Transcriber's Note: Original spelling and punctuation were
retained, with the following exceptions. On page
3, 'a mind native and indued to actuality' was
corrected to 'a mind native and induced to actuality'; on page
15, 'but who have have been discarded' to 'but who have been discarded'; on page
21, 'The kindgom of adventure' to 'The kingdom of adventure'; on page
91, 'The Master of Ballantræ' to 'The Master of Ballantrae', as in all other instances of this word; and on page
227, the one instance of 'A Humble Rèmonstrance' was corrected to
'A Humble Remonstrance' to match the other instances.
MATERIALS AND
METHODS OF FICTION
BY
CLAYTON HAMILTON
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
BRANDER MATTHEWS
The Chautauqua Press
CHAUTAUQUA, NEW YORK
1911
Copyright, 1908, by
The Baker and Taylor Company
Published, May, 1908
TO
FREDERIC TABER COOPER
WITH ADMIRATION FOR THE CRITIC
WITH AFFECTION FOR THE FRIEND
[pg vii]
CONTENTS
| CHAPTER | | PAGE |
| | Introduction | ix |
| I | The
Purpose of Fiction | 1 |
| II | Realism and Romance | 23 |
| II | The
Nature of Narrative | 42 |
| IV | Plot | 58 |
| V | Characters | 75 |
| VI | Setting | 97 |
| VII | The
Point of View in Narrative | 117 |
| VIII | Emphasis in Narrative | 136 |
| IX | The
Epic, the Drama, and the Novel | 153 |
| X | The
Novel, the Novelette, and the Short-story | 168 |
| XI | The
Structure of the Short-story | 184 |
| XII | The
Factor of Style | 201 |
| | Index | 221 |
[pg ix]
INTRODUCTION
I
In our time, in these early years of the twentieth century,
the novel is the prosperous parvenu of literature,
and only a few of those who acknowledge its vogue and
who laud its success take the trouble to recall its humble
beginnings and the miseries of its youth. But like other
parvenus it is still a little uncertain of its position in the
society in which it moves. It is a newcomer in the literary
world; and it has the self-assertiveness and the touchiness
natural to the situation. It brags of its descent,
although its origins are obscure. It has won its way to
the front and it has forced its admission into circles where
it was formerly denied access. It likes to forget that it
was once but little better than an outcast, unworthy
of recognition from those in authority. Perhaps it is
still uneasily conscious that not a few of those who were
born to good society may look at it with cold suspicion
as though it was still on sufferance.
Story-telling has always been popular, of course; and
the desire is deep-rooted in all of us to hear and to tell
some new thing and to tell again something deserving
remembrance. But the novel itself, and the short-story
also, must confess that they have only of late been able
to claim equality with the epic and the lyric, and with
comedy and tragedy, literary forms consecrated by antiquity.
There were nine muses in Greece of old, and
[pg x]
no one of these daughters of Apollo was expected to inspire
the writer of prose-fiction. Whoever had then a
story to tell, which he wished to treat artistically, never
dreamed of expressing it except in the nobler medium
of verse, in the epic, in the idyl, in the drama. Prose
seemed to the Greeks, and even to the Latins who followed
in their footsteps, as fit only for pedestrian purposes.
Even oratory and history were almost rhythmic;
and mere prose was too humble an instrument for those
whom the Muses cherished. The Alexandrian vignettes
of the gentle Theocritus may be regarded as anticipations
of the modern short-story of urban local color; but this
delicate idyllist used verse for the talk of his Tanagra
figurines.
Even when the modern languages entered into the
inheritance of Latin and Greek, verse held to its ancestral
privileges, and the brief tale took the form of the
ballad, and the longer narrative called itself a chanson
de geste. Boccaccio and Rabelais and Cervantes might
win immediate popularity and invite a host of imitators;
but it was long after their time before a tale in prose,
whether short or long, achieved recognition as worthy
of serious critical consideration. In his study of Balzac,
Brunetière recorded the significant fact that no novelist,
who was purely and simply a novelist, was elected to the
French Academy in the first two centuries of its existence.
And the same acute critic, in his "History of Classical
French Literature," pointed out that French novels were
under a cloud of suspicion even so far back as the days
of Erasmus, in 1525. It was many scores of years thereafter
before the self-appointed guardians of French
literature esteemed the novel highly enough to condescend
to discuss it.
[pg xi]
Perhaps this was not altogether a disadvantage. French
tragedy was discussed only too abundantly; and the theorists
laid down rules for it, which were not a little cramping.
Another French critic, M. Le Breton, in his account
of the growth of French prose-fiction in the first half of
the nineteenth century, has asserted that this exemption
from criticism really redounded to the benefit of the
novel, since the despised form was allowed to develop
naturally, spontaneously, free from all the many artificial
restrictions which the dogmatists succeeded in
imposing on tragedy and on comedy, and which resulted
at last in the sterility of the French drama toward the
end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth. While this advantage is undeniable, one may
question whether it was not bought at too great a price
and whether there would not have been a certain profit
for prose-fiction if its practitioners had been kept up to
the mark by a criticism which educated the public to
demand greater care in structure, more logic in the conduct
of events, and stricter veracity 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 and more authors of rich
natural endowment. In English literature especially,
prose-fiction tempted men as unlike as Defoe and Swift,
Richardson and Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, Goldsmith
and Johnson. And a little earlier the eighteenth century
essayists, with Steele and Addison at the head of them,
had developed the art of character-delineation, a development
out of which the novelists were to make their profit.
The influence of the English eighteenth-century essay on
the growth of prose-fiction, not only in the British Isles,
[pg xii]
but also on the continent of Europe, is larger than is
generally admitted. Indeed, there is a sense in which
the successive papers depicting the character and the
deeds of Sir Roger de Coverley may be accepted as the
earliest of serial stories.
But it was only in the nineteenth century that the
novel reached its full expansion and succeeded in winning
recognition as the heir of the epic and the rival of the
drama. This victory was the direct result of the overwhelming
success of the Waverley novels and of the
countless stories written more or less in accordance with
Scott's formula, by Cooper, by Victor Hugo and Dumas,
by Manzoni, and by all the others who followed in their
footsteps in every modern language. Not only born
story-tellers but writers who were by natural gift poets
or dramatists, seized upon the novel as a form in which
they could express themselves freely and by which they
might hope to gain a proper reward in money as well as
in fame. The economic interpretation of literary history
has not received the attention it deserves; and the future
investigator will find a rich field in his researches for the
causes of the expansion of the novel in the nineteenth
century simultaneous with the decline of the drama in
the literature of almost every modern language except
French.
As the nineteenth century drew towards its maturity,
the influence of Balzac reinforced the influence of Scott;
and realism began to assert its right to substitute itself
for romance. The adjustment of character to its appropriate
background, the closer connection of fiction with
the actual facts of life, the focusing of attention on the
normal and the usual rather than on the abnormal and
the exceptional,—all these steps in advance were more
[pg xiii]
easily taken in the freer form of the novel than they could
be in the more restricted formula of the drama; and for
the first time in its history prose-fiction found itself a
pioneer, achieving a solidity of texture which the theater
had not yet been able to attain.
The novel revealed itself at last as a fit instrument for
applied psychology, for the use of those delicate artists
who are interested rather in what character is than in
what it may chance to do. In the earliest fictions, whether
in prose or verse, the hero had been merely a type, little
more than a lay-figure capable of violent attitudes, a
doer of deeds who, as Professor Gummere has explained,
"answered the desire for poetic expression at a time
when an individual is merged in the clan." And as the
realistic writers perfected their art, the more acute readers
began to perceive that the hero who is a doer of deeds
can represent only the earlier stages of culture which we
have long outgrown. This hero came to be recognized
as an anachronism, out of place in a more modern social
organization based on a full appreciation of individuality.
