might demand that novels should be more than "reasonablytrue. " But even if Stevenson was here a little lax in the requirementshe imposed on others, he was stricter with himself when he wrote"Markheim" and the "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. " Another story-teller, also cut off before he had displayed the bestthat was in him, set up the same standards for his fellow-craftsmen infiction. In his striking discussion of the responsibility of thenovelist, Frank Norris asserted that the readers of fiction have "aright to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and thepursuit of happiness. It is _not_ right that they be exploited anddeceived with false views of life, false characters, false sentiment, false morality, false history, false philosophy, false emotions, false heroism, false notions of self-sacrifice, false views ofreligion, of duty, of conduct, and of manners. " III Even if there may have been a certain advantage to the novel, as M. Le Breton maintains, because it was long left alone unfettered by anycritical code, to expand as best it could, to find its own wayunaided and to work out its own salvation, the time has now come whenit may profit by a criticism which shall force it to consider itsresponsibilities and to appraise its technical resources, if it is toclaim artistic equality with the drama and the epic. It has wonits way to the front; and there are few who now question its right tothe position it has attained. There is no denying that in Englishliterature, in the age of Victoria, the novel established itselfas the literary form most alluring to all men of letters and that itsucceeded to the place held by the essay in the days of Anne and bythe play in the days of Elizabeth. And like the play and the essay in those earlier times, the novel nowattracts writers who have no great natural gift for the form. Just asPeele and Greene wrote plays because play-writing was popular andadvantageous, in spite of their inadequate dramaturgic equipment, andjust as Johnson wrote essays because essay-writing was popular andadvantageous in spite of his deficiency in the ease and lightnesswhich the essay demands, so Brougham and Motley and Froude adventuredthemselves in fiction. We may even doubt whether George Eliot was aborn story-teller and whether she would not have been more successfulin some other epoch when some other literary form than the novel hadhappened to be in fashion. In France the novel tempted Victor Hugo, who was essentially a lyric poet, and the elder Dumas, who wasessentially a playwright. There are not lacking signs of late that thedrama is likely in the immediate future to assert a sharper rivalrywith prose-fiction; and novelists like Sir James Barrie and the latePaul Hervieu have relinquished the easier narrative for the moredifficult and more dangerous stage-play. But there is no evidence thatthe novel is soon to lose its vogue. It has come to stay; and as thenineteenth century left it to the twentieth so the twentieth willprobably bequeath it to the twenty-first unimpaired in prosperity. Perhaps the best evidence of the solidity of its position is to befound in the critical consideration which it is at last receiving. Histories of fiction in all literatures and biographies of thenovelists in all languages are multiplying abundantly. We arebeginning to take our fiction seriously and to inquire into itsprinciples. Long ago Freytag's "Technic of the Drama" was followedby Spielhagen's "Technic of the Novel, " rather Teutonicallyphilosophic, both of them, and already a little out of date. Studies of prose-fiction are getting themselves written, none ofthem more illuminative than Professor Bliss Perry's. The noveliststhemselves are writing about the art of fiction, as Sir Walter Besantdid, and they are asking what the novel is, as the late MarionCrawford has done. They are beginning to resent the assertion ofthe loyal adherents of the drama, that the novel is too loose a formto call forth the best efforts of the artist, and that a playdemands at least technical skill whereas a novel may be often theproduct of unskilled labor. Questions of all kinds are presenting themselves for discussion. Hasthe rise of realism made romance impossible? Is there a validdistinction between romance and romanticism? Is the short-story adefinite form, differing from the novel in purpose as well as inlength? What is the best way to tell a story--in the third person, asin the epic--in the first person, as in an autobiography--or inletters? Which is of most importance, character or incident oratmosphere? Is the novel-with-a-purpose legitimate? Why is it thatdramatized novels often fail in the theatre? Ought a novelist to takesides with his characters and against them, or ought he to suppresshis own opinions and remain impassive, as the dramatist must? Does aprodigality in the invention of incidents reveal a greater imaginationin the novelist than is required for the sincere depicting of simplecharacters in every-day life? Why has the old trick of inserting brieftales inside a long novel--such as we find in "Don Quixote" and "TomJones" and the "Pickwick Papers"--been abandoned of late years? Howfar is a novelist justified in taking his characters so closely fromactual life that they are recognizable by his readers? What are theadvantages and disadvantages of local color? How much dialect may anovelist venture to employ? Is the historical novel really a loftiertype of fiction than the novel of contemporary life? Is it reallypossible to write a veracious novel about any other than thenovelist's native land? Why is it that so many of the greater writersof fiction have brought forth their first novel only after they hadattained to half the allotted three score years and ten? Is thescientific spirit going to be helpful or harmful to the writer offiction? Which is the finer form for fiction, a swift and directtelling of the story, with the concentration of a Greek tragedy, suchas we find in the "Scarlet Letter" and in "Smoke, " or an ampler andmore leisurely movement more like that of the Elizabethan plays, suchas we may see in "Vanity Fair" and in "War and Peace"? These questions, and many another, we may expect to hear discussed, even if they cannot all of them be answered, in any consideration ofthe materials and the methods of fiction. And the result of theseinquiries cannot fail to be beneficial, both to the writer of fictionand to the reader of fiction. To the story-teller himself they willserve as a stimulus and a guide, calling attention to the technic ofhis craft and broadening his knowledge of the principles of his art. To the idle reader even they ought to be helpful, because they willforce him to think about the novels he may read and because they willlead him to be more exacting, to insist more on veracity in theportrayal of life, and to demand more care in the method ofpresentation. Every art profits by a wider understanding of itsprinciples, of its possibilities and of its limitations, as well as bya more diffused knowledge of its technic. BRANDER MATTHEWS. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: 1908. POSTSCRIPT: It is a good sign for the future of the novel that in theten years which have elapsed since this introduction was written, theprofessors of literature in our colleges and in our graduate schoolshave been paying increased attention to the study of prose fiction. They had, first of all, to inform themselves more abundantly as to itspast history, and as to the relation it has borne to the epic on theone hand and to the drama on the other. Then, secondly, they have beenencouraged to pass on to the students they were guiding the results oftheir researches and of their reflections. And as a result thesignificance of the novel is day by day made more manifest. BRANDER MATTHEWS. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: 1918. A MANUAL OF THE ART OF FICTION CHAPTER I THE PURPOSE OF FICTION Fiction a Means of Telling Truth--Fact and Fiction--Truth and Fact--The Search for Truth--The Necessary Triple Process--Different Degrees of Emphasis--The Art of Fiction and the Craft of Chemistry--Fiction and Reality--Fiction and History--Fiction and Biography--Biography, History, and Fiction--Fiction Which Is True--Fiction Which Is False--Casual Sins against the Truth in Fiction--More Serious Sins against the Truth--The Futility of the Adventitious--The Independence of Created Characters--Fiction More True Than a Casual Report of Fact--The Exception and the Law--Truthfulness the only Title to Immortality--Morality and Immorality in Fiction--The Faculty of Wisdom--Wisdom and Technic--General and Particular Experience--Extensive and Intensive Experience--The Experiencing Nature--Curiosity and Sympathy. =Fiction a Means of Telling Truth. =--Before we set out upon a study ofthe materials and methods of fiction, we must be certain that weappreciate the purpose of the art and understand its relation to theother arts and sciences. _The purpose of fiction is to embody certaintruths of human life in a series of imagined facts. _ The importance ofthis purpose is scarcely ever appreciated by the casual carelessreader of the novels of a season. Although it is commonly believedthat such a reader overestimates the weight of works of fiction, theopposite is true--he underestimates it. Every novelist of genuineimportance seeks not merely to divert but also to instruct--toinstruct, not abstractly, like the essayist, but concretely, bypresenting to the reader characters and actions which are true. Forthe best fiction, although it deals with the lives of imaginarypeople, is no less true than the best history and biography, whichrecord actual facts of human life; and it is more true than suchcareless reports of actual occurrences as are published in the dailynewspapers. The truth of worthy fiction is evidenced by the honor inwhich it has been held in all ages among all races. "You can't foolall the people all the time"; and if the drama and the epic and thenovel were not true, the human race would have rejected them manycenturies ago. Fiction has survived, and flourishes to-day, because itis a means of telling truth. =Fact and Fiction. =--It is only in the vocabulary of very carelessthinkers that the words _truth_ and _fiction_ are regarded asantithetic. A genuine antithesis subsists between the words _fact_ and_fiction_; but _fact_ and _truth_ are not synonymous. The novelistforsakes the realm of fact in order that he may better tell the truth, and lures the reader away from actualities in order to present himwith realities. It is of prime importance, in our present study, therefore, that we should understand at the very outset the relationbetween fact and truth, the distinction between the actual and thereal. =Truth and Fact. =--A fact is a specific manifestation of a generallaw: this general law is the truth because of which that fact has cometo be. It is a fact that when an apple-tree is shaken by the wind, such apples as may be loosened from their twigs fall to the ground: itis a truth that bodies in space attract each other with a force thatvaries inversely as the square of the distance between them. Fact isconcrete, and is a matter of physical experience: truth is abstract, and is a matter of mental theory. Actuality is the realm of fact, reality the realm of truth. The universe as we apprehend it with oursenses is actual; the laws of the universe as we comprehend them withour understanding are real. =The Search for Truth. =--All human science is an endeavor to discoverthe truths which underlie the facts that we perceive: all humanphilosophy is an endeavor to understand and to appraise those truthswhen once they are discovered: and all human art is an endeavor toutter them clearly and effectively when once they are appraised andunderstood. The history of man is the history of a constant andcontinuous seeking for the truth. Amazed before a universe of facts, he has striven earnestly to discover the truth which underliesthem--striven heroically to understand the large reality of which theactual is but a sensuously perceptible embodiment. In the earliestcenturies of recorded thought the search was unmethodical; truth wasapprehended, if at all, by intuition, and announced as dogma: but inmodern centuries certain regular methods have been devised to guidethe search. The modern scientist begins his work by collecting a largenumber of apparently related facts and arranging them in an orderlymanner. He then proceeds to induce from the observation of these factsan apprehension of the general law that explains their relation. Thishypothesis is then tested in the light of further facts, until itseems so incontestable that the minds of men accept it as the truth. The scientist then formulates it in an abstract theoretic statement, and thus concludes his work. But it is at just this point that the philosopher begins. Acceptingmany truths from many scientists, the philosopher compares, reconciles, and correlates them, and thus builds out of them astructure of belief. But this structure of belief remains abstract andtheoretic in the mind of the philosopher. It is now the artist's turn. Accepting the correlated theoretic truths which the scientist and thephilosopher have given him, he endows them with an imaginativeembodiment perceptible to the senses. He translates them back intoconcrete terms; he clothes them in invented facts; he makes themimaginatively perceptible to a mind native and indued to actuality;and thus he gives expression to the truth. =The Necessary Triple Process. =--This triple process of thescientific discovery, the philosophic understanding, and the artisticexpression of truth has been explained at length, because everygreat writer of fiction must pass through the entire mentalprocess. The fiction-writer differs from other seekers for the truth, not in the method of his thought, but merely in its subject-matter. His theme is human life. It is some truth of human life that heendeavors to discover, to understand, and to announce; and inorder to complete his work, he must apply to human life an attentionof thought which is successively scientific, philosophic, andartistic. He must first observe carefully certain facts of actuallife, study them in the light of extended experience, and induce fromthem the general laws which he deems to be the truths which underliethem. In doing this, he is a scientist. Next, if he be a greatthinker, he will correlate these truths and build out of them astructure of belief. In doing this, he is a philosopher. Lastly, hemust create imaginatively such scenes and characters as willillustrate the truths he has discovered and considered, and willconvey them clearly and effectively to the minds of his readers. Indoing this, he is an artist. =Different Degrees of Emphasis. =--But although this triple mentalprocess (of scientific discovery, philosophic understanding, andartistic expression) is experienced in full by every master offiction, we find that certain authors are interested most in thefirst, or scientific phase of the process, others in the second, orphilosophic phase, and still others in the third, or artisticphase. Evidently Emile Zola is interested chiefly in a scientificinvestigation of the actual facts of life, George Eliot in aphilosophic contemplation of its underlying truths, and GabrieleD'Annunzio in an artistic presentation of the dream-world that heimagines. Washington Irving is mainly an artist, Tolstoi mainly aphilosopher, and Jane Austen mainly a scientifically accurateobserver. Few are the writers, even among the greatest masters ofthe art, of whom we feel, as we feel of Hawthorne, that the scientist, the philosopher, and the artist reign over equal precincts of theirminds. Hawthorne the scientist is so thorough, so accurate, and soprecise in his investigations of provincial life that no less acritic than James Russell Lowell declared the "House of the SevenGables" to be "the most valuable contribution to New England historythat has yet been made. " Hawthorne the philosopher is so wise in hisunderstanding of crime and retribution, so firm in his structure ofbelief concerning moral truth, that it seems that he, if any one, might give an answer to that poignant cry of a despairing murderer, -- "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?"[1] And Hawthorne the artist is so delicate in his sensitive and lovingpresentation of the beautiful, so masterly both in structure and instyle, that his work, in artistry alone, is its own excuse for being. Were it not for the _confinement_ of his fiction--its lack of rangeand sweep, both in subject-matter and in attitude of mind--his work onthis account might be regarded as an illustration of all that may begreat in the threefold process of creation. =The Art of Fiction and the Craft of Chemistry. =--_Fiction_, to borrowa figure from chemical science, _is life distilled_. In the author'smind, the actual is first evaporated to the real, and the real is thencondensed to the imagined. The author first transmutes the concreteactualities of life into abstract realities; and then he transmutesthese abstract realities into concrete imaginings. Necessarily, if hehas pursued this mental process without a fallacy, his imaginings willbe true; because they represent realities, which in turn have beeninduced from actualities. =Fiction and Reality. =--In one of his criticisms of the greatestmodern dramatist, Mr. William Archer has called attention to the factthat "habitually and instinctively men pay to Ibsen the compliment (sooften paid to Shakespeare) of discussing certain of his femalecharacters as though they were real women, living lives apart from thepoet's creative intelligence. " [It is evident that Mr. Archer, insaying "real women, " means what is more precisely denoted by the words"actual women. "] Such a compliment is also paid instinctively to everymaster of the art of fiction; and the reason is not hard tounderstand. If the general laws of life which the novelist has thoughtout be true laws, and if his imaginative embodiment of them be at allpoints thoroughly consistent, his characters will be true men andwomen in the highest sense. They will not be actual, but they will bereal. The great characters of fiction--Sir Willoughby Patterne, TitoMelema, D'Artagnan, Père Grandet, Rosalind, Tartufe, Hamlet, Ulysses--embody truths of human life that have been arrived at onlyafter thorough observation of facts and patient induction from them. Cervantes must have observed a multitude of dreamers before he learnedthe truth of the idealist's character which he has expressed in DonQuixote. The great people of fiction are typical of large classes ofmankind. They live more truly than do you and I, because they are madeof us and of many men besides. They have the large reality of generalideas, which is a truer thing than the actuality of facts. This is whywe know them and think of them as real people--old acquaintances whomwe knew (perhaps) before we were born, when (as is conceivable) welived with them in Plato's Realm of Ideas. In France, instead ofcalling a man a miser, they call him an Harpagon. We know Rosalind aswe know our sweetest summer love; Hamlet is our elder brother, andunderstands our own wavering and faltering. =Fiction and History. =--Instinctively also we regard the great peopleof fiction as more real than many of the actual people of a bygone agewhose deeds are chronicled in dusty histories. To a modern mind, ifyou conjure with the name of Marcus Brutus, you will start the spiritof Shakespeare's fictitious patriot, not of the actual Brutus, of avery different nature, whose doings are dimly reported by thechroniclers of Rome. The Richelieu of Dumas père may bear but slightresemblance to the actual founder of the French Academy; but he livesfor us more really than the Richelieu of many histories. We knowHamlet even better than we know Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who in many wayswas like him; even though Amiel has reported himself more thoroughlythan almost any other actual man. We may go a step further and declarethat the actual people of any age can live in the memory of after agesonly when the facts of their characters and their careers have beentransmuted into a sort of fiction by the minds of creative historians. Actually, in 1815, there was but one Napoleon; now there are as manyNapoleons as there are biographies and histories of him. He has beenrecreated in one way by one author, in another by another; and you maytake your choice. You may accept the Julius Cæsar of Mr. Bernard Shaw, or the Julius Cæsar of Thomas De Quincey. The first is franklyfiction; and the second, not so frankly, is fiction also--just as farfrom actuality as Shakespeare's adaptation of Plutarch's portraiture. =Fiction and Biography. =--One of the most vivid illustrations of how agreat creative mind, honestly seeking to discover, to understand, andto express the truth concerning actual characters of the past, necessarily makes fiction of those characters, is given by ThomasCarlyle in his "Heroes and Hero-Worship. " Here, in Carlyle's method ofprocedure, it is easy to discern that threefold process of creationwhich is undergone by the fiction-making mind. An examination ofrecorded facts concerning Mohammed, Dante, Luther, or Burns leads himto a discovery and a formulation of certain abstract truths concerningthe Hero as Prophet, as Poet, as Priest, or as Man of Letters; andthereafter, in composing his historical studies, he sets forth onlysuch actual facts as conform with his philosophic understanding of thetruth and will therefore represent this understanding with the utmostemphasis. He makes fiction of his heroes, in order most emphaticallyto tell the truth about them. =Biography, History, and Fiction. =--In this way biography and historyat their best are doomed to employ the methods of the art of fiction;and we can therefore understand without surprise why the averagereader always says of the histories of Francis Parkman that they readlike novels, even though the most German-minded scientists of historyassure us that Parkman is always faithful to his facts. Facts, to themind of this model of historians, were indicative of truths; andthose truths he endeavored to express with faultless art. Like thebest of novelists, he was at once a scientist, a philosopher, and anartist; and this is not the least of reasons why his histories willendure. They are as true as fiction. =Fiction Which Is True. =--Not only do the great characters of fictionconvince us of reality: in the mere events themselves of worthyfiction we feel a fitness that makes us know them real. SentimentalTommy really did lose that literary competition because he wasted afull hour searching vainly for the one right word; Hetty Sorrel reallykilled her child; and Mr. Henry must have won that midnight duel withthe Master of Ballantrae, though the latter was the better swordsman. These incidents conform to truths we recognize. And not only in thefiction that clings close to actuality do we feel a sense of truth. Wefeel it just as keenly in fairy tales like those of Hans ChristianAndersen, or in the worthiest wonder-legends of an earlier age. We aretold of The Steadfast Tin Soldier that, after he was melted in thefire, the maid who took away the ashes next morning found him in theshape of a small tin heart; and remembering the spangly littleballet-dancer who fluttered to him like a sylph and was burned up inthe fire with him, we feel a fitness in this little fancy which opensvistas upon human truth. Mr. Kipling's fable of "How the Elephant GotHis Trunk" is just as true as his reports of Mrs. Hauksbee. His theorymay not conform with the actual facts of zoological science; but atany rate it represents a truth which is perhaps more important forthose who have become again like little children. =Fiction Which Is False. =--Just as we feel by instinct the reality offiction at its best, so also with a kindred instinct equally keen wefeel the falsity of fiction when the author lapses from the truth. Unless his characters act and think at all points consistently withthe laws of their imagined existence, and unless these laws are inharmony with the laws of actual life, no amount of sophistication onthe part of the author can make us finally believe his story; andunless we believe his story, his purpose in writing it will havefailed. The novelist, who has so many means of telling truth, has alsomany means of telling lies. He may be untruthful in his very theme, ifhe is lacking in sanity of outlook upon the things that are. He may beuntruthful in his characterization, if he interferes with his peopleafter they are once created and attempts to coerce them to hispurposes instead of allowing them to work out their own destinies. Hemay be untruthful in his plotting, if he devises situationsarbitrarily for the sake of mere immediate effect. He may beuntruthful in his dialogue, if he puts into the mouths of his peoplesentences that their nature does not demand that they shall speak. Hemay be untruthful in his comments on his characters, if the charactersbelie the comments in their actions and their words. =Casual Sins Against the Truth in Fiction. =--With the sort of fictionthat is a tissue of lies, the present study does not concern itself;but even in the best fiction we come upon passages of falsity. Thereis little likelihood, however, of our being led astray by these: werevolt instinctively against them with a feeling that may best beexpressed in that famous sentence of Ibsen's Assessor Brack, "Peopledon't do such things. " When Shakespeare tells us, toward the end of"As You Like It, " that the wicked Oliver suddenly changed his natureand won the love of Celia, we know that he is lying. The scene is nottrue to the great laws of human life. When George Eliot, at a loss fora conclusion to "The Mill on the Floss, " tells us that Tom and MaggieTulliver were drowned together in a flood, we disbelieve her; just aswe disbelieve Sir James Barrie when he invents that absurd accident ofTommy's death. These three instances of falsity have been selectedfrom authors who know the truth and almost always tell it; and allthree have a certain palliation. They come at or near the very end oflengthy stories. In actual life, of course, there are no very ends:life exhibits a continuous sequence of causation stretching on: andsince a story has to have an end, its conclusion must in any casebelie a law of nature. Probably the truth is that Tommy didn't die atall: he is living still, and always will be living. And since SirJames Barrie couldn't write forever, he may be pardoned a makeshiftending that he himself apparently did not believe in. So also we mayforgive that lie of Shakespeare's, since it contributes to a generaltruthfulness of good-will at the conclusion of his story; and as forGeorge Eliot--well, she had been telling the truth stolidly for manyhundred pages. =More Serious Sins Against the Truth. =--But when Charlotte Brontë, in"Jane Eyre, " tells us that Mr. Rochester first said and then repeatedthe following sentence, "I am disposed to be gregarious andcommunicative to-night, " we find it more difficult to pardon theapparent falsity. In the same chapter, the author states that Mr. Rochester emitted the following remark:--"Then, in the first place, doyou agree with me that I have a right to be a little masterful, abrupt, perhaps exacting, sometimes, on the grounds I stated, namely, that I am old enough to be your father, and that I have battledthrough a varied experience with many men of many nations, and roamedover half the globe, while you have lived quietly with one set ofpeople in one house?" Such writing is inexcusably untrue. We cannot believe that any humanbeing ever asked a direct question so elaborately lengthy. People donot talk like that. As a contrast, let us notice for a moment thepoignant truthfulness of speech in Mr. Rudyard Kipling's story, "Onlya Subaltern. " A fever-stricken private says to Bobby Wick, "Beg y'pardon, sir, disturbin' of you now, but would you min' 'oldin' my'and, sir"?--and later, when the private becomes convalescent andBobby in his turn is stricken down, the private suddenly stares inhorror at his bed, and cries, "Oh, my Gawd! It can't be _'im!_" Peopletalk like that. =The Futility of the Adventitious. =--Arbitrary plotting, as a rule, isof no avail in fiction: almost always, we know when a story is trueand when it is not. We seldom believe in the long-lost will that isdiscovered at last on the back of a decaying picture-canvas; or in thechance meeting and mutual discovery of long-separated relatives; or insuch accidental circumstances as the one, for instance, because ofwhich Romeo fails to receive the message from Friar Laurence. Theincidents of fiction at its best are not only probable but inevitable:they happen because in the nature of things they have to happen, andnot because the author wants them to. Similarly, the truest charactersof fiction are so real that even their creator has no power to makethem do what they will not. It has been told of Thackeray that he grewso to love Colonel Newcome that he wished ardently that the good manmight live happily until the end. Yet, knowing the circumstances inwhich the Colonel was enmeshed, and knowing also the nature of thepeople who formed the little circle round about him, Thackerayrealized that his last days would of necessity be miserable; andrealizing this, the author told the bitter truth, though it cost himmany tears. =The Independence of Created Characters. =--The careless reader offiction usually supposes that, since the novelist invents hischaracters and incidents, he can order them always to suit his owndesires: but any honest artist will tell you that his characters oftengrow intractable and stubbornly refuse at certain points to accept theincidents which he has foreordained for them, and that at other timesthey take matters into their own hands and run away with the story. Stevenson has recorded this latter experience. He said, apropos of"Kidnapped, " "In one of my books, and in one only, the characters tookthe bit in their teeth; all at once, they became detached from theflat paper, they turned their backs on me and walked off bodily; andfrom that time my task was stenographic--it was they who spoke, it wasthey who wrote the remainder of the story. " The laws of life, and not the author's will, must finally decide thedestinies of heroes and of heroines. On the evening of February 3, 1850, just after he had written the last scene of "The ScarletLetter, " Hawthorne read it to his wife--"tried to read it, rather, " hewrote the next day in a letter to his friend, Horatio Bridge, "for myvoice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an oceanas it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion while writing it formany months. " Is it not conceivable that, in the "great diversity ofemotion" which the author experienced while bringing his story to aclose, he was tempted more than once to state that Hester andDimmesdale escaped upon the Bristol ship and thereafter expiated theiroffense in holy and serviceable lives? But if such a thought occurredto him, he put it by, knowing that the revelation of the scarletletter was inexorably demanded by the highest moral law. =Fiction More True Than a Casual Report of Fact. =--We are now ready tounderstand the statement that fiction at its best is much more truethan such careless reports of actual occurrences as are published inthe daily newspapers. Water that has been distilled is much morereally H_{2}O than the muddied natural liquid in the bulb of the retort;and life that has been clarified in the threefold alembic of thefiction-writer's mind is much more really life than the clouded andunrealized events that are reported in daily chronicles of fact. Thenewspaper may tell us that a man who left his office in an apparentlynormal state of mind went home and shot his wife; but people don't dosuch things; and though the story states an actual occurrence, it doesnot tell the truth. The only way in which the reporter could make thisstory true would be for him to trace out all the antecedent causeswhich led inevitably to the culminating incident. The incident itselfcan become true for us only when we are made to understand it. Robert Louis Stevenson once remarked that whenever, in a story bya friend of his, he came upon a passage that was notably untrue, healways suspected that it had been transcribed directly from actuallife. The author had been too sure of the facts to ask himself in whatway they were representative of the general laws of life. But factsare important to the careful thinker only as they are significantof truth. Doubtless an omniscient mind would realize a reason forevery accidental and apparently insignificant occurrence of actuallife. Doubtless, for example, the Universal Mind must understand whythe great musical-director, Anton Seidl, died suddenly of ptomainepoisoning. But to a finite mind such occurrences seem unsignificant oftruth; they do not seem to be indicative of a necessary law. Andsince the fiction-writer has a finite mind, the laws of life which hecan understand are more restrictedly logical than those undiscoveredlaws of actual life which pass his understanding. Many a casualoccurrence of the actual world would therefore be inadmissible in theintellectually-ordered world of fiction. A novelist has no right toset forth a sequence of events which, in its causes and effects, hecannot make the reader understand. =The Exception and the Law. =--We are now touching on a principle whichis seldom appreciated by beginners in the art of fiction. Everycollege professor of literary composition who has accused a student offalsity in some passage of a story that the student has submitted hasbeen met with the triumphant but unreasonable answer, "Oh, no, it'strue! It happened to a friend of mine!" And it has then becomenecessary for the professor to explain as best he could that an actualoccurrence is not necessarily true for the purposes of fiction. Theimagined facts of a genuinely worthy story are exhibited merelybecause they are representative of some general law of life heldsecurely in the writer's consciousness. A transcription, therefore, ofactual facts fails of the purposes of fiction unless the facts inthemselves are evidently representative of such a law. And many thingsmay happen to a friend of ours without evidencing to a consideratemind any logical reason why they had to happen. =Truthfulness the only Title to Immortality. =--It is necessary thatthe student should appreciate the importance of this principle at thevery outset of his apprenticeship to the art. For it is only byadhering rigorously to the truth that fiction can survive. In everyperiod of literature, many clever authors have appeared who havediverted their contemporaries with ingenious invention, brilliantincident, unexpected novelty of character, or alluring eloquence ofstyle, but who have been discarded and forgotten by succeedinggenerations merely because they failed to tell the truth. Probably inthe whole range of English fiction there is no more skilful weaver ofenthralling plots, no more clever master of invention or manipulatorof suspense, than Wilkie Collins; but Collins is already discarded andwell-nigh forgotten, because the reading world has found that heexhibited no truths of genuine importance, but rather sacrificed theeternal realities of life for mere momentary plausibilities. Probably, also, there is no artist in French prose more seductive in hiseloquence than René de Chateaubriand; but his fiction is no longerread, because the world has found that his sentimentalism was to thisextent a sham--it was false to the nature of normal human beings. "Alice in Wonderland" will survive the works of both these ableauthors, because of the many and momentous human truths that look uponus through its drift of dreams. =Morality and Immorality in Fiction. =--The whole question of themorality or immorality of a work of fiction is a question merely ofits truth or falsity. To appreciate this point, we must first becareful to distinguish immorality from coarseness. The morality of afiction-writer is not dependent on the decency of his expression. Infact, the history of literature shows that authors frankly coarse, like Rabelais or Swift for instance, have rarely or never beenimmoral; and that the most immoral books have been written in the mostdelicate language. Swift and Rabelais are moral, because they tell thetruth with sanity and vigor; we may object to certain passages intheir writings on esthetic, but not on ethical, grounds. They mayoffend our taste; but they are not likely to lead astray ourjudgment--far less likely than D'Annunzio, for instance, who, althoughhe never offends the most delicate esthetic taste, sicklies o'er withthe pale cast of his poetry a sad unsanity of outlook upon theultimate deep truths of human life. In the second place, we mustbravely realize that the morality of a work of fiction has little orno dependence on the subject that it treats. It is utterly unjust tothe novelist to decide, as many unreasonable readers do, that such abook as Daudet's "Sapho" must be of necessity immoral because itexhibits immoral characters in a series of immoral acts. There is nosuch thing as an immoral subject for a novel: in the treatment of thesubject, and only in the treatment, lies the basis for ethicaljudgment of the work. The one thing needful in order that a novel maybe moral is that the author shall maintain throughout his work a saneand healthy insight into the soundness or unsoundness of the relationsbetween his characters. He must know when they are right and know whenthey are wrong, and must make clear to us the reasons for hisjudgment. He cannot be immoral unless he is untrue. To make us pityhis characters when they are vile, or love them when they are noxious, to invent excuses for them in situations where they cannot be excused, to leave us satisfied when their baseness has been unbetrayed, to makeus wonder if after all the exception is not greater than the rule--ina single word, to lie about his characters--this is, for thefiction-writer, the one unpardonable sin. =The Faculty of Wisdom. =--But it is not an easy thing to tell thetruth of human life, and nothing but the truth. The best offiction-writers fall to falsehood now and then; and it is only byhonest labor and sincere strife for the ideal that they contrive inthe main to fulfil the purpose of their art. But the writer of fictionmust be not only honest and sincere; he must be wise as well. _Wisdomis the faculty of seeing through and all around an object ofcontemplation, and understanding totally and at once its relations toall other objects. _ This faculty cannot be acquired; it has to bedeveloped: and it is developed by experience only. Experienceordinarily requires time; and though, for special reasons which willbe noted later on, most of the great short-story writers have beenyoung, we are not surprised to notice that most of the great novelistshave been men mature in years. They have ripened slowly to arealization of those truths which later they have labored to impart. Richardson, the father of the modern English novel, was fifty-oneyears old when "Pamela" was published; Scott was forty-three when"Waverley" appeared; Hawthorne was forty-six when he wrote "TheScarlet Letter"; Thackeray and George Eliot were well on their way tothe forties when they completed "Vanity Fair" and "Adam Bede"; andthese are the first novels of each writer. =Wisdom and Technic. =--The young author who aspires to write novelsmust not only labor to acquire the technic of his art: it is even moreimportant that he should so order his life as to grow cunning in thebasic truths of human nature. His first problem--the problem ofacquiring technic--is comparatively easy. Technic may be learned frombooks--the master-works of art in fiction. It may be studiedempirically. The student may observe what the masters have, and havenot, done; and he may puzzle out the reasons why. And he may perhapsbe helped by constructive critics of fiction in his endeavor tounderstand these reasons. But his second problem--the problem ofdeveloping wisdom--is more difficult; and he must grapple with itwithout any aid from books. What he learns of human life, he mustlearn in his own way, without extraneous assistance. It is easy enough for the student to learn, for instance, how thegreat short-stories have been constructed. It is easy enough for thecritic, on the basis of such knowledge, to formulate empirically theprinciples of this special art of narrative. But it is not easy forthe student to discover, or for the critic to suggest, how a man inhis early twenties may develop such a wise insight into human life asis displayed, for example, in Mr. Kipling's "Without Benefit ofClergy. " A few suggestions may, perhaps, be offered; but they must beconsidered merely as suggestions, and must not be overvalued. =General and Particular Experience. =--At the outset, it may benoted that the writer of fiction needs two different endowments ofexperience:--first, a broad and general experience of life atlarge; and second, a deep and specific experience of that particularphase of life which he wishes to depict. A general and broadexperience is common to all masters of the art of fiction: it is inthe particular nature of their specific and deep experience thatthey differ one from another. Although in range and sweep of generalknowledge Sir Walter Scott was far more vast than Jane Austen, heconfessed amazement at the depth of her specific knowledge of every-dayEnglish middle-class society. Most of the great novelists havemade, like Jane Austen, a special study of some particular field. Hawthorne is an authority on Puritan New England, Thackeray onLondon high society, Henry James on cosmopolitan super-civilization. It would seem, therefore, that a young author, while keeping hisobservation fresh for all experience, should devote especial noticeto experience of some particular phase of life. But along comes Mr. Rudyard Kipling, with his world-engirdling knowledge, to jostle usout of faith in too narrow a focus of attention. =Extensive and Intensive Experience. =--Experience is of two sorts, extensive and intensive. A mere glance at the range of Mr. Kipling'ssubjects would show us the breadth of his extensive experience:evidently he has lived in many lands and looked with sympathy upon thelives of many sorts of people. But in certain stories, like his "They"for instance, we are arrested rather by the depth of his intensiveexperience. "They" reveals to us an author who not necessarily hasroamed about the world, but who necessarily has felt all phases of themother-longing in a woman. The things that Mr. Kipling knows in "They"could never have been learned except through sympathy. Intensive experience is immeasurably more valuable to the fiction-writerthan extensive experience: but the difficulty is that, although thelatter may be gained through the obvious expedients of travel andvoluntary association with many and various types of people, theformer can never be gained through any amount of deliberate andconscious seeking. The great intensive experiences of life, like loveand friendship, must come unsought if they are to come at all; and noman can gain a genuine experience of any joy or sorrow by experimentingpurposely with life. The deep experiences must be watched and waitedfor. The author must be ever ready to realize them when they come: whenthey knock upon his door, he must not make the mistake of answeringthat he is not at home. But he must not make the contrary mistake ofgoing out into the highways and hedges to compel them to come withinhis gates. =The Experiencing Nature. =--Undoubtedly, very few people are always athome for every real experience that knocks upon their doors; very fewpeople, to say the thing more simply, have an experiencing nature. Butgreat fiction may be written only by men of an experiencing nature;and here is a basis for confession that, after all, fiction-writersare born, not made. The experiencing nature is difficult to define;but two of its most evident qualities, at any rate, are a livelycuriosity and a ready sympathy. A combination of these two qualitiesgives a man that intensity of interest in human life which is acondition precedent to his ever growing to understand it. Curiosity, for instance, is the most obvious asset in Mr. Kipling's equipment. Wedid not need his playful confession in the "Just So Stories"-- "I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew):-- Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who"-- to convince us that from his very early youth he has been anindefatigable asker of questions. It was only through a healthycuriosity that he could have acquired the enormous stores of specificknowledge concerning almost every walk of life that he has displayedin his successive volumes. On the other hand, it was obviously throughhis vast endowment of sympathy that Dickens was able to learn sothoroughly all phases of the life of the lowly in London. =Curiosity and Sympathy. =--Experience gravitates to the man who isboth curious and sympathetic. The kingdom of adventure is withinus. Just as we create beauty in an object when we look upon itbeautifully, so we create adventure all around us when we walk theworld inwardly aglow with love of life. Things of interest happenedto Robert Louis Stevenson every day of his existence, because heincorporated the faculty of being interested in things. In one ofhis most glowing essays, "The Lantern-Bearers, " he declared thatnever an hour of his life had gone dully yet; if it had been spentwaiting at a railway junction, he had had some scattering thoughts, he had counted some grains of memory, compared to which the wholeof many romances seemed but dross. The author who aspires to writefiction should cultivate the faculty of caring for all things thatcome to pass; he should train himself rigorously never to be bored;he should look upon all life that swims into his ken with curiousand sympathetic eyes, remembering always that sympathy is a deeperfaculty than curiosity: and because of the profound joy of hisinterest in life, he should endeavor humbly to earn that heritage ofinterest by developing a thorough understanding of its source. Inthis way, perhaps, he may grow aware of certain truths of lifewhich are materials for fiction. If so, he will have accomplished thebetter half of his work: he will have found something to say. [1] Macbeth: Act V; Scene 3. REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. What is the logical relation (1) between fact and truth, (2) between fact and fiction, and (3) between truth and fiction? 2. Define the spheres of the respective contributions of art, philosophy, and science to the search for truth. 3. In what way is a well-imagined work of fiction more true to life than a newspaper report of actual occurrences? 