He was too much a type and too little an individual to
satisfy the demands of those who looked to literature as
the mirror of life itself and who had taught themselves
to relish what Lowell terms the "punctilious veracity
which gives to a portrait its whole worth."
Thus it was only in the middle years of the nineteenth
century, after Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert, after
Thackeray and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, that the
novel found out its true field. And yet it was in the
middle years of the seventeenth century that the ideal
to which it was aspiring had been proclaimed frankly by
the forgotten Furetière in the preface to his "Roman
Bourgeois." Furetière lacked the skill and the insight
[pg xiv]
needful for the satisfactory attainment of the standard
he set up,—indeed, the attainment of that standard is
beyond the power of most novelists even now. But
Furetière's declaration of the principles which 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 to appeal were ripe for the advance which he
insisted upon. "I shall tell you," said Furetière, "sincerely
and faithfully, several stories or adventures which
happened to persons who are neither heroes nor heroines,
who will raise no armies and overthrow no kingdoms,
but who will be honest folk of mediocre condition, and
who will quietly make their way. Some of them will be
good-looking and others ugly. Some of them will be
wise and others foolish; and these last, in fact, seem likely
to prove the larger number."
II
The novel had a long road to travel before it became
possible for novelists to approach the ideal that Furetière
proclaimed and before they had acquired the skill needed
to make their readers accept it. And there had also to
be a slow development of our own ideas concerning the
relation of art to life. For one thing, art had been expected
to emphasize a moral; there was even a demand
on the drama to be overtly didactic. Less than a score
of years after Furetière's preface, there was published
an English translation of the Abbé 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
most indispensable Rule of Drammatick Poems is that in
them Virtues always ought to be rewarded, or at least
[pg xv]
commended, in spight of all the Injuries of Fortune; and
that likewise Vices be always punished or at least detested
with Horrour, though they triumph upon the Stage for
that time."
Doctor Johnson was so completely a man of his own
century that he found fault with Shakspere because
Shakspere did not preach, because in the great tragedies
virtue is not always rewarded and vice is not always
punished. Doctor Johnson and the Abbé d'Aubignac
wanted the dramatist to be false to life as we all know it.
Beyond all peradventure the wages of sin is death; and
yet we have all seen the evil-doer dying in the midst of
his devoted family and surrounded by all the external
evidences of worldly success. To insist that virtue shall
be outwardly triumphant at the end of a play or of a novel
is to require the dramatist or the novelist to falsify. It is
to introduce an element of unreality into fiction. It is to
require the story-teller and the playmaker to prove a
thesis that common sense must reject.
Any attempt to require the artist to prove anything is
necessarily cramping. A true representation of life does
not prove one thing only, it proves many things. Life
is large, unlimited, and incessant; and the lessons of the
finest art are those of life itself; they are not single but
multiple. Who can declare what is the single moral contained
in the "Oedipus" of Sophocles, the "Hamlet" of
Shakspere, the "Tartufe" of Molière? No two spectators
of these masterpieces would agree on the special
morals to be isolated; and yet none of them would deny
that the masterpieces are profoundly moral because of
their essential truth. Morality, a specific moral,—this
is what the artist cannot deliberately put into his work,
without destroying its veracity. But morality is also
[pg xvi]
what he cannot leave out if he has striven only to handle
his subject sincerely. Hegel is right when he tells us
that art has its moral,—but the moral depends on him
who draws it. The didactic drama and the novel-with-a-purpose
are necessarily unartistic and unavoidably
unsatisfactory.
This is what the greater artists have always felt; this
is what they have often expressed unhesitatingly. Corneille,
for one, although he was a man of his time, a
creature of the seventeenth century, had the courage to
assert that "the utility of a play is seen in the simple
depicting of vices and virtues, which never fails to be
effective if it is well done and if the traits are so recognizable
that they cannot be confounded or mistaken; virtue
always gets itself loved, however unfortunate, and vice
gets itself hated, even though triumphant." Dryden,
again, a contemporary of d'Aubignac and a predecessor
of Johnson, had a clearer vision than either of them; and
his views are far in advance of theirs. "Delight," he
said, "is the chief if not the only end of poesy," and by
poesy he meant fiction in all its forms; "instruction can
be admitted but in the second place, for poetry only instructs
as it delights." And once more, when we pass
from the seventeenth century of Corneille and Dryden
to the nineteenth century when the novel has asserted
its rivalry with the drama, we find the wise Goethe declaring
to Eckermann the doctrine which is now winning acceptance
everywhere. "If there is a moral in the subject
it will appear, and the poet has nothing to consider but
the effective and artistic treatment of his subject; if he
has as high a soul as Sophocles, his influence will always
be moral, let him do what he will."
A high soul is not given to all writers of fiction, and
[pg xvii]
yet there is an obligation on them all to aspire to the
praise bestowed on Sophocles as one who "saw life steadily
and saw it whole." Even the humblest of story-tellers
ought to feel himself bound, not to preach, not to point
a moral ostentatiously, not to warp the march of events
for the sake of so-called "poetic justice," but to report
life as he knows it, making it neither better nor worse,
to represent it honestly, to tell the truth about it and
nothing but the truth, even if 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 of fiction
have failed to respect. Dickens, for example, is delighted
to reform a character in the twinkling of an eye, transforming
a bad man into a good man over night, and contradicting
all that we know about the permanence of
character.
Other novelists have asked us to admire violent and
unexpected acts of startling self-sacrifice, when a character
is made to take on himself the responsibility for the
delinquency of some other character. They have invited
our approbation for a moral suicide, which is quite
as blameworthy as any physical suicide. With his keen
insight into ethics and with his robust common sense,
Huxley stated the principle which these novelists have
failed to grasp. A man, he tells us, "may refuse to commit
another, but he ought not to allow himself to be believed
worse than he actually is," since this results in "a
loss to the world of moral force which cannot be afforded."
The final test of the fineness of fiction lies in its veracity.
"Romance is the poetry of circumstance," as Stevenson
tells us, and "drama is the poetry of conduct"; we
may be tolerant and easy-going in our acceptance of a
novelist's circumstances, but we ought to be rigorous as
[pg xviii]
regards conduct. As far as the successive happenings
of his story are concerned, the mere incidents, the author
may on occasion ask our indulgence and tax our credulity
a little; but he must not expect us to forgive him for any
violation of the fundamental truths of human nature.
It is this stern veracity, unflinching and inexorable,
which makes "Anna Karénina" one of the noblest works
of art that the nineteenth century devised to the twentieth,
just as it is the absence of this fidelity to the facts of life,
the twisting of character to prove a thesis, which vitiates
the "Kreutzer Sonata," and makes it unworthy of the
great artist in fiction who wrote the earlier work. It is
not too much to say that the development of Tolstoi as a
militant moralist is coincident with his decline as an
artist. He is no longer content to picture life as he sees
it; he insists on preaching. And when he uses his art,
not as an end in itself, but as an instrument to advocate
his own individual theories, although his great gifts are
not taken from him, the result is that his later novels lack
the broad and deep moral effect which gave his earlier
studies of life and character their abiding value.
Stevenson had in him "something of the shorter catechist";
and the Scotch artist in letters, enamored of words
as he was, seized firmly the indispensable law. "The
most influential books, and the truest in their influence,
are works of fiction," he declared. "They do not pin
their reader to a dogma, which he must afterward discover
to be inexact; they do not teach a lesson, which he
must afterward unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange,
they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from
ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintances of others,
and they show us the web of experience not as we can see
it for ourselves, but with a singular change—that monstrous,
[pg xix]
consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck
out. To be so, they must be reasonably true to the
human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn
of instruction." This is well thought and well put, although
many of us might demand that novels should
be more than "reasonably true." But even if Stevenson
was here a little lax in the requirements he 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 best that was in him, set up the same standards
for his fellow-craftsmen in fiction. In his striking discussion
of the responsibility of the novelist, Frank Norris
asserted that the readers of fiction have "a right to the
Truth as they have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness. It is not right that they be exploited
and deceived 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 of religion, 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 any critical code, to expand
as best it could, to find its own way unaided and to work
out its own salvation, the time has now come when it
may profit by a criticism which shall force it to consider
its responsibilities and to appraise its technical resources,
if it is to claim artistic equality with the drama and the
epic. It has won its way to the front; and there are few
[pg xx]
who now question its right to the position it has attained.
There is no denying that in English literature, in the age
of Victoria, the novel established itself as the literary
form most alluring to all men of letters and that it succeeded
to the place held by the essay in the days of Anne
and by the play in the days of Elizabeth.
And like the play and the essay in those earlier times,
the novel now attracts writers who have no great natural
gift for the form. Just as Peele and Greene wrote plays
because play-writing was popular and advantageous, in
spite of their inadequate dramaturgic equipment, and
just as Johnson wrote essays because essay-writing was
popular and advantageous in spite of his deficiency in
the ease and lightness which the essay demands, so Brougham
and Motley and Froude adventured themselves
in fiction. We may even doubt whether George Eliot
was a born story-teller and whether she would not have
been more successful in some other epoch when some
other literary form than the novel had happened to be
in fashion. In France the novel tempted Victor Hugo,
who was essentially a lyric poet, and the elder Dumas,
who was essentially a playwright. There are not lacking
signs of late that the drama is likely in the immediate
future to assert a sharper rivalry with prose-fiction;
and novelists like Mr. Barrie and M. Hervieu have relinquished
the easier narrative for the more difficult and
more dangerous stage-play. But there is no evidence
that the novel is soon to lose its vogue. It has come to
stay; and as the nineteenth century left it to the twentieth
so the twentieth will probably bequeath it to the twenty-first
unimpaired in prosperity.
Perhaps the best evidence of the solidity of its position
is to be found in the critical consideration which it is at
[pg xxi]
last receiving. Histories of fiction in all literatures and
biographies of the novelists in all languages are multiplying
abundantly. We are beginning to take our fiction
seriously and to inquire into its principles. Long ago
Freytag's "Technic of the Drama" was followed by
Spielhagen's "Technic of the Novel," rather Teutonically
philosophic, both of them, and already a little out of date.
Studies of prose-fiction are getting themselves written,
none of them more illuminative than Professor Bliss
Perry's. The novelists themselves are writing about the
art of fiction, as Sir Walter Besant did, and they are asking
what the novel is, as Mr. Marion Crawford has done.
They are beginning to resent the assertion of the loyal
adherents of the drama, that the novel is too loose a form
to call forth the best efforts of the artist, and that a play
demands at least technical skill whereas a novel may be
often the product of unskilled labor.
Questions of all kinds are presenting themselves for
discussion. Has the rise of realism made romance impossible?
Is there a valid distinction between romance
and romanticism? Is the short-story a definite form,
differing from the novel in purpose as well as in length?
What is the best way to tell a story,—in the third person,
as in the epic,—in the first person, as in an autobiography,—or
in letters? Which is of most importance, character
or incident or atmosphere? Is the novel-with-a-purpose
legitimate? Why is it that dramatized novels often fail
in the theater? Ought a novelist to take sides with his
characters and against them, or ought he to suppress his
own opinions and remain impassive, as the dramatist
must? Does a prodigality in the invention of incidents
reveal a greater imagination in the novelist than is required
for the sincere depicting of simple characters in
[pg xxii]
every-day life? Why has the old trick of inserting brief
tales inside a long novel—such as we find in "Don
Quixote" and "Tom Jones" and the "Pickwick Papers"—been
abandoned of late years? How far is a novelist
justified in taking his characters so closely from actual
life that they are recognizable by his readers? What are
the advantages and disadvantages of local color? How
much dialect may a novelist venture to employ? Is the
historical novel really a loftier type of fiction than the
novel of contemporary life? Is it really possible to write
a veracious novel about any other than the novelist's
native land? Why is it that so many of the greater writers
of fiction have brought forth their first novel only after
they had attained to half the allotted threescore years
and ten? Is the scientific spirit going to be helpful or
harmful to the writer of fiction? Which is the finer form
for fiction, a swift and direct telling of the story, with the
concentration of a Greek tragedy, such as we find in the
"Scarlet Letter" and in "Smoke," or an ampler and more
leisurely movement more like that of the Elizabethan
plays, such as 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 of the materials and the
methods of fiction. And the result of these inquiries
cannot fail to be beneficial, both to the writer of fiction
and to the reader of fiction. To the story-teller himself
they will serve as a stimulus and a guide, calling attention
to the technic of his craft and broadening his
knowledge
of the principles of his art. To the idle reader even
they ought to be helpful, because they will force him to
think about the novels he may read and because they
[pg xxiii]
will lead him to be more exacting, to insist more on veracity
in the portrayal of life and to demand more care in the
method of presentation. Every art profits by a wider
understanding of its principles, of its possibilities and of
its limitations, as well as by a more diffused knowledge
of its technic.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
OF FICTION
[pg 1]
CHAPTER I
THE PURPOSE OF FICTION
Before we set out upon a study of the materials
and methods of fiction, we must be certain that we
appreciate the purpose of the art and understand its
relation to the other arts and sciences. The purpose of
fiction is to embody certain truths of human life in a
series of imagined facts. The importance of this purpose
is scarcely ever appreciated by the casual careless reader
of the novels of a season. Although it is commonly
believed that such a reader overestimates the weight of
works of fiction, the opposite is true—he underestimates
it. Every novelist of genuine importance seeks not
merely to divert but also to instruct—to instruct, not
abstractly, like the essayist, but concretely, by presenting
to the reader characters and actions which are true.
For the best fiction, although it deals with the lives of
imaginary people, is no less true than the best history
and biography, which record actual facts of human life;
and it is more true than such careless reports of actual
occurrences as are published in the daily newspapers.
The truth of worthy fiction is evidenced by the honor in
which it has been held in all ages among all races. "You
can't fool all the people all the time"; and if the drama
and the epic and the novel were not true, the human race
would have rejected them many centuries ago. Fiction
has survived, and flourishes to-day, because it is a means
of telling truth.
[pg 2]
It is only in the vocabulary of very careless thinkers
that the words truth and fiction are regarded as antithetic.
A genuine antithesis subsists between the words fact and
fiction; but fact and truth are not synonymous. The
novelist forsakes the realm of fact in order that he may
better tell the truth, and lures the reader away from
actualities in order to present him with realities. It is of
prime importance, in our present study, therefore, that
we should understand at the very outset the relation
between fact and truth, the distinction between the actual
and the real.
A fact is a specific manifestation of a general law: this
general law is the truth because of which that fact has
come to 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: it is a truth that bodies in space
attract each other with a force that varies inversely as the
square of the distance between them. Fact is concrete,
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 our senses is actual; the laws of the
universe as we comprehend them with our understanding
are real.
All human science is an endeavor to discover the truths
which underlie the facts that we perceive: all human
philosophy is an endeavor to understand and to appraise
those truths when once they are discovered: and all human
art is an endeavor to utter them clearly and effectively
when once they are appraised and understood. The
history of man is the history of a constant and continuous
seeking for the truth. Amazed before a universe of facts,
he has striven earnestly to discover the truth which underlies
[pg 3]
them,—striven heroically to understand the large
reality of which the actual is but a sensuously perceptible
embodiment. In the earliest centuries of recorded
thought the search was unmethodical; truth was apprehended,
if at all, by intuition, and announced as dogma:
but in modern centuries certain regular methods have
been devised to guide the search. The modern scientist
begins his work by collecting a large number of apparently
related facts and arranging them in an orderly manner.