4. Explain the logical basis for distinguishing between morality and immorality in a work of art. SUGGESTED READING FRANK NORRIS:--"A Problem in Fiction, " in "The Responsibilities of theNovelist. " CLAYTON HAMILTON:--"On Telling the Truth, " in "The Art World" forSeptember, 1917. CHAPTER II REALISM AND ROMANCE Two Methods of Exhibiting the Truth--Every Mind Either Realistic or Romantic--Marion Crawford's Faulty Distinction--A Second Unsatisfactory Distinction--A Third Unsatisfactory Distinction--Bliss Perry's Negative Definition--The True Distinction One of Method, Not of Material--Scientific Discovery and Artistic Expression--The Testimony of Hawthorne--A Philosophic Formula--Induction and Deduction--The Inductive Method of the Realist--The Deductive Method of the Romantic--Realism, Like Inductive Science, a Strictly Modern Product--Advantages of Realism--Advantages of Romance--The Confinement of Realism--The Freedom of Romance--Neither Method Better Than the Other--Abuses of Realism--Abuses of Romance. =Two Methods of Exhibiting the Truth. =--Although all writers offiction who take their work seriously and do it honestly are at one intheir purpose--namely, to embody certain truths of human life in aseries of imagined facts--they diverge into two contrasted groupsaccording to their manner of accomplishing this purpose, --their methodof exhibiting the truth. Consequently we find in practice twocontrasted schools of novelists, which we distinguish by the titlesRealistic and Romantic. =Every Mind Either Realistic or Romantic. =--The distinction betweenrealism and romance is fundamental and deep-seated; for every man, whether consciously or not, is either a romantic or a realist in thedominant habit of his thought. The reader who is a realist by naturewill prefer George Eliot to Scott; the reader who is romantic willrather read Victor Hugo than Flaubert; and neither taste is betterthan the other. Each reader's preference is born with his brain, andhas its origin in his customary processes of thinking. In view of thisfact, it seems strange that no adequate definition has ever yet beenmade of the difference between realism and romance. [2] Varioussuperficial explanations have been offered, it is true; but none ofthem has been scientific and satisfactory. =Marion Crawford's Faulty Distinction. =--One of the most common ofthese superficial explanations is the one which has been phrased bythe late F. Marion Crawford in his little book upon "The Novel: WhatIt Is":--"The realist proposes to show men what they are; theromantist (_sic_) tries to show men what they should be. " The troublewith this distinction is that it utterly fails to distinguish. Surelyall novelists, whether realistic or romantic, try to show men whatthey are--what else can be their reason for embodying in imaginedfacts the truths of human life? Victor Hugo, the romantic, in "LesMisérables, " endeavors just as honestly and earnestly to show men whatthey are as does Flaubert, the realist, in "Madame Bovary. " And on theother hand, Thackeray, the realist, in characters like Henry Esmondand Colonel Newcome, shows men what they should be just as thoroughlyas the romantic Scott. Indeed, it is hardly possible to conceive howany novelist, whether romantic or realistic, could devise a means ofshowing the one thing without at the same time showing the other also. Every important fiction-writer, no matter to which of the two schoolshe happens to belong, strives to accomplish, in a single effort ofcreation, _both_ of the purposes noted by Marion Crawford. He may berealistic or romantic in his way of showing men what they are;realistic or romantic in his way of showing them what they should be:the difference lies, not in which of the two he tries to show, but inthe way he tries to show it. =A Second Unsatisfactory Distinction. =--Again, we have been told that, in their stories, the romantics dwell mainly upon the element ofaction, while the realists are interested chiefly in the element ofcharacter. But this explanation fails many times to fit the facts: forthe great romantic characters, like Leather-Stocking, Don Quixote, Monte Cristo, Claude Frollo, are just as vividly drawn as the greatcharacters of realism; and the great events of realistic novels, likeRawdon Crawley's discovery of his wife with Lord Steyne, or AdamBede's fight with Arthur Donnithorne, are just as thrilling as theresounding actions of romance. Furthermore, if we should accept thisexplanation, we should find ourselves unable to classify as eitherrealistic or romantic the very large body of novels in which neitherelement--of action or of character--shows any marked preponderanceover the other. Henry James, in his genial essay on "The Art ofFiction, " has cast a vivid light on this objection. "There is anold-fashioned distinction, " he says, "between the novel of characterand the novel of incident which must have cost many a smile to theintending fabulist who was keen about his work. .. . What is characterbut the determination of incident? What is incident but theillustration of character?. .. It is an incident for a woman to standup with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certainway; or if it be not an incident I think it will be hard to say whatit is. At the same time it is an expression of character. " =A Third Unsatisfactory Distinction. =--We have been told also that therealists paint the manners of their own place and time, while theromantics deal with more remote materials. But this distinction, likewise, often fails to hold. No stories were ever more essentiallyromantic than Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights, " which depict detailsof London and Parisian life at the time when the author wrote them;and no novel is more essentially realistic than "Romola, " whichcarries us back through many centuries to a medieval city far away. Thackeray, the realist, in "Henry Esmond, " and its sequel "TheVirginians, " departed further from his own time and place thanHawthorne, the romantic, in "The House of the Seven Gables"; and whilethe realistic Meredith frequently fares abroad in his stories, especially to Italy, the romantic Barrie looks upon life almost alwaysfrom his own little window in Thrums. =Bliss Perry's Negative Definition. =--In his interesting andsuggestive "Study of Prose Fiction, " Professor Bliss Perry has devoteda chapter to realism and another to romance; but he has not succeededin defining either term. He has, to be sure, essayed a negativedefinition of realism:--"Realistic fiction is that which does notshrink from the commonplace or from the unpleasant in its effort todepict things as they are, life as it is. " But we have seen that theeffort of all fiction, whether realistic or romantic, is to depictlife as it _really_ (though not necessarily as it _actually_) is. Doesnot "The Brushwood Boy, " although it suggests the super-actual, setforth a common truth of the most intimate human relationship, whichevery lover recognizes as real? Every great writer of fiction tries, in his own romantic or realistic way, to "draw the Thing as he sees Itfor the God of Things as They Are. " We must therefore focus ourattention mainly on the earlier phrases of Professor Perry'sdefinition. He states that realistic fiction does not shrink from thecommonplace. That depends. The realism of Jules and Edmond de Goncourtdoes not, to be sure; but most assuredly the realism of GeorgeMeredith does. You will find far less shrinking from the commonplacein many passages of the romantic Fenimore Cooper than in the pages ofGeorge Meredith. Whether or not realistic fiction shrinks from theunpleasant depends also on the particular nature of the realist. Zola's realism certainly does not; Jane Austen's decidedly does. Youwill find far less shrinking from the unpleasant, of one sort, in Poe, of another sort, in Catulle Mendès--both of them romantics--than inthe novels of Jane Austen. What is the use, then, of Professor Perry'sdefinition of realism, since it remains open to so many exceptions?And in his chapter on romance the critic does not even attempt toformulate a definition. =The True Distinction One of Method, Not of Material. =--We have nowexamined several of the current explanations of the differencebetween romance and realism and have found that each is wanting. Thetrouble with all of them seems to be that they attempt to find abasis for distinguishing between the two schools of fiction in thesubject-matter, or materials, of the novelist. Does not the realdistinction lie rather in the novelist's attitude of mind toward hismaterials, whatever those materials may be? Surely there is no suchthing inherently as a realistic subject or a romantic subject. Thevery same subject may be treated realistically by one novelist andromantically by another. George Eliot would have built a realisticnovel on the theme of "The Scarlet Letter"; and Hawthorne would havemade a romance out of the materials of "Silas Marner. " The wholeof human life, or any part of it, offers materials for romanticand realist alike. Therefore no distinction between the schools ispossible upon the basis of subject-matter: the real distinction mustbe one of method in setting subject-matter forth. The distinction isnot external, but internal; it dwells in the mind of the novelist;it is a matter for philosophic, not for literary, investigation. =Scientific Discovery and Artistic Expression. =--If we seek within themental habits of the novelist for a philosophic distinction betweenrealism and romance, we shall have to return to a consideration of thatthreefold process of the fiction-making mind which was expounded in thepreceding chapter of this book. Scientific discovery, philosophicunderstanding, and artistic expression of the truths of human lifeare phases of creation common to romantics and realists alike; butthough the writers of both schools meet equally upon the centralground of philosophic understanding, is it not evident that therealists are most interested in looking backward over the antecedentground of scientific discovery, and the romantics are most interested inlooking forward over the subsequent ground of artistic expression?Suppose, for the purpose of illustration, that two novelists of equalability--the one a realist, the other a romantic--have observed andstudied carefully the same events and characters of actual life; andsuppose further that they agree in their conception of the truth behindthe facts. Suppose now that each of them writes a novel to embody thisconception of the truth, in which they are agreed. Will not the realistregard as most important the scientific process of discovery by meansof which he arrived at his conception; and will he not therefore striveto make that process clear to the reader by turning back to the point atwhich he began his observations and then leading the reader forwardthrough a similar scientific study of imagined facts until the readerjoins him on the ground of philosophic understanding? And, on theother hand, will not the romantic regard as most important theartistic process of embodying his conception; and will he not thereforebe satisfied with any means of embodying it clearly and effectively, without caring whether or not the imagined facts which he selects forthis purpose are similar to the actual facts from which he first inducedhis philosophic understanding? =The Testimony of Hawthorne. =--This thought was apparently inHawthorne's mind when, in the preface to "The House of the SevenGables, " he wrote his well-known distinction between the Romance andthe (realistic) Novel:--"When a writer calls his work a Romance, itneed hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felthimself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. Thelatter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minutefidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinarycourse of man's experience. The former--while, as a work of art, itmust rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably sofar as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart--hasfairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a greatextent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. " =A Philosophic Formula. =--But Hawthorne's statement, although itcovers the ground, is not succinct and definitive; and if we are toexamine the thesis thoroughly, we had better first state it inphilosophic terms and then elucidate the statement by explanation andby illustration. So stated, the distinction is as follows: _In settingforth his view of life, the realist follows the inductive method ofpresentment, and the romantic follows the deductive method. _ =Induction and Deduction. =--The distinction between inductive anddeductive processes of thinking is very simple and is known to all: itis based upon the _direction_ of the train of thought. When we thinkinductively, we reason from the particular to the general; and when wethink deductively, the process proceeds in the reverse direction andwe reason from the general to the particular. In our ordinaryconversation, we speak inductively when we first mention a number ofspecific facts and then draw from them some general inference; and wespeak deductively when we first express a general opinion and thenelucidate it by adducing specific illustrations. That old dichotomy ofthe psychologists which divides all men, according to their habits ofthought, into Platonists and Aristotelians (or, to substitute a modernnomenclature, into Cartesians and Baconians) is merely an assertionthat every man, in the prevailing direction of his thinking, is eitherdeductive or inductive. Most of the great ethical philosophers havehad inductive minds; from the basis of admitted facts of experiencethey have reasoned out their laws of conduct. Most of the greatreligious teachers have had deductive minds: from the basis of certainsublime assumptions they have asserted their commandments. Most of thegreat scientists have thought inductively: they have reasoned fromspecific facts to general truths, as Newton reasoned from the fall ofan apple to the law of gravitation. Most of the great poets havethought deductively: they have reasoned from general truths tospecific facts, as Dante reasoned from a general moral conception ofcosmogony to the particular appropriate details of every circle inhell and purgatory and paradise. Now is not the thesis tenable that itis in just this way that realism differs from romance? In theirendeavor to exhibit certain truths of human life, do not the realistswork inductively and the romantics deductively? =The Inductive Method of the Realist. =--In order to bring to ourknowledge the law of life which he wishes to make clear, the realistfirst leads us through a series of imagined facts as similar aspossible to the details of actual life which he studied in order toarrive at his general conception. He elaborately imitates the facts ofactual life, so that he may say to us finally, "This is the sort ofthing that I have seen in the world, and from this I have learned thetruth I have to tell you. " He leads us step by step from theparticular to the general, until we gradually grow aware of the truthshe wishes to express. And in the end, we have not only grownacquainted with these truths, but have also been made familiar withevery step in the process of thought by which the author himselfbecame aware of them. "Adam Bede" tells us not only what George Eliotknew of life, but also how she came to learn it. =The Deductive Method of the Romantic. =--But the romantic novelistleads us in the contrary direction--namely, from the general to theparticular. He does not attempt to show us how he arrived at hisgeneral conception. His only care is to convey his general ideaeffectively by giving it a specific illustrative embodiment. Hefeels no obligation to make the imagined facts of his story resembleclosely the details of actual life; he is anxious only that theyshall represent his idea adequately and consistently. Stevensonknew that man has a dual nature, and that the evil in him, whenpampered, will gradually gain the upper hand over the good. In hisstory of the "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, " he did notattempt to set forth this truth inductively, showing us the kind offacts from the observation of which he had drawn this conclusion. Hemerely gave his thought an illustrative embodiment, by conceivinga dual character in which a man's uglier self should have a separateincarnation. He constructed his tale deductively: beginning with ageneral conception, he reduced it to particular terms. "Dr. Jekylland Mr. Hyde" is, of course, a thoroughly true story, even though itsincidents are contrary to the actual facts of life. It is just as realas a realistic novel; but in order to make it so, its author, becausehe was working deductively, was not obliged to imitate the detailsof actual life which he had studied. "I have learned something in theworld, " he says to us: "Here is a fable that will make it clear toyou. " =Realism, Like Inductive Science, a Strictly Modern Product. =--Thisphilosophic distinction between the methods of romance and realismshows two manifest advantages over all the other attempts at adistinction which have been examined in this chapter: first, itreally does distinguish; and secondly, it will be found in everycase to fit the facts. Furthermore, it is supported in an overwhelmingmanner by the history of human thought. Every student of philosophywill tell you that the world's thought was prevailingly deductivetill the days of Francis Bacon. Bacon was the first philosopher toinsist that induction, rather than deduction, was the most effectivemethod of searching for the truth. Science, which is based uponinduction, was in its infancy when Bacon taught; since then it hasmatured, largely because he and his successors in philosophypointed out the only method through which it might develop. Deduction has of course survived as a method of conducting thought;but it has lost the undisputed empery which it held over the ancientand the medieval mind. Now, if we turn to the history of fiction, weshall notice the significant fact that realism is a strictly modernproduct. All fiction was romantic till the days of Bacon. Realism iscontemporaneous with modern science and the other applications ofinductive thought. Romance survives, of course; but it has lost theundisputed empery of fiction which it held in ancient and inmedieval times. If Bacon had written fiction, he would have been arealist--the first realist in the history of literature; and this isthe only reply that is necessary to those who still maintain (ifany do) that he was capable of writing the romantic plays ofShakespeare. If it be granted now that the realist, by induction, leads his readerup from a consideration of imagined facts to a comprehension of truth, and that the romantic, by deduction, leads his reader down from anapprehension of truth to a consideration of imagined facts, we maynext examine certain advantages and disadvantages of each method incomparison with the other. =Advantages of Realism. =--In the first place, we notice, that, whilethe imagined facts of the romantic are selected merely to illustratethe truth he wishes to convey, the imagined facts of the realist areselected not only to illustrate, but also to support, the truth thatlies inherent in them. The realist, then, has this advantage, over theromantic in his method of expressing truth: he has the opportunity toprove his case by presenting the evidence on which his truth is based. It is therefore less difficult for him to conquer credence from askeptical and wary reader: and we must remember always that eventhough a story tells the truth, it is still a failure unless it getsthat truth believed. The romantic necessarily demands a deeper faithin his wisdom than the realist need ask for; and he can evoke deepfaith only by absolute sincerity and utter clearness in thepresentation of his fable. Unless the reader of "The Brushwood Boy"and "They" has absolute faith that Mr. Kipling knows the truth of histhemes, the stories are reduced to nonsense; for they present noevidence (through running parallel to actuality) which proves that theauthor _does_ know the truth. Unless the reader has faith thatStevenson deeply understands the nature of remorse, the conversationbetween Markheim and his ghostly visitant becomes incredible and vain. The author gives himself no opportunity to prove (through analogy withactual experience) that such a colloquy consistently presents theinner truth of conscience. =Advantages of Romance. =--But this great advantage of the realist--thathe supports his theme with evidence--carries with it an attendantdisadvantage. Since he lays his evidence bare before the reader, hemakes it simpler for the reader to detect him in a lie. The romanticsays, "These things are so, because I know they are"; and unless wereject him at once and in entirety as a colossal liar, we are almostdoomed to take his word in the big moments of his story. But therealist says, "These things are so, because they are supported byactual facts similar to the imagined facts in which I clothe them"; andwe may answer at any point in the story, "Not at all! On the verybasis of the facts you show us, we know better than to take yourword. " In other words, when the reader disbelieves a romance, he doesso by instinct, without necessarily knowing why; but when hedisbelieves a realistic novel, he does so by logic, with the evidencebefore him. A great romantic, therefore, must have the wisdom that convinces byits very presence and conquers credence through the reader'sintuition. Who could disbelieve the author of "The Scarlet Letter"? Wedo not need to see his evidence in order to know that he knows. Agreat realist, on the other hand, while he need not have thetriumphant and engaging mental personality necessary to a greatromantic, must have a thorough and complete equipment of evidencediscerned from observation of the actual. He must have eyes and ears, though he need not have a soul. =The Confinement of Realism. =--A novelist of realistic vent is, therefore, almost doomed to confine his fiction to his own place andtime. In no other period or nation can he be so certain of hisevidence. We know the enormous labor with which George Eliot amassedthe materials for "Romola, " a realistic study of Florence duringthe Renaissance; but though we recognize the work as that of athorough student, the details still fail to convince us as do thedetails of her studies of contemporary Warwickshire. The youngaspirant to the art of fiction who knows himself to be an incipientrealist had therefore best confine his efforts to attemptedreproduction of the life he sees about him. He had better accept thecommon-sensible advice which the late Sir Walter Besant gave in hislecture on "The Art of Fiction": "A young lady brought up in a quietcountry village should avoid descriptions of garrison life; a writerwhose friends and personal experiences belong to what we call thelower middle class should carefully avoid introducing his charactersinto society; a South-countryman would hesitate before attempting toreproduce the North-country accent. This is a very simple rule, butone to which there should be no exception--never to go beyond your ownexperience. " =The Freedom of Romance. =--The incipient realist is almost obliged toaccept this advice; but the incipient romantic need not necessarily doso. That final injunction of Besant's--"never to go beyond your ownexperience"--seems somewhat stultifying to the imagination; and thereis a great deal of very wise suggestion in Henry James' reply to it:"What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin andend?. .. The young lady living in a village has only to be a damselupon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me)to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about themilitary. Greater miracles have been seen than that, imaginationassisting, she should speak the truth about some of these gentlemen. "The romantic "upon whom nothing is lost, " may, "imaginationassisting, " project his truth into some other region of experiencethan those which he has actually observed. Edgar Allan Poe isindubitably one of the great masters of the art of fiction; but thereis nothing in any of his stories to indicate that he was born inBoston, lived in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York, and died inBaltimore. "The Assignation" indicates that he had lived inVenice--where, in fact, he had never been; others of his stories havethe atmosphere of other times and lands; and most of them pass in adream-world of his own creation, "out of space, out of time. " So long as the romantic is sure of his truth and certain of hispower to convince the reader, he need not support his truth by anaccumulation of evidence imitated from the actual life he hasobserved. But on the other hand, there is nothing to prevent hisdoing so; and unless he be very headstrong--so headstrong as to bealmost unreliable--he will be extremely chary of his freedom. Hewill not subvert the actual unless there is no other equallyeffective means of conveying the truth he has to tell. Many timesa close adherence to actuality is as advisable for the deductiveauthor as it is for the inductive; many times the romantic writergains as much as the realist by confining his fiction to his ownenvironment of time and place. Scott, after all, was less successfulwith his medieval kings and knights than with his homely and simpleScottish characters. Hawthorne, in "The Marble Faun, " lost acertain completeness of effect by stepping off his own New Englandshadow. "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, " with its subversion of the actual, is the sort of story that might be set out of space, out of time;but Stevenson enhanced the effect of its imaginative plausibilityby setting it in contemporary London. More and more, in recentyears, the romantics have followed the lead of the realists inembodying their truth in scenes and characters imitated fromactuality. The early stories of the thoroughly romantic Mr. Kiplingwere set in his own country, India, and in his own time; and it wasnot until his actual experience had broadened to other lands, that, to any great extent, his subjects broadened geographically. In hisstories of his own people, Mr. Kipling just as faithfully portrays theevery-day existence he has actually observed as any realist. Hismethod is romantic always: he deduces his details from his theme, instead of inducing his theme from his details. He is entirelyromantic in the direction of his thought; but it is very suggestiveof the tenor of contemporary romance, to notice that he has taken theadvice of the realists and seldom gone beyond his own experience. The range of romance is therefore far wider than the range ofrealism; for all that may be treated realistically may be treatedromantically also, and much else that may be treated romantically ishardly susceptible of realistic treatment. Granted that a romantichave truths enough in his head, there is scarcely any limit to thestories he may deduce from them; while, on the other hand, the workof the inductive novelist is limited by the limits of his premises. But the greater freedom of romance is attended by a more difficultresponsibility. If it be easier for the romantic to tell the truth, because he has more ways of telling it, it is surely harder for himto tell nothing but the truth. More often than the realist he istempted to assert uncertainties--tempted to say with vividness andcharm things of which he cannot quite be sure. =Neither Method Better Than the Other. =--But whatever may be thecomparative advantages and disadvantages of each method of exhibitingthe truth, it is absolutely certain that either method of presentmentis natural and logical; and hence all criticism that aims to exaltromance above realism, or realism above romance, must be foreverfutile. Guy de Maupassant, in his valuable preface to "Pierre etJean, " has spoken very wisely on this point. The ideal critic, hesays, should demand of the artist merely to "create somethingbeautiful, in the form most convenient to him, according to histemperament. " And he states further:--"The critic should appraise theresult only according to the nature of the effort. .. . He should admitwith an equal interest the contrasted theories of art, and judge theworks resultant from them only from the standpoint of their artisticworth, accepting _a priori_ the general ideas from which they owetheir origin. To contest the right of an author to make a romantic ora realistic work is to wish to force him to modify his temperament, refuse to recognize his originality, and not permit him to employ theeye and the intellect which nature has given him. Let us allow him theliberty to understand, to observe, and to conceive in whatever way hewishes, provided that he be an artist. " Surely this is the only sane view of the situation. Therefore, whenMr. W. D. Howells, in his dexterous little book on "Criticism andFiction, " pleads engagingly for realism as the only valid method forthe modern novelist, and when Stevenson, in many an alluring essay, blows blasts upon the trumpet of romance, and challenges the realiststo show excuse for their existence, each is fighting an unnecessarybattle, since each is at the same time right and wrong. Each is rightin asserting the value of his own method, and wrong in denying thevalue of the other's. The minds of men have always moved in twodirections, and always will; and as long as men shall write, we shallhave, and ought to have, both inductive and deductive fiction. =Abuses of Realism. =--Neither of the two methods is truer than theother; and both are great when they are well employed. Each, however, lends itself to certain abuses which it will be well for us to noticebriefly. The realist, on the one hand, in his careful imitation ofactual life, may grow near-sighted and come to value facts for theirown sake, forgetting that his primary purpose in setting themforth should be to lead us to understand the truths which underliethem. More and more, as the realist advances in technic and gains inability to represent the actual, he is tempted to make photographs oflife instead of pictures. A picture differs from a photographmainly in its artistic repression of the unsignificant; it exhibitslife more truly because it focusses attention on essentials. But anynovel that dwells sedulously upon non-essentials and exalts theunsignificant obscures the truth. This is the fallacy of thephotographic method; and from this fallacy arise the tediousminuteness of George Eliot in her more pedestrian moments, theinterminable tea-cups of Anthony Trollope, and the mire of theimitators of Zola. Realism latterly, especially in France, hasshown a tendency to degenerate into so-called "naturalism, " amethod of art which casts the unnatural emphasis of photographicreproduction upon phases of actual life which are base in themselvesand unsignificant of the eternal instinct which leads men morenaturally to look upward at the stars than downward at the mud. The"naturalistic" writers are deceived in thinking that they representlife as it really is. If their thesis were true, the human racewould have dwindled to extinction long ago. Surely a photograph of aslattern in the gutter is no more natural than a picture of Rosalindin the Forest of Arden; and no accuracy of imitated actuality can makeit more significant of truth. =Abuses of Romance. =--The romantic, on the other hand, because heworks with greater freedom than the realist, may overleap himself andexpress in a loose fashion general conceptions which are hasty anddevoid of truth. To this defect is owing the vast deal of rubbishwhich has been foisted on us recently by feeble imitators of Scott andDumas père--imitators who have assumed the trappings and the suits ofthe accredited masters of romance, but have not inherited theirclarity of vision into the inner truth of things that are. To suchdegenerate romance, Professor Brander Matthews has applied the term"romanticism"; and though his use of the term itself may be considereda little too special for general currency, no exception can be takento the distinction which he enforces in the following paragraph: "TheRomantic calls up the idea of something primary, spontaneous, andperhaps medieval, while the Romanticist suggests something secondary, conscious, and of recent fabrication. Romance, like many another thingof beauty, is very rare; but Romanticism is common enough nowadays. The truly Romantic is difficult to achieve; but the artificialRomanticist is so easy as to be scarce worth the attempting. TheRomantic is ever young, ever fresh, ever delightful; but theRomanticist is stale and second-hand and unendurable. Romance is neverin danger of growing old, for it deals with the spirit of man withoutregard to times and seasons; but Romanticism gets out of date withevery twist of the kaleidoscope of literary fashion. The Romantic iseternally and essentially true, but the Romanticist is inevitablyfalse. Romance is sterling, but Romanticism is shoddy. " But the Scylla and the Charybdis of fiction-writing may both beavoided. The realists gain nothing by hooting at the abuses ofromance; and the romantics gain as little by yawning over realism atits worst. "The conditions"--to use a phase of Emerson's--"are hardbut equal": and at their best, the realist, working inductively, andthe romantic, working deductively, are equally able to present thetruth of fiction. [2] The theory which follows in this chapter was first announced by the present writer in _The Dial_ for November 16, 1904. REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. Define the difference between realism and romance. 2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the realistic method? 3. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the romantic method? 4. Which method is more natural to your own mind? 5. Upon what evidence have you based your answer to the foregoing question? SUGGESTED READING BLISS PERRY: "A Study of Prose Fiction"--Chapter IX, on "Realism, " andChapter X, on "Romanticism. " F. MARION CRAWFORD: "The Novel: What It Is. " HENRY JAMES: "The Art of Fiction. " NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: Preface to "The House of the Seven Gables. " SIR WALTER BESANT: "The Art of Fiction. " GUY DE MAUPASSANT: Preface to "Pierre et Jean. " WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS: "Criticism and Fiction. " ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: "The Lantern-Bearers. " BRANDER MATTHEWS: "Romance Against Romanticism, " in "The HistoricalNovel. " CHAPTER III THE NATURE OF NARRATIVE Transition from Material to Method--The Four Methods of Discourse--1. Argumentation; 2. Exposition; 3. Description; 4. Narration, the Natural Mood of Fiction--Series and Succession--Life Is Chronological, Art Is Logical--The Narrative Sense--The Joy of Telling Tales--The Missing of This Joy--Developing the Sense of Narrative--The Meaning of the Word "Event"--How to Make Things Happen--The Narrative of Action--The Narrative of Character--Recapitulation. =Transition from Material to Method. =--We have now considered thesubject-matter of fiction and also the contrasted attitudes of mind ofthe two great schools of fiction-writers toward setting forth thatsubject-matter. We must next turn our attention to the technicalmethods of presenting the materials of fiction, and notice in detailthe most important devices employed by all fiction-writers in order tofulfil the purpose of their art. =The Four Methods of Discourse=--=1. Argumentation. =--Rhetoricians, aseverybody knows, arbitrarily but conveniently distinguish four forms, or moods, or methods, of discourse: namely, narration, description, exposition, and argumentation. It may be stated without fear ofwell-founded contradiction that the natural mood, or method, offiction is the first of these, --narration. Argumentation, for its ownsake, has no place in a work of fiction. There is, to be sure, a typeof novel, which is generally called in English "the novel with apurpose, " the aim of which is to persuade the reader to accept somespecial thesis that the author holds concerning politics, religion, social ethics, or some other of the phases of life that are readilyopen to discussion. But such a novel usually fails of its purpose ifit attempts to accomplish it by employing the technical devices ofargument. It can best fulfil its purpose by exhibiting indisputabletruths of life, without persuasive comment, _ex cathedra_, on the partof the novelist. In vain he argues, denounces, or defends, appeals tous or coaxes us, unless his story in the first place convinces by itsvery truthfulness. If his thesis be as incontestable as the authorthinks it is, it can prove itself by narrative alone. =2. Exposition. =--Exposition, for its own sake, is also out of placein fiction. The aim of exposition is to explain, --an aim necessarilyabstract; but the purpose of fiction is to represent life, --a purposenecessarily concrete. To discourse of life in abstract terms is tosubvert the natural mood of art; and the novelist may make his meaningjust as clear by representing life concretely, without a runningcommentary of analysis and explanation. Life truly represented willexplain itself. There are, to be sure, a number of great novelists, ofwhom George Eliot may be taken as the type, who frequently halt theirstory to write an essay about it. These essays are often instructivein themselves, but they are not fiction, because they do not embodytheir truths in imagined facts of human life. George Eliot is at onemoment properly a novelist, and at the next moment a discursiveexpositor. She would be still greater as a novelist, and a novelistmerely, if she could make her meaning clear without digressing toanother art. =3. Description. =--Description also, in the most artistic fiction, isused only as subsidiary and contributive to narration. The aim ofdescription--which is to suggest the look of things at a certaincharacteristic moment--is an aim necessarily static. But life--whichthe novelist purposes to represent--is not static but dynamic. Theaim of description is pictorial: but life does not hold its pictures;it melts and merges them one into another with headlong hurryingprogression. A novelist who devotes two successive pages to thedescription of a landscape or a person, necessarily makes his storystand still while he is doing it, and thereby belies an obvious law oflife. Therefore, as writers of fiction have progressed in art, theyhave more and more eliminated description for its own sake. =4. Narration, the Natural Mood of Fiction. =--Since, then, the naturalmood, or method, of fiction is narration, it is necessary that weshould devote especial study to the nature of narrative. And in astudy frankly technical we may be aided at the outset by a definition, which may subsequently be explained in all its bearings. _A narrative is a representation of a series of events. _ This is avery simple definition; and only two words of it can possibly demandelucidation. These words are _series_ and _event_. The word _event_will be explained fully in a later section of this chapter: meanwhileit may be understood loosely as synonymous with _happening_. Let usfirst examine the exact meaning of the word _series_. =Series and Succession. =--The word _series_ implies much more than theword _succession_: it implies a relation not merely chronological butalso logical; and the logical relation it implies is that of cause andeffect. In any section of actual life which we examine, the events arelikely to appear merely in succession and not in series. One eventfollows another immediately in time, but does not seem linked to itimmediately by the law of causation. What you do this morning does notoften necessitate as a logical consequence what you do this afternoon;and what you do this evening is not often a logical result of what youhave done during the day. Any transcript from actual life that is notdeliberately arranged and logically patterned is therefore likely notto be a narrative. A passage from a diary, for instance, which statesevents in the order of their happening but makes no attempt to presentthem as links in a chain of causation, is not, technically speaking, narrative in method. To illustrate this point, let us open at randomthe diary of Samuel Pepys. Here is his entry for April 29, 1666:-- "To Church, where Mr. Mills, a lazy sermon upon the Devil's having noright to anything in this world. To Mr. Evelyn's, where I walked inhis garden till he come from Church, with great pleasure readingRidley's discourse, all my way going and coming, upon the Civil andEcclesiastical Law. He being come home, he and I walked together inthe garden with mighty pleasure, he being a very ingenious man; and, the more I know him, the the more I love him. Weary to bed, afterhaving my hair of my head cut shorter, even close to my skull, forcoolness, it being mighty hot weather. " There is no logical continuity in the worthy diarist's faithfulchronicle of actuality. What occasioned the weariness with which hewent to bed? It could not have been the company of Mr. Evelyn, whom heloved; it could hardly have been the volume on the civil andecclesiastical law, though its title does suggest the soporific. Washis strength, like Samson's, shorn away with the hair of his head; orcan it be that that lazy sermon of Mr. Mills' got in its deadeningeffects at bedtime? We notice, at any rate, that the diarist's remarksneed considerable re-arrangement to make them really narrative. =Life Is Chronological, Art Is Logical. =--Yet it is just in this waythat commonly event succeeds event in the daily life of every one. Itis only in the great passionate crises of existence that event treadsupon event in uninterrupted sequence of causation. And here is themain formal difference between life as it actually happens and life asit is artistically represented in history, biography, and fiction. _Inevery art there are two steps; first, the selection of essentials, andsecondly, the arrangement of these essentials according to a pattern. _In the art of narration, events are first selected because theysuggest an essential logical relation to each other; and they are thenarranged along the lines of a pattern of causation. Let us comparewith the haphazard passage from Pepys a bit of narrative that isartistically patterned. Here is the conclusion to Stevenson's story of"Markheim. " The hero, having slain a dealer in his shop on Christmasday, spends a long time alone, ransacking the dealer's effects andlistening to the voice of conscience. He is interrupted by a ringingof the door-bell. The dealer's maid has returned from holidaying. -- "He opened the door and went downstairs very slowly, thinking tohimself. His past went soberly before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as a chance-medley--a scene ofdefeat. Life, as he thus reviewed it, tempted him no longer; but onthe further side he perceived a quiet haven for his bark. He paused inthe passage, and looked into the shop, where the candle still burnedby the dead body. It was strangely silent. Thoughts of the dealerswarmed into his mind as he stood gazing. And then the bell once morebroke out into impatient clamor. "He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like asmile. "'You had better go for the police, ' said he: 'I have killed yourmaster. '" The last sentence of this passage is an effect which is logically ledup to by many causes that are rapidly reviewed in the precedingsentences. Stevenson has here patterned a passage of life along linesof causation; he has employed the logical method of narration: butPepys, in the selection quoted, looked upon events with no narrativesense whatever. =The Narrative Sense. =--The narrative sense is, primarily, an abilityto trace an event back to its logical causes and to look forward toits logical effects. It is the sense through which we realize, forinstance, that what happened at two o'clock to-day, although it maynot have resulted necessarily from what happened an hour before, wasthe logical outcome of something else that happened at noon on thepreceding Thursday, let us say, and that this in turn was the resultof causes stretching back through many months. A well-developednarrative sense in looking on at life is very rare. Every one, ofcourse, is able to refer the headache of the morning after to thehilarity if the night before; and even, after some experience, toforesee the headache at the time of the hilarity: but life, to thecasual eye of the average man, hides in the main the secrets of itsseries, and betrays only an illogical succession of events. Mindscruder than the average see only a jumble of happenings in the lifethey look upon, and group them, if at all, by propinquity in time, rather than by any deeper law of relation. Such a mind had DameQuickly, the loquacious Hostess in Shakespeare's "Henry IV. " Considerthe famous speech in which she accuses Falstaff of breach of promiseto marry her:-- "Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in myDolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, uponWednesday in Wheeson week, when the prince broke thy head for likinghis father to a singing man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, comein then and call me gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess ofvinegar; telling us she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didstdesire to eat some; whereby I told thee they were ill for a greenwound? And didst thou not, when she was gone down stairs, desire me tobe no more so familiarity with such poor people; saying that ere longthey should call me madam? And didst thou not kiss me and bid me fetchthee thirty shillings? I put thee now to thy book-oath: deny it, ifthou canst. " There are, of course, many deficiencies in Dame Quickly's mentalmake-up; but the one for us to notice here is her utter lack of thenarrative sense. She would never be able to tell a story: because, inthe first place, she could not select from a muddle of events thosewhich bore an intelligible relation to one another, and in thesecond place, she could not arrange them logically instead ofchronologically. She has no sense of series. And although DameQuickly's mind is an exaggeration of the type it represents, thetype, in less exaggerated form, is very common; and everybody willagree that the average man, who has never taken pains to trainhimself in narrative, is not able in his ordinary conversation totell with ease a logically connected story. =The Joy of Telling Tales. =--The better sort of narrative sense isnot merely an abstract intellectual understanding of the relationof cause and effect subsisting between events often disparate intime; it is, rather, a concrete feeling of the relation. It is anintuitive feeling; and, being such, it is possessed instinctivelyby certain minds. There are people in the world who are naturalborn story-tellers; all of us have met with them in actual life:and to this class belong the story-telling giants, like Sir WalterScott, Victor Hugo, Dumas père, Stevenson, and Mr. Kipling. Narrative is natural to their minds. They sense events in series;and a series once started in their imagination propels itself withhurrying progression. Some novelists, like Wilkie Collins, havenothing else to recommend them but this native sense of narrative;but it is a gift that is not to be despised. Authors with somethingimportant to say about life have need of it, in order that theprocess of reading their fiction may be, in Stevenson's phrase, "absorbing and voluptuous. " In the great story-tellers, there is asort of self-enjoyment in the exercise of the sense of narrative;and this, by sheer contagion, communicates enjoyment to the reader. Perhaps it may be called (by analogy with the familiar phrase, "thejoy of living") the joy of telling tales. The joy of telling taleswhich shines through "Treasure Island" is perhaps the main reason forthe continued popularity of the story. The author is having such agood time in telling his tale that he gives us necessarily a goodtime in reading it. =The Missing of This Joy. =--But many of the novelists who have hadgreat things to say about human life have been singularly deficient inthis native sense of narrative. George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, forexample, almost never evidence the joy of telling tales. GeorgeEliot's natural habit of mind was abstract rather than concrete; shewas born an essayist. But, largely through the influence of GeorgeHenry Lewes, she deliberately decided that fiction was the mosteffective medium for expressing her philosophy of life. Thereafter shestrove earnestly to develop that sense of narrative which, at theoutset, was largely lacking in her mind. To many readers who are notwithout appreciation of the importance and profundity of herunderstanding of human nature, her stories are wearisome andunalluring, because she told them with labor, not with ease. She doesnot seem to have had a good time with them, as Stevenson had with"Treasure Island, " a story in other ways of comparative unimportance. And surely it is not frivolous to state that the most profound andserious of thoughts are communicated best when they are communicatedwith the greatest interest. =Developing the Sense of Narrative. =--It could hardly be hoped that aperson entirely devoid of the narrative sense should acquire it by anyamount of labor; but nearly every one possesses it in at least arudimentary degree, and any one possessing it at all may develop it byexercise. A simple and common-sensible exercise is to seize hold ofsome event that happens in our daily lives, and then think back overall the antecedent events we can remember, until we discern which onesamong them stand in a causal relation to the event we are considering. Next, it will be well to look forward and imagine the sort of eventswhich will logically carry on the series. The great generals ofhistory have won their most signal victories by an exercise of thenarrative sense. Holding at the moment of planning a campaign the pastand present terms of a logical series of events, they have imaginedforward and foreseen the probable progression of the series. This mayperhaps explain why the great commanders, like Cæsar and Grant, havewritten such able narrative when they have turned to literature. The young author who is trying to develop his narrative sense may findunending exercise in the endeavor to ferret out the various series ofevents which lie entangled in the confused and apparently unrelatedsuccessions of incidents which pass before his observation. When hesees something happen in the street, he will not be satisfied, likethe casual looker-on, merely with that solitary happening; he will tryto find out what other happenings led up to it, and again what otherhappenings must logically follow from it. When he sees an interestingperson in a street-car, he will wonder where that person has come fromand whither he is going, what he has just done and what he is about todo; he will look before and after, and pine for what is not. Thisexercise is in itself interesting; and if the result of it be writtendown, the young author will gain experience in expression at the sametime that he is developing his sense of narrative. =The Meaning of the Word "Event. "=--It remains for us now to considerphilosophically the significance of the word _event_. Every event hasthree elements: the thing that is done, the agents that do it, and thecircumstances of time and place under which it is done; or, to say thematter in three words, --action, actors, and setting. Only when allthree elements conspire can something happen. Life suggests to themind of a contemplative observer many possible events which remainunrealized because only one or two of the necessary three elements arepresent, --events that are waiting, like unborn children on the otherside of Lethe, until the necessary conditions shall call them intobeing. We observe a man who could do a great thing of a certain sortif only that sort of thing were demanded to be done at the time and inthe place in which he loiters wasted. We grow aware of a great thinglonging to be done, when there is no one present who is capable ofdoing it. We behold conditions of place and time entirely fitted for acertain sort of happening; but nothing happens, because the necessarypeople are away. "Never the time and the place and the loved one alltogether!" sang Robert Browning; and then he dreamed upon an eventwhich was waiting to be born, --waiting for the imagined meeting andmarriage of its elements. =How to Make Things Happen. =--It is the function of the master ofcreative narrative to call events into being. He does this byassembling and marrying the elements without which events cannotoccur. Granted the conception of a character who is capable of doingcertain things, he finds things of that sort for the character to do;granted a sense of certain things longing to be done, he finds peoplewho will do them; or granted the time and the place that seemexpectant of a certain sort of happening, he finds the agents properto the setting. There is a conversation of Stevenson's, covering thispoint, which has been often quoted. His biographer, Mr. GrahamBalfour, tells us: "Either on that day or about that time I remembervery distinctly his saying to me: 'There are, so far as I know, threeways, and three ways only, of writing a story. You may take a plot andfit characters to it, or you may take a character and choose incidentsand situations to develop it, or lastly--you must bear with me while Itry to make this clear'--(here he made a gesture with his hand as ifhe were trying to shape something and give it outline and form)--'youmay take a certain atmosphere and get action and persons to express itand realize it. I'll give you an example--"The Merry Men. " There Ibegan with the feeling of one of those islands on the west coast ofScotland, and I gradually developed the story to express the sentimentwith which the coast affected me. '" In other words, starting with any one of the three elements--action, actors, or setting--the writer of narrative may create events byimagining the other two. Comparatively speaking, there have been veryfew stories, like "The Merry Men, " in which the author has started outfrom a sense of setting; and nearly all of them have been writtenrecently. The feeling for setting as the initial element in narrativehardly dates back further than the nineteenth century. We maytherefore best consider it in a later and more special chapter, anddevote our attention for the present to the two methods of creatingnarrative that have been most often used--that in which the author hasstarted with the element of action, and that in which he has startedwith the element of character. Very few of the great masters of narrative have, like Honoré deBalzac, employed both one and the other method with equal success:nearly all of them have shown an habitual mental predilection for theone or for the other. The elder Dumas, for example, habitually deviseda scheme of action and then selected characters to fit into his plot;and George Meredith habitually created characters and then devised theelements of action necessary to exhibit and develop them. Readers, like the novelists themselves, usually feel a predilection for onemethod rather than the other; but surely each method is natural andreasonable, and it would be injudicious for the critic to exalt eitherof them at the expense of the other. There is plenty of material inlife to allure a mind of either habit. Certain things that are doneare in themselves so interesting that it matters comparatively littlewho is doing them; and certain characters are in themselves sointeresting that it matters comparatively little what they do. Toconceive a potent train of action and thereby foreordain the nature ofsuch characters as will accomplish it, or to conceive characterspregnant with potentiality for certain sorts of deeds and therebyforeordain a train of action, --either is a legitimate method forplanning out a narrative. That method is best for any author which ismost natural for him; he will succeed best working in his own way; andthat critic is not catholic who states that either the narrative ofaction or the narrative of character is a better type of work than theother. The truth of human life may be told equally well by those whosense primarily its element of action and by those who senseprimarily its element of character; for both elements must finallyappear commingled in any story that is real. The critic may, however, make a philosophical distinction between thetwo methods, in order to lead to a better understanding of them both. Those writers who sense life primarily as action may be said to workfrom the outside in; and those who sense it primarily as character maybe said to work from the inside out. The first method requires themore objective, and the second the more subjective, consciousness oflife. Of the two, the objective consciousness of life is (at itsweakest) more elementary and (at its strongest) more elemental thanthe subjective. =The Narrative of Action. =--Stevenson, in his "Gossip on Romance, " haseloquently voiced the potency of an objective sense of action as theinitial factor in the development of a narrative. He is speaking ofthe spell cast over him by certain books he read in boyhood. "For mypart, " he says, "I liked a story to begin with an old wayside innwhere, 'towards the close of the year 17--, ' several gentlemen inthree-cocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred theMalabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and ascowling fellow of Herculean proportions striding along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate. This was further afield than my home-keepingfancy loved to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvasthan the tales that I affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full tothe brim; a Jacobite would do, but the highwayman was my favouritedish. I can still hear that merry clatter of the hoofs along themoonlit lane; night and the coming of day are still related in my mindwith the doings of John Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words'post-chaise, ' the 'great north road, ' 'ostler, ' and 'nag' still soundin my ears like poetry. One and all, at least, and each with hisparticular fancy, we read story-books in childhood, not for eloquenceor character or thought, but for some quality of the brute incident. "For the writer who works from the outside in, it is entirely possibleto develop from "some quality of the brute incident" a narrative thatshall be not only stirring in its propulsion of events but alsoprofound in its significance of elemental truth. =The Narrative of Character. =--The method of working from the insideout--of using a subjective sense of character as the initial factor inthe development of a narrative--is wonderfully exemplified in the workof Ivan Turgénieff; and the method is very clearly explained in HenryJames' intimate essay on the great Russian master. Henry Jamesremarks: "The germ of a story, with him, was never an affair ofplot--that was the last thing he thought of: it was the representationof certain persons. The first form in which a tale appeared to him wasas the figure of an individual, or a combination of individuals, whomhe wished to see in action, being sure that such people must dosomething very special and interesting. They stood before himdefinite, vivid, and he wished to know, and to show, as much aspossible of their nature. The first thing was to make clear to himselfwhat he did know, to begin with; and to this end he wrote out a sortof biography of each of his characters, and everything that they haddone and that had happened to them up to the opening of the story. Hehad their _dossier_, as the French say, and as the police has of thatof every conspicuous criminal. With this material in his hand he wasable to proceed; the story all lay in the question, What shall I makethem do? He always made them do things that showed them completely;but, as he said, the defect of his manner and the reproach that wasmade him was his want of 'architecture'--in other words, ofcomposition. The great thing, of course, is to have architecture aswell as precious material, as Walter Scott had them, as Balzac hadthem. If one reads Turgénieff's stories with the knowledge that theywere composed--or rather that they came into being--in this way, onecan trace the process in every line. Story, in the conventional senseof the word--a fable constructed, like Wordsworth's phantom, 'tostartle and waylay'--there is as little as possible. The thingconsists of the motions of a group of selected creatures, which arenot the result of a preconceived action, but a consequence of thequalities of the actors. "--And yet, for the writer who, likeTurgénieff, works from the inside out, it is entirely possible todevelop from "the qualities of the actors" a train of action thatshall be as stirring as it is significant. =Recapitulation. =--The main principle of narrative to bear in mindis that action alone, or character alone, is not its propersubject-matter. The purpose of narrative is to represent events; andan event occurs only when both character and action, with contributorysetting, are assembled and commingled. Indeed, in the greatest andmost significant events, it is impossible to decide whether the actoror the action has the upper hand; it is impossible, in regardingsuch events, for the imagination to conceive what is done and whois doing it as elements divorced. A novelist who has started outwith either element and has afterward evoked the other may arriveby imagination at this final complete sense of an event. The bestnarratives of action and of character are indistinguishable, one fromanother, in their ultimate result: they differ only in their origin:and the author who aspires to a mastery of narrative shouldremember that, in narrative at its best, character and action andeven setting are one and inseparable. For the conveniences of study, however, it is well to examine theelements of narrative one by one; and we shall therefore devote threeseparate chapters to a technical consideration of plot, andcharacters, and setting. REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. What is a narrative? 