He then proceeds to induce from the observation of these
facts an apprehension of the general law that explains
their relation. This hypothesis is then tested in the
light of further facts, until it seems 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.
Accepting many truths from many scientists, the philosopher
compares, reconciles, and correlates them, and
thus builds out of them a structure of belief. But this
structure of belief remains abstract and theoretic in the
mind of the philosopher. It is now the artist's turn.
Accepting the correlated theoretic truths which the
scientist and the philosopher have given him, he endows
them with an imaginative embodiment perceptible to
the senses. He translates them back into concrete
terms; he clothes them in invented facts; he makes them
imaginatively perceptible to a mind native and induced
to actuality; and thus he gives expression to the truth.
This triple process of the scientific discovery, the
philosophic understanding, and the artistic expression of
truth has been explained at length, because every great
writer of fiction must pass through the entire mental
[pg 4]
process. 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 he endeavors to discover,
to understand, and to announce; and in order to complete
his work, he must apply to human life an attention of
thought which is successively scientific, philosophic, and
artistic. He must first observe carefully certain facts of
actual life, study them in the light of extended experience,
and induce from them the general laws which he deems
to be the truths which underlie them. In doing this, he
is a scientist. Next, if he be a great thinker, he will
correlate these truths and build out of them a structure of
belief. In doing this, he is a philosopher. Lastly, he
must create imaginatively such scenes and characters
as will illustrate the truths he has discovered and considered,
and will convey them clearly and effectively to
the minds of his readers. In doing this, he is an artist.
But although this triple mental process (of scientific
discovery, philosophic understanding, and artistic expression)
is experienced in full by every master of fiction,
we find that certain authors are interested most in the
first, or scientific phase of the process, others in the second,
or philosophic phase, and still others in the third, or
artistic phase. Evidently Emile Zola is interested chiefly
in a scientific investigation of the actual facts of life,
George Eliot in a philosophic contemplation of its underlying
truths, and Gabriele D'Annunzio in an artistic
presentation of the dream-world that he imagines.
Washington Irving is mainly an artist, Tolstoi mainly a
philosopher, and Jane Austen mainly a scientifically
accurate observer. Few are the writers, even among the
greatest masters of the art, of whom we feel, as we feel of
[pg 5]
Hawthorne, that the scientist, the philosopher, and the
artist reign over equal precincts of their minds. Hawthorne
the scientist is so thorough, so accurate, and so
precise in his investigations of provincial life that no less
a critic than James Russell Lowell declared the "House
of the Seven Gables" to be "the most valuable contribution
to New England history that has yet been made."
Hawthorne the philosopher is so wise in his understanding
of crime and retribution, so firm in his structure of
belief 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 loving presentation of the beautiful, so masterly both
in structure and in style, that his work, in artistry alone,
is its own excuse for being. Were it not for the confinement
of his fiction—its lack of range and sweep, both in
subject-matter and in attitude of mind,—his work on
this account might be regarded as an illustration of all
that may be great in the threefold process of creation.
Fiction, to borrow a figure from chemical science, is
life distilled. In the author's mind, the actual is first
evaporated to the real, and the real is then condensed to
the imagined. The author first transmutes the concrete
actualities of life into abstract realities; and then he transmutes
these abstract realities into concrete imaginings.
Necessarily, if he has pursued this mental process without
[pg 6]
a fallacy, his imaginings will be true; because they represent
realities, which in turn have been induced from
actualities.
In one of his criticisms of the greatest modern dramatist,
Mr. William Archer has called attention to the fact
that "habitually and instinctively men pay to Ibsen the
compliment (so often paid to Shakespeare) of discussing
certain of his female characters as though they were real
women, living lives apart from the poet's creative intelligence."
[It is evident that Mr. Archer, in saying "real
women," means what is more precisely denoted by the
words "actual women."] Such a compliment is also paid
instinctively to every master of the art of fiction; and the
reason is not hard to understand. If the general laws of
life which the novelist has thought out be true laws, and
if his imaginative embodiment of them be at all points
thoroughly consistent, his characters will be true men
and women in the highest sense. They will not be
actual, but they will be real. The great characters of
fiction—Sir Willoughby Patterne, Tito Melema, D'Artagnan,
Père Grandet, Rosalind, Tartufe, Hamlet,
Ulysses—embody truths of human life that have been
arrived at only after thorough observation of facts and
patient induction from them. Cervantes must have
observed a multitude of dreamers before he learned the
truth of the idealist's character which he has expressed
in Don Quixote. The great people of fiction are typical
of large classes of mankind. They live more truly than
do you and I, because they are made of us and of many
men beside. They have the large reality of general
ideas, which is a truer thing than the actuality of facts.
This is why we know them and think of them as real
people—old acquaintances whom we knew (perhaps)
[pg 7]
before we were born, when (as is conceivable) we lived
with them in Plato's Realm of Ideas. In France, instead
of calling a man a miser, they call him an Harpagon.
We know Rosalind as we know our sweetest summer
love; Hamlet is our elder brother, and understands our
own wavering and faltering.
Instinctively also we regard the great people of fiction
as more real than many of the actual people of a bygone
age whose deeds are chronicled in dusty histories. To
a modern mind, if you conjure with the name of Marcus
Brutus, you will start the spirit of Shakespeare's fictitious
patriot, not of the actual Brutus, of a very different nature,
whose doings are dimly reported by the chroniclers of
Rome. The Richelieu of Dumas père may bear but
slight resemblance to the actual founder of the French
Academy; but he lives for us more really than the Richelieu
of many histories. We know Hamlet even better than
we know Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who in many ways was
like him; even though Amiel has reported himself more
thoroughly than almost any other actual man. We may
go a step further and declare that the actual people of any
age can live in the memory of after ages only when the
facts of their characters and their careers have been
transmuted into a sort of fiction by the minds of creative
historians. Actually, in 1815, there was but one Napoleon;
now there are as many Napoleons as there are
biographies and histories of him. He has been recreated
in one way by one author, in another by another; and you
may take your choice. You may accept the Julius Cæsar
of Mr. Bernard Shaw, or the Julius Cæsar of Thomas
De Quincey. The first is frankly fiction; and the second,
not so frankly, is fiction also,—just as far from actuality
as Shakespeare's adaptation of Plutarch's portraiture.
[pg 8]
One of the most vivid illustrations of how a great
creative mind, honestly seeking to discover, to understand,
and to express the truth concerning actual characters
of the past, necessarily makes fiction of those
characters, is given by Thomas Carlyle in his "Heroes
and Hero-Worship." Here, in Carlyle's method of procedure,
it is easy to discern that threefold process of
creation which is undergone by the fiction-making mind.
An examination of recorded facts concerning Mohammed,
Dante, Luther, or Burns leads him to a discovery and a
formulation of certain abstract truths concerning the
Hero as Prophet, as Poet, as Priest, or as Man of Letters;
and thereafter, in composing his historical studies, he sets
forth only such actual facts as conform with his philosophic
understanding of the truth and will therefore
represent this understanding with the utmost emphasis.
He makes fiction of his heroes, in order most emphatically
to tell the truth about them.
In this way biography and history at their best are
doomed to employ the methods of the art of fiction; and
we can therefore understand without surprise why the
average reader always says of the histories of Francis
Parkman that they read like novels, even though the most
German-minded scientists of history assure us that Parkman
is always faithful to his facts. Facts, to the mind of
this model of historians, were indicative of truths; and
those truths he endeavored to express with faultless art.
Like the best of novelists, he was at once a scientist, a
philosopher, and an artist; and this is not the least of
reasons why his histories will endure. They are as true
as fiction.
Not only do the great characters of fiction convince us
of reality: in the mere events themselves of worthy fiction
[pg 9]
we feel a fitness that makes us know them real. Sentimental
Tommy really did lose that literary competition
because he wasted a full hour searching vainly for the
one right word; Hetty Sorrel really killed her child; and
Mr. Henry must have won that midnight duel with the
Master of Ballantrae, though the latter was the better
swordsman. These incidents conform to truths we
recognize. And not only in the fiction that clings close to
actuality do we feel a sense of truth. We feel it just as
keenly in fairy tales like those of Hans Christian Andersen,
or in the worthiest wonder-legends of an earlier age. We
are told of The Steadfast Tin Soldier that, after he was
melted in the fire, the maid who took away the ashes next
morning found him in the shape of a small tin heart;
and remembering the spangly little ballet-dancer who
fluttered to him like a sylph and was burned up in the
fire with him, we feel a fitness in this little fancy which
opens vistas upon human truth. Mr. Kipling's fable of
"How the Elephant Got His Trunk" is just as true as
his reports of Mrs. Hauksbee. His theory may not conform
with the actual facts of zoological science; but at
any rate it represents a truth which is perhaps more
important for those who have become again like little
children.
Just as we feel by instinct the reality of fiction at its
best, so also with a kindred instinct equally keen we feel
the falsity of fiction when the author lapses from the
truth. Unless his characters act and think at all points
consistently with the laws of their imagined existence,
and unless these laws are in harmony with the laws of
actual life, no amount of sophistication on the part of the
author can make us finally believe his story; and unless
we believe his story, his purpose in writing it will have
[pg 10]
failed. The novelist, who has so many means of telling
truth, has also many means of telling lies. He may be
untruthful in his very theme, if he is lacking in sanity of
outlook upon the things that are. He may be untruthful
in his characterization, if he interferes with his people
after they are once created and attempts to coerce them
to his purposes instead of allowing them to work out their
own destinies. He may be untruthful in his plotting, if
he devises situations arbitrarily for the sake of mere
immediate effect. He may be untruthful in his dialogue,
if he puts into the mouths of his people sentences that
their nature does not demand that they shall speak. He
may be untruthful in his comments on his characters, if
the characters belie the comments in their actions and
their words.
With the sort of fiction that is a tissue of lies, the present
study does not concern itself; but even in the best fiction
we come upon passages of falsity. There is little likelihood,
however, of our being led astray by these: we
revolt instinctively against them with a feeling that may
best be expressed in that famous sentence of Ibsen's
Assessor Brack, "People don't do such things." When
Shakespeare tells us, toward the end of "As you Like It,"
that the wicked Oliver suddenly changed his nature and
won the love of Celia, we know that he is lying. The
scene is not true to the great laws of human life. When
George Eliot, at a loss for a conclusion to "The Mill on
the Floss," tells us that Tom and Maggie Tulliver were
drowned together in a flood, we disbelieve her; just as we
disbelieve Mr. J. M. Barrie when he invents that absurd
accident of Tommy's death. These three instances of
falsity have been selected from authors who know the
truth and almost always tell it; and all three have a certain
[pg 11]
palliation. They come at or near the very end of
lengthy stories. In actual life, of course, there are no
very ends: life exhibits a continuous sequence of causation
stretching on: and since a story has to have an end,
its conclusion must in any case belie a law of nature.
Probably the truth is that Tommy didn't die at all: he is
living still, and always will be living. And since Mr.
Barrie couldn't write forever, he may be pardoned a makeshift
ending that he himself apparently did not believe in.
So also we may forgive that lie of Shakespeare's, since it
contributes to a general truthfulness of good-will at the
conclusion of his story; and as for George Eliot—well,
she had been telling the truth stolidly for many hundred
pages.
But when Charlotte Brontë, in "Jane Eyre," tells us
that Mr. Rochester first said and then repeated the
following sentence, "I am disposed to be gregarious and
communicative to-night," we find it more difficult to
pardon the apparent falsity. In the same chapter, the
author states that Mr. Rochester emitted the following
remark:—"Then, in the first place, do you 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
battled through a varied experience with many men of
many nations, and roamed over half the globe, while you
have lived quietly with one set of people in one house?"
Such writing is inexcusably untrue. We cannot believe
that any human being ever asked a direct question
so elaborately lengthy. People do not talk like that.
As a contrast, let us notice for a moment the poignant
truthfulness of speech in Mr. Rudyard Kipling's story,
"Only a Subaltern." A fever-stricken private says to
[pg 12]
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 and Bobby in
his turn is stricken down, the private suddenly stares in
horror at his bed, and cries, "Oh, my Gawd! It can't
be 'im!" People talk like that.
Arbitrary plotting, as a rule, is of no avail in fiction:
almost always, we know when a story is true and when
it is not. We seldom believe in the long-lost will that is
discovered at last on the back of a decaying picture-canvas;
or in the chance meeting and mutual discovery
of long-separated relatives; or in such accidental circumstances
as the one, for instance, because of which Romeo
fails to receive the message from Friar Laurence. The
incidents of fiction at its best are not only probable but
inevitable: they happen because in the nature of things
they have to happen, and not because the author wants
them to. Similarly, the truest characters of fiction are
so real that even their creator has no power to make them
do what they will not. It has been told of Thackeray
that he grew so to love Colonel Newcome that he wished
ardently that the good man might live happily until the
end. Yet, knowing the circumstances in which the
Colonel was enmeshed, and knowing also the nature of
the people who formed the little circle round about him,
Thackeray realized that his last days would of necessity
be miserable; and realizing this, the author told the bitter
truth, though it cost him many tears.
The careless reader of fiction usually supposes that,
since the novelist invents his characters and incidents, he
can order them always to suit his own desires: but any
honest artist will tell you that his characters often grow
intractable and stubbornly refuse at certain points to
[pg 13]
accept the incidents which he has foreordained for them,
and that at other times they 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 took the bit in their teeth; all at once,
they became detached from the flat paper, they turned
their backs on me and walked off bodily; and from
that time my task was stenographic—it was they who
spoke, it was they who wrote the remainder of the story."
The laws of life, and not the author's will, must finally
decide the destinies of heroes and of heroines. On the
evening of February 3, 1850, just after he had written
the last scene of "The Scarlet Letter," Hawthorne read
it to his wife,—"tried to read it, rather," he wrote the
next day in a letter to his friend, Horatio Bridge, "for my
voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and
down on an ocean as 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 for many months."
Is it not conceivable that, in the "great diversity of emotion"
which the author experienced while bringing his
story to a close, he was tempted more than once to state
that Hester and Dimmesdale escaped upon the Bristol
ship and thereafter expiated their offense in holy and
serviceable lives? But if such a thought occurred to him,
he put it by, knowing that the revelation of the scarlet
letter was inexorably demanded by the highest moral
law.
We are now ready to understand the statement that fiction
at its best is much more true than such careless
reports of actual occurrences as are published in the daily
newspapers. Water that has been distilled is much
[pg 14]
more really H2O than the muddied natural liquid in the
bulb of the retort; and life that has been clarified in the
threefold alembic of the fiction-writer's mind is much
more really life than the clouded and unrealized events
that are reported in daily chronicles of fact. The newspaper
may tell us that a man who left his office in an
apparently normal state of mind went home and shot his
wife: but people don't do such things; and though the
story states an actual occurrence, it does not tell the
truth. The only way in which the reporter could make
this story true would be for him to trace out all the antecedent
causes which led inevitably to the culminating
incident. The incident itself can become true for us
only when we are made to understand it.
Mrs. Isobel Strong, the devoted step-daughter and
amanuensis of Robert Louis Stevenson, once repeated to
the present writer a conversation at Vailima in which the
novelist remarked that whenever, in a story by a friend of
his, he came upon a passage that was notably untrue,
he always suspected that it had been transcribed directly
from actual life. The author had been too sure of the
facts to ask himself in what way they were representative
of the general laws of life. But facts are important to
the careful thinker only as they are significant of truth.