2. Distinguish between a succession and a series of events. 3. What are the two steps in any art? 4. What are the three component elements of every event? 5. Is life itself narrative in pattern? 6. Can the foregoing question be answered without qualification? 7. Discuss the comparative advantages of the narrative of action and the narrative of character. SUGGESTED READING WILLIAM TENNEY BREWSTER: Introduction to "Specimens of ProseNarration. " ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: "A Gossip on Romance. " HENRY JAMES: Essay on Turgénieff, in "Partial Portraits. " CHAPTER IV PLOT Narrative a Simplification of Life--Unity in Narrative--A Definite Objective Point--Construction, Analytic and Synthetic--The Importance of Structure--Elementary Narrative--Positive and Negative Events--The Picaresque Pattern--Definition of Plot--Complication of the Network--The Major Knot--"Beginning, Middle, and End"--The Sub-Plot--Discursive and Compacted Narratives--Telling Much or Little of a Story--Where to Begin a Story--Logical Sequence and Chronological Succession--Tying and Untying--Transition to the Next Chapter. =Narrative a Simplification of Life. =--Robert Louis Stevenson, in hisspirited essay entitled "A Humble Remonstrance, " has given veryvaluable advice to the writer of narrative. In concluding his remarkshe says, "And as the root of the whole matter, let him bear in mindthat his novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by itsexactitude; but a simplification of some side or point of life, tostand or fall by its significant simplicity. For although, in greatmen, working upon great motives, what we observe and admire is oftentheir complexity, yet underneath appearances the truth remainsunchanged: that simplification was their method, and that simplicityis their excellence. " Indeed, as we have already noted in passing, simplification is the method of every art. Every artist, in his ownway, simplifies life: first by selecting essentials from thehelter-skelter of details that life presents to him, and then byarranging these essentials in accordance with a pattern. And we havenoted also that the method of the artist in narrative is to selectevents which bear an essential logical relation to each other andthen to arrange them along the lines of a pattern of causation. =Unity in Narrative. =--Of course the prime structural necessity innarrative, as indeed in every method of discourse, is unity. Unity inany work of art can be attained only by a definite decision of theartist as to what he is trying to accomplish, and by a rigorous focusof attention on his purpose to accomplish it, --a focus of attention sorigorous as to exclude consideration of any matter which does notcontribute, directly or indirectly, to the furtherance of his aim. Thepurpose of the artist in narrative is to represent a series ofevents, --wherein each event stands in a causal relation, direct orindirect, to its logical predecessor and its logical successor in theseries. Obviously the only way to attain unity of narrative is toexclude consideration of any event which does not, directly orindirectly, contribute to the progress of the series. For this reason, Stevenson states in his advice to the young writer, from which we havealready quoted: "Let him choose a motive, whether of character orpassion: carefully construct his plot so that every incident is anillustration of the motive, and every property employed shall bear toit a near relation of congruity or contrast; . .. And allow neitherhimself in the narrative, nor any character in the course of thedialogue, to utter one sentence that is not part and parcel of thebusiness of the story or the discussion of the problem involved. Lethim not regret if this shortens his book; it will be better so; for toadd irrelevant matter is not to lengthen but to bury. Let him not mindif he miss a thousand qualities, so that he keeps unflaggingly inpursuit of the one he has chosen. " And earlier in the same essay, hesays of the novel: "For the welter of impressions, all forcible butall discreet, which life presents, it substitutes a certain artificialseries of impressions, all indeed most feebly represented, but allaiming at the same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, all chimingtogether like consonant notes in music or like the graduated tints ina good picture. From all its chapters, from all its pages, from allits sentences, the well-written novel echoes and re-echoes its onecreative and controlling thought; to this must every incident andcharacter contribute; the style must have been pitched in unison withthis; and if there is anywhere a word that looks another way, the bookwould be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller withoutit. " =A Definite Objective Point. =--The only way in which the writer ofnarrative may attain the unity that Stevenson has so eloquentlypleaded for is to decide upon a definite objective point, to bear inmind constantly the culmination of his series of events, and to valuethe successive details of his material only in so far as theycontribute, directly or indirectly, to the progress of the seriestoward that culmination. To say the thing more simply, he must see theend of his story from the beginning and must give the reader always asense of rigorous movement toward that end. His narrative, as a matterof construction, must be finished, before, as a matter of writing, itis begun. He must know as definitely as possible all that is to happenand all that is not to happen in his story before he ventures torepresent in words the very first of his events. He must not, as somebeginners try to do, attempt to make his story up as he goes along;for unless he holds the culmination of his series constantly in mind, he will not be able to decide whether any event that suggests itselfduring the progress of his composition does or does not form a logicalfactor in the series. =Construction, Analytic and Synthetic. =--The preliminary process ofconstruction may be accomplished in either of two ways. Authors withsynthetic minds will more naturally reason from causes to effects;and authors with analytic minds will more naturally reason fromeffects to causes. The former will construct forward through time, thelatter backward. Standing at the outset of a narrative, it is possibleto imagine forward along a series of events until the logicalculmination is divined; or standing at the culmination, it is possibleto imagine backward along the series to its far-away beginnings. Thackeray apparently constructed in the former manner; Guy deMaupassant apparently constructed in the latter. The lattermethod--the method of building backward from the culmination--isperhaps more efficacious toward the conservation of the strictestunity. It seems on the whole a little easier to exclude the extraneousin thinking from effects to causes than in thinking from causes toeffects, because analysis is a stricter and more focussed mood of mindthan synthesis. =The Importance of Structure. =--But in whichever way the process ofconstruction be accomplished, the best stories are always built beforethey are written; and that is the reason why, in reading them, we feelat every point that we are getting somewhere, and that the author isleading us step by step toward a definite culmination. Although, as isusually the case, we cannot, even midway through the story, foreseewhat the culmination is to be, we feel a certain reassurance in theknowledge that the author has foreseen it from the start. This feelingis one of the main sources of interest in reading narrative. Inlooking on at life itself, we are baffled by a muddle of eventsleading every whither; their succession is chaotic and lacking indesign; they are not marshaled and processional; and we have anuncomfortable feeling that no mind but that of God can foresee theirveiled and hidden culminations. But in reading a narrative arrangementof life, we have a comfortable sense of order, which comes of ourknowledge that the author knows beforehand whither the events aretending and can make us understand the sequence of causation throughwhich they are moving to their ultimate result. He makes life moreinteresting by making it more intelligible; and he does this mainly byhis power of construction. =Elementary Narrative. =--The simplest of all structures for anarrative is a straightway arrangement of events along a single strandof causation. In such a narrative, the first event is the direct causeof the second, the second of the third, the third of the fourth, andso on to the culmination of the series. This very simple structure isexhibited in many of the tales which have come down to us from earlycenturies. It is frequently employed in the "Gesta Romanorum, " andscarcely less frequently in the "Decameron" of Boccaccio. It has theadvantage of being completely logical and entirely direct. But wefeel, in reading stories so constructed, that the method ofsimplification has been carried too far, and that simplicity hastherefore ceased to be an excellence. Such a story is in this waymisrepresentative of life:--it fails utterly to suggest "the welter ofimpressions which life presents, " the sudden kaleidoscopic shifts ofactual life from one series of events to another, and the consequentintricacy and apparent chaos of life's successive happenings. Thestructure is too straightforward, too direct, too unwavering andunhesitant. =Positive and Negative Events. =--The simplest way to introduce theelement of hesitance and wavering, and thereby make the story moretruly suggestive of the intricate variety of life, is to interrupt theseries by the introduction of events whose apparent tendency is tohinder its progress, and in this way emphasize the ultimate triumph ofthe series in attaining its predestined culmination. Such events arenot extraneous; because, although they tend directly to dispute theprogress of the series, they tend also indirectly to further itthrough their failure to arrest it. The events in any skilfullyselected narrative may, therefore, be divided into two classes: eventsdirect or positive, and events indirect or negative. By a direct, orpositive, event is meant one whose immediate tendency is to aid theprogress of the series toward its predetermined objective point; andby an indirect, or negative, event is meant one whose immediatetendency is to thwart this predetermined outcome. It would be an easymatter, for example, in examining "Pilgrim's Progress, " to class aspositive those events which directly further the advance of Christiantoward the Celestial City, and to class as negative those events whoseimmediate tendency is to turn him aside from the straight and narrowpath. And yet both classes of events, positive and negative, make upreally only a single series; because the negative events are conqueredone by one by the preponderant power of the positive events, andcontribute therefore indirectly, through their failure, to theultimate attainment of the culmination. When a straightway arrangement of positive events along a singlestrand of causation is varied and emphasized in this way by theadmission of negative events, whose tendency is to thwart the progressof the series, the structure may be made very suggestive of thatconflict of forces which we feel to be ever present in actual life. This structure is exhibited, for example, in Hawthorne's little taleof "David Swan. " The point of the story is that nothing happens toDavid; the interest of the story lies in the events that almost happento him. The young man falls asleep at noon-time under the shade of aclump of maples which cluster around a spring beside the highroad. Three people, or sets of people, observe him in his sleep. The firstwould confer upon him Wealth, the second Love, the third Death, if heshould waken at the moment. But David Swan sleeps deeply; the peoplepass on; and all that almost happened to him subsides forever to theregion of the might-have-been. =The Picaresque Pattern. =--A simple series of this sort, wherein theevents proceed, now directly, now indirectly, along a single logicalline, may be succeeded by another simple series of the same sort, which in turn may be succeeded by a third, and so on indefinitely. Inthis way is constructed the type of story known as picaresque, becausein Spain, where the type was first developed, the hero was usually a_picaro_, or rogue. The narrative expedient in such stories is merelyto select a hero capable of adventure, to fling him loose into theroaring and tremendous world, and to let things happen to him oneafter another. The most widely known example of the type is not aSpanish story, but a French, --the "Gil Blas" of Alain René Le Sage. Assoon as Gil Blas arrives at the culmination of one series ofadventures, the author starts him on another. Each series is completein itself and distinct from all the rest; and the structure of thewhole book may be likened, in a homely figure, to a string ofsausages. The relation between the different sections of the story isnot organic; they are merely tied together by the continuance of thesame central character from one to another. Any one of the sectionsmight be discarded without detriment to the others; and the order ofthem might be rearranged. Plays, as well as novels, have beenconstructed in this inorganic way, --for example, Molière's "L'Etourdi"and "Les Facheux. " If the actors, in performing either of these plays, should omit one or two units of the sausage-string of incidents, theaudience would not become aware of any gap in structure. Yet a storybuilt in this straightforward and successive way may give a vastimpression of the shifting maze of life. Mr. Kipling's "Kim, " which ispicaresque in structure, shows us nearly every aspect of thelabyrinthine life of India. He selects a healthy and normal, but not aclever, boy, and allows all India to happen to him. The book iswithout beginning and without end; but its very lack of neatness andcompactness of plan contributes to the general impression it gives ofIndia's immensity. =Definition of Plot. =--But a simple series of events arranged along asingle strand of causation, or a succession of several series of thiskind strung along one after the other, may not properly be called aplot. The word _plot_ signifies a weaving together; and a weavingtogether presupposes the coexistence of more than one strand. Thesimplest form of plot, properly so called, is a weaving together oftwo distinct series of events; and the simplest way of weaving themtogether is by so devising them that, though they may be widelyseparate at their beginnings, they progress, each in its own way, toward a common culmination, --a single momentous event which standstherefore at the apex of each series. This event is the knot whichties together the two strands of causation. Thus, in "Silas Marner, "the culminating event, which is the redemption of Marner from amisanthropic aloofness from life, through the influence of Eppie, achild in need of love, is led up to by two distinct series of events, of which it forms the knot. The one series, which concerns itself withMarner, may be traced back to the unmerited wrong which he suffered inhis youth; and the other series, which concerns itself with Eppie, maybe traced back to the clandestine marriage of Eppie's father, GodfreyCass. The initial event of one series has no immediate logicalrelation to the initial event of the other; but each series, as itprogresses, approaches nearer and nearer to the other, until they meetand blend. =Complication of the Network. =--A type of plot more elaborate thanthis may be devised by leading up to the culmination along three ormore distinct lines of causation, instead of merely two. In the "Taleof Two Cities, " Sydney Carton's voluntary death upon the scaffoldstands at the apex of several series of events. And a plot may bestill further complicated by tying the strands together at otherpoints beside the culmination. In "The Merchant of Venice, " the twochief series of events are firmly knotted in the trial scene, whenShylock is circumvented by Portia; but they are also tied together, though less firmly, at the very outset of the play, when Antonioborrows from Shylock the money which makes it possible for Bassanio towoo and win the Lady of Belmont. Furthermore, any event in one of themain strands of causation may stand at the culmination of a minorstrand, and thus may form a little knot in the general network of theplot. In the same play, the minor strand of the elopement of Lorenzoand Jessica attains its culmination in a scene which stands onlymidway along the progress of the two main strands, that of the bondand that of the caskets, toward their common result in the defeat ofShylock. =The Major Knot. =--But however intricately woven a plot may be, andhowever many minor knots may tie together the various strands whichenter into it, there is almost always one point of greatestcomplication, one big knot which ties together all the strands atonce, and stands as the common culmination of all the series, majorand minor. The story concerns itself chiefly with telling the readerhow the major knot came to be tied; but in a plot of any complexity, the reader naturally desires to be told how the knot became untiedagain. Therefore this point of greatest complication, this culminationof all the strands of causation which are woven in the plot, thisobjective point of the entire narrative, is seldom set at the very endof a story, but usually at a point about three quarters of the wayfrom the beginning to the end. The first three quarters of the story, speaking roughly, exhibit the antecedent causes of the major knot; andthe last quarter of the story exhibits its subsequent effects. A plot, therefore, in its general aspects, may be figured as a complicationfollowed by an explication, a tying followed by an untying, or (to saythe same thing in French words which are perhaps more connotative) a_nouement_ followed by a _dénouement_. The events in the _dénouement_bear a closer logical relation to each other than the events in the_nouement_, because all of them have a common cause in the major knot, whereas the major knot is the ultimate effect of several distinctseries of causes which were quite separate one from another at thetime when the _nouement_ was begun. For this reason the _dénouement_shows usually a more hurried movement than the _nouement_--one eventtreading on another's heels. ="Beginning, Middle, and End. "=--Undoubtedly it was this threefoldaspect of a plot--1. _The Complication_; 2. _The Major Knot_; 3. _TheExplication_--which Aristotle had in mind when he stated that everystory must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. These words werenot intended to connote a quantitative equality. What Aristotle calledthe "middle" may, in a modern novel, be stated in a single page, andis much more likely to stand near the close of the book than at thecentre. But everything that comes after it, in what Aristotle calledthe "end, " should be an effect of which it is the cause; andeverything that comes before it, in what Aristotle called the"beginning, " should be, directly or indirectly, a cause of which it isthe effect. Only under these conditions will the plot be, as Aristotlesaid it should be, an organic whole. Only in this way can it conformto the principle of unity, which is the first principle of allartistic endeavor. =The Sub-Plot. =--Bearing the principle of unity ever in his mind, Stevenson, in a phrase omitted for the moment in one of the quotationsfrom "A Humble Remonstrance" set forth at the beginning of thischapter, advised the fiction-writer to "avoid a sub-plot, unless, assometimes in Shakespeare, the sub-plot be a reversion or complement ofthe main intrigue. " It seems safe to state that a sub-plot is of usein a novel only for the purpose of tying minor knots in the leadingstrands of causation, and should be discarded unless it serves thatpurpose. There is no reason, however, why a novel should not tell atonce several stories of equal importance, provided that these storiesbe deftly interlinked, as in that masterpiece of plotting, "Our MutualFriend. " In this novel, the chief expedient which Dickens has employedto bind his different stories together is to make the same person anactor in more than one of them, so that a particular event thathappens to him may be at the same time a factor in both one and theother series of events. Through the skilful use of this expedient, Dickens has contrived to give his novel unity of plot, in spite of thediversity of its narrative elements. But on the other hand, in"Middlemarch, " George Eliot has told three stories instead of one. Shehas failed to make her plot an organic whole by deftly interweavingthe three strands which she has spun. And therefore this monumentalnovel, so great in other ways, is faulty in structure, because itviolates the principle of unity. =Discursive and Compacted Narratives. =--According to the extent ofcomplication in the plot, novels may be grouped into two classes, --thediscursive and the compacted. Thackeray wrote novels of the formertype, Hawthorne of the latter. In "Vanity Fair" there are over half ahundred characters; in "The Scarlet Letter" there are three, orpossibly four. The discursive novel gives a more extensive, and thecompacted novel a more intensive, view of life. English authors forthe most part have tended toward the discursive type, and Continentalauthors toward the compacted. The latter type demands a finer and afirmer art, the former a broader and more catholic outlook on theworld. =Telling Much or Little of a Story. =--The distinction between the twotypes depends chiefly upon how much or how little of his entire storythe author chooses to tell. In actual life, as was stated in a formerchapter, there are no very ends; and it may now be added that alsothere are no absolute beginnings. Any event that happens is, inWhitman's words, "an acme of things accomplished" and "an encloser ofthings to be"; and in thinking back along its causes or forward alongits effects, we may continue the series until our thought loses itselfin an eternity. In any narrative, therefore, we are doomed to beginand end in mid-career; and the question is merely how extended asection of the entire imaginable and unimaginable series we shallchoose to represent to the reader. For instance, it would be a verysimple matter to trace the composition of Rossetti's "House of Life"back along a causal series to the birth of a boy in Arezzo in 1304;for it is hardly likely that Rossetti would have written a cycle oflove sonnets if many other poets, such as Shakespeare and Ronsard, hadnot done so before him; and Shakespeare and Ronsard, as Sir Sidney Leehas proved, were literary legatees of Petrarch, the aforesaid nativeof Arezzo. And yet, if we were to tell the story of how Rossetti'ssonnets came to be composed, it is doubtful if we should go furtherback in time than the occasion when his friend Deverell introduced himto the beautiful daughter of a Sheffield cutler who became theimmediate inspiration of his poetry of love. Dickens, in many novels, of which "David Copperfield" may be takenas an example, has chosen to tell the entire life-story of his herofrom birth up to maturity. But other novelists, like GeorgeMeredith in "The Egoist, " have chosen to represent events thatpass, for the most part, in one place, and in an exceedingly shortstretch of time. It is by no means certain that Meredith does not knowas much about the boyhood and youth of Sir Willoughby Patterne asDickens knew about the early years of David Copperfield; but he haschosen to compact his novel by presenting only a brief series ofevents which exhibit his hero at maturity. Surely Turgénieff, afterwriting out that _dossier_ of each of his characters to which HenryJames referred, must have known a great many events in their liveswhich he chose to omit from his finished novel. It is interesting toimagine the sort of plot that George Eliot would have built out ofthe materials of "The Scarlet Letter. " Probably she would have begunthe narrative in England at the time when Hester was a young girl. She would have set forth the meeting of Hester and Chillingworthand would have analyzed the causes culminating in their marriage. Then she would have taken the couple overseas to the colony ofMassachusetts. Here Hester would have met Arthur Dimmesdale; andGeorge Eliot would have expended all her powers as an analyst oflife in tracing the sweet thoughts and imperious desires that led thelovers to the dolorous pass. The fall of Hester would have been themajor knot in George Eliot's entire narrative. It would have stood atthe culmination of the _nouement_ of her plot: the subsequentevents would have been merely steps in the _dénouement_. Yet thefall of Hester was already a thing of the past at the outset ofthe story that Hawthorne chose to represent. He was interested only inthe after-effects of Hester's sin upon herself and her lover andher husband. The major knot, or culmination, of his plot was thereforethe revelation of the scarlet letter, --a scene which would have beenonly an incident in George Eliot's _dénouement_. It will be seen fromthis that any story which is extended in its implications may offer anovelist materials for any one of several plot-structures, accordingto whichever section of the entire story happens most to interest hismind. It will be seen, also, that much of the entire story must, in anycase, remain unwritten. A plot is not only, as Stevenson stated, asimplification of life; it is also a further simplification of thetrain of events which, in simplifying life, the novelist has firstimagined. The entire story, with all its implications, is selectedfrom life; and the plot is then selected from the entire story. Oftena novelist may suggest as much through deliberately omitting from hisplot certain events in his imagined story as he could suggest byrepresenting them. Perhaps the most powerful character in GeorgeMeredith's "Evan Harrington" is the great Mel, whose death isannounced in the very first sentence of the novel. Hawthorne, in "TheMarble Faun, " never clears away the mystery of Miriam's shadowypursuer, nor tells us what became of Hilda when she disappeared for atime from the sight and knowledge of her friends. =Where to Begin a Story. =--After the novelist has selected from hisentire story the materials he means to represent, and has patternedthese materials into a plot, he enjoys considerable liberty in regardto the point at which he may commence his narrative. He may begin atthe beginning of one or another of his main strands of causation, asScott usually does; or he may adopt the Homeric device, commended byHorace, of plunging into the midst of his plot and working his wayback only afterward to its beginning. In the first chapter of"Pendennis, " the hero is seventeen years old; the second chapternarrates the marriage of his father and mother, and his own birth andboyhood; and at the outset of the third chapter he is only sixteenyears of age. =Logical Sequence and Chronological Succession. =--It is obvious that, so long as the novelist represents his events in logical sequence, itis not at all necessary that he should present them in chronologicalsuccession. Stories may be told backward through time as well asforward. Thackeray often begins a chapter with an event that happenedone day, and ends it with an event that happened several days before;he works his way backward from effects to causes, instead of forwardfrom causes to effects. In carrying on a plot which is woven out ofseveral strands, it is hardly ever possible to represent events inuninterrupted chronological succession, even when the authorconsistently works forward from causes to effects; for after he haspursued one strand of his plot to a certain point in time, he isobliged to turn backward several days or weeks, or possibly a longerperiod, to pick up another strand and carry it forward to the samepoint in time at which he left the first. Retrogression in time, therefore, is frequently not only permissible but necessary. But it isonly common-sensible to state that chronological sequence should besacrificed merely for the sake of making clear the logical relation ofevents; and whenever juggling with chronology tends to obscure insteadof clarify that logical relation, it is evidence of an error ofjudgment on the part of the narrator. Turgénieff is often guilty ofthis error of judgment. He has a disconcerting habit of bringing a newcharacter into the scene which stands for the moment before the eye ofthe reader, and then turning the narrative backward several years inorder to recount the past life of the newcomer. Frequently, beforethis parenthetic recital is completed, the reader has forgotten thescene from which the author turned to the digression. =Tying and Untying. =--In most plots, as has been stated, the_nouement_ is more significant than the _dénouement_, and the causesleading to the tying of the major knot are more interesting than theeffects traced during the process of untying it. This is the reasonwhy the culmination is usually set well along toward the conclusion ofthe story. Sometimes even, when the major knot has been tied with aGordian intricacy, the author sets it at the very end of hisnarrative, and suddenly cuts it instead of carefully untying it. Butthere is no absolutely necessary reason why it should stand at theend, or, as is more frequently the case, at a point about threequarters through the story. It may even be set at the very beginning;and the narrative may concern itself entirely with an elaborate_dénouement_. This is the case, for example, in the detective story, where a very intricate knot is assumed at the outset, and thenarrative proceeds to exhibit the prowess of the detective-hero inuntying it. =Transition to the Next Chapter. =--A well-constructed plot, like anyother sort of well-articulated pattern, is interesting in itself; andcertain novels and short-stories, like Wilkie Collins' "Moonstone" andPoe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue, " maintain their interest almostthrough the element of plot alone. But since the purpose of fiction isto represent reality, a story will fail of the highest effect unlessthe people acting in its pattern of events produce upon the reader theillusion of living human beings. We must therefore turn our attentionnext to a study of the element of character. REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. How may unity be best attained in narrative? 2. Distinguish between the analytic and synthetic methods of construction. 3. Distinguish between positive and negative events. 4. Explain the pattern of picaresque romance. 5. What are the essential phases of a plot? 6. Explain the meaning of _nouement_ and _dénouement_. 7. Must a story always follow the order of chronology? 8. At what point in the exposition of a plot is the major knot most usually found? What is the logical reason for this usual position? SUGGESTED READING ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: "A Humble Remonstrance. " BLISS PERRY: "A Study of Prose Fiction"--Chapter VI, on "The Plot. " O. HENRY: "Roads of Destiny. "--The plotting of this story illustratesin practice most of the important points expounded in this chapter. CHAPTER V CHARACTERS Characters Should Be Worth Knowing--The Personal Equation of the Audience--The Universal Appeal of Great Fictitious Characters--Typical Traits--Individual Traits--The Defect of Allegory--The Defect of Caricature--Static and Kinetic Characters--Direct and Indirect Delineation--Subdivisions of Both Methods--I. Direct Delineation: 1. By Exposition; 2. By Description; [Gradual Portrayal]; 3. By Psychological Analysis; 4. By Reports from other Characters--II. Indirect Delineation: 1. By Speech; 2. By Action; 3. By Effect on other Characters; 4. By Environment. =Characters Should Be Worth Knowing. =--Before we proceed to study thetechnical methods of delineating characters, we must ask ourselveswhat constitutes a character worth delineating. A novelist is, tospeak figuratively, the social sponsor for his own fictitiouscharacters; and he is guilty of a social indiscretion, as it were, ifhe asks his readers to meet fictitious people whom it is neither ofvalue nor of interest to know. Since he aims to make his readersintimate with his characters, he must first of all be careful that hischaracters are worth knowing intimately. Most of us, in actual life, are accustomed to distinguish people who are worth our while frompeople who are not; and those of us who live advisedly are accustomedto shield ourselves from people who cannot, by the mere fact of whatthey are, repay us for the expenditure of time and energy we shouldhave to make to get to know them. And whenever a friend of ours asksus deliberately to meet another friend of his, we take it for grantedthat our friend has reasons for believing that the acquaintanceshipwill be of benefit or of interest to both. Now the novelist stands inthe position of a friend who asks us to meet certain people whom heknows; and he runs the risk of our losing faith in his judgment unlesswe find his people worth our while. By the mere fact that we bother toread a novel, thus expending time which might otherwise be passed incompany with actual people, we are going out of our way to meet thecharacters to whom the novelist wishes to introduce us. He thereforeowes us an assurance that they shall be even more worth our while thanthe average actual person. This is not to say that they shouldnecessarily be better; they may, of course, be worse: but they shouldbe more clearly significant of certain interesting elements of humannature, more thoroughly representative of certain phases of human lifewhich it is well for us to learn and know. =The Personal Equation of the Audience. =--In deciding on the sort ofcharacters that will be worth his readers' while, the novelist mustof course be influenced by the nature of the audience he is writingfor. The characters of "Little Women" may be worth the while ofchildren; and it is not an adverse criticism of Louisa M. Alcott tosay that they are not worth the while of mature men and women. Similarly, it is not an adverse criticism of certain Continentalnovelists to say that their characters are decidedly unfit companionsfor adolescent girls. Our judgment of the characters in a novelshould be conditioned always by our sense of the sort of readers towhom the novel is addressed. Henry James, in his later years, wroteusually for the super-civilized; and his characters should be judgedby different standards than the pirates of "Treasure Island, "--a storywhich was written for boys, both young and old. One reader may bebored by pirates, another by super-subtle cosmopolitans; and eachreader has the privilege of avoiding the society of the charactersthat weary him. =The Universal Appeal of Great Fictitious Characters. =--But the verygreatest characters of fiction are worth everybody's while; and surelythe masters need have felt no hesitancy in asking any one to meetSancho Panza, Robinson Crusoe, Henry Esmond, Jean Valjean, or TerenceMulvaney. In fact, the most amazing thing about a great fictitiousfigure is the multitude of very different people that the character iscapable of interesting. Many times we willingly absent ourselves fromactual society to pass an evening in the company of a fictitiouspersonage of a class with which we never associate in actual life. Perhaps in the actual world we would never bother to converse withilliterate provincial people; and yet we may not feel it a waste oftime and energy to meet them in the pages of "Middlemarch. " For my ownpart, I have always, in actual life, avoided meeting the sort ofpeople that appear in Thackeray's "Vanity Fair"; and yet I find it notonly interesting but profitable to associate with them through theentire extent of a rather lengthy novel. Why is it that a reader, who, although he has crossed the ocean many times, has never cared to enterthe engine-room of a liner, is yet willing enough to meet on intimateterms Mr. Kipling's engineer, Mac Andrew? And why is it that ladieswho, in actual society, are fastidious of their acquaintanceship, should yet associate throughout a novel with the Sapho of Daudet? Whatis the reason why these fictitious characters should seem, for nearlyevery reader, more worth while than the very same sort of people inactual life? =Typical Traits. =--The reason is that great fictitious characters aretypical of their class, to an extent rarely to be noticed in anyactual member of the class they typify. They "contain multitudes, " toborrow Whitman's phrase. All idealistic visionaries are typified inDon Quixote, all misers in Harpagon, all hypocrites in Tartufe, allegoists in Sir Willoughby Patterne, all clever, tricksy women in BeckySharp, all sentimentalists in Barrie's Tommy. But the average actualman is not of sufficient magnitude to contain a multitude of others;he is comparatively lacking in typical traits; he is not, to such agreat extent, illustrative of life, because only in a small measure ishe representative of his class. There are, of course, in actual life, certain people of unusual magnitude who justify Emerson's title of"Representative Men. " Benjamin Franklin, for example, is such a man. He is the only actual person entirely typical of eighteenth-centuryAmerica; and that is the main reason why, as an exhibition ofcharacter, his autobiography is just as profitable a book as themaster-works of fiction. But men so representative are rare in actuallife; and the chief business of fiction is therefore to supply them. =Individual Traits. =--It is mainly by supplying this need forrepresentative men and women that the novelist can make his charactersworth the while of every reader. But after he has made themquintessential of a class, he must be careful also to individualizethem. Unless he endows them with certain personal traits thatdistinguish them from all other representatives or members of theirclass, whether actual or fictitious, he will fail to invest them withthe illusion of reality. Every great character of fiction mustexhibit, therefore, an intimate combination of typical and individualtraits. It is through being typical that the character is true; it isthrough being individual that the character is convincing. =The Defect of Allegory. =--The reason why most allegorical figuresare ineffective is that, although they are typical, they are not atthe same time individual. They are abstractly representative of aclass; but they are not concretely distinguishable from otherrepresentatives or members of the class. We know them, therefore, not as persons but merely as ideas. We feel very little humaninterest nowadays in reading over the old morality plays, whosecharacters are merely allegorical abstractions. But in criticisingthem we must remember that they were designed not so much to be readas to be performed upon the stage; and that the actors who representedtheir abstract and merely typical characters must necessarily haveendowed them with concreteness and with individuality. Though acharacter in one of these allegorical plays might be called"Everyman, " it was one particular man who walked and talked upon theboards; and he evoked sympathy not so much for the type as for theindividual. But allegory written to be read is less likely toproduce the illusion of reality; and it is only when allegoricalcharacters are virtually conceived as individuals, instead of mereabstractions, that they touch the heart. Christian, in Bunyan's"Pilgrim's Progress, " is so conceived. He is entirely representativeof seventeenth-century Christianity; in a sense he is all men ofBunyan's time and Bunyan's religion; but he is also one man and oneonly, and we could never in our thought confuse him with any othercharacter in or out of fiction. =The Defect of Caricature. =--But just as a character may beineffective through being merely typical, so also a character may beunsignificant through being merely individual. The minor figures inBen Jonson's Comedies of Humours are mere personifications ofexaggerated individual traits. They are caricatures rather thancharacters. Dickens frequently commits the error of exhibitingfigures devoid of representative traits. Tommy Traddles is sharplyindividualized by the fact that his hair is always standing on end;but he exhibits no essential truth of human nature. Barkis, who isalways willin', and Micawber, who is always waiting for something toturn up, are emphatically distinguished from everybody else in or outof fiction; but they lack the large reality of representativecharacters. They are individualities instead of individuals. Theydo not exhibit an agglomeration of many different but consistenttraits rendered unified and single by a dominant and informingcharacteristic, such as ambition in Macbeth, senility in Lear, orirresoluteness in Hamlet. A great fictitious character must be atonce generic and specific; it must give concrete expression to anabstract idea; it must be an individualized representation of thetypical qualities of a class. It is only figures of this sort thatare finally worth while in fiction, --more worth the reader's whilethan the average actual man. =Static and Kinetic Characters. =--But there is yet another reason whyit is often more valuable for the reader to meet fictitious charactersthan to meet people of the same class in actual life; and this reasonis that during the day or two it takes to read a novel he may reviewthe most significant events of many years, and thus get to know afictitious character more completely in a brief space of time than hecould get to know him, if the character were actual, in several yearsof continuous acquaintanceship. We meet two sorts of characters in thepages of the novelists, --characters which may be called static, andcharacters which may be called kinetic. The first remain unchangedthroughout the course of the story: the second grow up or down, as thecase may be, through the influence of circumstances, of their ownwills, or of the wills of other people. The recurrent characters ofMr. Kipling's early tales, such as Mrs. Hauksbee, Strickland, Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, are static figures. Although they dodifferent things in different stories, their characters remain alwaysthe same. But Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are kinetic figures; theygrow and change throughout the novel; they are, each in his own way, bigger and wiser people when we leave them than they were when firstwe met them. To show a character developing under stress or ripeningeasily beneath beneficent influences is one of the greatestpossibilities of fiction. And to exhibit the gradual disintegration ofa character, as George Eliot does in the case of Tito Melema, is toteach us more of the tragedy of life than we might learn in many yearsof actual experience. =Direct and Indirect Delineation. =--Only after the process of creationis completed, and a character stands living in the mind of thenovelist, need he consider the various technical expedients which maybe employed to make the reader conscious of the character as apersonal presence. These technical expedients are many; but they mayall be grouped as phases of one or the other of two contrasted methodsof delineating character, which may be called, for convenience, directand indirect. According to the first method, traits of character areconveyed directly to the reader through some sort of statement by thewriter of the story: according to the second method, characteristicsare conveyed indirectly to the reader through a necessary inference, on his part, from the narrative itself. In employing the first, ordirect, method, the author (either in his own person or in that ofsome character which he assumes) stands between the reader and thecharacter he is portraying, in the attitude, more or less franklyconfessed, of showman or expositor. In employing the second, orindirect, method, the author seeks to obliterate himself as much aspossible from the reader's consciousness; and having brought thereader face to face with the character he desires to portray, leavesthe reader to make his own acquaintance with the character. Theindirect method is of course more difficult, and, when successfullyemployed, is more artistic, than the direct method. But seldom iseither used to the exclusion of the other; and it would be possible toillustrate by successive quotations from any first-rate novel, like"The Egoist" for example, how the same characteristics are portrayedfirst by the one and then by the other method. =Subdivisions of Both Methods. =--Each of the two methods shows itselfin many different phases. There are several distinct ways ofdelineating character directly, and also several distinct means ofindirect delineation. It is perhaps serviceable for the purposes ofstudy to distinguish them somewhat sharply one from another; but itmust always be remembered that the masters of fiction usually employ acommingling of them all, without conscious awareness of any criticaldistinction between them. Bearing this ever in mind, let us venture ona critical examination of some of the most frequently recurrentphases, first, of the direct, and secondly, of the indirect, method. =I. Direct Delineation: 1. By Exposition. =--The most obvious, and atthe same time the most elementary, means of direct portrayal is by adeliberate expository statement of the leading traits of the characterto be portrayed. Thus, at the outset of "The Vicar of Wakefield, " theauthor, writing in the person of the Vicar, thus expounds the traitsof Mrs. Primrose:-- "I was ever of opinion, that the honest man who married and brought upa large family, did more service than he who continued single, andonly talked of population. From this motive, I had scarce taken ordersa year before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose mywife as she did her wedding-gown, not for a fine glossy surface, butsuch qualities as would wear well. To do her justice, she was agood-natured notable woman; and as for breeding, there were fewcountry ladies who could show more. She could read any English bookwithout much spelling; but for pickling, preserving, and cookery, nonecould excel her. She prided herself also upon being an excellentcontriver in housekeeping; though I could never find that we grewricher with all her contrivances. " This elementary means of portrayal has the obvious advantage ofsuccinctness. The reader is told at once, and with a fair measure ofcompleteness, what he is to think about the character in question. Forthis reason the expedient is highly serviceable at the outset of astory. So excellent an artist as Stevenson, in the "New ArabianNights, " began each tale in the collection with a paragraph in whichhe expounded the main traits of the leading character. But theexpedient has also several disadvantages. In the first place, beingexpository, it is not narrative in mood; it savors of the essay ratherthan the story; and if it be used not at the outset but during thecourse of a narrative, it halts the progress of the action. In thesecond place, it is abstract rather than concrete; it does not bringthe reader into the presence of a character, but merely into thepresence of an explanation; and it leaves the reader in an attitudeexactly like that which he holds toward certain actual people, concerning whom he has been told a great deal by their friends, butwhom he has never met himself. The whole first chapter of "The Vicarof Wakefield" is a series of little essays on the various members ofthe Primrose family. Nothing happens in the chapter; the charactersnever step bodily into view; and we feel at the end that we have hearda great deal of talk about people whom we should like to meet but whomas yet we have not seen. =2. By Description. =--It is therefore in certain ways moresatisfactory to portray character directly through a descriptive, rather than an expository, statement. Thus, in the second chapter of"Martin Chuzzlewit, " we are told of Mr. Pecksniff:-- "His very throat was moral. You saw a good deal of it. You looked overa very low fence of white cravat (whereof no man had ever beheld thetie, for he fastened it behind), and there it lay, a valley betweentwo jutting heights of collar, serene and whiskerless before you. Itseemed to say, on the part of Mr. Pecksniff, 'There is no deception, ladies and gentlemen, all is peace, a holy calm pervades me. ' So didhis hair, just grizzled with an iron-gray, which was all brushed offhis forehead, and stood bolt upright, or slightly drooped in kindredaction with his heavy eyelids. So did his person, which was sleekthough free from corpulency. So did his manner, which was soft andoily. In a word, even his plain black suit, and state of widower, anddangling double eye-glass, all tended to the same purpose, and criedaloud, 'Behold the moral Pecksniff!'" This statement, being in the main concretely descriptive rather thanabstractly expository, brings us face to face with the character atthe same time that it tells us what to think of him. And whereas wefeel that we have merely heard about Mrs. Primrose, we feel that wehave really seen Mr. Pecksniff. =[Gradual Portrayal. ]=--It was the custom of Sir Walter Scott, at theintroduction of a character, to furnish the reader with an elaborateset portrayal, partly expository and partly descriptive, of the traitsand features of the character; and to allow this initial directstatement to do duty through the remainder of the novel. The troublewith this off-hand expedient is that the reader inevitably forgets theset statement of the author before the narrative has very farprogressed. It is therefore more effective to make a direct portrayalof character, whether expository or descriptive, little by littlerather than all in a lump; and to present at any one time to thereader only such traits or features as he needs to be reminded of inorder to appreciate the scene before him. Thus, in Mr. Kipling'smasterpiece, called "They, " we catch this initial glimpse of MissFlorence:-- "The garden door--heavy oak sunk deep in the thickness of thewall--opened further: a woman in a big garden hat set her foot slowlyon the time-hollowed stone step and as slowly walked across the turf. I was forming some apology when she lifted up her head and I saw thatshe was blind. "'I heard you, ' she said. 