Doubtless an omniscient mind would realize a reason for
every accidental and apparently insignificant occurrence
of actual life. Doubtless, for example, the Universal
Mind must understand why the great musical-director,
Anton Seidl, died suddenly of ptomaine poisoning. But
to a finite mind such occurrences seem unsignificant of
truth; they do not seem to be indicative of a necessary
law. And since the fiction-writer has a finite mind, the
laws of life which he can understand are more restrictedly
[pg 15]
logical than those undiscovered laws of actual life which
pass his understanding. Many a casual occurrence of
the actual world would therefore be inadmissible in the
intellectually-ordered world of fiction. A novelist has no
right to set forth a sequence of events which, in its causes
and effects, he cannot make the reader understand.
We are now touching on a principle which is seldom
appreciated by beginners in the art of fiction. Every
college professor of literary composition who has accused
a student of falsity in some passage of a story that the
student has submitted has been met with the triumphant
but unreasonable answer, "Oh, no, it's true! It happened
to a friend of mine!" And it has then become
necessary for the professor to explain as best he could that
an actual occurrence is not necessarily true for the purposes
of fiction. The imagined facts of a genuinely
worthy story are exhibited merely because they are representative
of some general law of life held securely in the
writer's consciousness. A transcription, therefore, of
actual facts fails of the purposes of fiction unless the
facts in themselves are evidently representative of such a
law. And many things may happen to a friend of ours
without evidencing to a considerate mind any logical
reason why they had to happen.
It is necessary that the student should appreciate the
importance of this principle at the very outset of his
apprenticeship to the art. For it is only by adhering
rigorously to the truth that fiction can survive. In every
period of literature, many clever authors have appeared
who have diverted their contemporaries with ingenious
invention, brilliant incident, unexpected novelty of character,
or alluring eloquence of style, but who have been
discarded and forgotten by succeeding generations merely
[pg 16]
because they failed to tell the truth. Probably in the
whole range of English fiction there is no more skilful
weaver of enthralling plots, no more clever master of invention
or manipulator of suspense, than Wilkie Collins;
but Collins is already discarded and well-nigh forgotten,
because the reading world has found that he exhibited no
truths of genuine importance, but rather sacrificed the
eternal realities of life for mere momentary plausibilities.
Probably, also, there is no artist in French prose more
seductive in his eloquence than René de Chateaubriand;
but his fiction is no longer read, because the world has
found that his sentimentalism was to this extent a sham,—it
was false to the nature of normal human beings.
"Alice in Wonderland" will survive the works of both
these able authors, because of the many and momentous
human truths that look upon us through its drift of
dreams.
The whole question of the morality or immorality of a
work of fiction is a question merely of its truth or falsity.
To appreciate this point, we must first be careful to distinguish
immorality from coarseness. The morality of a
fiction-writer is not dependent on the decency of his
expression. In fact, the history of literature shows that
authors frankly coarse, like Rabelais or Swift for instance,
have rarely or never been immoral; and that the most
immoral books have been written in the most delicate
language. Swift and Rabelais are moral, because they
tell the truth with sanity and vigor: we may object to
certain passages in their writings on esthetic, but not on
ethical, grounds. They may offend our taste; but they
are not likely to lead astray our judgment:—far less
likely than D'Annunzio, for instance, who, although he
never offends the most delicate esthetic taste, sicklies o'er
[pg 17]
with the pale cast of his poetry a sad unsanity of outlook
upon the ultimate deep truths of human life. In the
second place, we must bravely realize that the morality
of a work of fiction has little or no dependence on the
subject that it treats. It is utterly unjust to the novelist
to decide, as many unreasonable readers do, that such a
book as Daudet's "Sapho" must be of necessity immoral
because it exhibits immoral characters in a series of
immoral acts. There is no such thing as an immoral
subject for a novel: in the treatment of the subject, and
only in the treatment, lies the basis for ethical judgment
of the work. The one thing needful in order that a novel
may be moral is that the author shall maintain throughout
his work a sane and healthy insight into the soundness
or unsoundness of the relations between his characters.
He must know when they are right and know when they
are wrong, and must make clear to us the reasons for his
judgment. He cannot be immoral unless he is untrue.
To make us pity his 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 make
us wonder if after all the exception is not greater than
the rule,—in a single word, to lie about his characters:—this
is, for the fiction-writer the one unpardonable sin.
But it is not an easy thing to tell the truth of human life,
and nothing but the truth. The best of fiction-writers
fall to falsehood now and then; and it is only by honest
labor and sincere strife for the ideal that they contrive
in the main to fulfil the purpose of their art. But the
writer of fiction must be not only honest and sincere; he
must be wise as well. Wisdom is the faculty of seeing
through and all around an object of contemplation, and
[pg 18]
understanding totally and at once its relations to all other
objects. This faculty cannot be acquired; it has to be
developed: and it is developed by experience only. Experience
ordinarily requires time; and though, for special
reasons which will be noted later on, most of the great
short-story writers have been young, we are not surprised
to notice that most of the great novelists have been men
mature in years. They have ripened slowly to a realization
of those truths which later they have labored to
impart. Richardson, the father of the modern English
novel, was fifty-one years old when "Pamela" was published;
Scott was forty-three when "Waverley" appeared;
Hawthorne was forty-six when he wrote "The Scarlet
Letter"; Thackeray and George Eliot were well on their
way to the forties when they completed "Vanity Fair"
and "Adam Bede"; and these are the first novels of each
writer.
The young author who aspires to write novels must not
only labor to acquire the technic of his art: it is even more
important that he should so order his life as to grow cunning
in the basic truths of human nature. His first
problem—the problem of acquiring technic—is comparatively
easy. Technic may be learned from books—the
master-works of art in fiction. It may be studied
empirically. The student may observe what the masters
have, and have not, done; and he may puzzle out the
reasons why. And he may perhaps be helped by constructive
critics of fiction in his endeavor to understand
these reasons. But his second problem—the problem
of developing wisdom—is more difficult; and he must
grapple with it without any aid from books. What he
learns of human life, he must learn in his own way,
without extraneous assistance.
[pg 19]
It is easy enough for the student to learn, for instance,
how the great short-stories have been constructed. It is
easy enough for the critic, on the basis of such knowledge,
to formulate empirically the principles of this special art
of narrative. But it is not easy for the student to discover,
or for the critic to suggest, how a man in his early
twenties may develop such a wise insight into human life
as is displayed, for example, in Mr. Kipling's "Without
Benefit of Clergy." A few suggestions may, perhaps, be
offered; but they must be considered merely as suggestions,
and must not be overvalued.
At the outset, it may be noted that the writer of fiction
needs two different endowments of experience:—first,
a broad and general experience of life at large; and second,
a deep and specific experience of that particular phase of
life which he wishes to depict. A general and broad
experience is common to all masters of the art of fiction:
it is in the particular nature of their specific and deep
experience that they differ one from another. Although
in range and sweep of general knowledge Sir Walter
Scott was far more vast than Jane Austen, he confessed
amazement at the depth of her specific knowledge of every-day
English middle-class society. Most of the great
novelists have made, like Jane Austen, a special study
of some particular field. Hawthorne is an authority on
Puritan New England, Thackeray on London high
society, Mr. Henry James on cosmopolitan super-civilization.
It would seem, therefore, that a young author,
while keeping his observation fresh for all experience,
should devote especial notice to experience of some
particular phase of life. But along comes Mr. Rudyard
Kipling, with his world-engirdling knowledge, to jostle
us out of faith in too narrow a focus of attention.