'Isn't that a motor car?'" And it is only after five pages of narrative that the writer deems itthe proper time to add:-- "She stood looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay, and I saw for the first time that she was beautiful. " =3. By Psychological Analysis. =--The point that a direct statement ofcharacteristics should preferably be delivered to the reader little bylittle rather than all in a lump is particularly patent when thestatement is not external and objective like those already quoted, butinternal and subjective. In a certain type of fiction, which iscommonly called "the psychological novel, " the usual expedient fordelineating character is a statement partly narrative and partlyexpository of what is taking place within the mind of the fictitiousperson, based upon an analysis of his thoughts and his emotions, atimportant moments of the story. This expedient of portraying characterby mental analysis is George Eliot's favorite technical device. Hereis a typical passage, from "The Mill on the Floss, " Chapter V:-- "Maggie soon thought she had been hours in the attic, and it must betea-time, and they were all having their tea, and not thinking of her. Well, then, she would stay up there and starve herself--hide herselfbehind the tub, and stay there all night; and then they would all befrightened, and Tom would be sorry. Thus Maggie thought in the prideof her heart, as she crept behind the tub; but presently she began tocry again at the idea that they didn't mind her being there. If shewent down again to Tom now--would he forgive her?--perhaps her fatherwould be there, and he would take her part. But then she wanted Tom toforgive her because he loved her, not because his father told him. No, she would never go down if Tom didn't come to fetch her. Thisresolution lasted in great intensity for five dark minutes behind thetub; but then the need of being loved, the strongest need in poorMaggie's nature, began to wrestle with her pride, and soon threw it. She crept from behind her tub into the twilight of the long attic, butjust then she heard a quick footstep on the stairs. "Tom had been too much interested in his talk with Luke, in going theround of the premises, walking in and out where he pleased, andwhittling sticks without any particular reason, except that he didn'twhittle sticks at school, to think of Maggie, and the effect his angerhad produced on her. He meant to punish her, and that business havingbeen performed, he occupied himself with other matters, like apractical person. "-- And so on. It is only after four hundred words more of this sort ofanalysis that the author tells us: "It was Tom's step, then, thatMaggie heard on the stairs. " This is George Eliot's way of portrayingthe characters of two children who have quarreled. Much is to be said in favor of this expedient of depicting characterby analysis. It is the only means by which the reader may be informeddirectly of those thoughts and emotions of a character which are themainsprings of his acts. And since we cannot feel that we know aperson intimately unless we understand the workings of his mind atcharacteristic moments, we derive a great advantage from thisimmediate presentation of his mental processes. On the other hand, theuse of the expedient destroys the very desirable illusion that thereader is an observer actually looking at the action, since thedetails depicted do not happen to the eye but rather to the analyticunderstanding. The expedient has the disadvantages of beingexceedingly abstract, and of halting happenings while the author tellsus why they happened. It is certainly unfortunate, for instance, thatit should take Tom a whole long page to get to Maggie after she hasheard his "_quick_ footstep on the stairs. " Furthermore, thisexpedient tends to destroy the illusion of reality by forcing thereader into a mental attitude which he seldom assumes in looking on atactual life. During actual occurrences people almost never pause toanalyze each other and seldom even analyze themselves. They act, andwatch other people act, without a microscopic insight into motives. And surely the purpose of narrative should be to represent events asthey seem to occur in actuality, rather than to present a dissertationon their causes in the manner of an essay. An important point, however, remains to be considered. Events are oftwo kinds, external and internal; things happen subjectively as wellas objectively: and in representing the sort of occurrence which takesplace only inside a person's mind, the expedient of analysis is by farthe most serviceable means of making clear the elements of characterthat contribute to it. But if the same expedient be employedhabitually in the depiction of external events as well, it is likelyto give the impression of unwarrantable vivisection. There is acertain falsity of mood in giving an objective event a subjectiverendering. =4. By Reports from Other Characters. =--When, therefore, it is desiredto depict a character by direct comment on his actions or hispersonality, there is a great advantage in allowing the comment to bemade by one of the other characters in the story, instead of by theauthor himself in an attitude of assumed omniscience. Jane Austendeftly exhibits this subtler phase of the expedient in many admirablepassages. For instance, in Chapter XXXIII of "Emma, " Mrs. Elton thuschatters to Emma Woodhouse:-- "'Jane Fairfax is absolutely charming, Miss Woodhouse. I quite raveabout Jane Fairfax--a sweet, interesting creature. So mild andlady-like--and with such talents! I assure you I think she has veryextraordinary talents. I do not scruple to say that she playsextremely well. I know enough of music to speak decidedly on thatpoint. Oh! she is absolutely charming! You will laugh at mywarmth--but upon my word, I talk of nothing but Jane Fairfax. '" In Chapter XXI the same character has been thus commented on by EmmaWoodhouse and Mr. Knightley. Emma speaks first:-- "'Miss Fairfax is reserved. ' "'I always told you she was--a little; but you will soon overcome allthat part of her reserve which ought to be overcome, all that has itsfoundation in diffidence. What arises from discretion must behonored. ' "'You think her diffident. I do not see it. '" These passages not only serve to portray, more or less directly, thepersonality of Jane Fairfax, but serve also at the same time toportray indirectly the personalities of the people who are talkingabout her. Mrs. Elton, in particular, is very clearly exhibited. Andthis point leads us to an examination of one of the most effectivemeans of indirect delineation. =II. Indirect Delineation: 1. By Speech. =--If the mere speech of afictitious figure be reported with sufficient fidelity to truth, it ispossible to convey through this expedient alone a very vivid sense ofcharacter. Consider the following bits of talk:-- "'You're not a gun-sharp? I am sorry. I could have surprised you. Apart from my gun, my tale don't amount to much of anything. I thankyou, but I don't use any tobacco you'd be likely to carry. .. . BullDurham? _Bull Durham!_ I take it all back--every last word. BullDurham--here! If ever you strike Akron, Ohio, when this fool-war'sover, remember you've Laughton O. Zigler in your vest pocket. Including the city of Akron. We've a little club there. .. . Hell!What's the sense of talking Akron with no pants?' "'Did I talk? I despise exaggeration--tain't American or scientific--butas true as I'm sitting here like a blue-ended baboon in a kloof, TeddyRoosevelt's Western tour was a maiden's sigh compared to myadvertising work. ' "'But the general was the peach. I presume you're acquainted with theaverage run of British generals, but this was my first. I sat on hisleft hand, and he talked like--like the _Ladies' Home Journal_. J'everread that paper? It's refined, Sir--and innocuous, and full ofnickel-plated sentiments guaranteed to improve the mind. He was it. Hebegan by a Lydia Pinkham heart-to-heart talk about my health, andhoped the boys had done me well, and that I was enjoying my stay intheir midst. '" These passages are taken from Mr. Kipling's story called "TheCaptive. " The action is laid during the South-African war. Is itnecessary to add that the speaker is an American gun-inventor who hasfought upon the Boer side and has been captured by the British? One point must be considered carefully. The art of these passages liesmainly in the fact that we learn more about Zigler indirectly, fromhis manner of talking, than directly, from the things which he tellsus of himself. His statement that he comes from Akron, Ohio, is lesssuggestive than his fondness for Bull Durham. Any direct statementmade by a character concerning himself is of no more artistic valuethan if it were made about him by the author, unless his manner ofmaking it gives at the same time an indirect evidence of his nature. The subtlest phase of indirect delineation through speech is aconveyance to the reader, through a character's remarks about himself, of a sense of him different from that which his statement literallyexpresses. Sir Willoughby Patterne, in "The Egoist, " talks abouthimself frequently and in detail; but the reader soon learns from thetone and manner of his utterance to discount the high esteem in whichhe holds himself. By saying one thing directly, the egoist conveysanother and a different thing indirectly to the reader. =2. By Action. =--But in fiction, as in life, actions speak louder thanwords: and the most convincing way of delineating character indirectlyis by exhibiting a person in the performance of a characteristicaction. If the action be visualized with sufficient clearness and ifits dominant details be presented to the reader with adequateemphasis, a more vivid impression of character will be conveyed thanthrough any sort of direct statement by the author. As an instance ofcharacterization through action only, without comment or directportrayal, let us consider the following passage from the duel sceneof "The Master of Ballantrae. " Two brothers, Mr. Henry and the Master, hate each other; they fall to altercation over a game of cards; andthe scene is narrated by Mackellar, a servant of Mr. Henry's:-- "Mr. Henry laid down his cards. He rose to his feet very softly, andseemed all the while like a person in deep thought. 'You coward!' hesaid gently, as if to himself. And then, with neither hurry nor anyparticular violence, he struck the Master in the mouth. "The Master sprang to his feet like one transfigured; I had never seenthe man so beautiful. 'A blow!' he cried. 'I would not take a blowfrom God Almighty. ' "'Lower your voice, ' said Mr. Henry. 'Do you wish my father tointerfere for you again?' "'Gentlemen, gentlemen. ' I cried, and sought to come between them. "The Master caught me by the shoulder, held me at arm's length, andstill addressing his brother: 'Do you know what this means?' said he. "'It was the most deliberate act of my life, ' says Mr. Henry. "'I must have blood, I must have blood for this, ' says the Master. "'Please God it shall be yours, ' said Mr. Henry; and he went to thewall and took down a pair of swords that hung there with others, naked. These he presented to the Master by the points. 'Mackellarshall see us play fair, ' said Mr. Henry. 'I think it very needful. ' "'You need insult me no more, ' said the Master, taking one of theswords at random. 'I have hated you all my life. ' "'My father is but newly gone to bed, ' said Mr. Henry. 'We must gosomewhere forth of the house. ' "'There is an excellent place in the long shrubbery, ' said theMaster. "'Gentlemen, ' said I, 'shame upon you both! Sons of the same mother, would you turn against the life she gave you?' "'Even so, Mackellar, ' said Mr. Henry, with the same perfect quietudeof manner he had shown throughout. " It is not necessary for Mackellar to tell us that, whereas Mr. Henryis phlegmatic and deliberate, the Master is impulsive and mercurial. It is not necessary for him to attempt analysis of the emotions andthoughts of the leading characters, since these are sufficientlyevident from what they do and say. The action happens to the eye andear, without the interpretation of an analytic intellect; but thereader is made actually present at the scene, and can see and judge itfor himself. The method is absolutely narrative and not at allexpository, --entirely objective and concrete. Surely this is the mostartistic means of portraying those elements of character whichcontribute to external, or objective, events: and even what happensinside the mind of a character may often be more poignantly suggestedby a concrete account of how he looks and what he does than by anabstract analytic statement of the movements of his mind. WhenHepzibah Pyncheon opens her shop in the House of the Seven Gables, herstate of feeling is indicated indirectly, by what she does and how shedoes it. =3. By Effect on Other Characters. =--Perhaps the most delicate meansof indirect delineation is to suggest the personality of one characterby exhibiting his effect upon certain other people in the story. Inthe third book of the "Iliad, " there is a temporary truce upon theplains of Troy; and certain elders of the city look forth from thetower of the Scæan gates and meditate upon the ten long years ofconflict and of carnage during which so many of their sons have died. Toward them walks the white-armed Helen, robed and veiled in white;and when they mark her approach, they say to each other (old and wiseand weary with sorrows though they be):-- "'Small blame is theirs, if both the Trojan knights And brazen-mailed Achaians have endured So long so many evils for the sake Of that one woman. '" --(Bryant's Version. ) Perhaps the most remarkable instance in modern literature of the useof this expedient is Mr. Kipling's tale of "Mrs. Bathurst. " The storyis all about the woman from whom it takes its title; but she never fora moment appears upon the scene of action, and is portrayed entirelythrough her effect upon several different men. Here is a bit ofconversation concerning her. Note her effect upon the humorous and notespecially sensitive Pyecroft. -- "Said Pyecroft suddenly:-- "'How many women have you been intimate with all over the world, Pritch?' "Pritchard blushed plum color to the short hairs of his seventeen-inchneck. "''Undreds, ' said Pyecroft. 'So've I. How many of 'em can you rememberin your own mind, settin' aside the first--an' per'aps the last--_andone more_?' "'Few, wonderful few, now I tax myself, ' said Sergeant Pritchard, relievedly. "'An' how many times might you 'ave been at Aukland?' "'One--two, ' he began. 'Why, I can't make it more than three times inten years. But I can remember every time that I ever saw Mrs. B. ' "'So can I--an' I've only been to Aukland twice--how she stood an'what she was sayin' an' what she looked like. That's the secret. 'Tisn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just It. Some women'll stay in a man's memory if they once walked down astreet, but most of 'em you can live with a month on end, an' nextcommission you'd be put to it to certify whether they talked in theirsleep or not, as one might say. '" =4. By Environment. =--Another very delicate expedient is to suggest acharacter through a careful presentation of his habitual environment. We learn a great deal about Roderick Usher from the melancholy aspectof his House. It is possible to describe a living-room in such a wayas to convey a very definite sense of its occupant before he entersit. Notice, for example, how much we learn about Mr. And Mrs. Boffin(especially the latter) from this descriptive passage of Chapter V of"Our Mutual Friend. " Silas Wegg has come to fulfill his engagement toread aloud to them the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:"-- "It was the queerest of rooms, fitted and furnished more like aluxurious amateur tap-room than anything else within the ken of SilasWegg. There were two wooden settles by the fire, one on either side ofit, with a corresponding table before each. On one of these tables theeight volumes were ranged flat, in a row like a galvanic battery; onthe other, certain squat case-bottles of inviting appearance seemed tostand on tiptoe to exchange glances with Mr. Wegg over a front row oftumblers and a basin of white sugar. On the hob, a kettle steamed; on, the hearth, a cat reposed. Facing the fire between the settles, asofa, a footstool, and a little table formed a centrepiece devoted toMrs. Boffin. They were garish in taste and color, but were expensivearticles of drawing-room furniture that had a very odd look beside thesettles and the flaring gaslight pendant from the ceiling. There was aflowery carpet on the floor; but, instead of reaching to thefireside, its glowing vegetation stopped short at Mrs. Boffin'sfootstool, and gave place to a region of sand and sawdust. Mr. Weggalso noticed, with admiring eyes, that, while the flowery landdisplayed such hollow ornamentation as stuffed birds, and waxen fruitsunder glass shades, there were, in the territory where vegetationceased, compensatory shelves on which the best part of a large pie andlikewise of a cold joint were plainly discernible among other solids. The room itself was large, though low; and the heavy frames of itsold-fashioned windows, and the heavy beams in its crooked ceiling, seemed to indicate that it had once been a house of some mark standingalone in the country. " Neither Boffin nor Mrs. Boffin appears in this descriptive paragraph;yet many of the idiosyncrasies of each are suggested by theconglomeration of queer belongings that they have gathered roundthem. The student of the art of fiction may find profitable exercise inpractising separately the various means of portraying character whichhave been illustrated in this chapter; but, as was stated at theoutset, he should always remember that these means are seldom used bythe great artists singly, but are generally employed to complementeach other in contributing to a central impression. The character ofBecky Sharp, for instance, is delineated indirectly through herspeech, her actions, her environment, and her effect on other people, and at the same time is delineated directly through comments made uponher by the author and by other figures in the story, through analysisof her thoughts and her emotions, through expository statements of hertraits, and through occasional descriptions of her. In all of theseways does Thackeray exert himself to give the world assurance of awoman. It would, however, be extremely difficult to imagine Becky Sharpdivorced from her environment of London high society. She is a part ofher setting, and her setting is a part of her. We have just noticed, in the case of that queer room of the Boffins', how the mererepresentation of setting may contribute to the delineation ofcharacter. But setting is important in many other ways; and it is to aspecial consideration of that element of narrative that we must nextturn our attention. REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. What combination of traits makes a character worth knowing? 2. Distinguish between the method of allegory and the method of caricature. 3. Imagine a fictitious person; and, after you have become sufficiently acquainted with this imaginary character, write eight distinct themes, in each of which the selfsame figure is projected in accordance with a different method of delineation:--1. By Exposition, 2. By Description, 3. By Psychological Analysis, 4. By Reports from Other Characters, 5. By Speech, 6. By Action, 7. By Effect on Other Characters, and 8. By Environment. SUGGESTED READING BLISS PERRY: "A Study of Prose Fiction"--Chapter V, on "TheCharacters. " Read at greater length those passages of famous fiction from whichhave been selected the illustrative quotations cited in this chapter. CHAPTER VI SETTING Evolution of Background in the History of Painting--The First Stage--The Second Stage--The Third Stage--Similar Evolution of Setting in the History of Fiction: The First Stage--The Second Stage--The Third Stage: 1. Setting as an Aid to Action--2. Setting as an Aid to Characterization--Emotional Harmony in Setting--The Pathetic Fallacy--Emotional Contrast in Setting--Irony in Setting--Artistic and Philosophical Employment--1. Setting as a Motive toward Action--2. Setting as an Influence on Character--Setting as the Hero of the Narrative--Uses of the Weather--Romantic and Realistic Settings--A Romantic Setting by Edgar Allan Poe--A Realistic Setting by George Eliot--The Quality of Atmosphere, or Local Color--Recapitulation. =Evolution of Background in the History of Painting: The FirstStage. =--In the history of figure painting it is interesting to studythe evolution of the element of background. This element isnon-existent in the earliest examples of pictorial art. The figures inPompeiian frescoes are limned upon a blank bright wall, mostfrequently deep red in color. The father of Italian painting, Cimabue, following the custom of the Byzantine mosaïcists, whose work he haddoubtless studied at Ravenna, drew his figures against a backgrounddevoid of distance and perspective and detail; and even in the work ofhis greater and more natural pupil, Giotto, the element of backgroundremains comparatively insignificant. What interests us in Giotto'swork at Padua and Assisi is first of all the story that he has totell, and secondly the human quality of the characters that heexhibits. His sense of setting is extremely slight; and the homelydetails that he presents for the purpose of suggesting the time andplace and circumstances of his action are very crudely depicted. Hisfrescoes are all foreground. It is the figures in the forefront of hispictures that arrest our eye. His buildings and his landscapes areconventionalized out of any real reference to his people. These areexamples of the first stage of evolution--the stage in which theelement of background bears no significant relation to the mainbusiness of the picture. =The Second Stage. =--In the second stage, the background is broughtinto an artistic, or decorative, relation with the figures in theforeground. This phase is exhibited by Italian painting at its periodof maturity. The great Florentines drew their figures against abackground of decorative line, the great Venetians against abackground of decorative color. But even in the work of the greatestof them the background exists usually to fulfil a purpose merelydecorative, a purpose with immediate reference to art but withoutimmediate reference to life. There is no real reason, with referenceto life itself, why the "Mona Lisa" of Leonardo should smileinscrutably upon us before a background of jagged rocks and cloudysky; and the curtains in Raphael's "Sistine Madonna" are introducedmerely as a detail of composition, and are not intended as a literalstatement that curtains hung upon a rod exist in heaven. =The Third Stage. =--In the third stage, which is exhibited by laterpainting, the background is brought into living relation with thefigures of the foreground, --a relation suggested not merely by theexigencies of art but rather by the conditions of life itself. Thusthe great Dutch _genre_ painters, like the younger Teniers, show theircharacters in immediate human relation to a carefully detailedinterior; or if, like Adrian van Ostade, they take them out of doors, it is to show them entirely at home in an accustomed landscape. This stage, in its modern development, exhibits an absolutelyessential relation between the foreground and the background--thefigures and the setting--so that neither could be imagined exactly asit is without the presence of the other. Such an essential harmony isshown in the "Angelus" of Jean-François Millet. The people exist forthe sake of giving meaning to the landscape; and the landscape existsfor the sake of giving meaning to the people. The "Angelus" is neitherfigure painting nor landscape painting merely; it is both. =Similar Evolution of Setting in the History of Fiction: The FirstStage. =--In the history of fiction we may note a similar evolution inthe element of setting. The earliest folk-tales of every nation happen"once upon a time, " and without any definite localization. In the"Gesta Romanorum, " that medieval repository of accumulated narratives, the element of setting is nearly as non-existent as the element ofbackground in the frescoes of Pompeii. Even in the "Decameron" ofBoccaccio the stories are seldom localized: they happen almostanywhere at almost any time. The interest in Boccaccio's narrative, like the interest in Giotto's painting, is centred first of all in theelement of action, and secondly in the element of character. But hisstories are all foreground. When the scene is out of doors, it is setvaguely in a conventional landscape: when it is indoors, it is setvaguely in a conventional palace. Because of this, his narrative islacking in visual appeal. Most of his _novelle_ read like summaries ofnovels, --setting forth an abstract synopsis of the action rather thana concrete representation of it. He _tells_ you what happens, insteadof _making_ it happen before the eye of your imagination. Hischaracters are drawn in outline merely, instead of being livinglyprojected in relation to a definite environment. The defect of hisnarrative, like the defect of Giotto's painting, is mainly lack ofbackground. =The Second Stage. =--Somewhat later in the history of fiction, as inthe history of figure painting, we find instances in which the elementof setting is used for a decorative purpose, and is brought into anartistic relation with the elements of action and character. Such ause is made of landscape, for example, in the "Orlando Furioso" ofAriosto and the "Faerie Queene" of Spenser. The settings depicted bythese narrative poets are essentially pictorial, and are used as adecorative background to the action rather than as part and parcel ofit. If we seek an example in prose rather than in poetry, we need onlyturn to the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney. In this again the settingis beautifully fashioned, but is employed merely for a decorativepurpose. The background of pastoral landscape bears no necessaryrelation to the figures in the foreground. It exists for the sake ofart rather than for the sake of life. This employment of the elementof setting for a purpose essentially pictorial subsists in many laterworks of fiction, like the "Paul and Virginia" of Bernardin deSaint-Pierre. In this the setting is composed and painted for the sakeof its own sentimental beauty, and is obtruded even at the expense ofthe more vital elements of character and action. The story is, as itwere, merely a motive for decorative composition. =The Third Stage: 1. Setting as an Aid to Action. =--It is only infiction of a more modern spirit that the element of setting has beenbrought into living relation with the action and the characters; andit is only in the last century that the most intimate possibilitiesof such a relation have been appreciated and applied. Of course themost elementary means of making the setting "part and parcel of thebusiness of the story" is to employ it as a utilitarian adjunct tothe action. Granted certain incidents that are to happen, certainscenery and properties are useful, in the novel just as in thetheatre; and if these are supplied advisedly, the setting will, asit were, become a part of what is happening instead of remainingmerely a decorative background to the incidents. The first Englishauthor to establish firmly this utilitarian relation between thesetting and the action was Daniel Defoe. Defoe was by profession ajournalist; and the most characteristic quality of his mind was anhabitual matter-of-factness. Plausibility was what he most desiredin his fictions; and he discerned instinctively that the readiestmeans of making a story plausible was by representing with entireconcreteness and great wealth of specific detail the physicaladjuncts to the action. The multitudinous particulars of Crusoe'sisland are therefore exhibited concretely to the reader one by one, as Crusoe makes use of them successively in what he does. =2. Setting as an Aid to Characterization. =--But though in Defoe theelement of setting is merged with the element of action, it is notbrought into intimate relation with the element of character. Theisland is a part of what Crusoe does, rather than a part of what heis. But the dwelling-room of the Boffins, which was described in theparagraph from "Our Mutual Friend" quoted toward the end of thepreceding chapter, is a part of what the Boffins are, rather than ofwhat they do. The setting in the latter case is used as an adjunct tothe element of character instead of to the element of action. Fieldingand his contemporaries were the first English novelists to make thesetting in this way representative of personality as well as useful tothe plot; but the finer possibilities of the relation between settingand character were not fully realized until the nineteenth century. The eighteenth-century authors, in so far as they elaborated theelement of setting, seem to have done so mainly for the sake ofgreater vividness. The appeal of setting being visual, the element wasemployed to illustrate the action and to make the characters clearlyevident to the eye. By rendering a story more concrete, a definitesetting rendered it more credible. This the eighteenth-centurynovelists discerned; but only with the rise of the romantic movementwas the element applied to subtler uses. =Emotional Harmony in Setting. =--A new and very interestingattitude toward landscape setting was disclosed by Rousseau in the"Nouvelle Héloise" and developed by his numerous followers in earlynineteenth-century romance. The writers who advocated a "return tonature" spelled nature with a capital N and considered it usuallyas an anthropomorphic presence. As a result of this, when theydeveloped a natural background for their stories, they established asympathetic interchange of mood between the characters and thelandscape, and imagined (to use the famous phrase of Leibnitz) a"pre-established harmony" between the shifting moods of nature andof man. Thus the setting was employed no longer merely to subservethe needs of action or to give a greater vividness of visual appeal, but was used rather to symbolize and represent the human emotionsevoked in the characters at significant moments of the plot. Whenthe hero was suffering with sadness, the sky was hung with heavyclouds; and when his mind grew illumined with a glimmering of hope, the sun broke through a cloud-rift, casting light over the land. Dickens is especially fond of imagining an emotional harmony betweenhis settings and his incidents. Consider for a moment the followingwell-known passage from the funeral of Little Nell ("The Old CuriosityShop, " Chapter LXXII):-- "Along the crowded path they bore her now; pure as the newly-fallensnow that covered it; whose day on earth had been as fleeting. Underthe porch, where she had sat when Heaven in its mercy brought her tothat peaceful spot, she passed again; and the old church received herin its quiet shade. "They carried her to one old nook, where she had many and many a timesat musing, and laid their burden softly on the pavement. The lightstreamed on it through the coloured window--a window where the boughsof trees were ever rustling in the summer, and where the birds sangsweetly all day long. With every breath of air that stirred amongthose branches in the sunshine, some trembling, changing light wouldfall upon her grave. .. . "They saw the vault covered, and the stone fixed down. Then, when thedusk of evening had come on, and not a sound disturbed the sacredstillness of the place--when the bright moon poured in her light ontomb and monument, on pillar, wall, and arch, and most of all (itseemed to them) upon her quiet grave--in that calm time, when outwardthings and inward thoughts teem with assurances of immortality, andworldly hopes and fears are humbled in the dust before them--then, with tranquil and submissive hearts, they turned away, and left thechild to God. " Here the mood of the scene is expressed almost entirely through theelement of setting; and the human emotion of the mourners is realizedand represented by the aspect of the churchyard. =The Pathetic Fallacy. =--The excessive use of this expedient isdeplored by John Ruskin in a chapter of "Modern Painters" entitled"The Pathetic Fallacy. " His point is that, since concrete objects donot actually experience human emotions, it is a violation ofartistic truth to ascribe such emotions to them. But, on the otherhand, it is indubitably true that human beings habitually translatetheir own abstract feelings into the concrete terms of theirsurroundings; and therefore, in a subjective sense at least, anemotional harmony frequently does exist between the mood of a manand the aspect of his environment. The same place may at the sametime look gloomy to a melancholy man and cheerful to a merry one;and there is therefore a certain human fitness in describing it asgloomy or as cheerful, according to the feeling of the characterobserving it. Doubtless to a man tremendously bereaved the very rainmay seem a weeping of high heaven; and surely there are times whenit is deeply true, subjectively, to say that the morning stars allsing together. What we may call emotional similarity of setting istherefore not necessarily a fallacy. Even when it subverts theactual, as in the fable of the morning stars, it may yet berepresentative of reality. In its commoner and less exaggerativephases it is very useful for purposes of suggestion; and only whenit becomes blatant through abuse may it be said to belie the laws oflife. =Emotional Contrast in Setting. =--Frequently, however, emotionalsimilarity between the setting and the characters is less serviceable, for the sake of emphasis, than emotional contrast. In the followingpassage from Mr. Kipling's "Without Benefit of Clergy, " the serene andperfect happiness of Holden and Ameera is emphasized by contrast withthe night-aspect of the plague-infested city:-- "'My lord and my love, let there be no more foolish talk of goingaway. Where thou art, I am. It is enough. ' She put an arm round hisneck and a hand on his mouth. "There are not many happinesses so complete as those that are snatchedunder the shadow of the sword. They sat together and laughed, callingeach other openly by every pet name that could move the wrath of thegods. The city below them was locked up in its own torments. Sulphurfires blazed in the streets; the conches in the Hindu temples screamedand bellowed, for the gods were inattentive in those days. There was aservice in the great Mahomedan shrine, and the call to prayer from theminarets was almost unceasing. They heard the wailing in the houses ofthe dead, and once the shriek of a mother who had lost a child and wascalling for its return. In the gray dawn they saw the dead borne outthrough the city gates, each litter with its own little knot ofmourners. Wherefore they kissed each other and shivered. " =Irony in Setting. =--An emotional contrast of this nature between themood of the characters and the mood of the setting may be pushed tothe point of irony. In a story by Alphonse Daudet, entitled "TheElixir of the Reverend Father Gaucher, " a certain monastery is savedfrom financial ruin by the sale of a cordial which Father Gaucher hasinvented and distilled. But the necessity of sampling the cordialfrequently during the process of manufacturing it leads the reverendfather eventually to become an habitual drunkard. And toward the endof the story an ironic contrast is drawn between the solemn monastery, murmurous with chants and prayers, and Father Gaucher in hisdistillery hilariously singing a ribald drinking-song. =Artistic and Philosophical Employment. =--The uses of setting thathave been thus far considered have been artistic rather thanphilosophical in nature; but very recent writers have grown to use theelement not only for the sake of illustrating character and action butalso for the sake of determining them. The sociologists of thenineteenth century have come to regard circumstance as a prime motivefor action, and environment as a prime influence on character; andrecent writers have applied this philosophic thesis in theiremployment of the element of setting. =1. Setting as a Motive Toward Action. =--The way in which the settingmay suggest the action is thus discoursed upon by Stevenson in his"Gossip on Romance":-- "Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance. The pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts--the active and thepassive. Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny;anon we are lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking wave, anddashed we know not how into the future. Now we are pleased by ourconduct, anon merely pleased by our surroundings. It would be hard tosay which of these modes of satisfaction is the more effective, butthe latter is surely the more constant. .. . "One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events andplaces. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sitthere. One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early risingand long rambles in the dew. The effect of night, of any flowingwater, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the openocean, calls up in the mind an army of anonymous desires andpleasures. Something, we feel, should happen; we know not what, yet weproceed in quest of it. And many of the happiest hours of life fleetby us in this vain attendance on the genius of the place and moment. It is thus that tracts of young fir, and low rocks that reach intodeep soundings, particularly torture and delight me. Something musthave happened in such places, and perhaps ages back, to members of myrace; and when I was a child I tried in vain to invent appropriategames for them, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit them with theproper story. Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cryaloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certaincoasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abidetheir destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, 'miching mallecho. ' Theinn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green garden and silent, eddying river--though it is known already as the place where Keatswrote some of his "Endymion" and Nelson parted from his Emma--stillseems to wait the coming of the appropriate legend. Within these iviedwalls, behind these old green shutters, some further businesssmoulders, waiting for its hour. The old Hawes Inn at the Queen'sFerry makes a similar call upon my fancy. There it stands, apart fromthe town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, halfmarine--in front, the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardshipswinging to her anchor; behind, the old garden with the trees. Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dinedthere at the beginning of the "Antiquary. " But you need not tellme--that is not all; there is some story, unrecorded or not yetcomplete, which must express the meaning of that inn more fully. .. . Ihave lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, onthe heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that should justify theplace; but though the feeling had me to bed at night and called meagain at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour had notyet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen'sFerry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a horseman, ona tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green shutters of theinn at Burford. " In this way, the setting may, in many cases, exist as the initialelement of the narrative, and suggest an action appropriate to itself. But it may do more than that. In certain special instances the settingmay not only suggest, but may even cause, the action, and remain thedeciding factor in determining its course. This is the case, forexample, in Mr. Kipling's story, "At the End of the Passage, " whichopens thus:-- "Four men, each entitled to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit ofhappiness, ' sat at a table playing whist. The thermometer marked--forthem--one hundred and one degrees of heat. The room was darkened tillit was only just possible to distinguish the pips of the cards and thevery white faces of the players. A tattered, rotten punkah ofwhitewashed calico was puddling the hot air and whining dolefully ateach stroke. Outside lay gloom of a November day in London. There wasneither sky, sun, nor horizon--nothing but a brown purple haze ofheat. It was as though the earth were dying of apoplexy. "From time to time clouds of tawny dust rose from the ground withoutwind or warning, flung themselves tablecloth-wise among the tops ofthe parched trees, and came down again. Then a whirling dust-devilwould scutter across the plain for a couple of miles, break, and falloutward, though there was nothing to check its flight save a long lowline of piled railway-sleepers white with the dust, a cluster of hutsmade of mud, condemned rails, and canvas, and the one squatfour-roomed bungalow that belonged to the assistant engineer in chargeof a section of the Gaudhari State Line then under construction. " The terrible tale that follows could happen only as a result of thefearful loneliness and, more especially, the maddening heat of such aplace as is described in these opening paragraphs. The setting in thisstory causes and determines the action. =2. Setting as an Influence on Character. =--But in many other tales byrecent writers the setting is used not so much to determine the actionas to influence and mold the characters; and when employed for thispurpose, it becomes expressive of one of the most momentous truths ofhuman life. For what a man _is_ at any period of his existence islargely the result of the interaction of two forces, --namely, theinnate tendencies of his nature and the shaping power of hisenvironment. George Meredith, and more especially Mr. Thomas Hardy, therefore devote a great deal of attention to setting as an influenceon character. Consider, for example, the following brief passage fromMr. Hardy's "Tess of the D'Ubervilles":-- "Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of Froom Vale, at a seasonwhen the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss offertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love shouldnot grow passionate. The ready hearts existing there were impregnatedby their surroundings. " Zola, in his essay on "The Experimental Novel, " states that the properfunction of setting is to exhibit "the environment which determinesand completes the man"; and the philosophic study of environmentreacting upon character is one of the main features of his ownmonumental series of novels devoted to the Rougon-Macquart family. Hisexample has been followed by a host of recent writers; and a newschool of fiction has grown up, the main purpose of which is toexhibit the influence of certain carefully studied social, natural, business, or professional conditions on the sort of people who liveand work among them. This incentive has been developed to manifest advantage in America bysuch novelists as Mrs. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mr. George W. Cable, Mr. Hamlin Garland, Mrs. Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, Jack London, Mr. Booth Tarkington, and Mr. Stewart Edward White. Each of theseauthors--and many others might be mentioned--has attained a specialsort of eminence by studying minutely the effect upon impressionablecharacters of a particular environment. The manifold diversity of lifein the many different districts of the United States affords ourfiction-writers a predestined opportunity to endeavor to make thenation acquainted with itself. =Setting as the Hero of the Narrative. =--If the setting be used bothto determine the action and to mold the characters, it may stand forthas the most important of the three elements of narrative. In VictorHugo's "Notre Dame de Paris, " the cathedral is the leading factor ofthe story. Claude Frollo would be a very different person if it werenot for the church; and many of the main events, such as the ultimatetragic scene when Quasimodo hurls Frollo from the tower-top, could nothappen in any other place. In Mr. Kipling's very subtle story entitled"An Habitation Enforced, " which is included in his "Actions andReactions, " the setting is really the hero of the narrative. AnAmerican millionaire and his wife, whose ancestors were English, settle for a brief vacation in the county of England from which thewife's family originally came. Gradually the old house and the Englishlandscape take hold of them; ancestral feelings rise to dominate them;and they remain forever after in enforced habitation on the ancientsoil. =Uses of the Weather. =--All that has been said thus far of setting ingeneral applies of course to one of the most interesting of itselements, --the weather. In simple stories like the usual nursery tale, the weather may be non-existent. Or it may exist mainly for adecorative purpose, like the frequent golden oriental dawns ofSpenser's poem or the superb and colorful symphonies of sky and sea inPierre Loti's "Iceland Fisherman. " It may be used as a utilitarianadjunct to the action: at the end of "The Mill on the Floss, " as wehave already noted, the rains descend and the flood comes merely forthe purpose of drowning Tom and Maggie. Or it may be employed toillustrate a character: we are told of Clara Middleton, in "TheEgoist, " that she possesses the "art of dressing to suit the seasonand the sky"; and therefore the look of the atmosphere at any hourhelps to convey to us a sense of her appearance. Somewhat moreartistically, the weather may be planned in pre-established harmonywith the mood of the characters: this expedient is wonderfully used inthe wild and wind-swept tales of Fiona MacLeod. On the other hand, theweather may stand in emotional contrast with the characters: theMaster of Ballantrae and Mr. Henry fight their duel on a night ofabsolute stillness and stifling cold. Again, the weather may be usedto determine the action: in Mr. Kipling's early story called "FalseDawn, " the blinding sandstorm causes Saumarez to propose to the wronggirl. Or it may be employed as a controlling influence over character:the tremendous storm toward the end of "Richard Feverel, " in thechapter entitled "Nature Speaks, " determines the return of the hero tohis wife. In some cases, even, the weather itself may be the real heroof the narrative: the great eruption of Vesuvius in "The Last Days ofPompeii" dominates the termination of the story. Although the weather is a subject upon everybody's tongue, there arevery few people who are capable of talking about it with intelligenceand art. Very few writers of fiction--and nearly all of them arerecent--have exhibited a mastery of the weather, --a mastery based atonce upon a detailed and accurate observation of natural phenomena anda philosophic sense of the relation between these phenomena and theconcerns of human beings. Perhaps in no other detail of craftsmanshipdoes Robert Louis Stevenson so clearly prove his mastery as in hismarshalling of the weather, always vividly and truthfully described, to serve a purpose always fitting to his fictions. =Romantic and Realistic Settings. =--Let us next consider the maindifference between the merits of a good romantic and a good realisticsetting. Since the realist leads us to a comprehension of his truththrough a careful imitation of the actual, the thing most to bedesired in a realistic setting is fidelity to fact; and this can beattained only by accurate observation. But since the romantic is notbound to imitate the actual, and fabricates his investiture merely forthe sake of embodying his truth clearly and consistently, the thingmost to be desired in a romantic setting is imaginative fitness to theaction and the characters; and this can sometimes be attained byartistic inventiveness alone, without display of observation of theactual. Verisimilitude is of course the highest merit of either sortof setting; but whereas verisimilitude with the realist lies inresemblance to actuality, verisimilitude with the romantic lies ratherin artistic fitness. The distinction may perhaps be best observed inthe historical novels produced by the one and by the other school. Inthe setting of realistic historical novels, like George Eliot's"Romola" and Flaubert's "Salammbô, " what the authors have mainlystriven for has been accuracy of detail; but in romantic historicalnovels, like those of Scott and Dumas père, the authors have soughtrather for imaginative fitness of setting. The realists have followedthe letter, and the romantics the spirit, of other times and lands. =A Romantic Setting by Edgar Allan Poe. =--As an example of a pureromantic setting, far removed from actuality and yet thoroughlytruthful in artistic fitness to the action and the characters, we cando no better than examine the often-quoted opening of Poe's "Fall ofthe House of Usher":-- "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn ofthe year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I hadbeen passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract ofcountry; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drewon, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how itwas--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense ofinsufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for thefeeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, becausepoetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even thesternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon thescene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscapefeatures of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-likewindows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks ofdecayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare tono earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of thereveler upon opium: the bitter lapse into every-day life, the hideousdropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickeningof the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading ofthe imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. .. . It waspossible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of theparticulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would besufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate, its capacity forsorrowful impression; and acting upon this idea, I reined my horse tothe precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffledlustre by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even morethrilling than before--upon the remodelled and inverted images of thegray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-likewindows. " Certainly this setting bears very little resemblance to the actual;but just as certainly its artistic fitness to the tale of terrorwhich it preludes gives it an imaginative verisimilitude. =A Realistic Setting by George Eliot. =--As an example of a realisticsetting, closely copying the actual, let us examine the followingpassage from "Adam Bede" (Chapter XVIII):-- "You might have known it was Sunday if you had only waked up in thefarmyard. The cocks and hens seemed to know it, and made only crooningsubdued noises; the very bull-dog looked less savage, as if he wouldhave been satisfied with a smaller bite than usual. The sunshineseemed to call all things to rest and not to labor; it was asleepitself on the moss-grown cow-shed; on the group of white ducksnestling together with their bills tucked under their wings; on theold black sow stretched languidly on the straw, while her largestyoung one found an excellent spring-bed on his mother's fat ribs; onAlick, the shepherd, in his new smock-frock, taking an uneasy siesta, half-sitting, half-standing on the granary steps. " There is no obvious imaginative fitness in this passage, since in thechapter where it occurs the chief characters are going to a funeral;but it has an extraordinary verisimilitude, owing to the author'saccurate observation of the details of life in rural England. =The Quality of Atmosphere, or Local Color. =--These two passagesdiffer very widely from each other. In one thing, and one only, arethey alike. Each of them exhibits the subtle quality called"atmosphere. " This quality is very difficult to define, though itspresence may be recognized instinctively in any work of graphic art, like a painting or a description. Without attempting to define it, wemay discover the technical basis for its presence if we seek out thesole deliberate device in which these two passages, different as theyare in every other feature, are at one. It will be noticed that ineach of them the details selected for presentation have been chosensolely for the sake of a common quality inherent in them--the qualityof sombreness and gloom in the one case, and the quality of Sabbathquietude in the other--and that they have been marshalled to convey acomplete sense of this central and pervading quality. It is commonlysupposed that what is called "atmosphere" in a description isdependent upon the setting forth of a multiplicity of details; butthis popular conception is a fallacy. "Atmosphere" is dependent ratherupon a strict selection of details pervaded by a common quality, arigorous rejection of all others that are dissonant in mood, and anarrangement of those selected with a view to exhibiting their commonquality as the pervading spirit of the scene. This is obviously the technical basis for the "atmosphere" of a purelyimaginary setting like that of the melancholy House of Usher. Theeffect is undeniably produced by the suppression of all details thatdo not contribute to the central sense of gloom. But the same deviceunderlies (less obviously, to be sure) all such descriptions of actualplaces as are rich in "atmosphere. " What is called "local color"--thevery look and tone of a definite locality--is produced not byphotographic multiplicity of details, but by a marshalling ofmaterials carefully selected to suggest the central spirit of theplace to be depicted. The camera frequently defeats itself by flinginginto emphasis details that are dissonant with the informing spirit ofthe scene it seeks to reproduce: so also does the author whoovercrowds his picture with multifarious details, however faithfulthey may be to fact. The true triumphs of "local coloring" have beenmade by men who have struck at the heart and spirit of a place--havecaught its tone and timbre as George Du Maurier did with the_Quartier Latin_--and have set forth only such details as tingled withthis spiritual tone. =Recapitulation. =--We have studied the many uses of the element ofsetting, and have seen that in the best-developed fiction it has grownto be entirely coördinate with the elements of character and action. Novelists have come to consider that any given story can happen onlyin a given set of circumstances, and that if the setting be changedthe action must be altered and the characters be differently drawn. Itis therefore impossible, in the best fiction of the present day, toconsider the setting as divorced from the other elements of thenarrative. There was a time, to be sure, when description for its ownsake existed in the novel, and the action was halted to permit theintroduction of pictorial passages bearing no necessary relation tothe business of the story, --"blocks" of setting, as it were, whichmight be removed without detriment to the progression of thenarrative. But the practice of the best contemporary novelists issummed up and expressed by Henry James in this emphatic sentence fromhis essay on "The Art of Fiction":--"I cannot imagine compositionexisting in a series of blocks, nor conceive, in any novel worthdiscussing at all, of a passage of description that is not in itsintention narrative. " REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. Explain and illustrate the three historic stages in the evolution of the element of setting. 