[pg 20]
Experience is of two sorts, extensive and intensive. A
mere glance at the range of Mr. Kipling's subjects would
show us the breadth of his extensive experience: evidently
he has lived in many lands and looked with sympathy
upon the lives of many sorts of people. But in certain
stories, like his "They" for instance, we are arrested
rather by the depth of his intensive experience. "They"
reveals to us an author who not necessarily has roamed
about the world, but who necessarily has felt all phases
of the mother-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-writer than extensive experience: but the
difficulty is that, although the latter may be gained through
the obvious expedients of travel and voluntary association
with many and various types of people, the former can
never be gained through any amount of deliberate and
conscious seeking. The great intensive experiences of
life, like love and friendship, must come unsought if they
are to come at all; and no man can gain a genuine experience
of any joy or sorrow by experimenting purposely
with life. The deep experiences must be watched and
waited for. The author must be ever ready to realize
them when they come: when they knock upon his door,
he must not make the mistake of answering that he is not
at home. But he must not make the contrary mistake of
going out into the highways and hedges to compel them to
come within his gates.
Undoubtedly, very few people are always at home for
every real experience that knocks upon their doors: very
few people, to say the thing more simply, have an experiencing
nature. But great fiction may be written only by
[pg 21]
men of an experiencing nature; and here is a basis for
confession that, after all, fiction-writers are born, not
made. The experiencing nature is difficult to define;
but two of its most evident qualities, at any rate, are a
lively curiosity and a ready sympathy. A combination
of these two qualities gives a man that intensity of interest
in human life which is a condition precedent to his ever
growing to understand it. Curiosity, for instance, is the
most obvious asset in Mr. Kipling's equipment. We did
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
an indefatigable asker of questions. It was only through
a healthy curiosity that he could have acquired the
enormous stores of specific knowledge concerning almost
every walk of life that he has displayed in his successive
volumes. On the other hand, it was obviously through his
vast endowment of sympathy that Dickens was able to
learn so thoroughly all phases of the life of the lowly in
London.
Experience gravitates to the man who is both curious
and sympathetic. The kingdom of adventure is within
us. Just as we create beauty in an object when we look
upon it beautifully, so we create adventure all around us
when we walk the world inwardly aglow with love of life.
Things of interest happened to Robert Louis Stevenson
every day of his existence, because he incorporated the
faculty of being interested in things. In one of his most
glowing essays, "The Lantern-Bearers," he declared
that never an hour of his life had gone dully yet; if it had
[pg 22]
been spent waiting at a railway junction, he had had
some scattering thoughts, he had counted some grains of
memory, compared to which the whole of many romances
seemed but dross. The author who aspires to write
fiction should cultivate the faculty of caring for all things
that come to pass; he should train himself rigorously
never to be bored; he should look upon all life that swims
into his ken with curious and sympathetic eyes, remembering
always that sympathy is a deeper faculty than curiosity:
and because of the profound joy of his interest in life, he
should endeavor humbly to earn that heritage of interest
by developing a thorough understanding of its source.
In this way, perhaps, he may grow aware of certain truths
of life which are materials for fiction. If so, he will have
accomplished the better half of his work: he will have
found something to say.
[pg 23]
CHAPTER II
REALISM AND ROMANCE
Although all writers of fiction who take their work
seriously and do it honestly are at one in their purpose—namely,
to embody certain truths of human life in a
series of imagined facts—they diverge into two contrasted
groups according to their manner of accomplishing
this purpose,—their method of exhibiting the truth.
Consequently we find in practice two contrasted schools
of novelists, which we distinguish by the titles Realistic
and Romantic.
The distinction between realism and romance is fundamental
and deep-seated; for every man, whether consciously
or not, is either a romantic or a realist in the
dominant habit of his thought. The reader who is a
realist by nature will prefer George Eliot to Scott; the
reader who is romantic will rather read Victor Hugo
than Flaubert; and neither taste is better than the other.
Each reader's preference is born with his brain, and has
its origin in his customary processes of thinking. In view
of this fact, it seems strange that no adequate definition
has ever yet been made of the difference between realism
and romance.1 Various superficial explanations have
been offered, it is true; but none of them has been scientific
and satisfactory.
One of the most common of these superficial explanations
[pg 24]
is the one which has been phrased by Mr. F. Marion
Crawford in his little book upon "The Novel: What It
Is":—"The realist proposes to show men what they are;
the romantist (sic) tries to show men what they should
be." The trouble with this distinction is that it utterly
fails to distinguish. Surely all novelists, whether realistic
or romantic, try to show men what they are:—what else
can be their reason for embodying in imagined facts the
truths of human life? Victor Hugo, the romantic, in "Les
Miserables", endeavors just as honestly and earnestly to
show men what they are as does Flaubert, the realist, in
"Madame Bovary." And on the other hand, Thackeray,
the realist, in characters like Henry Esmond and Colonel
Newcome, shows men what they should be just as thoroughly
as the romantic Scott. Indeed, it is hardly possible
to conceive how any novelist, whether romantic or
realistic, could devise a means of showing the one thing
without at the same time showing the other also. Every
important fiction-writer, no matter to which of the two
schools he happens to belong, strives to accomplish, in a
single effort of creation, both of the purposes noted by
Mr. Crawford. He may be realistic 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
in the way he tries to show it.
Again, we have been told that, in their stories, the
romantics dwell mainly upon the element of action, while
the realists are interested chiefly in the element of character.
But this explanation fails many times to fit the
facts: for the great romantic characters, like Leatherstocking,
Don Quixote, Monte Cristo, Claude Frollo, are
just as vividly drawn as the great characters of realism;
[pg 25]
and the great events of realistic novels, like Rawdon
Crawley's discovery of his wife with Lord Steyne, or Adam
Bede's fight with Arthur Donnithorne, are just as thrilling
as the resounding actions of romance. Furthermore, if
we should accept this explanation, we should find ourselves
unable to classify as either realistic or romantic
the very large body of novels in which neither element—of
action or of character—shows any marked preponderance
over the other. Mr. Henry James, in his
genial essay on "The Art of Fiction," has cast a vivid
light on this objection. "There is an old-fashioned distinction,"
he says, "between the novel of character and
the novel of incident which must have cost many a smile to
the intending fabulist who was keen about his work....
What is character but the determination of incident?
What is incident but the illustration of character?... It
is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting
on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it
be not an incident I think it will be hard to say what it is.
At the same time it is an expression of character."
We have been told also that the realists paint the
manners of their own place and time, while the romantics
deal with more remote materials. But this distinction,
likewise, often fails to hold. No stories were ever more
essentially romantic than Stevenson's "New Arabian
Nights," which depict details of London and Parisian
life at the time when the author wrote them; and no novel
is more essentially realistic than "Romola," which carries
us back through many centuries to a medieval city far
away. Thackeray, the realist, in "Henry Esmond" and
its sequel "The Virginians," departed further from his
own time and place than Hawthorne, the romantic, in
"The House of the Seven Gables"; and while the realistic
[pg 26]
Mr. Meredith frequently fares abroad in his stories,
especially to Italy, the romantic Mr. Barrie looks upon
life almost always from his own little window in Thrums.
In his interesting and suggestive "Study of Prose
Fiction," Professor Bliss Perry has devoted a chapter to
realism and another to romance; but he has not succeeded
in defining either term. He has, to be sure, essayed
a negative definition of realism:—"Realistic fiction is
that which does not shrink from the commonplace or
from the unpleasant in its effort to depict things as they
are, life as it is." But we have seen that the effort of all
fiction, whether realistic or romantic, is to depict life as it
really (though not necessarily as it actually) is. Does not
"The Brushwood Boy," although it suggests the super-actual,
set forth a common truth of the most intimate
human relationship, which every lover recognizes as real?