2. What did Ruskin mean by "the pathetic fallacy"? 3. What are the modern uses of the element of setting? 4. Explain the process of attaining atmosphere, or local color. 5. Adduce original instances of emotional harmony, emotional contrast, and irony in setting. SUGGESTED READING ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: "A Gossip on Romance. " BLISS PERRY: "A Study of Prose Fiction"--Chapter VII, on "TheSetting. " Read at greater length those passages of famous fiction from whichhave been selected the illustrative quotations cited in this chapter. CHAPTER VII THE POINT OF VIEW IN NARRATIVE The Importance of the Point of View--Two Classes, The Internal and the External--I. Subdivisions of the First Class: 1. The Point of View of the Leading Actor; 2. The Point of View of Some Subsidiary Actor; 3. The Points of View of Different Actors; 4. The Epistolary Point of View. --II. Subdivisions of the Second Class:--1. The Omniscient Point of View; 2. The Limited Point of View; 3. The Rigidly Restricted Point of View--Two Tones of Narrative, Impersonal and Personal: 1. The Impersonal Tone; 2. The Personal Tone--The Point of View as a Factor in Construction--The Point of View as the Hero of the Narrative. =The Importance of the Point of View. =--We have now examined in detailthe elements of narrative, and must next consider the various pointsof view from which they may be seen and, in consequence, berepresented. Granted a given series of events to be set forth, thestructure of the plot, the means of character delineation, the use ofsetting, the entire tone and tenor of the narrative, are all dependentdirectly on the answer to the question, Who shall tell the story? For a given train of incidents is differently seen and judged, according to the standpoint from which it is observed. The evidence inmost important murder trials consists mainly of successive narrativestold by different witnesses; and it is very interesting to notice, incomparing them, how very different a tone and tenor is given to thesame event by each of the observers who recounts it. It remains forthe jury to determine, if possible, from a comparison of the variousviews of the various witnesses, what it was that actually happened. But this, in many cases, is extremely difficult. One witness sawthe action in one way, another in another; one formed a certainjudgment of the character of the accused, another formed a judgmentdiametrically different; each has his separate sense of the train ofcausation that culminated in the act; the accused himself woulddisagree with all the witnesses, if indeed he were capable of lookingon the facts without conscious or unconscious self-deception; and wemay be certain that an infallible omniscient mind, cognizant ofall the hidden motives, would see the matter differently still. Thetask of the jury is, in the main, to induce from all these tragicinconsistencies an absolute outlook upon the real truth thatunderlies the facts so differently seen and so variously judged. Such an absolute outlook is hardly possible to the finite mind of man;and though it is often assumed by the writer of fiction in the tellingof his tale, it can seldom be consistently maintained. It is thereforesafer to acknowledge that the absolute truth of a story, whetheractual or fictitious, can never be entirely told; that the same trainof incidents looks different from different points of view; and thattherefore the various points of view from which any story may belooked upon should be studied carefully for the purpose of determiningfrom which of them it is possible, in a given case, to approach mostnearly a clear vision of the truth. =Two Classes, The Internal and the External. =--The points of view fromwhich a story may be seen and told are many and various; but they mayall be grouped into two classes, the internal and the external. Astory seen internally is narrated in the first person by one of itsparticipants; a story seen externally is narrated in the third personby a mind aloof from the events depicted. There are, of course, manyvariations, both of the internal and of the external point of view. These in turn must be examined, for the purpose of determining thespecial advantages and disadvantages of each. =I. Subdivisions of the First Class: 1. The Point of View of theLeading Actor. =--First of all, a story may be told by the leadingactor in its series of events, --the hero, as in "Henry Esmond, " or theheroine, as in "Jane Eyre. " This point of view is of especial value innarratives in which the element of action is predominant. Themultifarious adventures of Gil Blas sound at once more vivid and moreplausible narrated in the first person than they would sound narratedin the third. When what is done is either strange or striking, weprefer to be told about it by the very man who did it. "TreasureIsland" is narrated by Jim Hawkins, "Kidnapped" by David Balfour; andmuch of the vividness of these exciting tales depends upon the factthat they are told in each case by a boy who stood ever in theforefront of the action. The plausibility of "Robinson Crusoe" isincreased by the convention that the hero is narrating his ownpersonal experience: in fact Defoe, in all his fictions, preferred towrite in the first person, because what he sought primarily wasplausibility of tone. This point of view is also of supreme advantage in recounting personalemotion. Consider for a moment the following paragraph from"Kidnapped" (Chapter X):-- "I do not know if I was what you call afraid; but my heart beat like abird's, both quick and little; and there was a dimness came before myeyes which I continually rubbed away, and which continually returned. As for hope, I had none; but only a darkness of despair and a sort ofanger against all the world that made me long to sell my life as dearas I was able. I tried to pray, I remember, but that same hurry of mymind, like a man running, would not suffer me to think upon thewords; and my chief wish was to have the thing begin and be done withit. " Now, for the sake of experiment, let us go through the passage, substituting the pronoun "he" for the pronoun "I. " Thus:-- "He was hardly what is called afraid; but his heart beat like abird's, both quick and little; and there was a dimness came before hiseyes which he continually rubbed away, and which continually returned. As for hope, he had none. .. . " and so forth. Notice how much vividnessis lost, --how much immediacy of emotion. The zest and tang of theexperience is sacrificed, because the reader is forced to stand aloofand observe it from afar. The point of view of the leading actor makes for vividness in stillanother way. It necessitates an absolute concreteness and objectivityin the delineation of the subsidiary characters. On the other hand, itprecludes analysis of their emotions and their thoughts. The hero cantell us only what they said and did, how they looked in action and inspeech, and what they seemed to him to think and feel. But he cannotenter their minds and delve among their motives. Furthermore, hecannot, without sacrificing naturalness of mood, analyze to any greatextent his own mental processes. Consequently it is almost impossibleto tell from the hero's point of view a story in which the main eventsare mental or subjective. We can hardly imagine George Eliot writingin the first person: the "psychological novel" demands the third. But the chief difficulty in telling a story from the leading actor'spoint of view is the difficulty of characterizing the narrator. Allmeans of direct delineation are taken from him. He cannot write essayson his merits or his faults; he can neither describe nor analyzehimself; he cannot see himself as others see him. We must derive oursense of who and what he is, solely from the things he does and says, and from his manner of telling us about them. And although it is notespecially difficult, within a brief compass, to delineate a characterthrough his way of telling things [Notice Laughton O. Zigler, in Mr. Kipling's "The Captive, " whose speech has been examined in a formerchapter], it is extremely difficult to maintain this expedientconsistently throughout a lengthy novel. Furthermore, an extended story can be told only by a person with awell-trained sense of narrative; and it is often hard to concede tothe hero the narrative ability that he displays. How is it, we mayask, that Jim Hawkins is capable of such masterly description as thatof "the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, " in the second paragraphof "Treasure Island"? How is it that David Balfour, an untutored boy, is capable of writing the rhythmic prose of Robert Louis Stevenson, master of style? And in many cases it is also difficult to concede tothe hero an adequate motive for telling his own story. Why is it that, in the sequel to "Kidnapped, " David Balfour should write out all theintimate details of his love for Catriona? And how is it conceivablethat Jane Eyre should tell to any one, and least of all to the generalpublic, the profound privacies of emotion evoked by her relation withMr. Rochester? The answer is, of course, that such violations of the hard terms ofactuality are justified by literary convention; and that if the gainin vividness be great enough, the reader will be willing to concede, first, that the story shall be told by the leading actor, regardlessof motive, and second, that he shall be granted the requisite masteryof narrative. But the fact remains that it is very hard for the heroto draw his own character except in outline; and therefore if theemphasis is to lie less on what he does than on the sort of personthat he is, the expedient will be ineffectual. The main structural advantage of telling the story through the personof the hero is that his presence as the central figure in every eventnarrated makes for coherence and gives the story unity. But attendantdisadvantages are that it is often difficult to account for the hero'spresence in every scene, that he cannot be an eye-witness to eventshappening at the same time in different places, and that it is hard toaccount for his possession of knowledge regarding those details of theplot which have no immediate bearing on himself. It seems alwayssomewhat lame to state, as heroes telling their own stories arefrequently obliged to do, "These things I did not know at the time, and found out only afterward; but I insert them here, because it is atthis point in the plot that they belong. " =2. The Point of View of Some Subsidiary Actor. =--Many of thesedisadvantages may be overcome by telling the tale from the point ofview, not of the leading actor, but of some minor personage in thestory. In this case again, analysis of character is precluded; but thenarrator may delineate the leading actor directly, through descriptiveand expository comment. In stories where the hero is an extraordinaryperson, and could not without immodesty descant upon his own unusualcapabilities, it is of obvious advantage to represent him from thepoint of view of an admiring friend. Thus when Poe invented thedetective story, he wisely decided to exhibit the extraordinaryanalytic power of Dupin through a narrative told not by the detectivehimself but by a man who knew him well; and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, following in his footsteps, has invented Dr. Watson to tell the talesof Sherlock Holmes. The actual instance of Boswell and Johnson substantiates thepossibility of a minor actor's knowing intimately all phases of ahero's life and character. And since the point of view of thesecondary personage is just as internal to the events themselves asthat of the leading actor, the story may be told with an immediacy, avividness, and a plausibility approximating closely the effect derivedfrom a narrative told by the hero. And there is now less difficulty inaccounting for the narrator's knowledge of all the details of theplot. He can witness minor necessary scenes at which the hero is notpresent; he can know things (and tell them to the reader) which at thetime the hero did not know; and if his presence be withheld from animportant incident, the hero can narrate it to him afterward. Nevertheless, it is often very difficult to maintain throughout a longstory the point of view of a minor actor in the plot. Thackeray breaksdown completely in his attempt to tell "The Newcomes" from the pointof view of Arthur Pendennis, the hero of a former novel. Stevensonassigns to Mackellar the task of narrating "The Master of Ballantrae":but when the Master disappears and Mackellar remains at home with Mr. Henry, it is necessary for the author to invent a second personage, the Chevalier de Burke, to tell the story of the Master's wanderings. =3. The Points of View of Different Actors. =--This last instance leadsus to consider the possibility of telling different sections of thestory from the points of view of different characters, assigning toeach the particular phase of the narrative that he is especiallyfitted to recount. Three quarters of the "Strange Case of DoctorJekyll and Mr. Hyde" is narrated in the third person, externally; butthe final intimate vividness of horror is gained by shifting to aninternal point of view for the two concluding chapters, --the firstwritten by Dr. Lanyon, and the last by Jekyll himself. Mr. Kiplinghas developed to very subtle uses the expedient of opening a storyfrom the point of view of a narrator who is named simply "I" and whois not characterized in any way at all, and then letting the storyproper be told to this impersonal narrator by several characters whoare clearly delineated through their speech and through the parts thatthey have played in the tale that they are telling. This device isused in nearly all the stories of the "Soldiers Three. " The narratormeets Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd under certain circumstances, andgathers from them bit by bit the various features of the story, --onedetail being contributed by one of the actors, another by another, until out of the successive fragments the story is built up. It is inthis way also, as we have already noted, that the tale of Mrs. Bathurst is set before the reader. =4. The Epistolary Point of View. =--A convenient means of shifting theburden of the narrative at any point to a certain special character isto introduce a letter written by that character to one of the otherpeople in the plot. This expedient is employed with extraordinarycleverness by George Meredith in "Evan Harrington. " Most of the taleis told externally; but every now and then the clever and wittyCountess de Saldar writes a letter in which a leading incident isilluminated from her personal point of view. Ever since the days of Richardson the device has frequently been usedof telling an entire story through a series of letters exchanged amongthe characters. The main advantage of this method is the constantshifting of the point of view, which makes it possible for the readerto see every important incident through the eyes of each of thecharacters in turn. Furthermore, it is comparatively easy tocharacterize in the first person when the thing that is written is sointimate and personal as a letter. But the disadvantage of the devicelies in the fact that it tends toward incoherence in the structure ofthe narrative. It is hard for the author to stick to the point atevery moment without violating the casual and discursive tone that theepistolary style demands. Of course a certain unity may be gained if the letters used are allwritten by a single character. The chief advantage of this method overa direct narrative written by one of the actors is the added motivefor the revelation of intimate matters which is furnished by the factthat the narrator is writing, not for the public at large, but onlyfor the friend, or friends, to whom the letters are addressed. But aseries of letters written by one person only is very likely to becomemonotonous; and more is usually gained than lost by assigning theepistolary rôle successively to different characters. =II. Subdivisions of the Second Class. =--We have seen that, althoughthe employment of an internal point of view gives a narrativevividness of action, objectivity of observation, immediacy of emotion, and plausibility of tone, it is attended by several difficulties inthe delineation of the characters and the construction of the plot. Itis therefore in many cases more advisable for the author to look uponthe narrative externally and to write it in the third person. Butthere are several different ways of doing this; for though a storyviewed externally is told in every case by a mind distinct from thatof any of the characters, there are many different stations in whichthat mind may set itself, and many different moods in which it mayrecount the story. =1. The Omniscient Point of View. =--First of all (to start with aphase that contrasts most widely with the internal point of view) theexternal mind may set itself equidistant from all the characters andmay assume toward them an attitude of absolute omniscience. Thestory, in such a case, is told by a sort of god, who is cognizant ofthe past and future of the action while he is looking at the present, and who sees into the minds and hearts of all the characters at onceand understands them better than they do themselves. The main practical advantage in assuming the god-like point of view isthat the narrator is never obliged to account for his possession ofintimate information. He can observe events which happen at the sametime in places widely separated. Darkness cannot dim his eyes; lockeddoors cannot shut him out. He can be with a character when thatcharacter is most alone. He can make clear to us the thoughts that donot tremble into speech, the emotions that falter and subside intoinaction. He can know, and can convey to us, how much of a person'sreal thought is expressed, and how much is concealed, by the languagethat he uses. And the reader seeks no motive to account for thenarrator's revelation of the personal secrets of the characters. The omniscient point of view is the only one that permits upon a largescale the depiction of character through mental analysis. It istherefore usually used in the "psychological novel. " It was employedalways by George Eliot, and was selected almost always by GeorgeMeredith. It is, of course, invaluable for telling the sort of storywhose main events are mental, or subjective. A spiritual experiencewhich does not translate itself into concrete action can be viewedadequately only from the god-like point of view. But when it isemployed in the narration of objective events, the writer runs thedanger of undue abstractness. A certain vividness--a certain immediacyof observation--are likely to be lost, because of the aloofness fromthe characters of the mind that sees them. This point of view is at once the most easy and the most difficultthat the author may assume. Technically it is the easiest, because thewriter is absolutely free in the selection and the patterning of hisnarrative materials; but humanly it is the most difficult, because itis hard for any man consistently to play the god, even toward his ownfictitious creatures. Although George Eliot assumes omniscience ofDaniel Deronda, the consensus of opinion among men of sound judgmentis that she does not really know her hero. Deronda is in truth alesser person than she thinks him; and her assumption of omnisciencebreaks down. In fact, unless an author is gifted with the god-likewisdom of George Meredith, he is almost sure to break down in theeffort to sustain the omniscient attitude consistently throughout acomplicated novel. =2. The Limited Point of View. =--Therefore, in assuming a point ofview external to the characters, it is usually wiser for the author toaccept a compromise and to impose certain definite limits upon his ownomniscience. Thus, while maintaining the prerogative to enter at anymoment the minds of one or more of his characters, he may limit hisobservation of the others to what was actually seen and heard of themby those of whose minds he is omniscient. In such a case, although theauthor tells the story in the third person, he virtually sees thestory from the point of view of a certain actor, or of certain actors, in it. The only phase of this device which we need to examine is thatwherein the novelist's omniscience is limited to a single character. This special point of view is employed with consummate art by JaneAusten. In "Emma, " for example, she portrays every intimate detail ofthe heroine's thoughts and feelings, entering Emma's mind at will, orlooking at her from the outside with omniscient eyes. But in dealingwith the other characters, the author limits her own knowledge to whatEmma knew about them, and sees them consistently through the eyes ofthe heroine. Hence the story, although written by Jane Austen in thethird person, is really seen by Emma Woodhouse and thought of in thefirst. Similarly, in "Pride and Prejudice, " Elizabeth Bennet is theonly character that the author permits herself to analyze at anylength: the others are seen objectively, merely as Elizabeth saw them. The reader is made acquainted with every step in the heroine's gradualchange of feeling toward Mr. Darcy; but of the change in Darcy'sthoughts and feelings toward Elizabeth the reader is told nothinguntil she herself discovers it. Of course, in applying this device, it is possible for the author, atcertain points in the narrative, to shift his limited omniscience fromone of the characters to another. In such a case, although the storyis told throughout consistently in the third person, one scene may beviewed from the standpoint of one of the characters, another from thatof another character, and so on. Imagine for a moment two adjacent rooms with a single door betweenthem which is locked; and suppose a character alone in each of therooms, --each person thinking of the other. Now an author assumingabsolute omniscience could tell us what each of them was thinking atthe selfsame moment: the locked door would not be a bar to him. But anauthor telling the story from the attitude of limited omnisciencecould tell us only what one of them was thinking, and would not beable to see beyond the door. Whether or not he would find himself atliberty to choose which room he should be cognizant of, would dependof course on whether he was maintaining the same point of viewthroughout his story or was selecting it anew for every scene. In thefirst case, the one character whom he could see would be determined inadvance: in the other, he should have to decide from the point of viewof which of them that special scene could be the more effectively setforth. The attitude of limited omniscience is more easy to maintain than thatof a god-like mind intimately cognizant of all the characters at once;and furthermore, the employment of the more restricted point of viewis more likely to produce the illusion of life. In actual experience, we see only one mind internally, --our own; all other people we lookupon externally: and a story, therefore, which lays bare to us onemind and only one is more in tune with life itself than a story inwhich many minds are searched by an all-seeing eye. Also, a story toldin the third person from the point of view which has been illustratedfrom Jane Austen's novels enjoys nearly every advantage of a narrativetold in the first person by the leading actor, without beingencumbered by certain of the most noticeable disadvantages. =3. The Rigidly Restricted Point of View. =--For the sake ofconcreteness, however, it is often advisable for the author writing inthe third person to restrict his point of view still further, and, foregoing absolutely the prerogative of omniscience, to limit himselfto an attitude merely observant and entirely external to all thecharacters. In such a case the author wears, as it were, an invisiblecap like that of Fortunatus, which permits him to move unnoticed amonghis characters; and he reports to us externally their looks, theiractions, and their speech, without ever assuming an ability to delveinto their minds. This rigidly external point of view is employedfrequently by Guy de Maupassant in his briefer fictions; but althoughit is especially valuable in the short-story, it is extremelydifficult to maintain through the extensive compass of a novel. Themain advantage of this point of view is that it necessitates upon thepart of the author an attitude toward his story which is at allmoments visual rather than intellectual. He does not give a ready-madeinterpretation of his incidents, but merely projects them before theeyes of his readers and allows to each the privilege of interpretingthem for himself. But, on the other hand, the reader loses theadvantage of the novelist's superior knowledge of his creatures: and, except in dramatic moments when the motives are self-evident from theaction, may miss the human purport of the scene. =Two Tones of Narrative, Impersonal and Personal: 1. The ImpersonalTone. =--In employing every phase of the external point of view exceptthe one which has been last discussed, the author is free to choosebetween two very different tones of narrative, --the impersonal and thepersonal. He may either obliterate or emphasize his own personality asa factor in the story. The great epics and folk-tales have all beentold impersonally. Whatever sort of person Homer may have been, henever obtrudes himself into his narrative; and we may read both the"Iliad" and the "Odyssey" without deriving any more definite sense ofhis personality than may be drawn from the hints which are given us bythe things he knows about. No one knows the author of "Beowulf" or ofthe "Nibelungen Lied. " These stories seem to tell themselves. They areseen from nobody's point of view, or from anybody's--whichever way wechoose to say it. Many modern authors, like Sir Walter Scott, instinctively assume the epic attitude toward their characters andincidents: they look upon them with a large unconsciousness of selfand depict them just as any one would see them. Other authors, likeMr. William Dean Howells, strive deliberately to keep the personalnote out of their stories: self-consciously they triumph over self inthe endeavor to leave their characters alone. =2. The Personal Tone. =--But novelists of another class prefer toadmit frankly to the reader that the narrator who stands apart fromall the characters and writes about them in the third person is theauthor himself. They give a personal tone to the narrative; theyassert their own peculiarities of taste and judgment, and never letyou forget that they, and they alone, are telling the story. Thereader has to see it through their eyes. It is in this way, forexample, that Thackeray displays his stories, --pitying his characters, admiring them, making fun of them, or loving them, and never lettingslip an opportunity to chat about the matter with his readers. Mr. Howells, in Section XV of his "Criticism and Fiction, " commentsadversely on Thackeray's tendency "to stand about in his scene, talking it over with his hands in his pockets, interrupting theaction, and spoiling the illusion in which alone the truth of artresides"; and in a further sentence he condemns him as "a writer whohad so little artistic sensibility, that he never hesitated on anyoccasion, great or small, to make a foray among his characters, andcatch them up to show them to the reader and tell him how beautiful orugly they were; and cry out over their amazing properties. " Thissweeping condemnation of the narrative attitude of one of thebest-beloved of the great masters sounds just a little bigoted. It istrue, of course, that the strictest artists in fiction, like Guy deMaupassant, prefer to tell their tales impersonally: they leave theircharacters rigidly alone, and allow the reader to see them withoutlooking through the author's personality. But there is a type ofliterature wherein the chief charm for the reader lies in the factthat he is permitted to see things through the author's mind. When weread Charles Lamb's essay on "The South Sea House, " we read it not somuch to look at the deserted and memorable building as to look at Elialooking at it. Similarly many readers return again and again to "TheNewcomes" not so much for the pleasure of seeing London high societyas for the pleasure of seeing Thackeray see it. The merit, or thedefect, of the method in any case is a question not of rules andregulations but of the tone and quality of the author's mind. Whetheror not he may safely obtrude himself into his fictions dependsentirely on who he is. This is a matter more of personality than ofart: and what might be insufferable with one author may stand as themain merit of another. For instance, the greatest charm of Sir JamesBarrie's novels emanates from the author's habit of emphasizing thepersonal relation between himself and his characters. The author'smany-mooded attitude toward Sentimental Tommy is a matter of humaninterest just as much as anything that Tommy feels himself. Let us admit, then, in spite of Mr. Howells, that the author offiction has a right to assert himself as the narrator, provided thathe be a person of interest and charm. It remains for us to considerthe various moods in which, in such a case, the writer may look uponhis story. The self-obliterating author endeavors to hide his ownopinion of the characters, in order not to interfere with the reader'sindependence of judgment concerning them; but the author who writespersonally does not hesitate to reveal, nor even to express directly, his admiration of a character's merits or his deprecation of acharacter's defects. You will seek in vain, in studying thefictitious people of Guy de Maupassant, for any indication of theauthor's approval or disapproval of them; and there is something veryadmirable in this absolute impassiveness of art. But on the otherhand, there is a certain salutary humanness about an author who lovesor hates his characters just as he would love or hate the same sort ofpeople in actual life, and writes about them with the glow of personalemotion. Sir James Barrie often disapproves of Tommy; sometimes hefeels forced to scold him; but he loves him for a' that: and we feelinstinctively that the hero is the more truthfully delineated forbeing represented by a friend. =The Point of View as a Factor in Construction. =--It will be gatheredfrom the foregoing discussion of the various points of view innarrative that no one of them may be pronounced absolutely better thanthe others. But this much may be said dogmatically: there is alwaysone best point of view from which to tell any given short-story; andalthough in planning a novel the author works with far less technicalrestriction, there is almost always one best point of view from whichto tell a given novel. Therefore, it is advisable for the author todetermine as early as possible, from a studious consideration of hismaterials, what is the best point of view from which to tell the storyhe is planning, and thereafter to contemplate his narrative from thatstandpoint and that only. Furthermore, the interest of art demandsthat the point of view selected shall, if possible, be maintainedconsistently throughout the telling of the story. This, however, is avery difficult matter; and only in very recent years have even thebest writers grown to master it. The novels which have been toldwithout a single violation of this principle are very few in number. But the fact remains that any unwarrantable breakdown in the point ofview selected diseconomizes the attention of the reader. It isunfortunate, for instance, that Thomas Bailey Aldrich, in "MarjorieDaw, " should have found it necessary, after telling almost the entiretale in letters, to shift suddenly to the external point of view andend the story with a few pages of direct narrative. Such an unexpectedvariation of method startles and to some extent disrupts the attentionof the reader, and thereby detracts from the effect of the thing to beconveyed. Henry James and Mr. Kipling exhibit, in their several ways, extraordinary mastery of point of view; and their works may veryprofitably be studied for examples of this special phase of artistryin narrative. The very title of "What Maisie Knew", by Henry James, proclaims the rigidly restricted standpoint from which the narrativematerial is seen. In Mr. Kipling's tale, "A Deal in Cotton, " which isincluded in "Actions and Reactions, " the interest is derived chieflyfrom the trick of telling the story twice, --first from the point ofview of Adam Strickland, and the second time from the point of view ofAdam's native body-servant, who knew many matters that were hiddenfrom his master. =The Point of View as the Hero of the Narrative. =--In certain specialcases the point of view has been made, so to speak, the real hero ofthe story. Some years ago Mr. Brander Matthews, in collaboration withthe late H. C. Bunner, devised a very clever narrative entitled "TheDocuments in the Case. " It consisted merely of a series of numbereddocuments, widely different in nature, presented with neitherintroduction nor comment by the authors. The series containedclippings from various newspapers, personal letters, I. O. U's, race-track reports, pawn-tickets, letter-heads, telegrams, theatreprogrammes, advertisements, receipted bills, envelopes, etc. In spiteof the diversity of these materials, the authors succeeded infabricating a narrative which was entirely coherent and at all pointsclear. The main interest, however, lay in the novelty and clevernessof the point of view; and though such an exaggerated technicalexpedient may be serviceable now and then for a special sort of story, it is not of any general value. A point of view that attractsattention to itself necessarily distracts attention from the storythat is being represented; and in a narrative of serious import, themain emphasis should be thrown upon the thing that is told rather thanupon the way of telling it. REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. In what ways is the impression of a narrative dependent on the point of view selected by the author? 2. Imagine a fictitious event; and after you have become sufficiently acquainted with this imaginary incident, write seven distinct themes, in each of which this incident is projected from a different point of view:--1. As seen by the leading actor; 2. As seen by a minor actor; 3. As seen by different actors; 4. As told in letters; 5. From an omniscient point of view; 6. From a limited point of view; and 7. From a rigidly restricted point of view. 3. Imagine a fictitious event; and write two distinct themes, in one of which this event is recounted personally, and in the other impersonally. SUGGESTED READING Read the most important works of fiction that have been mentioned inthis chapter. CHAPTER VIII EMPHASIS IN NARRATIVE Essential and Contributory Features--Art Distinguishes Between the Two by Emphasis--Many Technical Devices: 1. Emphasis by Terminal Position; 2. Emphasis by Initial Position; 3. Emphasis by Pause [Further Discussion of Emphasis by Position]; 4. Emphasis by Direct Proportion; 5. Emphasis by Inverse Proportion; 6. Emphasis by Iteration; 7. Emphasis by Antithesis; 8. Emphasis by Climax; 9. Emphasis by Surprise; 10. Emphasis by Suspense; 11. Emphasis by Imitative Movement. =Essential and Contributory Features. =--The features of any objectthat we contemplate may with intelligent judgment be divided into twoclasses, according as they are inherently essential, or else merelycontributory, to the existence of that object as an individual entity. If any one of its inherently essential features should be altered, that object would cease to be itself and would become another object;but if any or all of its merely contributory features should bechanged, the object would still retain its individuality, however muchits aspect might be altered. And in general it may be said that we donot understand an object until we are able to set intelligently in onegroup or the other every feature it presents to our attention. =Art Distinguishes Between the Two by Emphasis. =--In contemplatingnatural objects, it is often difficult to distinguish those featureswhich are merely contributory from those which are inherentlyessential; but it ought not to be difficult to do so in contemplatinga work of art. For it is possible for the artist--in fact it isincumbent upon him--to help the observer to distinguish clearlybetween the essential and the contributory details of the object hehas fabricated. By employing certain technical expedients inexhibiting his work, the artist is able to communicate to the observerhis own intelligent distinction between its more important, and itsless important, features. He does this by casting emphasis upon thenecessary details and gathering out of emphasis the subsidiary ones. The importance of the principle of emphasis is recognized in all thearts; for it is only by an application of this principle that theartist can gather and group in the background the subsidiary elementsof his work, while he flings into vivid relief those elements thatembody the essence of the thing he has to say. The halo with which theByzantine mosaïcists surrounded the faces of their saints, the gloryof golden light that gleams about the figure of Christ in heaven inTintoretto's decorations, the blank bright walls of the Doge's palaceundermined by darkling and shadowy arcades, the refrain of a Provençalsong, the sharp shadow under the visor of Verrocchio's equestrianstatue, the thought-provoking chiaroscuro of Rembrandt's figurepaintings--these expedients are all designed to attract attention tothe essential elements of a whole of many parts. By technical devicessuch as these, emphasis must be given to the central truth of a workof art in order that the observer may not look instead at the mereaccidents of its investiture. Where many elements are gatheredtogether for the purpose of representing an idea, some of them must bemore important than the others because they are to a greater extentimbued with it inherently; and the artist will fail of his purposeunless he indicates clearly which elements are essential and which aremerely subsidiary. =Many Technical Devices. =--Scarcely any other work of art, exceptinga Gothic cathedral or a theatrical performance, is made of elementsmore multifarious than those of a fictitious narrative. The details ofa novel are so many and so various that the author needs at all timesa nice understanding and a careful application of the principle ofemphasis. It is therefore advisable that the present chapter should bedevoted to the enumeration and illustration of the different technicaldevices which are employed by artists in narrative to cast the neededemphasis on the essential features of their stories. =1. Emphasis by Terminal Position. =--First of all, it is obviouslyeasy to emphasize by position. In any narrative, or section of anarrative, that is designed to be read in a single sitting, the lastmoments are of necessity emphatic because they are the last. When thereader lays the narrative aside, he remembers most vividly the lastthing that has been presented to his attention; and if he thinks backto the earlier portions of the story, he must do so by thinkingthrough the concluding passage. Therefore, it is necessary in theshort-story, and advisable in the chapters of a novel, to reserve forthe ultimate position one of the most inherently important features ofthe narrative; for surely it is bad art to waste the natural emphasisof position by casting it upon a subsidiary feature. The importance of this simple expedient will readily be recognized ifthe student will gather together a hundred short-stories written byacknowledged masters and examine the last paragraph of each. Considerfor a moment the final sentences of "Markheim, " which we have alreadyquoted in another connection:-- "He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like asmile. "'You had better go for the police, ' said he: 'I have killed yourmaster. '" The entire story is summed up in the concluding phrase; and the finalsentence rings ever after in the reader's memory. Here, to cite a new example, is the conclusion of Poe's "The Masque ofthe Red Death":-- "And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had comelike a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in theblood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairingposture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out withthat of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominionover all. " The sense of absolute ruin which we derive from this impressiveparagraph is, to a considerable extent, due to the emphasis it gainsfrom its finality. The effect would unquestionably be subtracted from, if another paragraph should be appended and should steal away itsimportance of position. In order to derive the utmost emphasis from the terminal position, thegreat artist Guy de Maupassant, in his short-stories, developed aperiodicity of structure by means of which he reserved the solution ofthe narrative, whenever possible, until the final sentences. Thisperiodic structure is employed, for example, in his well-known storyof "The Necklace" ("_La Parure_"). It deals with a poor woman wholoses a diamond necklace that she has borrowed from a rich friend inorder to wear at a ball. She buys another exactly like it and returnsthis in its place. For ten years she and her husband labor day andnight to pay off the debts they have incurred to purchase thesubstituted jewels. After the debts are all paid, the woman tells herfriend of what had happened. Then follows this last sentence of thestory:-- "'Oh, my poor Mathilde. But mine were false. At most they were worthfive hundred francs!'" The periodic pattern of Guy de Maupassant was sedulously copied by O. Henry; but this popular contributor to the American magazines wenteven further than his master and developed a double surprise to bedelivered suddenly at the conclusion of the narrative. A typicalexample of his work is "The Gift of the Magi, " wherein an unexpectedoutcome is immediately capped by a second outcome still moreunexpected. The success of O. Henry with the reading public may beattributed mainly to his cleverness in taking full advantage of thepowerful expedient of emphasis by terminal position. His technicaladroitness may be studied best by reading rapidly the final paragraphsof any hundred of his stories. He had the happy faculty of saying lastthe best and brightest thing he had to say. =2. Emphasis by Initial Position. =--Next to the last position, themost emphatic place in a brief narrative, or section of a narrative, is of course the first. The mind of the reader receives with anespecial vividness whatever is presented to it at the outset. For thisreason it is necessary in the short-story, and advisable in thechapters of a novel, to begin with material that not only isinherently essential, but also strikes the key-note of the narrativethat is to follow. Edgar Allan Poe is especially artistic in applyingthis principle of emphasis by initial position. We have alreadyquoted, in another connection, the solemn opening of "The Fall of theHouse of Usher, " with its suggestion of immitigable gloom of settingas the dominant note of the narrative. In "The Cask of Amontillado, "wherein the thing to be emphasized is the element of action, Poebegins with this sentence: "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I hadborne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowedrevenge": and we know already that the story is to set forth a signalact of vengeance. In "The Tell-Tale Heart, " which is a study ofmurderous madness, and deals primarily with the element of character, the author opens thus:-- "True!--nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; butwhy _will_ you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened mysenses--not destroyed--not dulled them. Above all was the sense ofhearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. Iheard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observehow healthily--how calmly I can tell you the whole story. " =3. Emphasis by Pause. =--In general it may be said that any pause in anarrative emphasizes by position whatever immediately precedes it, andalso (though to a considerably less extent) whatever immediatelyfollows it. For this reason many masters of the short-story, likeDaudet and de Maupassant, construct their narratives in sections, inorder to multiply the number of terminal and initial positions. Asterisks strung across the page not only make the reader aware of thecompletion of an integral portion of the story, but also focus hisattention emphatically on the last thing that has been said before theinterruption. The employment of _points de suspension_--a mark ofpunctuation consisting of a series of successive dots . .. --which is sofrequent with French authors, is a device which is used to interrupt asentence solely for the sake of emphasis by pause. =Further Discussion of Emphasis by Position. =--The instances which wehave selected to illustrate the expedient of emphasizing by positionhave been chosen for convenience from short-stories; but the sameprinciple may be applied with similar success in constructing thechapters of a novel. Certain great but inartistic novelists, like SirWalter Scott, show themselves to be singularly obtuse to the advantageof placing emphatic material in an emphatic position. Scott is almostalways careless of his chapter endings: he allows the sections of hisnarrative to drift and straggle, instead of rounding them to anemphatic close. But more artistic novelists, like Victor Hugo forexample, never fail to take advantage of the terminal position. Consider the close of Book XI, Chapter II, of "Notre Dame de Paris. "The gypsy-girl, Esmeralda, has been hanged in the Place de Grève. Thehunchback, Quasimodo, has flung the archdeacon, Claude Frollo, fromthe tower-top of Notre Dame. This paragraph then brings the chapter toan end:-- "Quasimodo then raised his eye to the gypsy, whose body he saw, depending from the gibbet, shudder afar under her white robe with thelast tremblings of death-agony; then he lowered it to the archdeacon, stretched out at the foot of the tower and no longer having humanform; and he said with a sob that made his deep chest heave: 'Oh! allthat I have loved!'" A chapter ending may be artistically planned either (as in theforegoing instance) to sum up with absolute finality the narrativeaccomplishment of the chapter, or else, by vaguely foreshadowing thesubsequent progress of the story, to lure the reader to proceed. Theelder Dumas possessed in a remarkable degree the faculty of soterminating one chapter as to allure the reader to an immediatecommencement of the next. He did this most frequently by introducing anew thread of narrative in a phrase of the concluding sentence, andthereby exciting the reader's curiosity to follow up the thread. The expedient of emphasis by terminal and by initial position cannot, of course, be applied without reservation to an entire novel. The lastchapter of a novel with a complicated plot is often of necessitydevoted to tying or untying minor knots in the straggling threads ofthe general network. Therefore, the most emphatic place in an extendednarrative is not at the very end, but rather at the close of thechapter which sets forth the culmination. Also, although many greatnovels, like "The Scarlet Letter, " have begun at an emphatic moment inthe plot, many others have opened slowly and have presented noimportant material until the narrative was well under way. "TheTalisman" of Scott, "The Spy" of Fenimore Cooper, and many anotherearly nineteenth-century romance, began with a solitary horseman whomthe reader was forced to follow for several pages before anythingwhatever happened. Latterly, however, novelists have learned fromwriters of short-stories the art of opening emphatically with materialimportant to the plot. =4. Emphasis by Direct Proportion. =--Another means of emphasis innarrative is by proportion. More time and more attention should begiven to essential scenes than to matters of subsidiary interest. Themost important characters should be given most to say and do; and theamount of attention devoted to the others should be proportioned totheir importance in the action. Becky Sharp stands out sharply fromthe half a hundred other characters in "Vanity Fair, " because moretime is devoted to her than to any of the others. Similarly, in "Emma"and in "Pride and Prejudice, " as we have noted in the precedingchapter, the heroine is in each case emphasized by the fact that sheis set forth from a more intimate point of view than the minor peoplein the story. It is wise, for the sake of emphasis by proportion, todraw the major characters more completely and more carefully than theminor; and much may therefore be said, on this ground, in defence ofDickens's habit of drawing humanly only the leading characters in hisnovels and merely sketching in caricature the subsidiary actors. =5. Emphasis by Inverse Proportion. =--It is sometimes possible, inspecial cases, to emphasize ironically by inverse proportion. Anauthor may deliberately devote several successive pages to dwelling onsubsidiary matters, only to emphasize sharply a sudden paragraph orsentence in which he turns to the one thing that really counts. Butthis ironical expedient is, of course, less frequently serviceablethan that of emphasis by direct proportion. =6. Emphasis by Iteration. =--Undoubtedly the easiest means ofinculcating a detail of narrative is to repeat it again and again. Emphasis by iteration is a favorite device of Dickens. The reader isnever allowed to forget the catch-phrase of Micawber or the moral lookof Pecksniff. In many cases, to be sure, the reader wishes that hemight escape the constantly recurrent repetition; but Dickensoccasionally applies the expedient with subtle emotional effect. In "ATale of Two Cities, " for example, the repeated references to echoingfootsteps and to the knitting of Madame Defarge contribute a greatdeal to the sense of imminent catastrophe. Certain modern authors have developed a phase of emphasis by iterationwhich is similar to the employment of the _leit-motiv_ in themusic-dramas of Richard Wagner. In the Wagnerian operas a certainmusical theme is devoted to each of the characters, and is woven intothe score whenever the character appears. Similarly, in the laterplays of Henrik Ibsen, certain phrases are repeated frequently, toindicate the recurrence of certain dramatic moods. Thus, in"Rosmersholm, " reference is made to the weird symbol of "whitehorses, " whenever the mood of the momentary scene foreshadows thedouble suicide which is to terminate the play. Students of "HeddaGabler" need not be reminded of the emphasis flung by iteration on thephrases, "Vine-leaves in his hair, " "Fancy that, Hedda!", "Wavy-hairedThea, " "The one cock on the fowl-roost, " and "People don't do suchthings!" The same device may be employed just as effectively in theshort-story and the novel. A single instance will suffice forillustration. Notice, in examining the impressive talk of the old lamain Mr. Kipling's "Kim, " how much emphasis is derived from thecontinual recurrence of certain phrases, like the "Search for theRiver, " "the justice of the Wheel, " "to acquire merit, " and so forth. A narrative expedient scarcely distinguishable in effect from simpleiteration is the device of parallelism of structure. For example, inHawthorne's story of "The White Old Maid, " the first scene and thelast, although they are separated in time by many, many years, takeplace in the same spacious chamber, with the moonbeams falling in thesame way through two deep and narrow windows, while waving curtainsproduce the same ghostly semblance of expression on a face that isdead. =7. Emphasis by Antithesis. =--Emphasis in narrative is alsoattained by antithesis, --an expedient employed in every art. In moststories it is well so to select the characters that they will seteach other off by contrast. In the great duel scene of the "Masterof Ballantrae, " from which a selection has been quoted in a previouschapter, the phlegmatic calm of Mr. Henry is contrasted sharplywith the mercurial hot-headedness of the Master; and each characterstands forth more vividly because of its opposition to the other. Of the two women who are loved by Tito Melema, the one, Tessa, issimple and childish, the other, Romola, complex and intellectual. The most interesting stories present a constant contrast ofmutually foiling personalities; and whenever characters of variedviews and opposing aims come nobly to the grapple in a struggle thatvitally concerns them, the tensity of the situation will be augmentedif the difference between the characters is marked. This expedientis therefore of especial importance in the drama. Othello seems morepoignantly emotional in the presence of the coldly intellectualIago. In "The School for Scandal, " Charles and Joseph Surface aremuch more effective together than either of them would be alone. Thewholehearted and happy-go-lucky recklessness of the one sets offthe smooth and smug dissimulation of the other; the first gives lightto the play, and the second shade. Hamlet's wit is sharpened by thegarrulous obtuseness of Polonius; the sad world-wisdom of PaulaTanqueray is accentuated by the innocence of Ellean. Similarly, toreturn to the novel for examples, we need only instance the contrastin mind between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, the contrast in moodbetween Claude Frollo and Phoebus de Châteaupers, the contrast inideals between Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen Grandcourt. The expedient of antithesis is also employed effectively in thebalance of scene against scene. The absolute desolation whichterminates "The Masque of the Red Death" is preceded by "a masked ballof the most unusual magnificence. " In Scott's "Kenilworth, " we passfrom the superb festivities which Leicester institutes in honor ofQueen Elizabeth, to the lonely prison where Amy Robsart, his discardedwife, is languishing. Victor Hugo is, in modern fiction, the greatestmaster of antithesis of mood between scene and scene. His mostemphatic effects are attained, like those of Gothic architecture, by ajuxtaposition of the grotesque and the sublime. Often, to be sure, heoverworks the antithetic; and entire sections of his narrative movelike the walking-beam of a ferry-boat, tilting now to this side, nowto that. But in spite of his excess in employing this device, hispractice should be studied carefully; for at his best he illustratesmore convincingly than any other author the effectiveness of emphasisby contrast. The subtlest way of employing this expedient is to present anantithesis of mood within a single scene. Dame Quickly's account ofFalstaff's death touches at once the heights of humor and the depthsof pathos. At the close of "Mrs. Bathurst, " the tragic narrative isinterrupted by the passage of a picnic-party singing a lightlove-song. Shylock, in his great dialogue with Tubal, is at the samemoment plunged in melancholy over the defection of his daughter andflushed with triumph because he has Antonio at last within hisclutches. Each emotion seems more potent because it is contrasted withthe other. In Mr. Kipling's "Love-o'-Women, " the tragic effect isenhanced by the fact that the tale is told by the humorous Mulvaney. Thus:-- "'An' now?' she sez, lookin' at him; an' the red paint stud lone onthe white av her face like a bull's-eye on a target. "He lifted up his eyes, slow an' very slow, an' he looked at her longan' very long, an' he tuk his spache betune his teeth wid a wrenchthat shuk him. "'I'm dyin', Aigypt--dyin', ' he says; ay, those were his words, for Iremimber the name he called her. He was turnin' the death-color, buthis eyes niver rowled. They were set--set on her. Widout word orwarnin' she opened her arms full stretch, an' 'Here!' she sez. (Oh, fwhat a golden mericle av a voice ut was. ) 'Die here, ' she sez; an'Love-o'-Women dhropped forward, an' she hild him up, for she was afine big woman. " =8. Emphasis by Climax. =--Another rhetorical expedient fromwhich emphasis may be derived is, of course, the use of climax. The materials of a short-story, or of a chapter of narrative, should in nearly every case be assembled in an ascending order ofimportance, --each incident carrying the interest to a higherlevel than that of the preceding. The same is true of the structureof a novel from the outset to the moment of the culmination; butof course it is rarely possible in the _dénouement_ to carry theinterest any higher than the level it attained at the point ofgreatest complication. Climacteric progressiveness of structureis effectively exhibited in Henry James' tale of mystery andterror, "The Turn of the Screw. " The author on horror's headhorrors accumulates, in a steadily ascending scale. But, on theother hand, many stories have been marred by the introduction ofa very striking scene too early in the structure, after whichthere has succeeded of necessity an appreciable diminution in theinterest. The reason why sequels to great novels have rarely beensuccessful is that it has been impossible for the author in thesecond volume to sustain a climacteric rise of interest from thelevel where he left off in the first. =9. Emphasis by Surprise. =--A means of emphasis less technical andmore psychological than those which have been hitherto discussed isthat which owes its origin to surprise. Whatever hits the readerunexpectedly will hit him hard. He will be most impressed by that forwhich he has been least prepared. Chapter XXXII of "Vanity Fair"passes in Brussels during the battle of Waterloo. The reader is keptin the city with the women of the story while the men are fighting onthe field a dozen miles away. All day a distant cannonading rumbles onthe ear. At nightfall the noise stops suddenly. Then, at the end ofthe chapter, the reader is told:-- "No more firing was heard at Brussels--the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city: and Amelia was praying forGeorge, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through hisheart. " This statement of George Osborne's death is emphasized in several waysat once. It is made emphatic by position, since it is placed at thevery end of a long chapter; by inverse proportion, since it is setforth in a single phrase after many pages that have been devoted toless important matters; but most of all by the startle of surprisewith which it strikes the reader. Likewise, the last sentence of deMaupassant's "The Necklace, " quoted earlier in this chapter, isemphatic by surprise as well as by position; and the same is true ofthe clever and unexpected close of H. C. Bunner's "A Sisterly Scheme, "in many ways a little masterpiece of art. In tales of mystery, the interest is maintained chiefly by the deftmanipulation of surprise; but even in novels wherein the aim tomystify is very far from being the primary purpose of the author, itis often wise to keep a secret from the reader for the sake of theemphasis by surprise which may be derived at the moment of revelation. In "Our Mutual Friend" the reader is led for a long time to supposethat the character of Mr. Boffin is changing for the worse; and hisinterest is stimulated keenly when he discovers ultimately that theapparent degeneration has been only a pretense. In the drama this expedient must be used with great delicacy, becausea sudden and startling shock of surprise is likely to scatter theattention of the spectators and flurry them out of a true conceptionof the scene. The reader of a novel, when he discovers with surprisethat he has been skilfully deceived through several pages, may pauseto reconstruct his conception of the narrative, and may even re-readthe entire passage through which the secret has been withheld fromhim. But in the theatre, the spectators cannot stop the play whilethey reconstruct in retrospect their judgment of a situation; andtherefore, in the drama, a moment of surprise should be carefully ledup to by anticipatory suggestion. Before Lady Macbeth is disclosedwalking in her sleep, her doctor and her waiting-gentlewoman are senton to tell the audience of her "slumbery agitation. " This is excellentart in the theatre; but it would be bad art in the pages of a novel. In a story written to be read, surprise is most effective when it iscomplete. =10. Emphasis by Suspense. =--An even more interesting form of emphasisin narrative is emphasis by suspense. Wilkie Collins is accreditedwith having said that the secret of holding the attention of one'sreaders lay in the ability to do three things: "Make 'em laugh; make'em weep; make 'em wait. " Still abide these three; and the greatest isthe last. The ability to make the reader wait, through many pages andat times through many chapters, is a very valuable asset of the writerof fiction; but this ability is applied to best advantage when it isexercised within certain limitations. In the first place, there is nouse in making the reader wait unless he is first given an inkling ofwhat he is to wait for. The reader should be tantalized; he should bemade to long for the fruit that is just beyond his grasp; and heshould not be left in ignorance as to the nature of the fruit, lest heshould long for it half-heartedly. A vague sense of "somethingevermore about to be" is not so interesting to the reader as a vividsense of the imminence of some particular occurrence that he wishesardently to witness. The expedient of suspense is most effective wheneither of two things and only two, both of which the reader hasimagined in advance, is just about to happen, and the reader, desirousof the one and apprehensive of the other, is kept waiting while thebalance trembles. In the second place, there is seldom any use inmaking the reader wait unless he is given in the end the thing he hasbeen waiting for. A short-story may occasionally set forth a suspensewhich is never to be satisfied. Frank R. Stockton's famous tale, "TheLady or the Tiger?", ends with a question which neither the reader northe author is able to answer; and Bayard Taylor's fascinatingshort-story, "Who Was She?", never reveals the alluring secret of theheroine's identity. But in an extended story an unsatisfied suspenseis often less emphatic than no suspense at all, because the reader inthe end feels cheated by the author who has made him wait for nothing. There are, of course, exceptions to this statement. In "The MarbleFaun, " Hawthorne is undoubtedly right in never revealing the shape ofDonatello's ears, even though the reader continually expects therevelation; but, in the same novel, it is difficult to see what, ifanything, is gained by making the reader wait in vain for the truthabout the shadowy past of Miriam. =11. Emphasis by Imitative Movement. =--Emphasis in narrative may alsobe attained by imitative movement. Whatever is imagined to havehappened quickly should be narrated quickly, in few words and in rapidrhythm; and whatever is imagined to have happened slowly should benarrated in a more leisurely manner, --sometimes in a greater number ofwords than are absolutely necessitated by the sense alone, --the wordsbeing arranged, furthermore, in a rhythm of appreciable sluggishness. In "Markheim, " the dealer is murdered in a single sudden sentence:"The long, skewerlike dagger flashed and fell. " But, later on in thestory, it takes the hero a whole paragraph, containing no less thanthree hundred words, to mount the four-and-twenty steps to the firstfloor of the house. In the following passage from "The Masque of theRed Death, " notice how much of the effect is due to imitative movementin the narrative:-- "But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad assumptions of themummer had inspired the whole party there were found none who putforth hand to seize him; so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yardof the Prince's person; and, while the vast assembly, as if with oneimpulse, shrank from the centres of the rooms to the walls, he madehis way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured stepwhich had distinguished him from the first, through the blue chamberto the purple--through the purple to the green--through the green tothe orange--through this again to the white--and even thence to theviolet, ere a decided movement had been made to arrest him. It wasthen, however, that the Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and theshame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the sixchambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror thathad seized upon all. " The spectre and the Prince pass successivelythrough the same series of rooms; but it takes the former fifty-onewords to cover the distance, whereas it takes the latter only six. In every story that is artistically fashioned, the methods of emphasisenumerated in this chapter will be found to be continually applied. Its essential features will be rendered prominent by position(terminal or initial), by pause, by proportion (direct or inverse), byiteration or parallelism, by antithesis, by climax, by surprise, bysuspense, by imitative movement, or by a combination of any or all ofthese. The necessity of emphasis is ever present; the means ofemphasis are simple; and any writer of narrative who knows his artwill endeavor to employ them always to the best advantage. REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. What reasons account for the importance of the principle of emphasis in art? 2. Imagine a fictitious event of sufficient complexity; select the one detail that seems to be the most essential; and then write eleven distinct themes, narrating this same incident, and emphasizing this detail successively, 1. By Terminal Position; 2. By Initial Position; 3. By Pause; 4. By Direct Proportion; 5. By Inverse Proportion; 6. By Iteration; 7. By Antithesis; 8. By Climax; 9. By Surprise; 10. By Suspense, and 11. By Imitative Movement. SUGGESTED READING VICTOR HUGO: "Notre Dame de Paris. "--This is one of the great novelsof the world; and it illustrates, at many moments, every technicaldevice of emphasis that has been expounded in this chapter. CHAPTER IX THE EPIC, THE DRAMA, AND THE NOVEL Fiction a Generic Term--Narrative in Verse and Narrative in Prose--Three Moods of Fiction: I. The Epic Mood--II. The Dramatic Mood: 1. Influence of the Actor; 2. Influence of the Theatre; 3. Influence of the Audience--[Dramatized Novels]--III. The Novelistic Mood. =Fiction a Generic Term. =--Throughout the present volume, the word_fiction_ has been used with a very broad significance, to includeevery type of literary composition whose purpose is to embody certaintruths of human life in a series of imagined facts. The reason forthis has been that the same general artistic methods, with very slightand obvious modifications, are applicable to every sort of narrativewhich sets forth imagined people in a series of imagined acts. Nearlyall of the technical principles which have been outlined in the sixpreceding chapters apply not only to the novel and the short-story, but likewise to the epic and the lesser narrative in verse, and also(though with certain evident limitations) to the drama. The materialsand methods of fiction may be studied in the works of Homer, Shakespeare, and even Browning, as well as in the works of Balzac, Turgénieff, and Mr. Kipling. The nature of narrative is necessarilythe same, whatever be its mood or its medium. The methods ofconstructing plots, of delineating characters, of employing settings, do not differ appreciably whether a narrative be written in verse orin prose; and in either case the same selection of point of view andvariety of emphasis are possible. Therefore, in this volume, noattempt has hitherto been made to distinguish one type of fictitiousnarrative from another. =Narrative in Verse and Narrative in Prose. =--Such a distinction, if itbe attempted at all, should be made only on the broadest and mostgeneral lines. First of all, it should be admitted that, in an inquiryconcerned solely with the methods of fiction, no technical distinctionis possible between the narrative that is written in verse and thenarrative that is written in prose. The two differ in the mood oftheir materials and the medium through which they are expressed; butthey do not differ distinctly in methods of construction. As far asplot and characters and setting are concerned, Sir Walter Scott wentto work in the Waverley Novels, which are written in prose, just as hehad gone to work in "Marmion" and "The Lady of the Lake, " which arewritten in verse. In his verse he said things with the better art, inhis prose he had more things to say; but in each case his centralpurpose was the same: and nothing can be gained from a critical dictumthat "Ivanhoe" is fiction and that "Marmion" is not. In the history ofevery nation, fiction has been written earliest in verse and onlyafterwards in prose. What we loosely call the novel was developedlate in literature, at a time after prose had supplanted verse as thenatural medium for narrative. Therefore, and therefore only, have wecome to regard the novel as a type of prose literature. For there isno inherent reason why a novel may not be written in verse. There is asense in which Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh, " Owen Meredith's"Lucile, " and Coventry Patmore's "The Angel in the House, " to mentionworks of very different quality and calibre, may be regarded moreproperly as novels than as poems. The story of "Maud" inspiredTennyson to poetic utterance, and he told the tale in a series ofexquisite lyrics; but the same story might have been used by adifferent author as the basis for a novel in prose. The subject of"Evangeline" was suggested to Longfellow by Hawthorne; and if thegreat prose poet had written the story himself, it would not havediffered essentially in material or in structural method from thenarrative as we know it through the medium of the verse romancer. François Coppée has composed admirable short-stories in verse aswell as in prose. "The Strike of the Iron-Workers" ("_La Gréve desForgerons_"), which is written in rhymed Alexandrines, does notdiffer markedly in narrative method from "The Substitute" ("_LeRemplaçant_"), which is written in prose. To be sure, the former is apoem and the latter is not; but only a very narrow-minded critic wouldcall the latter a short-story without applying the same term also tothe former. Therefore, the question whether a certain fictitious taleshould be told in verse or in prose has no place in a generaldiscussion of the materials and methods of fiction. It is a matterof expression merely, and must be decided in each case by thetemperamental attitude of the author toward his subject-matter. =Three Moods of Fiction. =--Eliminating, therefore, as unprofitable anyattempt at a critical distinction between fiction that is written inverse and fiction that is written in prose, we may yet derive acertain profit from a distinction along broad and general linesbetween three leading moods of fiction, --the epic, the dramatic, andwhat (lacking a more precise term) we may call the novelistic. Certainmaterials of fiction are inherently epic, or dramatic, or novelistic, as the case may be. Also, an author, according to his mental attitudetoward life and toward the subject-matter of his fictions, may casthis stories either in the epic, the dramatic, or the novelistic mood. In order to understand this distinction, we must examine the nature ofthe epic and the drama, and then study the novel in comparison withthese two elder types of fiction. =I. The Epic Mood. =--The great epics of the world, whether, as in thecase of the Norse sagas and possibly of the Homeric poems, they havebeen a gradual and undeliberate aggregation of traditional ballads, orelse, as in the case of the "Æneid" and "Paradise Lost, " they havebeen the deliberate production of a single conscious artist, haveattained their chief significance from the fact that they have summedup within themselves the entire contribution to human progress of acertain race, a certain nation, a certain organized religion. Theglory that was Greece is epitomized and sung forever in the"Iliad, "--the grandeur that was Rome, in the "Æneid. " All that theMiddle Ages gave the world is gathered and expressed in the "DivineComedy" of Dante: all of medieval history, science, philosophy, scholarship, poetry, religion may be reconstructed from a rightreading and entire understanding of this single monumental poem. Ifyou would know Portugal in her great age of discovery and conquest andnational expansion, read the "Lusiads" of Camoëns. If you would knowChristianity militant against the embattled legions of the Saracens, read the "Jerusalem Liberated" of Tasso. If you would know what thePuritan religion once meant to the greatest minds of England, read the"Paradise Lost" of Milton. The great epics have attained this resumptive and historicalsignificance only by exhibiting as subject-matter a vast and communalstruggle, in which an entire race, an entire nation, an entireorganized religion has been concerned, --a struggle imagined as so vastthat it has shaken heaven as well as earth and called to conflict notonly men but also gods. The epic has dealt always with a struggle, atonce human and divine, to establish a great communal cause. Thiscause, in the "Æneid, " is the founding of Rome; in the "JerusalemLiberated" it is the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre; in the "FaerieQueene" it is the triumph of the virtues over the vices; in the"Lusiads" it is the discovery and conquest of the Indies; in the"Divine Comedy" it is the salvation of the human soul. Whatevernations, whatever races, whatever gods oppose the founding of Rome orthe liberation of Jerusalem must be conquered, because in either casethe epic cause is righteous and predestined to prevail. As a result of this, the characters in the great epics are memorablemainly because of the part that they play in advancing or retardingthe victory of the vast and social cause which is the subject of thestory. Their virtues and their faults are communal and representative:they are not adjudged as individuals, apart from the conflict in whichthey figure: and, as a consequence, they are rarely interesting intheir individual traits. It is in rendering the more intimate andpersonal phases of human character that epic literature shows itself, when compared with the modern novel, inefficient. The epic authorexhibits little sympathy for any individual who struggles against thecause that is to be established. Æneas dallying with Dido andsubsequent desertion of her is of little interest to Virgil on theground of individual personality: what interests him mainly is that solong as Æneas lingers with the Carthaginian queen, the founding ofRome is being retarded, and that when at last Æneas leaves her, hedoes so to advance the epic cause. Therefore Virgil regards thedesertion of Dido as an act of heroic virtue on the part of the manwho sails away to found a nation. A modern novelist, however (and thisis the main point to be considered in this connection), would conceivethe whole matter more personally. He would be far less interested atthe moment in the ultimate founding of Rome than he would be in themisery of the deserted woman; and instead of considering Æneas as amodel of heroic virtue, would adjudge him as personally base. Fromthis we see that the novelistic attitude toward character is much moreintimate than the epic attitude. The wrath of Achilles is significantto Homer, not so much because it is an exhibition of individualpersonality as because it is a factor in jeopardizing the victory ofthe Greeks. Considered as types of individual character, most ofHomer's heroes are mere boys. It is the cause for which they fightthat gives them dignity: embattled Greece must repossess the beautywhich a lesser race has reft away from it. Even Helen herself ismerely an idea to be fought for; she is not, as a woman, interestinghumanly. It is only in infrequent passages, such as the scene ofparting between Andromache and Hector, that the ancient epics revealthe intimate attitude toward character to which we have grownaccustomed in the modern novel. Because the epic authors have been interested always in communalconflict rather than in individual personality, they have seldom madeany use of the element of love, --the most intimate and personal of allemotions. There is no love in Homer, and scarcely any love in Virgiland in Milton. Tasso, to be sure, uses a love motive as the basis foreach of the three leading strands of his story; but because of this, his epic, though gaining in modernity and charm, loses something ofthe communal immensity--the impersonal dignity--of the "Iliad" and the"Æneid. " On the other hand, novelistic authors, since they have beeninterested mainly in the revelation of intimate phases of individualpersonality, have seized upon the element of love as the leadingmotive of their stories. And this is one of the main differences, onthe side of content, between epic and novelistic fiction. Certain great works of fiction stand upon the borderland between theepic and the novel. "Don Quixote" is, for instance, such a work. Itis epic in that it sums up and expresses the entire contribution ofSpain to the progress of humanity. It is resumptive of the nation thatproduced it: all phases of Spanish life and character, ideals andtemperament, are epitomized within it. But, on the other hand, it isnovelistic in the emphasis it casts on individual personality, --theintimacy with which it focusses the interest not so much upon a nationas upon a man. The epic, in the ancient sense, is dead to-day. Facility ofintercommunication between the nations has made us all citizens of theworld; and an increased sense of the relativity of national andreligious ideals has made us catholic of other systems than our own. Consequently we have lost belief in a communal conflict so absolutelyjust and necessary as to call to battle powers not only human butdivine. Also, since the French Revolution, we have grown to set theone above the many, and to believe that, of right, society exists forthe sake of the individual rather than the individual for the sake ofsociety. Therefore the novel, which deals with individual personalityin and for itself, is more attuned to modern life than the epic, whichpresents the individual mainly in relation to a communal cause whichhe strives to advance or to retard. The epic note, however, survives in certain momentous modern novels. "Uncle Tom's Cabin, " for example, is less important merely as a novelthan as the epic of the great cause of abolition. Underlying many ofthe works of Erckmann-Chatrian is an epic purpose to advance the causeof universal peace by a depiction of the horrors of war. Balzac had inmind the resumptive phase of epic composition when he planned his"Human Comedy" (choosing his title in evident imitation of that ofDante's poem), and started out to sum up all phases of human life ina single monumental series of narratives. So also the late FrankNorris had an epic idea in his imagination when he planned a trilogyof novels (which unhappily he died before completing) to exhibit whatthe great wheat industry means to the modern world. In the broad and social sense, the epic is undeniably a greater typeof fiction than the novel, because it is more resumptive of life inthe large, and looks upon humanity with a vaster sweep of vision; butin the deep and personal sense, the novel is the greater, because itis more capable of an intimate study of individual emotion. And it ispossible, as we have seen, that modern fiction should be at once epicand novelistic in content and in mood, --epic in resuming all aspectsof a certain phase of life and in exhibiting a social struggle, andnovelistic in casting emphasis upon personal details of character andin depicting intimate emotions. Probably no other author has succeededbetter than Emile Zola in combining the epic and the novelistic moodsof fiction; and the novels in the Rougon-Macquart series are at oncecommunal and personal in their significance. =II. The Dramatic Mood. =--It is somewhat simpler to trace adistinction both in content and in method between novelistic anddramatic fiction, because the latter is produced under specialconditions which impose definite limitations upon the author. Adrama is, in essence, a story devised to be presented by actors on astage before an audience. The dramatist, therefore, works everunder the sway of three influences to which the novelist is notsubmitted:--namely, the temperament of the actors by whom his playsare to be performed, the physical conditions of the theatre in whichthey are to be produced, and the psychologic nature of the audiencebefore which they are to be presented. The combined force of thesethree external influences upon the dramatist accounts for all ofthe essential differences between the drama and the novel. =1. Influence of the Actor. =--First of all, because of the influenceof his actors, the dramatist is obliged to draw character throughaction, and to eliminate from his work almost every other means ofcharacterization. He must therefore select from life such moments asare active rather than passive. His characters must constantly bedoing something; they may not pause for careful contemplation. Consequently the novelist has a wider range of subject than thedramatist, because he is able to consider life more calmly, and toconcern himself, if need be, with thoughts and feelings that do nottranslate themselves into action. In depicting objective events inwhich the element of action is paramount, the drama is moreimmediate and vivid; but the novel may depict subjective eventswhich are quite beyond the presentation of actors in a theatre. Furthermore, since he is not obliged to think of actors, thenovelist has a greater freedom in creating characters than thedramatist. The great characters of the drama have been devised byplaywrights who have already attained command of the theatre oftheir place and time, and who therefore have fashioned their parts tofit the individual actors they have found ready to perform them. Consequently they have endowed their characters with the physical, andeven to some extent the mental, characteristics of certain actualactors. M. Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac is not merely Cyrano, butalso Constant Coquelin; Sardou's La Tosca is not merely La Tosca, butalso Mme. Sarah Bernhardt; Molière's Célimène is not merely Célimène, but also Mlle. Molière; Shakespeare's Hamlet is not merely Hamlet, but also Richard Burbage. In working thus with one eye upon theactual, the dramatist is extremely likely to be betrayed intountruthfulness. In the last scene of "Hamlet, " the Queen says ofthe Prince, "He's fat and scant of breath. " This line was of courseoccasioned by the fact that Richard Burbage was corpulent during theseason of 1602. But the eternal truth is that Prince Hamlet is aslender man; and Shakespeare has here been forced to belie thetruth in order to subserve the fact. On the other hand, thedramatist is undoubtedly aided in his great aim of creatingcharacters by holding in mind certain actual people who have beenselected to represent them; and what the novelist gains in range andfreedom of characterization, he is likely to lose in concretenessof delineation. =2. Influence of the Theatre. =--Secondly, the form and structure ofthe drama in any age is imposed upon the dramatist by the size andshape and physical appointments of the theatre he is writing for. Plays must be built in one way to fit the theatre of Dionysus, inanother way to fit the Globe upon the Bankside, in still another wayto fit the modern electric-lighted stage behind a picture-frameproscenium. The dramatist in constructing his story is hedged in by amultitude of physical restrictions, of which he must make a specialstudy in order to force them to contribute to the presentation of histruth instead of detracting from it. In this regard, again, thenovelist works with greater freedom. Seldom is his labor subjected tomerely physical restrictions from without. Sometimes, to be sure, certain arbitrary conditions of the trade of publishing have exercisedan influence over the structure of the novel. In England, early in thenineteenth century, it was easier to sell a three-volume novel than atale of lesser compass; and many a story of the time had to be piecedout beyond its natural and truthful length in order to meet thedemands of the public and the publishers. But such a case, in thehistory of the novel, is exceptional. In general, the novelist maybuild as he chooses. He may tell a tale, long or short, happening infew places or in many; and is not, like the modern dramatist, confinedin place to no more than four or five different settings, and in timeto the two hours' traffic of the stage. The novel, therefore, is farmore serviceable than the drama as a medium for exhibiting the gradualgrowth of character, --the development of personality under influencesextending over long periods of time and exerted in many differentplaces. =3. Influence of the Audience. =--Thirdly, the very content of thedrama is determined by the fact that a play must be devised tointerest a multitude rather than an individual. The novelist writesfor a reader sitting alone in his library: whether ten such readers ora hundred thousand ultimately read a book, the author speaks to eachof them apart from all the others. But the dramatist must plan hisstory to interest simultaneously a multitude of heterogeneousobservers. The drama, therefore, must be richer in popular appeal; butthe novel may be subtler in appealing to the one instead of to themany. Since the novelist addresses himself to a single person only, orto a limitless succession of single persons, he may choose the sort ofreader he will write for; but the dramatist must please the many, andis therefore at the mercy of the multitude. He writes less freely thanthe novelist, since he cannot pick his auditors. His themes, histhoughts, and his emotions are restricted by the limits of popularappreciation. This important condition is potent in determining the proper contentof dramatic fiction. For it has been found in practice that the onething most likely to interest a crowd is a struggle between characterand character. Speaking empirically, the late Ferdinand Brunetière, inhis preface to "_Annales du Théâtre et de la Musique_" for 1893, stated that the drama has dealt always with a struggle between humanwills; and his statement, formulated in the catch-phrase, "Nostruggle, no drama, " has since become a commonplace of dramaticcriticism. The reason for this is simply that characters areinteresting to a crowd mainly in those crises of emotion that bringthem to the grapple. A single individual, like the reader of a novel, may be interested intellectually in those gentle influences beneathwhich a character unfolds itself as mildly as a blowing rose; but tothe gathered multitude a character does not appeal except in momentsof contention. Hence the drama, to interest an audience, must presentits characters in some struggle of the wills, --whether it be merelyflippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice, or gentle, as inthat of Viola and Orsino, or terrible, with Macbeth, or piteous, withLear. The drama, therefore, is akin to the epic, in that it mustrepresent a struggle; but it is more akin to the novel, in that itdeals with human character in its individual, rather than itscommunal, aspects. But in range of representing characters, the dramais more restricted than the novel; for though the novelist is atliberty to exhibit a struggle of individual human wills whenever hemay choose to do so, he is not, like the dramatist, prohibited fromrepresenting anything else. In covering this special province, thedrama is undeniably more vivid and emphatic; but many momentous phasesof human experience are not contentious but contemplative; and thesethe novel may reveal serenely, without employment of the sound andfury of the drama. Since the mind of the multitude is more emotional than intellectual, the dramatist, for his most effective moments, is obliged to set forthaction with emotion for its motive. But the novelist, in motivatingaction, may be more considerate and intellectual, since his appeal ismade to the individual mind. In its psychologic processes, the crowdis more commonplace and more traditional than is the individual. Thedrama, therefore, is less serviceable than the novel as a vehicle forconveying unaccustomed and advanced ideas of life. The crowd has nospeculation in its eyes: it is impatient of original thought, and ofany but inherited emotion: it evinces little favor for the original, the questioning, the new. Therefore if an author holds ideas ofreligion, or of politics, or of social law that are in advance of histime, he will do better to embody them in a novel than in a drama;because the former makes its appeal to the individual mind, which hasmore patience for intellectual consideration. Furthermore, the novelist need not, like the dramatist, subserve theimmediate necessity for popular appeal. The dramatic author, since heplans his story for a heterogeneous multitude of people, mustincorporate in the same single work of art elements that will interestall classes of mankind. But the novelistic author, since he is atliberty to pick his auditors at will, may, if he choose, write onlyfor the best-developed minds. It is an element of Shakespeare'sgreatness that his most momentous plays, like "Hamlet" and "Othello, "are of interest to people who can neither read nor write, as well asto people of educated sensibilities. But it is an evidence ofMeredith's greatness that his novels are caviare to the general. Mr. Kipling's "They" is the greater story because it defends itself frombeing understood by those it is not really for. In exhibiting thesubtler and more delicate phases of human experience, the novel fartranscends the drama. The drama, at its deepest, is more poignant; butthe novel, at its highest, is more exquisite. =Dramatized Novels. =--The proper material for the drama is, as wehave seen, a struggle between individual human wills, motivated byemotion rather than by intellect, and expressed in terms ofobjective action. In representing such material, the drama is supreme. But the novel is wider in range; for besides exhibiting (thoughless emphatically) this special aspect of human life, it may embodymany other and scarcely less important phases of individualexperience. Of late, an effort has been made to break down thebarrier between the novel and the drama: many stories, which havebeen told first in the novelistic mood, have afterward beenreconstructed and retold for presentation in the theatre. Thisattempt has succeeded sometimes, but has more often failed. Yet itought to be very easy to distinguish a novel that may be dramatizedfrom a novel that may not. Certain scenes in novelistic literature, like the duel in "The Master of Ballantrae, " are essentially dramaticboth in content and in mood. Such scenes may be adapted with verylittle labor to the uses of the theatre. Certain novels, like "JaneEyre, " which exhibit an emphatic struggle between individual humanwills, are inherently capable of theatric representment. But any novelin which the main source of interest is not the clash of characteron character, in which the element of action is subordinate, or inwhich the chief appeal is made to the individual (instead of thecollective) mind, is not capable of being dramatized successfully. =III. The Novelistic Mood. =--It is impossible to determine whether, atthe present day, the novel or the drama is the more effective mediumfor embodying the truths of human life in a series of imagined facts. Dramatic fiction has the greater depth, and novelistic fiction has thegreater breadth. The latter is more extensive, the former moreintensive, in its artistry. This much, however, may be decideddefinitely. The novel, at its greatest, may require a vaster sweep ofwisdom on the part of the author; but the drama is technically moredifficult, since the dramatist, besides mastering all of the generalmethods of fiction which he necessarily employs in common with thenovelist, must labor in conformity with a special set of conditions towhich the novelist is not submitted. George Meredith may be a greaterauthor than Sir Arthur Wing Pinero; but Pinero is of necessity morerigid in his mastery of structure. REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. Define the three moods of fiction, --epic, dramatic, and novelistic. 2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the epic mood? 3. Explain the three influences under which the dramatist must always do his work, --that of the actor, that of the theatre, and that of the audience. 4. What sort of novel can be dramatized successfully? SUGGESTED READING Study, comparatively, the character of Æneas in Virgil's epic, thecharacter of Macbeth in Shakespeare's drama, and the character ofSentimental Tommy in Sir James Barrie's novels. Students who desire to pursue a special study of the materials andmethods of the drama will find a full discussion of these topics inthree books by Clayton Hamilton, entitled "The Theory of the Theatre, ""Studies in Stagecraft, " and "Problems of the Playwright. " CHAPTER X THE NOVEL, THE NOVELETTE, AND THE SHORT-STORY Novel, Novelette, and Short-Story--The Novel and the Novelette--The Short-Story a Distinct Type--The Dictum of Poe--The Formula of Brander Matthews--Definition of the Short-Story--Explanation of This Definition: 1. "Single Narrative Effect"; 2. "Greatest Economy of Means"; and 3. "Utmost Emphasis"--Brief Tales That Are Not Short-Stories--Short-Stories That Are Not Brief--Bliss Perry's Annotations--The Novelist and the Writer of Short-Stories--The Short-Story More Artistic Than the Novel--The Short-Story Almost Necessarily Romantic. =Novel, Novelette, and Short-Story. =--Turning our attention from theepic and the drama, and confining it to the general type of fictionwhich in the last chapter was loosely named novelistic, we shall findit possible to distinguish somewhat sharply, on the basis of bothmaterial and method, between three several forms, --the novel, thenovelette, and the short-story. The French, who are more precise thanwe in their use of denotative terms, are accustomed to divide theirnovelistic fiction into what they call the _roman_, the _nouvelle_, and the _conte_. "Novel" and "novelette" are just as serviceable termsas _roman_ and _nouvelle_; in fact, since "novelette" is thediminutive of "novel, " they express even more clearly than theirFrench equivalents the relation between the two forms they designate. But it is greatly to be regretted that we do not have in English adistinctive word that is the equivalent of _conte_. Edgar Allan Poeused the word "tale" with similar meaning; but this term is soindefinite and vague that it has been discarded by later critics. Itis customary at the present day to use the word "short-story, " whichProfessor Brander Matthews has suggested spelling with a hyphen toindicate that it has a special and technical significance. The French apply the term _roman_ to extensive works like "Notre Damede Paris" and "Eugénie Grandet"; and they apply the term _nouvelle_ toworks of briefer compass but similar method, like the "Colomba" andthe "Carmen" of Prosper Mérimée. In English we may class as novelsworks like "Kenilworth, " "The Newcomes, " "The Last of the Mohicans, ""The Rise of Silas Lapham"; and we may class as novelettes works like"Daisy Miller, " "The Treasure of Franchard, " "The Light That Failed. "The difference is merely that the novelette (or _nouvelle_) is a workof less extent, and covers a smaller canvas, than the novel (or_roman_). The distinction is quantitative but not qualitative. Thenovelette deals with fewer characters and incidents than the novel; itusually limits itself to a stricter economy of time and place; itpresents a less extensive view of life, with (most frequently) a moreintensive art. But these differences are not definite enough towarrant its being considered a species distinct from the novel. Exceptfor the restrictions imposed by brevity of compass, the writer ofnovelettes employs the same methods as the writer of novels; and, furthermore, he sets forth similar materials. =The Novel and the Novelette. =--More and more in recent years, thenovel has tended to shorten to the novelette. A stricter sense of arthas led to the exclusion of digressive and discursive passages; andthe hurry and preoccupation of contemporary readers has militatedagainst the leisurely and rambling habit of the authors of an earliertime. The lesson of excision and condensation has been taught bywriters as different in tone as Mérimée, Turgénieff, and Stevenson. "The three-volume novel is extinct, " as Mr. Kipling stated in themotto prefixed to the poem called "The Three-Decker, " in which, with acommingling of satire and sentiment, he chanted its requiem. It wasnearly always, in the matter of structure, a slovenly form; and thereis therefore little cause for regret that the novelette seems destinedto supplant it. For the novelette accomplishes the same purpose as thenovel, with necessarily a more intensive emphasis of art, and with atax considerably less upon the time and attention of the reader. =The Short-Story a Distinct Type. =--But the _conte_, or short-story, differs from the novel and the novelette not only quantitatively, butalso qualitatively, not only in length, but also in kind. In such_contes_ as "The Necklace" of de Maupassant and "The Last Class" ofDaudet, in such short-stories as "Ligeia, " "The Ambitious Guest, ""Markheim, " and "Without Benefit of Clergy, " the aim of the author isquite distinct from that of the writer of novels and of novelettes. Inmaterial and in method, as well as in extent, these stories representa type that is noticeably different. The short-story, as well as the novel and the novelette, has alwaysexisted. The parable of "The Prodigal Son, " in the fifteenth chapterof the Gospel according to Luke, is just as surely a short-story inmaterial and method as the books of "Ruth" and "Esther" are novelettesin form. But the critical consciousness of the short-story as aspecies of fiction distinct in purpose and in method from the noveldates only from the nineteenth century. It was Edgar Allan Poe whofirst designated and realized the short-story as a distinct form ofliterary art. In the scholarly and thorough introduction to hiscollection of "American Short Stories, "[3] Professor Charles SearsBaldwin points out that Poe, more than any of his predecessors in theart of fiction, felt narrative as structure. It was he who firstrejected from the tale everything that was, from the standpoint ofnarrative form, extraneous, and made the narrative progress moredirect. The essential features of his structure were (to use ProfessorBaldwin's words) harmonization, simplification, and gradation. Hestripped his stories of every least incongruity. What he taught by hisexample was reduction to a straight predetermined course; and he madeclear to succeeding writers the necessity of striving for unity ofimpression through strict unity of form. =The Dictum of Poe. =--Poe was a critic as well as a teller of tales;and what he inculcated by example he also stated by precept. In hisnow famous review of Hawthorne's "Tales, " published originally in_Graham's Magazine_ for May, 1842, he thus outlined his theory of thespecies:-- "The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length, for reasonsalready stated in substance. As it cannot be read at one sitting, itdeprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from_totality_. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses ofperusal, modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book. But simple cessation in reading would, ofitself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fulness of hisintention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul ofthe reader is at the writer's control. There are no external orextrinsic influences--resulting from weariness or interruption. "A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has notfashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but havingconceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single _effect_to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents--he then combinessuch events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceivedeffect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing ofthis effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the wholecomposition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preëstablished design. And bysuch means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length paintedwhich leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindredart, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale hasbeen presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an endunattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable hereas in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided. " =The Formula of Brander Matthews. =--From the very outset, the currencyof Poe's short-stories was international; and his concrete example instriving for totality of impression exerted an immediate influence notonly in America but even more in France. But his abstract theory, which (for obvious reasons) did not become so widely known, was notreceived into the general body of critical thought until much later inthe century. It remained for Professor Brander Matthews, in hiswell-known essay on "The Philosophy of the Short-story, " printedoriginally in _Lippincott's Magazine_ for October, 1885, [4] to stateexplicitly what had lain implicit in the passage of Poe's criticismalready quoted, and to give a general currency to the theory that theshort-story differs from the novel essentially, --and not merely in thematter of length. In the second section of his essay, ProfessorMatthews stated:-- "A true short-story is something other and something more than a merestory which is short. A true short-story differs from the novelchiefly in its essential unity of impression. In a far more exact andprecise use of the word, a short-story has unity as a novel cannothave it. Often, it may be noted by the way, the short-story fulfillsthe three false unities of the French classic drama: it shows oneaction, in one place, on one day. A short-story deals with a singlecharacter, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotionscalled forth by a single situation. Poe's paradox that a poem cannotgreatly exceed a hundred lines in length under penalty of ceasing tobe one poem and breaking into a string of poems, may serve to suggestthe precise difference between the short-story and the novel. Theshort-story is the single effect, complete and self-contained, whilethe novel is of necessity broken into a series of episodes. Thus theshort-story has, what the novel cannot have, the effect of 'totality, 'as Poe called it, the unity of impression. "Of a truth, the short-story is not only not a chapter out of a novel, or an incident or an episode extracted from a longer tale, but at itsbest it impresses the reader with the belief that it would be spoiledif it were made larger, or if it were incorporated into a moreelaborate work. .. . "In fact, it may be said that no one has ever succeeded as a writer ofshort-stories who had not ingenuity, originality, and compression; andthat most of those who have succeeded in this line had also the touchof fantasy. " =Definition of the Short-Story. =--On the basis of these theories, thepresent writer essayed a few years ago to formulate within a singlesentence a definition of the short-story. Thus: _The aim of ashort-story is to produce a single narrative effect with the greatesteconomy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis. _[5] =Explanation of This Definition: 1. "Single Narrative Effect. "=--Becauseof its succinctness, this sentence needs a little explanation. A narrativeeffect necessarily involves the three elements of action, characters, and setting. In aiming to produce a narrative effect, the short-story, therefore, differs from the sketch, which may concern itself with onlyone of these elements, without involving the other two. The sketch mostoften deals with character or setting divested of the element of action;but in the short-story something has to happen. In this regard, theshort-story is related more closely to the novel than to the sketch. Butalthough in the novel any two, or all three, of the narrative elementsmay be so intimately interrelated that no one of them stands out clearlyfrom the others, it is almost always customary in the short-story tocast a marked preponderance of emphasis on one of the elements, to thesubversion of the other two. Short-stories, therefore, may be dividedinto three classes, according as the effect which they purpose toproduce is primarily an effect of action, or of character, or of setting. "The Masque of the Red Death" produces an effect of setting, "TheTell-Tale Heart" an effect of character, and "The Cask of Amontillado" aneffect of action. For the sake of economy it is incumbent on theauthor to suggest at the outset which of the three sorts of narrativeeffect the story is intended to produce. The way in which Poeaccomplished this in the three stories just mentioned may be seen at onceupon examination of the opening paragraph of each. Having selected hiseffect the author of a short-story should confine his attention toproducing that, and that alone. He should stop at the very moment when hispreëstablished design has been attained; and never during the progressof his composition should he turn aside for the sake of a lesser effectnot absolutely inherent in his single narrative purpose. Stevensoninsisted on this focus of attention in a passage of a personal letteraddressed to Sir Sidney Colvin:-- "Make another end to it? Ah, yes, but that's not the way I write; thewhole tale is implied; I never use an effect when I can help it, unless it prepares the effects that are to follow; that's what a storyconsists in. To make another end, that is to make the beginning allwrong. The _dénouement_ of a long story is nothing, it is just 'a fullclose, ' which you may approach and accomplish as you please--it is acoda, not an essential member in the rhythm; but the body and end of ashort-story is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of thebeginning. " =2. "Greatest Economy of Means"; and 3. "Utmost Emphasis. "=--Thephrase "single narrative effect, " with all its implications, shouldnow be clear. The phrase "with the greatest economy of means"implies that the writer of a short-story should tell his tale withthe fewest necessary number of characters and incidents, and shouldproject it in the narrowest possible range of place and time. If hecan get along with two characters, he should not use three. If asingle event will suffice for his effect, he should confine himselfto that. If his story can pass in one place at one time, he mustnot disperse it over several times and places. But in strivingalways for the greatest possible conciseness, he must not neglectthe equally important need of producing his effect "with the utmostemphasis. " If he can gain markedly in emphasis by violating thestrictest possible economy, he should do so; for, as Poe stated, undue brevity is exceptionable, as well as undue length. Thus theparable of "The Prodigal Son, " which might be told with only twocharacters--the father and the prodigal--gains sufficiently inemphasis by the introduction of a third--the good son--to warrantthis violation of economy. The greatest structural problem of thewriter of short-stories is to strike just the proper balance betweenthe effort for economy of means--which tends to conciseness--andthe effort for the utmost emphasis--which tends to amplitude oftreatment. =Brief Tales That Are Not Short-Stories. =--There can be no doubt thatthe short-story, thus rigidly defined, exists as a distinct form offiction, --a definite literary species obeying laws of its own. Now andagain before the nineteenth century, it appeared unconsciously. SincePoe, it has grown conscious of itself, and has been deliberatelydeveloped to perfection by later masters, like Guy de Maupassant. Butit must be admitted frankly that brief tales have always existed, andstill continue to exist, which stand entirely outside the scope ofthis rigid and rather narrow definition. Professor Baldwin, after acareful examination of the hundred tales in Boccaccio's "Decameron, "concluded that only two of them were short-stories in the moderncritical sense, [6] and that only three others approached the totalityof impression that depends on conscious unity of form. If we shouldselect at random a hundred brief tales from the best contemporarymagazines, we should find, of course, that a larger proportion of themwould fulfill the definition; but it is almost certain that themajority of them would still be stories that merely happen to beshort, instead of true short-stories in the modern critical sense. Yetthese brief fictions, which are not short-stories, and for which wehave no name, are none the less estimable in content, and sometimespresent a wider view of life than could be encompassed within therigid limits of a technical short-story. Hawthorne's tales standhigher in the history of literature than Poe's, because they reveal adeeper insight into life, even though the great New England dreameroften violates the principle of economy of means, and constructs lessfirmly than the mathematically-minded Poe. Washington Irving's brieftales, such as "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, "which are not short-stories in the technical sense of the term, arefar more valuable as representations of humanity than many astructural masterpiece of Guy de Maupassant. "For my part, " Irvingwrote to one of his friends, "I consider a story merely as a frame onwhich to stretch the materials; it is the play of thought, andsentiment, and language, the weaving in of characters, lightly yetexpressively delineated; the familiar and faithful exhibition ofscenes in common life; and the half-concealed vein of humor that isoften playing through the whole, --these are among what I aim at, andupon which I felicitate myself in proportion as I think I succeed. "There is much to be said in favor of this meandering and leisurelymethod; and authors too intent upon a merely technical accomplishmentmay lose the genial breadth of outlook upon life which men like Irvinghave so charmingly displayed. Let us admit, therefore, that thestory-which-is-merely-short is just as worthy of cultivation as thetechnical short-story. =Short-Stories That Are Not Brief. =--But if there exist many brieftales which are not short-stories, so also there exist certainshort-stories which are not brief. "The Turn of the Screw, " by HenryJames, is a short-story, in the technical sense of the term, althoughit contains between two and three hundred pages. Assuredly it is not anovelette. It aims to produce one narrative effect, and only one; andit is difficult to imagine how the full force of its cumulativemystery and terror could have been created with greater economy ofmeans. It is a long short-story. Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, " which is conceived, and for the most part executed, as ashort-story, is longer than the same author's "The Beach of Falesá, "which is conceived and executed as a novelette. Edward Everett Hale'sfamous short-story, "The Man Without a Country, " is long enough to beprinted in a little volume by itself. The point to be remembered, therefore, is that the two different types of brief fiction are to bedistinguished one from the other not by comparative length but bystructural method. The critic may formulate the technical laws of thestricter type; but it must not be forgotten that these laws do notapply (and there is no reason whatever that they should) to thoseother estimable narratives which, though brief, stand outside thedefinition of the short-story. =Bliss Perry's Annotations. =--Bearing in mind this limitation ofthe subject, we may proceed to a further study of the strictshort-story type. In an admirable essay on "The Short Story, "[7]Professor Bliss Perry had discussed at length its requirements andrestrictions. Admitting that writers of short-stories usually cast amarked preponderance of emphasis on one of the three elements ofnarrative, to the subversion of the other two, Professor Perrycalls attention to the fact that in the short-story of character, "the characters must be unique, original enough to catch the eye atonce. " The writer does not have sufficient time at his disposal toreveal the full human significance of the commonplace. "If histheme is character-development, then that development must behastened by striking experiences. " Hence this class of short-story, as compared with the novel, must set forth characters more unusualand unexpected. But in the short-story of action, on the otherhand, the plot may be sufficient unto itself, and the charactersmay be the merest lay figures. The heroine of "The Lady or theTiger, " for example, is simply _a_ woman--not any woman in particular;and the hero of "The Pit and the Pendulum" is simply _a_ man--notany man in particular. The situation itself is sufficient to holdthe reader's interest for the brief space of the story. Hence, although, in the short-story of character, the leading actor islikely to be strikingly individualized, the short-story of actionmay content itself with entirely colorless characters, devoid of anypersonal traits whatever. Professor Perry adds that in the class ofshort-story which casts the main emphasis on setting, "bothcharacters and action may be almost without significance"; and hecontinues, --"If the author can discover to us a new corner of theworld, or sketch the familiar scene to our heart's desire, orillumine one of the great human occupations, as war, or commerce, orindustry, he has it in his power, through this means alone, to giveus the fullest satisfaction. " From the fact that the short-story does not keep the powers of thereader long upon the stretch, Professor Perry deduces certainopportunities afforded to short-story writers but denied tonovelists, --opportunities, namely, "for innocent didacticism, forposing problems without answering them, for stating arbitrarypremises, for omitting unlovely details and, conversely, for makingbeauty out of the horrible, and finally for poetic symbolism. " Passingon to a consideration of the demands which the short-story makes uponthe writer, he asserts that, at its best, "it calls for visualimagination of a high order: the power to see the object; to penetrateto its essential nature; to select the one characteristic trait bywhich it may be represented. " Furthermore, it demands a mastery ofstyle, "the verbal magic that recreates for us what the imaginationhas seen. " But, on the other hand, "to write a short-story requires nosustained power of imagination"; "nor does the short-story demand ofits author essential sanity, breadth, and tolerance of view. " Since hedeals only with fleeting phases of existence--"not with wholes, butwith fragments"--the writer of the short-story "need not beconsistent; he need not think things through. " Hence, in spite of thetechnical difficulties which beset the author of short-stories, hiswork is, on human grounds, more easy than that of the novelist, whomust be sane and consistent, and must be able to sustain a prolongedeffort of interpretive imagination. =The Novelist and the Writer of Short-Stories. =--These points havebeen so fully covered and so admirably illustrated by Professor Perrythat they do not call for any further discussion in this place. Butperhaps something may be added concerning the different equipmentsthat are required by authors of novels and authors of short-stories. Matthew Arnold, in a well-known sonnet, spoke of Sophocles as a man"who saw life steadily and saw it whole"; and if we judge the novelistand the writer of short-stories by their attitudes toward life, we maysay that they divide this verse between them. Balzac, George Eliot, and Meredith look at life in the large; they try to "see it whole" andto reproduce the chaos of its intricate relations: but Poe, deMaupassant, and Mr. Kipling aim rather to "see steadily" a limitedphase of life, to focus their minds upon a single point of experience, and then to depict this point briefly and strikingly. It follows thatthe novelist requires an experience of life far more extensive thanthat which is required by the writer of short-stories. The greatnovelists have all been men of mature years and accumulated wisdom. But if an author knows one little point of life profoundly, he mayfashion a great short-story, even though that one thing be the onlything he knows. Of life as it is actually lived, of genuine humanityof character, of moral responsibility in human intercourse, EdgarAllan Poe knew nothing; and yet he was fully equipped to produce whatremain until this day the most perfect examples of the short-story inour language. It is therefore not surprising that, although the greatnovels of the world have been written for the most part by men overforty years of age, the great short-stories have been written by menin their twenties and their thirties. Mr. Kipling wrote two or threeshort-stories which are almost great when he was only seventeen. Steadiness of vision is a quality of mind quite distinct from theability to see things whole. "Plain Tales from the Hills" are in manyways the better stories for being the work of a lad of twenty:whatever Mr. Kipling saw at that very early age he envisaged steadilyand expressed with the glorious triumphant strength of youth. But ifat the same period he had attempted a novel, the world undoubtedlywould have found out how very young he was. He would have beenincapable of slicing a cross-section clean through the vastitude ofhuman life, of seeing it whole, and of representing the appallingintricacy of its interrelations. On the other hand, most of the maturemen who have been wise enough to do the latter, have shown themselvesincapable of focussing their minds steadily upon a single point ofexperience. Wholeness and steadiness of vision--few are the men who, like Sophocles, have possessed them both. The same author, therefore, has almost never been able to write great short-stories and greatnovels. Scott wrote only one short-story, --"Wandering Willie's Tale"in "Redgauntlet"; Dickens also wrote only one that is worthy of beingconsidered a masterpiece of art, --"A Child's Dream of a Star"; andThackeray, Cooper, George Eliot, and Meredith have written none atall. On the other hand, Poe could not possibly have written a novel;Guy de Maupassant shows himself less masterly in his more extendedworks; and Mr. Kipling has yet to prove that the novel is within hispowers. Hawthorne is the one most notable example of the man who, beginning as a writer of short-stories, has developed in maturer yearsa mastery of the novel. =The Short-Story More Artistic Than the Novel. =--Unlike theshort-story, the novel aims to produce a series of effects, --acumulative combination of the elements of narrative, --and acknowledgesno restriction to economy of means. It follows that the novel, as aliterary form, requires far less attention than the short-story tominute details of art. Great novels may be written by authors ascareless as Scott, as lazy as Thackeray, or as cumbersome as GeorgeEliot; for if a novelist gives us a criticism of life which is new andtrue, we forgive him if he fails in the nicer points of structure andstyle. But without these nicer points, the short-story is impossible. The economy of means that it demands can be conserved only by rigidrestriction of structure; and the necessary emphasis can be producedonly by perfection of style. The great masters of the short-story, like Poe and Hawthorne, Daudet and de Maupassant, have all beencareful artists: they have not, like Thackeray, been slovenly instructure; they have not, like Scott, been regardless of style. Theartistic instinct shows itself almost always at a very early age. If aman is destined to be an artist, he usually exhibits a surprisingprecocity of expression at a period when as yet he has very little toexpress. This is another reason why the short-story, as opposed to thenovel, belongs to youth rather than to age. Though a young writer maybe obliged to acknowledge inferiority to his elders in maturity ofmessage, he may not infrequently transcend them in fineness oftechnical accomplishment. =The Short-Story Almost Necessarily Romantic. =--Another point thatremains to be considered, before we relinquish this general discussionin order to devote our attention more particularly to a technicalstudy of the structure of the short-story, is that, although the novelmay be either realistic or romantic in general method, the short-storyis almost of necessity obliged to be romantic. In the brief spaceallotted to him, it is practically impossible for the writer ofshort-stories to induce a general truth from particular imagined factsimitated from actuality: it is far simpler to deduce the imagineddetails of the story from a central thesis, held securely in theauthor's mind and suggested to the reader at the outset. It is aquicker process to think from the truth to facts than to think fromfacts to the truth. Daudet and de Maupassant, who worked realisticallyin their novels, worked romantically in their _contes_; and the greatshort-stories of our own language have nearly all been written byromantic authors, like Poe, Hawthorne, Stevenson, and Mr. Kipling. [3] A contribution to "The Wampum Library"; Longmans, Green & Co. , 1904. [4] This paper, later included in _Pen and Ink_, 1888, has since been published by itself in a little volume: Longmans, Green & Co. , 1901. [5] This definition was printed first in the _Bookman_ for February, 1904, and later in the _Reader_ for February, 1906. It has subsequently been repeated in nearly every book that deals with this special aspect of the art of fiction. [6] The second story of the second day, and the sixth story of the ninth day. See "American Short Stories, " p. 28. [7] Published first in _The Atlantic Monthly_ for August, 1902, and since included, as Chapter XII. In "A Study of Prose Fiction": Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , 1904. REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. Distinguish between the novel, the novelette, and the short-story. 2. Define the short-story. 3. Explain the contributions made by Edgar Allan Poe and Brander Matthews to the consciousness of the short-story as a special form of art. 4. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the short-story as compared with the novel? 5. Is realism possible in the short-story? If not, why not? SUGGESTED READING EDGAR ALLAN POE: Review of Hawthorne's "Tales. " BRANDER MATTHEWS: "The Philosophy of the Short-Story. " BLISS PERRY: "A Study of Prose Fiction"--Chapter XII, on "The ShortStory. " CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN: Introduction to "American Short Stories. " HENRY SEIDEL CANBY: "The Short Story in English. " CHARLES RAYMOND BARRETT: "Short Story Writing. " BRANDER MATTHEWS: Introduction to "The Short-Story: SpecimensIllustrating Its Development. " CHAPTER XI THE STRUCTURE OF THE SHORT-STORY Only One Best Way to Construct a Short-Story--Problems of Short-Story Construction--The Initial Position--The Terminal Position--Poe's Analysis of "The Raven"--Analysis of "Ligeia"--Analysis of "The Prodigal Son"--Style Essential to the Short-Story. =Only One Best Way to Construct a Short-Story. =--Since the aim of ashort-story is to produce a single narrative effect with the greatesteconomy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis, itfollows that, given any single narrative effect--any theme, in otherwords, for a short-story--there can be only one best way to constructthe story based upon it. A novel may be built in any of a multitude ofways; and the selection of method depends more upon the temperamentand taste of the author than upon inherent logical necessity. But in ashort-story the problem of the author is primarily structural; andstructure is a matter of intellect instead of a matter of temperamentand taste. Now, the intellect differs from the taste in being anabsolute and general, rather than an individual and personal, qualityof mind. There is no disputing matters of taste, as the Latin proverbjustly says; but matters of intellect may be disputed logically untila definite decision is arrived at. Hence, although the planning of anovel must be left to the individual author, the structure of ashort-story may be considered as a matter impersonal and absolute, like the working out of a geometrical proposition. =Problems of Short-Story Construction. =--The initial problem of thewriter of short-stories is to find out by intellectual means the onebest way of constructing the story that he has to tell; and, in orderto solve this problem, there are many questions he must take up anddecide. First of all, he must conserve the need for economy of meansby considering how many, or rather, _how few_, characters arenecessary to the narrative, how few distinct events he can get alongwith, and how narrow is the compass of time and place within which hemay compact his material. He must next consider all the availablepoints of view from which to tell the given story, and must decidewhich of them will best subserve his purpose. Next, in deciding on hismeans of delineating characters, of representing action, of employingsetting, he must be guided always by the endeavor to strike a justbalance between (on the one hand) the greatest economy of means and(on the other) the utmost emphasis. And finally, to conserve thelatter need, he must, in planning the narrative step by step, beguided by the principle of emphasis in all its phases. =The Initial Position. =--The natural emphasis of the initial and theterminal position is, in the short-story, a matter of primeimportance. The opening of a perfectly constructed tale fulfills twopurposes, one of which is intellectual and the other emotional. Intellectually, it indicates clearly to the reader whether, in thenarrative that follows, the element of action, or of character, or ofsetting is to be predominant, --in other words, which of the threesorts of narrative effect the story is intended to produce. Emotionally, it strikes the key-note and suggests the tone of theentire story. Edgar Allan Poe, in his greatest tales, planned hisopenings infallibly to fulfill these purposes. He began a story ofsetting with description; a story of character with a remark made by, or made about, the leading actor; and a story of action with asentence pregnant with potential incident. Furthermore, he conveyed inhis very first sentence a subtle sense of the emotional tone of theentire narrative. In opening his short-stories, Hawthorne showed himself far inferior tohis great contemporary. Only unawares did he occasionally hit upon theinevitable first sentence. Often he wasted time at the beginning bywriting an unnecessary introduction; and frequently he began upon thewrong track, by suggesting character at the outset of a story ofaction, or suggesting setting at the outset of a story of character. The tale of "The Gentle Boy, " for instance, which was one of the firstto attract attention to his genius, begins unnecessarily with anhistorical essay of three pages; and it is not until the narrative iswell on its way that the reader is able to sense the one thing that itis all about. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in his earlier stories, employed a method ofopening which is worthy of careful critical consideration. In "PlainTales from the Hills" and the several volumes that followed it withinthe next few years, his habit was to begin with an expository essay, filling the space of a paragraph or two, in which he stated the themeof the story he was about to tell. "This is what the story is to dealwith, " he would say succinctly: "Now listen to the tale itself. " Thismethod is extremely advantageous on the score of economy. It gives thereader at the outset an intellectual possession of the theme; andknowing from the very beginning the effect designed to be produced, hecan follow with the greater economy of attention the narrative thatproduces it. But, on the other hand, the method is inartistic, in thatit presents explicitly what might with greater subtlety be conveyedimplicitly, and subverts the mood of narrative by obtrudingexposition. In his later stories, Mr. Kipling has discarded for themost part this convenient but too obvious expedient, and has revealedhis theme implicitly through the narrative tenor and emotional tone ofhis initial sentences. That the latter method of opening is the moreartistic will be seen at once from a comparison of examples. This isthe beginning of "Thrown Away, " an early story:-- "To rear a boy under what parents call the 'sheltered life system' is, if the boy must go into the world and fend for himself, not wise. Unless he be one in a thousand he has certainly to pass through manyunnecessary troubles; and may, possibly, come to extreme grief simplyfrom ignorance of the proper proportions of things. "Let a puppy eat the soap in the bath-room or chew a newly blackedboot. He chews and chuckles until, by and by, he finds out thatblacking and Old Brown Windsor made him very sick; so he argues thatsoap and boots are not wholesome. Any old dog about the house willsoon show him the unwisdom of biting big dogs' ears. Being young, heremembers and goes abroad, at six months, a well-mannered little beastwith a chastened appetite. If he had been kept away from boots, andsoap, and big dogs till he came to the trinity full-grown and withdeveloped teeth, consider how fearfully sick and thrashed he would be!Apply that notion to the 'sheltered life, ' and see how it works. Itdoes not sound pretty, but it is the better of two evils. "There was a Boy once who had been brought up under the 'shelteredlife' theory; and the theory killed him dead. .. . " And so on. At this point, after the expository introduction, thenarrative proper begins. Consider now the opening of a later story, "Without Benefit of Clergy. " This is the first sentence:--"But if itbe a girl?" Notice how much has already been said and suggested inthis little question of six words. Surely the beginning of this storyis conducted with the better art. The expository opening was copied from Mr. Kipling by O. Henry andestablished by this writer as a fashion which is still continued bycontributors to American magazines. But a popular expedient is notnecessarily to be regarded as a permanent contribution to the methodsof fiction; and Mr. Kipling, in his later stories, is a finer artistthan Miss Edna Ferber or any other of the many imitators of O. Henry. =The Terminal Position. =--But, in the structure of the short-story, the emphasis of the terminal position is an even more importantmatter. In this regard again Poe shows his artistry, in stopping atthe very moment when he has attained completely his preëstablisheddesign. His conclusions remain to this day unsurpassed in the sensethey give of absolute finality. Hawthorne was far less firm inmastering the endings of his stories. His personal predilection forpointing a moral to adorn his tale led him frequently to append apassage of homiletic comment which was not bone of the bone and bloodof the blood of the narrative itself. In the chapter on emphasis, wehave already called attention to Guy de Maupassant's device ofperiodic structure, by means of which the solution of the story iswithheld till the concluding sentences. This exceedingly effectiveexpedient, however, is applicable only in the sort of story whereinthe element of surprise is inherent in the nature of the theme. In noother single feature of construction may the work of the inexperiencedauthor be so readily detected as in the final passage of his story. Mr. Kipling's "Lispeth" (the first of "Plain Tales from the Hills"), which was written at a very early age, began perfectly [the first wordis "She"] and proceeded well; but when he approached his conclusion, the young author did not know where to stop. His story really ended atthe words, "And she never came back"; for at that point hispre-established design had been entirely effected. But instead ofclosing there, he appended four unnecessary paragraphs, dealing withthe subsequent life of his heroine--all of which was, to use his ownfamiliar phrase, "another story. " Poe and de Maupassant would not havemade this mistake; and neither would Mr. Kipling after he had growninto mastery of artistic method. In one of the most celebrated storiesof O. Henry, entitled "The Gift of the Magi", the author made thetechnical mistake of appending a superfluous paragraph after hislogical pattern had been completed. =Poe's Analysis of "The Raven. "=--In his very interesting paper on"The Philosophy of Composition, " Edgar Allan Poe outlined step by stepthe intellectual processes by which he developed the structure of "TheRaven" and fashioned a finished poem from a preconceived effect. It isgreatly to be regretted that he did not write a similar essayoutlining in detail the successive stages in the construction of oneof his short-stories. With his extraordinarily clear and analyticintellect, he fashioned his plots with mathematical precision. Sorigorously did he work that in his best stories we feel that theremoval of a sentence would be an amputation. He succeeded absolutelyin giving his narrative the utmost emphasis with the greatest economyof means. =Analysis of "Ligeia. "=--If we learn through and through how a singleperfect story is constructed, we shall have gone far towardunderstanding the technic of story-building as a whole. Let ustherefore analyze one of Poe's short-stories--following in the mainthe method which he himself pursued in his analysis of "The Raven"--inorder to learn the successive steps by which any excellent short-storymay be developed from its theme. Let us choose "Ligeia" for thesubject of this study, because it is very widely known, and becausePoe himself considered it the greatest of his tales. Let us see how, starting with the theme of the story, Poe developed step by step thestructure of his finished fabric; and how, granted his preëstablisheddesign, the progress of his plan was in every step inevitable. [8] The theme of "Ligeia" was evidently suggested by those lines fromJoseph Glanvill which, quoted as a motto for the story, are thricerepeated during the course of the narrative:-- "And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth themysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will, pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yieldhimself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through theweakness of his feeble will. " Poe recognized, with the English moralist, that the human will isstrong and can conquer many of the ills that flesh is heir to. If itwere still stronger, it could do more mighty things; and if it were_very much_ stronger, it is even conceivable that it might vanquishdeath, its last and sternest foe. Now it was legitimate for thepurposes of fiction to imagine a character endowed with a will strongenough to conquer death; and a striking narrative effect couldcertainly be produced by setting forth this moral conquest. This, then, became the purpose of the story: to exhibit a character with asuperhuman will, and to show how, by sheer force of volition, thisperson conquered death. Having thus decided on his theme, the writer of the story wasfirst forced to consider how many, or rather _how few_, characterswere necessary to the narrative. One, at least, was obviouslyessential, --the person with the superhuman will. For esthetic reasonsPoe made this character a woman, and called her Ligeia; but it isevident that _structurally_ the story would have been the same if hehad made the character a man. The resultant narrative would have beendifferent in mood and tone; but it would not have been different instructure. Given this central character, it was not perhaps evidentat first that another person was needed for the tale. But in allstories which set forth an extraordinary being, it is necessary tointroduce an ordinary character to serve as a standard by which theunusual capabilities of the central figure may be measured. Furthermore, in stories which treat of the miraculous, it isnecessary to have at least one eye-witness to the extraordinarycircumstances beside the person primarily concerned in them. Henceanother character was absolutely needed in the tale. This secondperson, moreover, had to be intimately associated with the heroine, for the two reasons already considered. The most intimate relationimaginable was that of husband and wife; he must therefore be thehusband of Ligeia. Beside these two people, --a woman of superhumanwill, and her husband, a man of ordinary powers, --no other characterwas necessary; and therefore Poe did not (and _could not_, accordingto the laws of the short-story) introduce another. The Lady ofTremaine, as we shall see later on, is not, technically considered, acharacter. The main outline of the story could now be plotted. Ligeia and herhusband must be exhibited to the reader; and then, in her husband'spresence, Ligeia must conquer death by the vigor of her will. But inorder to do this, she must first die. If she merely exerted her willto ward off the attacks of death, the reader would not be convincedthat her recovery had been accomplished by other than ordinary means. She must die, therefore, and must afterwards resurrect herself by apowerful exertion of volition. The reader must be fully convinced thatshe did really die; and therefore, before her resurrection, she mustbe laid for some time in the grave. The story, then, divided itselfinto two parts: the first, in which Ligeia was alive, terminated withher death; and the second, in which she was dead, ended with herresurrection. Having thus arrived at the main outline of his plot, Poe was nextforced to decide on the point of view from which the story should betold. Under the existing conditions, any one of three distinct pointsof view may have seemed, at the first glance, available: that of thechief character, that of the secondary character, and that of anexternal omniscient personality. But only a little consideration wasnecessary to show that only one of these three could successfully beemployed. Obviously, the story could not be narrated by Ligeia: for itwould be awkward to let an extraordinary woman discourse about her ownunusual qualities; and furthermore, she could hardly narrate a storyinvolving as one of its chief features her stay among the dead withoutbeing expected to tell the secrets of her prison-house. It waslikewise impossible to tell the tale from the point of view of anexternal omniscient personality. In order that the final andmiraculous incident might seem convincing, it had to be narrated notimpersonally but personally, not externally but by an eye-witness. Therefore, the story must, of course, be told by the husband ofLigeia. At this point the main outline was completed. It then becamenecessary for Poe to plan the two divisions of the story in detail. In the first part, no action was necessary, and very littleattention had to be paid to setting. It was essential that all ofthe writer's stress should be laid on the element of character; forthe sole purpose of this initial division of the story must be toproduce upon the reader an extremely emphatic impression of theextraordinary personality of Ligeia. As soon as the reader could besufficiently impressed with the force of her character, she must bemade to die; and the first part of the story would be finished. Butat this point Poe was obliged to choose between the direct and theindirect means of delineating character. Should Ligeia be depicteddirectly by her husband, or indirectly, through her own speech? Inother words, should this first half of the story be a descriptionor a conversation? The matter was easy to decide. The method ofconversation was unavailable; because a dialogue between Ligeia andher husband would keep the attention of the reader hovering from oneto the other, whereas it was necessary for the purpose of the taleto focus all of the attention on Ligeia. She must, therefore, bedepicted directly by her husband. Having concluded that he must devotethe entire first half of his story to this description, Poeemployed all his powers to make it adequate and emphatic. Thedescription must, of course, be largely subjective and suggestive, and must be pervaded with a sense of something unfathomable aboutthe person described. In order that (reverting to the language ofPoe's own critical dictum) "his very initial sentence" might "tendto the outbringing of this effect, " the author wrote, "I cannotfor my soul remember how, when, or even precisely where I firstbecame acquainted with the Lady Ligeia"; and the story was begun. It was more difficult to handle the second division of the tale, which was to deal with the period between Ligeia's death and herresurrection. The main stress of the story now ceased to be laid onthe element of character. The element of action, furthermore, wassubsidiary in the second part of the tale, as it had been already inthe first. All that had to happen was the resurrection of Ligeia;and this the reader had been forced by the very theme of thestory to foresee. The chief interest in the second part must thereforelie in determining where and when and how this resurrection wasaccomplished. A worthy setting must be found for the culminatingevent. Poe could lose no time in preparing a place for his climax;and therefore he was obliged, as soon as he had laid Ligeia in thegrave, to begin an elaborate description of the stage settings of hisfinal scene. The place must be wild and weird and arabesque. It mustbe worthy to receive a resurrected mortal revisiting the glimpsesof the moon. The place was found, the time--midnight--decided upon:but the question remained, --_how_ should Ligeia be resurrected? And here arose almost an insuperable difficulty. Ligeia had beenburied (_must have been_ buried, as we have seen), and her body hadbeen given to the worms. Yet now she must be revived. And it would notbe sufficient to let her merely walk bodily into the fantasticapartment where her husband, dream-haunted, was waiting to receiveher; for the point to be emphasized was not so much the mere fact ofher being once more alive, as the fact that she had won her way backto life by the exertion of her own extraordinary will. The reader mustbe shown not only _the result_ of her triumph over death, but _thevery process of the struggle_ through which by sheer volition sheforced her soul back into the bodily life. If only her body werepresent, so that the reader could be shown its gradual obsession byher soul, all would be easily accomplished; but, by the conditions ofthe story, her body _could not_ be present: and the difficulty of theproblem was extreme. But here Poe hit upon a solution of the difficulty. Would not anotherdead body do as well? Surely Ligeia could breathe her life into anydiscarded female form. Therefore, of course, her husband must marryagain, solely in order that his second wife should die. The LadyRowena Trevanion of Tremaine is, therefore, as I have already hinted, not really a character, but only a necessary adjunct to the finalscene, an indispensable piece of stage property. In order to indicatethis fact, Poe was obliged to abstain carefully from describing her indetail, and to seek in every possible way to prevent the reader'sattention from dwelling long upon her. Hence, although, in writing thefirst part of the story, he devoted several pages to the descriptionof the heroine, he dismissed the Lady Rowena, in the second part, withonly two descriptive epithets, --"fair-haired and blue-eyed, " todistinguish her briefly from the dark-eyed and raven-haired Ligeia. With the help of this convenient body, it was easy for Poe to develophis final scene. The intense struggle of Ligeia's soul to win its wayback to the world could be worked up with enthralling suspense: andwhen at last the climax was reached and the husband realized that hislost love stood living before him, the purpose of the story would beaccomplished, Ligeia's will would have done its work, and there wouldbe nothing more to tell. Poe wrote, "These are the full, and theblack, and the wild eyes--of my lost love--of the Lady--of the _LadyLigeia_": and the story was ended. For it must be absolutely understood that with whatever may havehappened after that moment of entire recognition this particular storydoes not, and cannot, concern itself. Whether in the next momentLigeia dies again irrevocably, or whether she lives an ordinarylifetime and then ultimately dies forever, or whether she remainsalive eternally as a result of the triumph of her will, are questionsentirely beyond the scope of the story and have nothing to do with thesingle narrative effect which Poe, from the very outset, was planningto produce. At no other point does he more clearly display hismastery than in his choice of the perfect moment at which to end hisstory. It would, of course, be idle to assert that Poe disposed of all thenarrative problems which confronted him while constructing this storyprecisely in the order I have indicated. Unfortunately, he neverexplained in print the genesis of any of his stories, and we can onlyimagine the process of his plans with the aid of his careful analysisof the development of "The Raven. " But I think it has been clearlyshown that the structure of "Ligeia" is at all points inevitablyconditioned by its theme, and that no detail of the structure could bealtered without injuring the effect of the story; and I am confidentthat some intellectual process similar to that which has been outlinedmust be followed by every author who seeks to construct stories asperfect in form as Poe's. =Analysis of "The Prodigal Son. "=--The student of short-storystructure is therefore advised to submit several other masterpieces ofthe form to a process of intellectual analysis similar to that whichwe have just pursued. By so doing he will become impressed with the_inevitability_ of every structural expedient that is employed in thebest examples of the type. For a further illustration of thisinevitability of structure, let us look for a moment at the parable of"The Prodigal Son" (Luke xv. , beginning with the eleventh verse), which, although it was written down many centuries ago, fulfills themodern critical concept of the short-story, in that it produces asingle narrative effect with the greatest economy of means that isconsistent with the utmost emphasis. For the purposes of this study, let us set aside the religious implications of the parable, andconsider it as an ordinary work of fiction. The story should moreproperly be called "The Forgiving Father, " rather than "The ProdigalSon"; because the single narrative effect to be wrought out is theextent of a father's forgiveness toward his erring children. Twocharacters are obviously needed for the tale, --first, a father toexercise forgiveness, and second, a child to be forgiven. Whether thischild were a son or a daughter would, of course, have no effect on themere structure of the story. In the narrative as we know it, theerring child is a son. In pursuance of the greatest economy of means, the story might be told with these two characters only, because theeffect to be wrought out is based on the personal relation betweenthem, --a relation involving no one else. But fatherly forbearanceexercised toward an _only_ child might seem a trait of human weaknessinstead of patriarchal strength; and the father's forgiveness will begreatly accentuated if, beside the prodigal, he has other childrenless liable to error. Therefore, in pursuance of the utmost emphasis, it is necessary to add a third character, --another son who is notallured into the way of the transgressor. The story must necessarilybe narrated by an external omniscient personality: it must be seen andtold from a point of view aloof and god-like. The father could not tellit, because the theme of the tale is the beauty of his own character;and neither of the two sons is in a position to see the story wholeand to narrate it without prejudice. The story opens perfectly, withthe very simple sentence, "A certain man had two sons. " Already thereader knows that he is to be told a story of character (rather thanof action or of setting) concerning three people, the most importantof whom is the certain man who has been mentioned first. Consider, inpassing, how faulty would have been such another opening as this, forinstance, --"Not long ago, in a city of Judea". .. . Such an initialsentence would have suggested setting, instead of suggestingcharacter, as the leading element in the story. Very properly, thefirst of the two sons to be singled out specifically is the moreimportant of the two, the prodigal: "And the younger of them said tohis father, 'Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth tome. '" Thus, in only two sentences, the reader is given the entirebasis of the story. The swift and simple narrative that follows ismasterly in absolute conciseness. The younger son takes his journeyinto a far country, wastes his substance in riotous living, begins tobe in want, suffers and repents, and returns to seek the forgivenessof his father. Wonderfully, beautifully, his father loves and pitiesand forgives him: "For this my son was dead and is alive again; he waslost, and is found. " At this point the story would end, if it weretold with only two characters instead of three. But emphasis demandsthat the elder son should now make an entirely reasonable objection tothe reception of the prodigal; because the great love which is theessence of the father's character will shine forth much more brightlywhen he overrules the objection. He does so in the same words he hadused in the first moment of emotion: "For this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found. " These beautifulwords, which now receive the emphasis of iteration as well as theemphasis of terminal position, sum up and complete the entirepreëstablished design. This story, which contains only five hundred words, is a littlemasterpiece of structure. It embodies a narrative theme of profoundhuman import; it exhibits three characters so clearly and completelydrawn that the reader knows them better than he knows many a hero of alengthy novel; and it displays an absolute adjustment between economyand emphasis in its succinct yet touching train of incidents. Furthermore, it is also, in the English version of the King Jamestranslators, a little masterpiece of style. The words are simple, homely, and direct. Most of them are of Saxon origin, and themajority are monosyllabic. Less than half a dozen words in the entirenarrative contain more than two syllables. And yet they are set sodelicately together that they fall into rhythms potent with emotionaleffect. How much the story gains from this mastery of prose may befelt at once by comparing with the King James version parallelpassages from the standard French Bible. The English monosyllabicrefrain, with its touching balance of rhythm, loses nearly all of itsesthetic effect in the French translation: "_Car mon fils, que voici, était mort, mais il est ressuscité; il était perdu, mais il estretrouvé. _" And that very moving sentence about the elder son, "And hewas angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out andentreated him, " becomes in the French Bible, "_Mais il se mit encolère, et ne voulut point entrer; et son père étant sorti, le priaitd'entrer. _" No especial nicety of ear is necessary to notice that thefirst is greatly written, and the second is not. =Style Essential to the Short-Story. =--And this leads us to thegeneral consideration that even a perfectly constructed story willfail of the uttermost effect unless it be at all points adequatelywritten. After Poe had, with his intellect, outlined step by stepthe structure of "Ligeia, " he was obliged to confront a furtherproblem, --the problem of writing the story with the thrilling andenthralling harmony of that low, musical language which haunts uslike the echo of a dream. It is one thing to build a story; it isquite another thing to write it: and in Poe's case it is evident thatan appreciable interval of time must have elapsed between hisaccomplishment of the first, and his undertaking of the second, effort. He built his stories intellectually, in cold blood; he wrotethem emotionally, in esthetic exaltation: and the two moods are sodistinct and mutually exclusive that they must have been successiveinstead of coexistent. Some authors build better than they write;others write better than they build. Seldom, very seldom, is a manequipped, as Poe was, with an equal mastery of structure and of style. Yet though unity of form may be attained through structure alone, unity of mood is dependent mainly upon style. The language should bepitched throughout in tune with the emotional significance of thenarrative effect to be produced. Any sentence which is tuned out ofharmony will jangle and disrupt the unity of mood, which is asnecessary to a great short-story as it is to a great lyric poem. Hawthorne, though his structure was frequently at fault, proved thegreatness of his art by maintaining, through sheer mastery ofstyle, an absolute unity of mood in every story that he undertook. Mr. Kipling has not always done so, because he has frequently usedlanguage more with manner than with style; but in his best stories, like "The Brushwood Boy" and "They, " there is a unity of tonethroughout the writing that sets them on the plane of highest art. [8] The analysis of "Ligeia" which follows was first printed in the _Reader_ for February, 1906. It is here resumed with a few revisions of detail. REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. What are the main points to be considered in constructing a short-story? 2. Explain the technical importance of the last paragraph, and the first paragraph, of a short-story. 3. Analyze a great short-story according to the method illustrated in the foregoing analyses of "Ligeia" and "The Prodigal Son. " SUGGESTED READING EDGAR ALLAN POE: "The Fall of the House of Usher. " NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: "The White Old Maid. " BRET HARTE: "Tennessee's Pardner. " ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: "Markheim. " RUDYARD KIPLING: "Without Benefit of Clergy. " KENNETH GRAHAME: "The Roman Road. " F. J. STIMSON: "Mrs. Knollys. " GUY DE MAUPASSANT: "The Necklace. " ALPHONSE DAUDET: "The Last Class. " H. C. BUNNER: "A Sisterly Scheme. " O. HENRY: "A Municipal Report. " CHAPTER XII THE FACTOR OF STYLE Structure and Style--Style a Matter of Feeling--Style an Absolute Quality--The Twofold Appeal of Language--Concrete Examples--Onomatopoetic Words--Memorable Words--The Patterning of Syllables--Stevenson on Style--The Pattern of Rhythm--The Pattern of Literation--Style a Fine Art--Style an Important Aid to Fiction--The Heresy of the Accidental--Style an Intuitive Quality--Methods and Materials--Content and Form--The Fusion of Both Elements--The Author's Personality--Recapitulation. =Structure and Style. =--The element of style, which has just beentouched upon in reference to the short-story, must now be consideredin its broader aspect as a factor of fiction in general. Hitherto, inexamining the methods of fiction, we have confined our attention forthe most part to the study of structural expedients. The reason isthat structure, being a matter merely of the intellect, can beanalyzed clearly and expounded definitely. Like any other intellectualsubject--geometry, for instance--structure may be taught. But style, although it is in fiction a factor scarcely less important, is not amatter merely of the intellect. It is not so easily permissible ofclear analysis and definite exposition; and although it is true that, in a certain sense, it may be learned, it is also true that it cannotbe taught. =Style a Matter of Feeling. =--The word "style" comes trippingly to thetongue of every critic; but it has never yet been satisfactorilydefined. Famous phrases have been made about it, to be sure; but mostof these, like that corrupted from Buffon's cursory remark in hisdiscourse of reception into the Academy--"_Le style est de l'hommemême_, "--are lofty admissions of the impossibility of definition. Bythis fact we are fortified in our opinion that style is a matter offeeling rather than of intellect. Avoiding, therefore, as unwise anyattempt at definition, we may yet succeed in clarifying our ideasregarding style if we circle round the subject. =Style an Absolute Quality. =--At the outset, in order to narrow thecompass of the circle, let us admit that the familiar phrase "badstyle" is a contradiction of terms. Basically, there is no such thingas good style or bad. Either a literary utterance is made with style, or else it is made without it. This initial distinction is absolute, not relative. It must, however, be admitted that of two utterancesmade with style, the one may be more imbued with that quality than isthe other; but even this secondary distinction is a matter of more andless, rather than of better and worse. Style, then, is a qualitypossessed in a greater or less degree, or else not possessed at all. This much being granted, we may investigate with clearer minds thephilosophic aspect of the subject. =The Twofold Appeal of Language. =--Language makes to the mind of thereader or the listener an appeal which is twofold. First, it conveysto his intellect a definite meaning through the content of the wordsthat are employed; and secondly, it conveys to his sensibilities anindefinite suggestion through their sound. Consciously, he receives ameaning from the denotation of the words; subconsciously, he receivesa suggestion from their connotation. Now, an utterance has the qualityof style when these two appeals of language--the denotative and theconnotative, the definite and the indefinite, the intellectual and thesensuous--are so coördinated as to produce upon the reader or thelistener an effect which is, not dual, but indissolubly single. And anutterance is devoid of the quality of style when, although it conveysa meaning to the intellect through the content of the words, it doesnot reinforce that conveyance of meaning by a cognate and harmonicappeal to the senses through their sound. In the latter case thelanguage produces upon the recipient an effect which is, not single, but dual and divorced. =Concrete Examples. =--The matter may be made more clear by theexamination of concrete examples. The following sentence, forinstance, is devoid of style: "The square on the hypothenuse of aright-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the othertwo sides": for, although by its content it conveys to the intellect ameaning which is entirely clear and absolutely definite, it does notby its sound convey to the senses a suggestion which is cognate. But, on the other hand, the following lines from Tennyson's "The Princess"are rich in style, because the appeals to the intellect and to the earare so coördinated as to produce a single simultaneous effect:-- "Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees. " In these lines, fully as much is conveyed to the reader by the meremelody of m's and r's and l's as by the content, or denotation, of thewords. For instance, the word "innumerable, " which denotes to theintellect merely "incapable of being numbered, " is in this connectionmade to suggest to the senses the murmuring of bees. That one word, therefore, accomplishes a dual service, and contributes to theexpression of the general idea in one way through its content and inanother through its sound. =Onomatopoetic Words. =--This coördination of the two appeals is theorigin and the essence of the quality of style. But the question nowdemands to be considered, --_how_ may this coördination be effected?The first detail we must attend to is the choice of words. Tennyson'stask, in the lines that we have just considered, was comparativelyeasy. He was writing about certain sounds; and it was not especiallydifficult for him to imitate those sounds with the words that heselected to denote them. His device was the obvious one which iscalled, by rhetoricians, onomatopoeia. In every language those wordswhich are denotative of sounds are nearly always also imitative ofthem. Such words, as, for example, "whisper, " "thunder, " "rattle, " arein themselves stylistic. Alone, and apart from any context, theyincorporate that cognate appeal of significance and sound which is thesecret of style. Thus far the matter is extremely simple. But thereare also many words which denote other things than sounds and yetsomehow convey subtly to the ear a sensuous suggestion of theircontent. Such words, for instance, are "mud, " "nevermore, " and"tremulous. " Any child could tell you that words like these "soundjust like what they mean"; and yet it would be impossible for thecritical intellect to explain exactly wherein lies the fitness betweensound and sense in such a word as "mud. " The fitness, however, isobviously there. If we select from several languages words which areidentical in denotation, we are likely to find that, because of theirdifference in sound, they connote different phases of the idea whichthey contain. For example, the English word "death" has a spiritualsound; whereas the German "_der Tod_" sounds horrible and grim, andthe French "_la mort_" sounds fearsome and bizarre. In content, thesethree words are indistinguishable; but in style they differ verywidely. Their diversity of connotation is obviously inherent in theirsound; and yet, though the difference may be heard at once, it seemsinexplicable by the intellect. =Memorable Words. =--But by far the greatest number of stylistic wordsowe their connotation not so much to their sound alone, as to theircapacity for evoking memories. They awake the psychologic process ofassociation. Such are the words which lie close to the heart of everyone's experience, --words like "home, " "sorrow, " "mother, " "youth, " and"friends. " Whenever such a word is used, it conveys to the reader orthe listener not only the specific meaning intended by the momentarycontext, but also a subsidiary and subconscious recollection of manyphases of his personal experience. All of the indisputably magic wordspossess this associative or _memorable_ quality. Saying one thingdefinitely, they evoke a concordant harmony of subconscious andshadowy suggestion. Expressing a message in the present, they recallremembered beauty from the past. Thus it is with the words of thosetwo enchanted lines of Keats, -- "Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. " They say much more than what they say. Conveying one meaning to thereader, they remind him of many, many others. =The Patterning of Syllables. =--But the choice of suggestive andmemorable words is only the first step toward mastery of style. Theperfect marriage of significance and sound is dependent not so muchupon the words themselves as upon the way in which they are arranged. The art of style, like every other art, proceeds by an initialselection of materials and a subsequent arrangement of them inaccordance with a pattern. In style, the pattern is of primeimportance; and therefore, in order to understand the witchery ofwriting, we must next consider technically the patterning of words. =Stevenson on Style. =--This phase of the subject has been clearlyexpounded and deftly illustrated by Robert Louis Stevenson in hisessay "On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature. "[9] Thisessay is, so far as I know, the only existing treatise on the technicof style which is of any practical value to the incipient artist. Itshould therefore be read many times and mastered thoroughly by everystudent of the mystery of writing. Since it is now easily accessible, it will not be necessary here to do more than summarize its leadingpoints, --stating them in a slightly different way in order that theymay better fit the present context. =The Pattern of Rhythm. =--Every normal sentence, unless it beextremely brief, contains a knot, or hitch. Up to a certain point, thethought is progressively complicated; after that, it is resolved. Now, the art of style demands that this natural implication and explicationof the thought should be attended by a cognate implication andexplication of the movement of the sentence. Unless the hitch in therhythm coincides with the hitch in the thought, the two appeals of thesentence (to the intellect and to the ear) will contest against eachother instead of combining to accomplish a common effect. Thereforethe first necessity in weaving a web of words is to conquer anaccordance between the intellectual progression of the thought and thesensuous progression of the sound. The appeal of rhythm to the humanear is basic and elemental; and style depends for its effect more upona mastery of rhythmic phrase than upon any other individual detail. Inverse, the technical problem is twofold: first, to suggest to the earof the reader a rhythmic pattern of standard regularity; and then, tovary from the regularity suggested, as deftly and as frequently as maybe possible without ever allowing the reader for a moment to forgetthe fundamental pattern. In prose, the writer works with greaterfreedom; and his problem is therefore at once more easy and moredifficult. Instead of starting with a standard pattern, he has toinvent a web of rhythm which is suited to the sense he wishes toconvey; and then, without ever disappointing the ear of the reader byunnecessarily withholding an expected fall of rhythm, he must shatterevery inkling of monotony by continual and tasteful variation. =The Pattern of Literation. =--But language, by its very nature, offersto the ear not only a pattern of rhythm but also a pattern of letters. Amastery of literation is therefore a necessary element of style. Effects indisputably potent in suggestion may be gained by running arecurrence of certain letters, deftly for a time withheld, --sinceblatancy must always be avoided, --yet triumphant in harmonious return. The great sentences of literature which echo in our ears because theirsound is married to their meaning will be found upon examination toincorporate an intricate pattern of tastefully selected letters. Thus itis with the following sentence of Sir Thomas Browne's, wherein it isdifficult to decide whether the rhythm or the literation contributesthe larger share to its symmetry of sound:--"But the iniquity ofoblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of menwithout distinction to merit of perpetuity. " Thus it is, again, withthis sentence from Ruskin's "Seven Lamps of Architecture":--"They arebut the rests and monotones of the art; it is to its far happier, far higher, exaltation that we owe those fair fronts of variegatedmosaic, charged with wild fancies and dark hosts of imagery, thickerand quainter than ever filled the depths of midsummer dream; thosevaulted gates, trellised with close leaves; those window-labyrinths oftwisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses of multitudinouspinnacle and diademed tower; the only witnesses, perhaps, thatremain to us of the faith and fear of nations. " So it is also withthese sentences from De Quincey's "The English Mail-Coach":--"The sea, the atmosphere, the light, bore each an orchestral part in thisuniversal lull. Moonlight, and the first timid tremblings of the dawn, were by this time blending; and the blendings were brought into astill more exquisite state of unity by a slight silvery mist, motionless and dreamy, that covered the woods and fields, but with aveil of equable transparency. " =Style a Fine Art. =--A more detailed study of style along these lineswould lead us to considerations too minutely technical for the purposeof the present volume. Style, in its highest development, belongs onlyto the finest art of literature; and it must be admitted thatliterature is not always, nor even perhaps most frequently, a fineart. Of the four rhetorical moods, or methods, of discourse, exposition lends itself the least to the assistance of the quality ofstyle. Explanations are communicated from intellect to intellect. Words, in exposition, must be chosen chiefly with a view to definitedenotation. The expository writer must be clear at any cost; he mustaim to be precise rather than to be suggestive. Style is considerablymore important as an adjunct to argumentation; since in order reallyto persuade, a writer must not only convince the reader's intellectbut also rouse and conquer his emotions. But it is in narrative and indescription that the quality of style is most contributive to themaximum effect. To evoke a picture in the reader's mind, or to conveyto his consciousness a sense of movement, it is advisable (I amtempted to say necessary) to play upon his sensibilities with thesound of the very sentences that are framed to convey a content to hisintellect. =Style an Important Aid to Fiction. =--Since narrative is the naturalmood of fiction, and since description is more often introduced thaneither argument or exposition, it follows that the writer of fictionmust always reckon with the factor of style. It is true that storiesmay be written without style; it is even true that many of thegreatest stories have been devoid of this indefinable quality: but itis not therefore logical to argue that the factor of style may beneglected. How much it may be made to contribute to the attainment ofthe aim of fiction will be recognized instinctively upon examinationof any wonderfully written passage. Let us consider, for example, thefollowing paragraphs from "Markheim. " After Markheim has killed thedealer, and gone upstairs to ransack the belongings of the murderedman, he suffers an interval of quietude amid alarms. -- "With the tail of his eye he saw the door--even glanced at it fromtime to time directly, like a besieged commander pleased to verify thegood estate of his defenses. But in truth he was at peace. The rainfalling in the street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on theother side, the notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and the voices of many children took up the air and words. Howstately, how comfortable was the melody! How fresh the youthfulvoices! Markheim gave ear to it smilingly, as he sorted out the keys;and his mind was thronged with answerable ideas and images;church-going children and the pealing of the high organ; childrenafield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers on the brambly common, kite-fliers in the windy and cloud-navigated sky; and then, at anothercadence of the hymn, back again to church, and the somnolence ofsummer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson (which hesmiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs, and the dimlettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel. "And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was startled to hisfeet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting gush of blood, wentover him, and then he stood transfixed and thrilling. A step mountedthe stair slowly and steadily, and presently a hand was laid upon theknob, and the lock clicked, and the door opened. " Anybody who has ears to hear will immediately appreciate how much theeffect of this passage is enhanced by the masterly employment of everyphase of style which we have hitherto discussed. If, instead ofwriting, "Presently the notes of a piano were wakened to the music ofa hymn, " Stevenson had written, "Soon a piano began to play a hymn, "he would have suggested to the ear a jangle like the banging of tinpans, instead of the measured melody he had in mind. And let it beparticularly noted that the phrase suggested for comparison is, _inintellectual content alone_, scarcely distinct from the original. Howlittle is the difference in denotation, how great the difference insuggestion! The brief phrase, "Kite-fliers in the windy andcloud-navigated sky, " seems to blow us bodily upward into theair:--here is mastery of rhythm. "The somnolence of summer Sundays, "is whispery and murmurous with s's, m's, and n's:--here (moreobviously) is mastery of literation. In the second paragraph, noticehow the rhythm suddenly hurries when Markheim is startled to his feet;and in the last sentence, consider the monotonous and measuredslowness of the movement, ominous with pauses. =The Heresy of the Accidental. =--Every now and then a critic stepsforward with the statement that style in fiction is not a deliberateand conscious conquest, that the sound of sentences is accidental andmay therefore not be marshaled to contribute to the sense, and thatpreoccupation with details of rhythm and of literation is an evidenceof a finical and narrow mind. To such a statement no answer isnecessary but the wholesome advice to re-read, aloud and carefully, several passages on a par with that from "Markheim" which we have justexamined. Very evidently Stevenson knew intuitively what he was aboutwhen he planned his rhythmic patterns and his literate orchestralharmonies. =Style An Intuitive Quality. =--I say "intuitively, " because, as Iadmitted at the outset, style is, with the author, a matter of feelingrather than of intellect. But matters may be planned with sensibilityas well as with intelligence. The writer with the gift of styleforehears a rhythmic pattern into which he weaves such words as may bedenotative of his thought; and all the while that he is striving to bedefinite and clear, he carries in his mind a subtle sense of theharmonic accompaniment of consonants, the melodious eloquence ofvowels. By what means a writer may attain to mastery of style is a questionnot to be answered by the intellect. Matters of sensibility arepersonal, and every man must solve them for himself. The author of"Markheim, " as he tells us in his essay on "A College Magazine, "taught himself to write by playing the sedulous ape to many masters;and this method may be recommended to aspirants with an imitative ear. But there can be no general rule; because, although in the process ofpure reason all men rightly minded think alike, each man differs fromevery other in the process of emotion. This is the reason why style, besides being (as we asserted at theoutset) an absolute quality, possessed or not possessed by anyliterary utterance, is also in every case a quality personal tothe author who attains it. In this regard, Buffon was right instating that style is a phase of the man himself. Any work that isaccomplished by the intellect alone belongs to man in general ratherthan to one man in particular; but any work that is accomplished bythe sensibilities incorporates those profounder qualities by virtueof which each man stands distinct from every other. By studying thestructure of an author's work, we can estimate his intellect: bystudying the style, we can estimate that subtler entity which is theman himself. =Methods and Materials. =--At the close of our study of the materialsand methods of fiction, it is advisable that we should consider ingeneral the relation between form and content, --the respective valueof methods and materials. Primarily, there are two groups of worthyfiction, --that which is great mainly on account of its content, andthat which is great mainly on account of its form. It would be unwise, of course, to overestimate the single and inherent value of eithermaterial or method. Some comparison, however, may be made between themerits of the one group and the other. =Content and Form. =--In the first place, it must be noted that, as faras the general reader is concerned, the appeal of any work of fictiondepends far more upon its content than upon its form. The averagereader knows little and cares less about the technical methods of theart. What he demands above all is interesting subject-matter. Heseeks, in the popular phrase, "a good story"; he wishes to be toldinteresting things about interesting people; and he does not feelespecially concerned about the question whether or not these thingsare told him in an interesting way. The matter, rather than themanner, is the element that most allures him. There are many reasons that tempt the critic to accept withoutreservation the general reader's view. For instance, many of themost important works of fiction have been inefficient in mere art. The"Don Quixote" of Cervantes is indubitably one of the very greatestnovels in all literature, for the reason that it contains so vasta world. Yet it is very faulty both in structure and in style. Theauthor seems to have built it little by little, as he went along;and he changed his plan so often during the process of constructionthat the resultant edifice, like the cathedral of St. Peter's, isarchitecturally incoherent. He showed so little regard for unity thathe did not hesitate to halt his novel for half a hundred pageswhile he set before the reader the totally extraneous novelette of"The Curious Impertinent, " which he happened to find lying idle in hisdesk. How little he was a master of mere style may be felt at once bycomparing his plays with those of Calderon. Yet these technicalconsiderations do not count against the value of his masterpiece. Allof Spain is there resumed and uttered, all pains that the idealist inany age must suffer, all the pity and the glory of aspirationmisapplied. Scott has no style, and Thackeray has no structure; but thesetechnical defects go down before their magnitude of message. Scottteaches us the glory and the greatness of being healthy, young, adventurous, and happy; and Thackeray, with tears in his eyes thathumanize the sneer upon his lips, teaches us that the thing we callSociety, with a capital S, is but a vanity of vanities. If we turnfrom the novel to the short-story, we shall notice that certain themesare in themselves so interesting that the resultant story could notfail to be effective even were it badly told. It is perhaps unfair totake as an example Mr. F. J. Stimson's tale called "Mrs. Knollys, "because his story is both correctly constructed and beautifullywritten; but merely in theme this tale is so effective that it couldhave endured a less accomplished handling. The story runs asfollows:[10]--A girl and her husband, both of whom are very young, goto the Alps for their honeymoon. The husband, in crossing a glacier, falls into a crevasse. His body cannot immediately be recovered; butMrs. Knollys learns from a German scientist who is making a study ofthe movement of the ice that in forty-five years the body will becarried to the end of the glacier. Thereafter she regards her husbandas absent but not lost, and lives her life in continuous imaginedcommunion with him. At the end of the allotted time, she returns andfinds his body. She is then a woman in her sixties; but her husbandis, in aspect, still a boy of twenty-one. She has dreamt of him asgrowing old beside her: she finds him sundered from her by half acentury of change. --Even in a bald and ineffective summary theinterest of this narrative effect must be apparent. The story scarcelyneeded to be told so well as Mr. Stimson told it. We must admit, then, that, from the standpoint of the author as wellas from that of the general reader, material may often be regarded asmore important than method. But the critic is not therefore justifiedin stating that style and structure may be neglected with impunity. Other things being equal, the books that have lived the longest arethose which have been executed with admirable art. The decline in thefame of Fenimore Cooper is a case in point. Merely in subject-matter, his books are more important now than they were at the time of theiroriginal publication; for the conditions of life in the forestprimeval must necessarily assume a more especial interest to a worldthat, in its immediate experience, is rapidly forgetting them. ButCooper wrote very carelessly and very badly; and as we advance to afiner appreciation of the art of fiction, we grow more and moredistracted from the contemplation of his message by his preposterousinequalities of craftsmanship. Novels like the "Leatherstocking Tales" may be most enjoyed (I hadalmost said appreciated best) by readers with an undeveloped sense ofart. This would seem a very strange admission at the close of a studydevoted to the art of fiction, were it not for the existence of thatother group of stories whose importance lies in method even more thanin material. A lesser thing done perfectly is often more significantthan a bigger thing done badly. Jane Austen is likely to live longerthan George Eliot, because she conveyed her message, less momentousthough it were, with a finer and a firmer art. Jane Austen's subjectsseem, at the first glance, to be of very small account. From Englishmiddle-class society she selects a group of people who are in noregard remarkable, and thereafter concerns herself chiefly with thesimple question of who will ultimately marry whom. But by sedulouslydwelling on the non-essentials of life, she contrives to remind thereader of its vast essentials. By talking to us skilfully about themany things that do not matter, she suggests to us, inversely and withunobtrusive irony, the few things that really do. Her very message, therefore, is immediately dependent upon her faultless art. If she haddone her work less well, the result would have been non-significantand wearisome. Poe and de Maupassant are shining examples of the class of authors whoare destined to live by their art alone. Poe, in his short-stories, said nothing of importance to the world; and de Maupassant said manymatters which might more decorously have remained untalked of. But thething they meant to do, they did unfalteringly; and perfectworkmanship is in itself a virtue in this world of shoddy compromiseand ragged effort. Long after people have ceased to care for battle, murder, and sudden death, the thrill and urge of buoyant adventure, they will re-read the boyish tales of Stevenson for the sake of theirswiftness of propulsion and exultant eloquence of style. And fully to appreciate this class of fiction, some technicalknowledge of the art is necessary. Washington Irving's efforts must, to a great extent, be lost on readers who are lacking in the ear forstyle. He had very little to say, --merely that the Hudson isbeautiful, that the greatest sadness upon earth arises from the earlydeath of one we love, that laughter and tears are at their deepestindistinguishable, and that it is very pleasant to sit before the fireof an old baronial hall and remember musingly; but he said this littlelike a gentleman, --with a charm, a grace, an easy urbanity ofdemeanor, that set his work forever in the class of what has been welldone by good and faithful servants. There is a very fine pleasure in watching with awareness the doing ofthings that are done well. Hence, even for the casual reader, it isadvisable to study the methods of fiction in order to develop a morerefined delight in reading. It would seem that a detective story, inwhich the interest is centred mainly in the long withholding of amystery, would lose its charm for a reader to whom its secret has beenonce revealed. But the reader with a developed consciousness of methodfinds an interest evermore renewed in returning again and again toPoe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue. " After his first surprise has beenabated, he can enjoy more fully the deftness of the author's art. After he has viewed the play from a stall in the orchestra, he mayderive another and a different interest by watching it from the wings. To use a familiar form of words, Jane Austen is the novelist'snovelist, Stevenson the writer's writer, Poe the builder's builder;and in order fully to appreciate the work of artists such as these, itis necessary (in Poe's words) to "contemplate it with a kindred art. " =The Fusion of Both Elements. =--But the critic should not therefore beallured into setting method higher than material and overestimatingform at the expense of content. The ideal to be striven for in fictionis such an intimate interrelation between the thing said and the wayof saying it that neither may be contemplated apart from the other. Weare touching now upon a third and smaller group of fiction, whichcombines the special merits of the two groups already noted. Such anovel as "The Scarlet Letter, " such a short-story as "The BrushwoodBoy, " belong in this third and more extraordinary class. WhatHawthorne has to say is searching and profound, and he says it with anequal mastery of structure and of style. "The Scarlet Letter" would begreat because of its material alone, even had its author been abungler; it would be great because of its art alone, even had he beenless humanly endowed with understanding. But it is greater as we knowit, in its absolute commingling of the two great merits of importantsubject and commensurate art. =The Author's Personality. =--But in studying "The Scarlet Letter" weare conscious of yet another element of interest, --an interest derivedfrom the personality of the author. The same story told with equal artby some one else would interest us very differently. And now we aretouching on still another group of worthy fiction. Many stories enduremore because of the personality of the men who wrote them than becauseof any inherent merit of material or method. Charles Lamb's"Dream-Children; A Revery, " which, although it is numbered among the"Essays of Elia, " may be regarded as a short-story, is importantmainly because of the nature of the man who penned it, --a man who, inan age infected with the fever of growing up, remained at heart alittle child, looking upon the memorable world with eyes of wonder. =Recapitulation. =--These, then, are the three merits to be striven forin equal measure by aspirants to the art of fiction: momentousmaterial, masterly method, and important personality. To discovercertain truths of human life that are eminently worth the telling, toembody them in imagined facts with a mastery both of structure and ofstyle, and, behind and beyond the work itself, to be all the time aperson worthy of being listened to: this is, for the fiction-writer, the ultimate ideal. Seldom, very seldom, have these three contrariousconditions revealed themselves in a single author; seldom, therefore, have works of fiction been created that are absolutely great. It wouldbe difficult for the critic to select off-hand a single novel whichmay be accepted in all ways as a standard of the highest excellence. But if the term _fiction_ be regarded in its broadest significance, itmay be considered to include the one greatest work of art everfashioned by the mind of man. The "Divine Comedy" is supreme insubject-matter. The facts of its cosmogony have been disproved bymodern science, the religion of which it is the monument has falleninto disbelief, the nation and the epoch that it summarizes have beentrampled under the progress of the centuries; but in central andinherent truth, in its exposition of the struggle of the beleagueredhuman soul to win its way to light and life, it remains perennial andnew. It is supreme in art. With unfaltering and undejected effort themaster-builder upreared in symmetry its century of cantos; withfaultless eloquence he translated into song all moods the human hearthas ever known. And it is supreme in personality; because in everyline of it we feel ourselves in contact with the vastest individualmind that ever yet inhabited the body of a man. We know (to quote thePoet's most appreciative translator)-- "from what agonies of heart and brain, What exultations trampling on despair, What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong, What passionate outcry of a soul in pain, Uprose this poem of the earth and air, This medieval miracle of song. " His labor kept him lean for twenty years; and many a time he learnedhow salt his food who fares upon another's bread, --how steep his pathwho treadeth up and down another's stairs. But Dante saw andconquered, --realizing what he had to do, knowing how to do it, beingworthy of his work. Therefore, singly among authors, he deserves theepithet his countrymen apply to him, --divine. "The Divine Comedy" is the supreme epic of the world. The supremenovel remains to be written. It is doubtful if human literary art mayattain completeness more than once. But as our authors labor to embodytruths of human life in arranged imagined facts, they shouldconstantly be guided and inspired by the allurement of the ultimateideal. The noblest work is evermore accomplished by followers of thegleam. Let us, in parting company, paraphrase the sense of a remarkmade centuries ago by Sir Philip Sidney, --that model of a scholar anda gentleman:--It is well to shoot our arrows at the moon; for thoughthey may miss their mark, they will yet fly higher than if we hadflung them into a bush. [9] First published in the _Contemporary Review_ for April, 1885; and now included in Volume XXII of the "Thistle Edition": Charles Scribner's Sons. [10] "Mrs. Knollys" is now easily accessible in "The Short Story: Specimens Illustrating Its Development. " Edited by Brander Matthews. American Book Company, 1908. REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. What is meant by style in literature? 2. Make three patterns of words, --the first notable for sheer selection, the second notable for rhythm, and the third notable for literation. 3. Write a theme, containing approximately three hundred words, that shall be judged for its quality of style. SUGGESTED READING ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: "On Some Technical Elements of Style inLiterature. " WALTER PATER: "Essay on Style, " in "Appreciations. " HERBERT SPENCER: "Philosophy of Style. " INDEX _Actions and Reactions_, 112, 137. _Adam Bede_, 20, 33, 116. Addison, Joseph, xv; _Sir Roger de Coverley_, xv. _Æneid, The_, 160, 161, 162. Alcott, Louisa M. , 78; _Little Women_, 78. Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 137; _Marjorie Daw_, 137. _Alice in Wonderland_, 18. _Ambitious Guest, The_, 174. _American Short Stories_, 174. Amiel, Henri-Frédéric, 9. Andersen, Hans Christian, 11. _Angel in the House, The_, 158. _An Habitation Enforced_, 112. _Anna Karénina_, xxi. _Arcadia_, 102. Archer, William, 8. Ariosto, Ludovico, 102; _Orlando Furioso_, 102. Aristotle, 69, 70. Arnold, Matthew, 184. _Assignation, The_, 38. _As You Like It_, 12. _At the End of the Passage_, 110. Aubignac, Abbé d', xviii, xx; _Pratique du Théâtre_, xviii. _Aurora Leigh_, 158. Austen, Jane, 7, 21, 29, 90, 130, 131, 221, 222; _Emma_, 90, 130, 146; _Pride and Prejudice_, 131, 146. Bacon, Francis, 34. Baldwin, Charles Sears, 174, 175, 180; _American Short Stories_, 174. Balfour, Graham, 54. Balzac, Honoré de, xiv, xvi, xvii, 55, 58, 157, 163, 184; _Eugénie Grandet_, 173; _Human Comedy_, 163. Barrie, Sir James Matthew, xxiv, 13, 28, 135, 136. _Beach of Falesá, The_, 182. _Beowulf_, 133. Bernhardt, Sarah, 165. Besant, Sir Walter, xxiv, 37; _The Art of Fiction_, 37. Beyle, Henri, see Stendhal. Boccaccio, Giovanni, xiv, 64, 101, 180; _Decameron_, 64, 101, 180. Boswell, James, 125. Brontë, Charlotte, 13; _Jane Eyre_, 13, 122, 124, 170. Brougham, Lord, xxiii. Browne, Sir Thomas, 213. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 158; _Aurora Leigh_, 158. Browning, Robert, 157. Brunetière, Ferdinand, xiv, 167; _History of Classical French Literature_, 14. _Brushwood Boy, The_, 28, 35, 205, 223. Buffon, Comte de, 207, 218. Bunner, Henry Cuyler, 137, 152; _A Sisterly Scheme_, 152; _The Documents in the Case_, 137. Bunyan, John, 81; _Pilgrim's Progress_, 65, 81. Burbage, Richard, 165. Cable, George Washington, 111. Calderon, 219. Camoëns, 160; _The Lusiads_, 160. _Captive, The_, 91, 124. Carlyle, Thomas, 10; _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, 10. _Carmen_, 173. Carroll, Lewis, _Alice in Wonderland_, 18. _Cask of Amontillado, The_, 143, 178. Cervantes, xiv, 8, 219; _Don Quixote_, xxv, 162, 219; _The Curious Impertinent_, 219. Chateaubriand, René de, 18. _Child's Dream of a Star, A_, 185. Cimabue, 99. Collins, Wilkie, 18, 51, 75, 153; _The Moonstone_, 75. _Colomba_, 173. Colvin, Sir Sidney, 179. Cooper, James Fenimore, xvi, 29, 146, 186, 220; _Leatherstocking Tales_, 221; _The Last of the Mohicans_, 173; _The Spy_, 146. Coppée, François, 159; _The Strike of the Iron-Workers_, 159; _The Substitute_, 159. Coquelin, Constant, 165. Corneille, Pierre, xx. Crawford, F. Marion, xxiv, 26; _The Novel: What It Is_, 26. _Criticism and Fiction_, 40, 134. _Curious Impertinent, The_, 219. _Cyrano de Bergerac_, 165. _Daisy Miller_, 173. _Daniel Deronda_, 130, 149. D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 7, 18. Dante Alighieri, 32, 160, 225; _The Divine Comedy_, 160, 224, 225. Daudet, Alphonse, 79, 107, 144, 174, 186, 187; _Sapho_, 19, 79; _The Elixir of the Reverend Father Gaucher_, 107; _The Last Class_, 174. _David Copperfield_, 72. _David Swan_, 65. _Deal in Cotton, A_, 137. _Decameron_, 64, 101, 180. Defoe, Daniel, xv, 103, 122; _Robinson Crusoe_, 103, 122. De Quincey, Thomas, 10, 214; _The English Mail-Coach_, 214. Dickens, Charles, xx, 23, 70, 72, 81, 104, 147, 185; _A Child's Dream of a Star_, 185; _A Tale of Two Cities_, 68, 147; _David Copperfield_, 72; _Martin Chuzzlewit_, 86; _Our Mutual Friend_, 70, 96, 103, 152; _Pickwick Papers_, xxv; _The Old Curiosity Shop_, 104, 105. _Divine Comedy, The_, 160, 224, 225. _Documents in the Case, The_, 137. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 125, 149. _Dream-Children_, 223. _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Strange Case of_, xxii, 33, 38, 126, 182. Dryden, John, xx. Dumas, Alexandra, père, xvi, xxiii, 9, 42, 50, 145. Du Maurier, George, 117. Eckermann, J. P. , xx. _Egoist, The_, 72, 84, 92, 113. _Elia, Essays of_, 223. Eliot, George, xvii, xxiii, 6, 13, 20, 25, 27, 28, 29, 33, 37, 41, 45, 51, 67, 70, 72, 73, 83, 87, 88, 116, 123, 129, 130, 184, 186, 221; _Adam Bede_, 20, 33, 116; _Daniel Deronda_, 130, 149; _Middlemarch_, 70, 79; _Romola_, 28, 37, 114, 148; _Silas Marner_, 29, 67; _The Mill on the Floss_, 12, 87, 112. _Elixir of the Reverend Father Gaucher, The_, 107. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 43, 80; _Representative Men_, 80. _Emma_, 90, 130, 146. _English Mail-Coach, The_, 214. Erasmus, xiv. Erckmann-Chatrian, 163. _Essays of Elia_, 223. _Esther, Book of_, 174. _Eugénie Grandet_, 173. _Evangeline_, 159. _Evan Harrington_, 73, 127. _Experimental Novel, The_, 111. _Faerie Queene, The_, 102, 161. _Fall of the House of Usher, The_, 96, 114, 117, 143. _False Dawn_, 113. Ferber, Edna, 193. Fielding, Henry, xv, 103; _Tom Jones_, xxv. Flaubert, Gustave, xvii, 25, 26, 114; _Madame Bovary_, 26; _Salammbô_, 114. Franklin, Benjamin, 80; _Autobiography of_, 80. Freeman, Mrs. Mary E. Wilkins, 111. Freytag, Gustave, xxiv; _Technic of the Drama_, xxiv. Froude, James Anthony, xxiii. Furetière, Antoine, xvii, xviii; _Roman Bourgeois_, xvii. Garland, Hamlin, 111. _Gentle Boy, The_, 191. _Gesta Romanorum_, 64, 101. _Gift of the Magi, The_, 143, 194. _Gil Blas_, 66, 122. Giotto, 99, 101. Glanvill, Joseph, 195. Goethe, J. W. Von, xx; _Conversations with Eckermann_, xx. Goldsmith, Oliver, xv; _The Vicar of Wakefield_, 84, 85. Goncourt, Jules and Edmond de, 28. _Gossip on Romance, A_, 56, 108. Greene, Robert, xxiii. Gummere, Francis B. , xvii. Hale, Edward Everett, 182; _The Man Without a Country_, 182. _Hamlet_, xiv, 8, 9, 82, 165, 169. Hardy, Thomas, 111; _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_, 111. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, xvii, 7, 15, 20, 28, 29, 31, 38, 65, 71, 72, 73, 146, 148, 154, 159, 175, 180, 186, 187, 191, 193, 205, 223; _David Swan_, 65; _The Ambitious Guest_, 174; _The Gentle Boy_, 191; _The House of the Seven Gables_, 7, 28, 31; _The Marble Faun_, 38, 73, 154; _The Scarlet Letter_, xxv, 15, 20, 29, 36, 71, 72, 73, 146, 223; _The White Old Maid_, 148. _Hedda Gabler_, 148. Hegel, G. F. W. , xix. _Henry Esmond_, 28, 122. _Henry IV_, 49. Henry, O. , 143, 193, 194; _The Gift of the Magi_, 143, 194. _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, 10. Hervieu, Paul, xxiv. Homer, 74, 133, 157, 160, 162; _The Iliad_, 94, 133, 160, 162; _The Odyssey_, 133. Horace, 74. _House of the Seven Gables, The_, 7, 28, 31. Howells, William Dean, 40, 134, 135; _Criticism and Fiction_, 40, 134; _The Rise of Silas Lapham_, 173. Hugo, Victor, xvi, xxiii, 25, 26, 50, 112, 145, 149; _Les Misérables_, 26; _Notre Dame de Paris_, 112, 145, 149, 173. _Human Comedy_, 163. _Humble Remonstrance, A_, 60, 70. Huxley, Thomas Henry, xxi. Ibsen, Henrik, 8, 12, 147; _Hedda Gabler_, 148; _Rosmersholm_, 147. _Iceland Fisherman, The_, 112. _Iliad, The_, 94, 133, 160, 162. Irving, Washington, 7, 181, 222; _Rip Van Winkle_, 181; _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_, 181. James, Henry, 21, 27, 37, 57, 72, 78, 118, 137, 151, 181; _Daisy Miller_, 173; _The Art of Fiction_, 27, 118; _The Turn of the Screw_, 151, 181; _What Maisie Knew_, 137. _Jane Eyre_, 13, 122, 124, 170. _Jerusalem Liberated_, 160. Johnson, Samuel, xv, xviii, xx, xxiii, 125. Jonson, Ben, 81. _Just So Stories_, 23. Keats, John, 211. _Kenilworth_, 149, 173. _Kidnapped_, 15, 122, 124. _Kim_, 67, 148. _King Lear_, 82. Kipling, Rudyard, 11, 21, 22, 23, 35, 39, 50, 67, 79, 82, 87, 106, 110, 112, 124, 127, 137, 148, 150, 157, 169, 173, 174, 184, 185, 186, 187, 191, 192, 193, 194, 205; _Actions and Reactions_, 112, 137; _A Deal in Cotton_, 137; _An Habitation Enforced_, 112; _At the End of the Passage_, 110; _False Dawn_, 113; _How the Elephant Got His Trunk_, 11; _Just So Stories_, 23; _Kim_, 67, 148; _Lispeth_, 193; _"Love-o'-Women, "_ 150; _Mrs. Bathurst_, 95, 127, 150; _Only a Subaltern_, 14; _Plain Tales from the Hills_, 185, 191, 193; _Soldiers Three_, 127; _The Brushwood Boy_, 28, 35, 205, 223; _The Captive_, 91, 124; _The Light That Failed_, 173; _The Three-Decker_, 174; _They_, 22, 35, 87, 169, 205; _Thrown Away_, 192; _Without Benefit of Clergy_, 21, 106, 174, 192. _Kreutzer Sonata, The_, xxi. _Lady of the Lake, The_, 158. _Lady or the Tiger? The_, 154, 183. Lamb, Charles, 135, 223; _Dream-Children_, 223; _Essays of Elia_, 223; _The South Sea House_, 135. _Lantern-Bearers, The_, 23. _Last Class, The_, 174. _Last Days of Pompeii, The_, 113. _Last of the Mohicans, The_, 173. _Leatherstocking Tales_, 221. Le Breton, André, xiv, xxiii. Lee, Sir Sidney, 71. _Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The_, 181. Leibnitz, Baron G. W. Von, 104. Leonardo da Vinci, 100. Le Sage, Alain René, 66; _Gil Blas_, 66, 122. _Les Facheux_, 66. _Les Misérables_, 26. _L'Etourdi_, 66. Lewes, George Henry, 51. _Ligeia_, 174, 194, 195, 201, 204. _Light That Failed, The_, 173. _Lispeth_, 193. _Little Women_, 78. London, Jack, 111. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 159, 225; _Evangeline_, 159. Loti, Pierre, 112; _The Iceland Fisherman_, 112. _"Love-o'-Women, "_ 150. Lowell, James Russell, xvii, 7. _Lucile_, 158. _Lusiads, The_, 160. _Macbeth_, 7, 82, 153, 168. MacLeod, Fiona, 113. _Madame Bovary_, 26. _Man Without a Country, The_, 182. Manzoni, Alessandro, xvi. _Marble Faun, The_, 38, 73, 154. _Marjorie Daw_, 137. _Markheim_, xxii, 36, 48, 141, 154, 174, 215, 216, 217. _Marmion_, 158. _Martin Chuzzlewit_, 86. _Masque of the Red Death, The_, 142, 149, 155, 178. _Master of Ballantrae, The_, 92, 93, 94, 113, 126, 148, 170. Matthews, Brander, 42, 137, 173, 176; _The Documents in the Case_, 137; _The Philosophy of the Short-Story_, 176. _Maud_, 158. Maupassant, Guy de, 40, 63, 132, 134, 142, 143, 152, 174, 180, 181, 184, 186, 187, 193, 221; _Pierre et Jean_, 40; _The Necklace_, 142, 152, 174. Mendès, Catulle, 29. _Merchant of Venice, The_, 68. Meredith, George, 29, 55, 72, 73, 113, 127, 129, 130, 169, 171, 184, 186; _Evan Harrington_, 73, 127; _The Egoist_, 72, 84, 92, 113; _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_, 113. Meredith, Owen, 160; _Lucile_, 160. Merimée, Prosper, 173; _Carmen_, 173; _Colomba_, 173. _Merry Men, The_, 54. _Middlemarch_, 70, 79. Millet, Jean-François, 101. _Mill on the Floss, The_, 12, 87, 112. Milton, John, 160, 162; _Paradise Lost_, 160. _Modern Painters_, 105. Molière, J. B. Poquelin de, xix, 66, 165; _Les Facheux_, 66; _Le Tartufe_, xix, 8; _L'Etourdi_, 66. _Moonstone, The_, 75. Motley, John Lothrop, xxiii. _Mrs. Bathurst_, 95, 127, 150. _Mrs. Knollys_, 219, 220. _Murders in the Rue Morgue, The_, 75, 222. _Necklace, The_, 142, 152, 174. _New Arabian Nights_, 28, 85. _Newcomes, The_, 126, 173. _Nibelungen Lied_, 133. Norris, Frank, xxii, 111, 164. _Notre Dame de Paris_, 112, 145, 149, 173. _Nouvelle Héloise_, La, 104. _Novel, The: What It Is_, 26. _Odyssey, The_, 133. _OEdipus King_, xix. _Old Curiosity Shop, The_, 104, 105. _Only a Subaltern_, 14. _Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The_, 113. _Orlando Furioso_, 102. Ostade, Adrian van, 100. _Othello_, 149, 169. _Our Mutual Friend_, 70, 96, 103, 152. _Pamela_, 20. _Paradise Lost_, 160. Parkman, Francis, 10. Patmore, Coventry, 158; _The Angel in the House_, 158. _Paul and Virginia_, 102. Peele, George, xxiii. _Pendennis_, 14. Pepys, Samuel, 47. Perry, Bliss, xxiv, 28, 29, 182, 183, 184; _A Study of Prose Fiction_, 28, 182. Petrarch, 71. _Philosophy of Composition, The_, 194. _Philosophy of the Short-Story, The_, 176. _Pickwick Papers_, xxv. _Pierre et Jean_, 40. _Pilgrim's Progress_, 65, 81. Pinero, Sir Arthur Wing, 149, 171. _Pit and the Pendulum, The_, 183. _Plain Tales from the Hills_, 185, 191, 193. Plato, 9. Plutarch, 10. Poe, Edgar Allan, 29, 38, 75, 114, 115, 125, 142, 143, 144, 172, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 190, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 204, 205, 221, 222; _Ligeia_, 174, 194, 195, 201, 204; _The Assignation_, 38; _The Cask of Amontillado_, 143, 178; _The Fall of the House of Usher_, 96, 114, 117, 143; _The Masque of the Red Death_, 142, 149, 155, 178; _The Murders in the Rue Morgue_, 75, 222; _The Philosophy of Composition_, 194; _The Pit and the Pendulum_, 183; _The Raven_, 194, 201; _The Tell-Tale Heart_, 144, 178. _Pride and Prejudice_, 131, 146. _Princess, The_, 209. _Prodigal Son, The_, 174, 201, 202, 203, 204. Rabelais, François, xiv, 18. Raphael, 100. _Raven, The_, 194, 201. _Redgauntlet_, 185. Rembrandt, 140. Richardson, Samuel, xv, 20, 127; _Pamela_, 20. _Rip Van Winkle_, 181. _Rise of Silas Lapham, The_, 173. _Robinson Crusoe_, 103, 122. _Romeo and Juliet_, 14. _Romola_, 28, 37, 114, 148. Ronsard, Pierre, 71. _Rosmersholm_, 147. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 71, 72. Rostand, Edmond, 165; _Cyrano de Bergerac_, 165. Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 104; _La Nouvelle Héloise_, 104. Ruskin, John, 105, 213; _Modern Painters_, 105; _Seven Lamps of Architecture_, 213. _Ruth, Book of_, 174. Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 102; _Paul and Virginia_, 102. _Salammbô_, 114. _Sapho_, 19, 79. Sardou, Victorien, 165; _La Tosca_, 165. _Scarlet Letter, The_, xxv, 15, 20, 29, 36, 71, 72, 73, 146, 223. _School for Scandal, The_, 149. Scott, Sir Walter, xvi, 20, 21, 25, 26, 38, 42, 50, 58, 74, 86, 133, 145, 146, 149, 158, 185, 219; _Kenilworth_, 149, 173; _Marmion_, 158; _Redgauntlet_, 185; _The Lady of the Lake_, 158; _The Talisman_, 146; _Wandering Willie's Tale_, 185; _Waverley_, 20. _Seven Lamps of Architecture, The_, 213. Shakespeare, William, xviii, xix, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 35, 49, 70, 71, 157, 165, 168, 169; _As You Like It_, 12; _Hamlet_, xiv, 8, 9, 82, 165, 169; _Henry IV_, 49; _King Lear_, 82; _Macbeth_, 7, 82, 153, 168; _Othello_, 149, 169; _Romeo and Juliet_, 14; _The Merchant of Venice_, 68. Shaw, George Bernard, 10. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 149; _The School for Scandal_, 149. Sidney, Sir Philip, 102, 225; _Arcadia_, 102. _Silas Marner_, 29, 67. _Sisterly Scheme, A_, 152. _Smoke_, xxv. Smollett, Tobias, xv. _Soldiers Three_, 127. Sophocles, xix, xx, 184, 185; _OEdipus King_, xix. Spenser, Edmund, 102, 112; _The Faerie Queene_, 102, 161. Spielhagen, Friedrich, xxiv; _Technic of the Novel_, xxiv. _Spy, The_, 146. Steele, Sir Richard, xv. Stendhal, xvii. Sterne, Laurence, xv. Stevenson, Robert Louis, xxi, xxii, 16, 23, 28, 33, 36, 39, 40, 48, 50, 54, 56, 60, 61, 62, 70, 73, 85, 108, 113, 170, 173, 174, 179, 182, 187, 212, 223; _A College Magazine_, 217; _A Gossip on Romance_, 56, 108; _A Humble Remonstrance_, 60, 70; _Kidnapped_, 15, 122, 124; _Markheim_, xxii, 36, 48, 141, 154, 174, 215, 216, 217; _New Arabian Nights_, 28, 85; _On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature_, 212; _Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, xxii, 33, 38, 126, 182; _The Beach of Falesá_, 182; _The Lantern Bearers_, 23; _The Master of Ballantrae_, 92, 93, 94, 113, 126, 148, 170; _The Merry Men_, 54; _The Treasure of Franchard_, 173; _Treasure Island_, 51, 52, 78, 122, 124. Stimson, F. J. , 219; _Mrs. Knollys_, 219, 220. Stockton, Frank R. , 154; _The Lady or the Tiger?_, 154, 183. _Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, xxii, 33, 38, 126, 182. _Strike of the Iron-Workers, The_, 159. _Study of Prose Fiction, A_, 28, 182. _Substitute, The_, 159. Swift, Jonathan, xv, 18. _Tale of Two Cities, A_, 68, 147. _Talisman, The_, 146. Tarkington, Booth, 111. _Tartufe, Le_, xix, 8. Tasso, Torquato, 160, 162; _Jerusalem Liberated_, 160. Taylor, Bayard, 154; _Who Was She?_, 154. _Tell-Tale Heart, The_, 144, 178. Teniers, David, the younger, 100. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 158, 209; _Maud_, 158; _The Princess_, 209. _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_, 111. Thackeray, William Makepeace, xvii, 14, 21, 26, 27, 28, 63, 71, 74, 79, 97, 126, 134, 135, 185, 219; _Henry Esmond_, 28, 122; _Pendennis_, 14; _The Newcomes_, 126, 173; _The Virginians_, 28; _Vanity Fair_, xxv, 20, 71, 79, 97, 98, 146, 151. _Theocritus_, xiv. _They_, 22, 35, 87, 169, 205. _Three-Decker, The_, 174. _Thrown Away_, 192. Tintoretto, 140. Tolstoi, Count Leo, xxi, 7; _Anna Karénina_, xxi; _The Kreutzer Sonata_, xxi; _War and Peace_, xxv. _Tom Jones_, xxv. _Tosca, La_, 165. _Treasure Island_, 51, 52, 78, 122, 124. _Treasure of Franchard, The_, 173. Trollope, Anthony, 41, 51. Turgénieff, Ivan, 57, 58, 72, 157, 173; _Smoke_, xxv. _Turn of the Screw, The_, 151, 181. _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, 163. _Vanity Fair_, xxv, 20, 71, 79, 97, 98, 146, 151. Verrocchio, Andrea, 140. _Vicar of Wakefield, The_, 84, 85. Virgil, 161; _The Æneid_, 160, 161, 162. _Virginians, The_, 28. Wagner, Richard, 147. _Wandering Willie's Tale_, 185. _War and Peace_, xxv. _Waverley_, 20. _What Maisie Knew_, 137. _White Old Maid, The_, 148. White, Stewart Edward, 111. Whitman, Walt, 71, 79. _Who Was She?_, 154. _Without Benefit of Clergy_, 21, 106, 174, 192. Wordsworth, William, 58. Zola, Emile, 6, 29, 41, 111, 164; _The Experimental Novel_, 111; _The Rougon-Macquart Series_, 111, 164. THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y.