Every great writer of fiction tries, in his own romantic or
realistic way, to "draw the Thing as he sees It for the
God of Things as They Are." We must therefore focus
our attention mainly on the earlier phrases of Professor
Perry's definition. He states that realistic fiction does
not shrink from the commonplace. That depends. The
realism of Jules and Edmond de Goncourt does not, to
be sure; but most assuredly the realism of Mr. Meredith
does. You will find far less shrinking from the commonplace
in many passages of the romantic Fenimore Cooper
than in the pages of Mr. Meredith. Whether or not
realistic fiction shrinks from the unpleasant depends also
on the particular nature of the realist. Zola's realism
certainly does not; Jane Austen's decidedly does. You
will find far less shrinking from the unpleasant, of one
sort, in Poe, of another sort, in Catulle Mendès—both
of them romantics—than in the novels of Jane Austen.
[pg 27]
What is the use, then, of Professor Perry's definition of
realism, since it remains open to so many exceptions?
And in his chapter on romance the critic does not even
attempt to formulate a definition.
We have now examined several of the current explanations
of the difference between romance and realism and
have found that each is wanting. The trouble with all
of them seems to be that they attempt to find a basis for
distinguishing between the two schools of fiction in the
subject-matter, or materials, of the novelist. Does not
the real distinction lie rather in the novelist's attitude
of mind toward his materials, whatever those materials
may be? Surely there is no such thing inherently as a
realistic subject or a romantic subject. The very same
subject may be treated realistically by one novelist and
romantically by another. George Eliot would have built
a realistic novel on the theme of "The Scarlet Letter";
and Hawthorne would have made a romance out of the
materials of "Silas Marner." The whole of human life,
or any part of it, offers materials for romantic and realist
alike. Therefore no distinction between the schools is
possible upon the basis of subject-matter: the real distinction
must be one of method in setting subject-matter
forth. The distinction is not external, but internal; it
dwells in the mind of the novelist; it is a matter for philosophic,
not for literary, investigation.
If we seek within the mental habits of the novelist for a
philosophic distinction between realism and romance, we
shall have to return to a consideration of that threefold
process of the fiction-making mind which was expounded
in the preceding chapter of this book. Scientific discovery,
philosophic understanding, and artistic expression of the
truths of human life are phases of creation common to
[pg 28]
romantics and realists alike; but though the writers of
both schools meet equally upon the central ground of
philosophic understanding, is it not evident that the
realists are most interested in looking backward over the
antecedent ground of scientific discovery, and the romantics
are most interested in looking forward over the subsequent
ground of artistic expression? Suppose, for the
purpose of illustration, that two novelists of equal ability—the
one a realist, the other a romantic—have observed
and studied carefully the same events and characters
of actual life; and suppose further that they agree in
their conception of the truth behind the facts. Suppose
now that each of them writes a novel to embody this conception
of the truth, in which they are agreed. Will not
the realist regard as most important the scientific process
of discovery by means of which he arrived at his conception;
and will he not therefore strive to make that process
clear to the reader by turning back to the point at which
he began his observations and then leading the reader
forward through a similar scientific study of imagined
facts until the reader joins him on the ground of philosophic
understanding? And on the other hand, will not
the romantic regard as most important the artistic process
of embodying his conception; and will he not therefore
be satisfied with any means of embodying it clearly and
effectively, without caring whether or not the imagined
facts which he selects for this purpose are similar to the
actual facts from which he first induced his philosophic
understanding? This thought was apparently in Hawthorne's
mind when, in the preface to "The House of the
Seven Gables," he wrote his well-known distinction
between the Romance and the (realistic) Novel:—
"When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need
[pg 29]
hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude,
both as to its fashion and material, which he would
not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed
to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition
is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely
to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course
of man's experience. The former—while, as a work
of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it
sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the
truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to present
that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the
writer's own choosing or creation."
But Hawthorne's statement, although it covers the
ground, is not succinct and definitive; and if we are to
examine the thesis thoroughly, we had better first state
it in philosophic terms and then elucidate the statement
by explanation and by illustration. So stated, the distinction
is as follows: In setting forth his view of life,
the realist follows the inductive method of presentment, and
the romantic follows the deductive method.
The distinction between inductive and deductive
processes of thinking is very simple and is known to all:
it is based upon the direction of the train of thought.
When we think inductively, we reason from the particular
to the general; and when we think deductively, the process
proceeds in the reverse direction and we reason from the
general to the particular. In our ordinary conversation,
we speak inductively when we first mention a number of
specific facts and then draw from them some general
inference; and we speak deductively when we first express
a general opinion and then elucidate it by adducing
specific illustrations. That old dichotomy of the psychologists
which divides all men, according to their habits
[pg 30]
of thought, into Platonists and Aristotelians (or, to substitute
a modern nomenclature, into Cartesians and
Baconians) is merely an assertion that every man, in the
prevailing direction of his thinking, is either deductive
or inductive. Most of the great ethical philosophers
have had inductive minds: from the basis of admitted
facts of experience they have reasoned out their laws of
conduct. Most of the great religious teachers have had
deductive minds: from the basis of certain sublime assumptions
they have asserted their commandments. Most of
the great scientists have thought inductively: they have
reasoned from specific facts to general truths, as Newton
reasoned from the fall of an apple to the law of gravitation.
Most of the great poets have thought deductively:
they have reasoned from general truths to specific facts,
as Dante reasoned from a general moral conception of
cosmogony to the particular appropriate details of every
circle in hell and purgatory and paradise. Now is not the
thesis tenable that it is in just this way that realism differs
from romance? In their endeavor to exhibit certain
truths of human life, do not the realists work inductively
and the romantics deductively?
In order to bring to our knowledge the law of life which
he wishes to make clear, the realist first leads us through
a series of imagined facts as similar as possible to the
details of actual life which he studied in order to arrive
at his general conception. He elaborately imitates the
facts of actual life, so that he may say to us finally, "This
is the sort of thing that I have seen in the world, and from
this I have learned the truth I have to tell you." He leads
us step by step from the particular to the general, until we
gradually grow aware of the truths he wishes to express.
And in the end, we have not only grown acquainted with
[pg 31]
these truths, but have also been made familiar with every
step in the process of thought by which the author himself
became aware of them. "Adam Bede" tells us not
only what George Eliot knew of life, but also how she
came to learn it.
But the romantic novelist leads us in the contrary
direction—namely, from the general to the particular.
He does not attempt to show us how he arrived at his
general conception. His only care is to convey his general
idea effectively by giving it a specific illustrative embodiment.
He feels no obligation to make the imagined facts
of his story resemble closely the details of actual life; he
is anxious only that they shall represent his idea adequately
and consistently. Stevenson knew that man has
a dual nature, and that the evil in him, when pampered,
will gradually gain the upper hand over the good. In his
story of the "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,"
he did not attempt to set forth this truth inductively,
showing us the kind of facts from the observation of which
he had drawn this conclusion. He merely gave his
thought an illustrative embodiment, by conceiving a dual
character in which a man's uglier self should have a
separate incarnation. He constructed his tale deductively:
beginning with a general conception, he reduced it to
particular terms. "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is, of
course, a thoroughly true story, even though its incidents
are contrary to the actual facts of life. It is just as real
as a realistic novel; but in order to make it so, its author,
because he was working deductively, was not obliged to
imitate the details of actual life which he had studied.
"I have learned something in the world," he says to us:
"Here is a fable that will make it clear to you."
This philosophic distinction between the methods of
[pg 32]
romance and realism shows two manifest advantages over
all the other attempts at a distinction which have been
examined in this chapter: first, it really does distinguish;
and secondly, it will be found in every case to fit the
facts. Furthermore, it is supported in an overwhelming
manner by the history of human thought. Every student
of philosophy will tell you that the world's thought was
prevailingly deductive till the days of Francis Bacon.
Bacon was the first philosopher to insist that induction,
rather than deduction, was the most effective method of
searching for the truth. Science, which is based upon
induction, was in its infancy when Bacon taught: since
then it has matured, largely because he and his successors
in philosophy pointed 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 ancient and the
medieval mind. Now, if we turn to the history of fiction,
we shall notice the significant fact that realism is a strictly
modern product. All fiction was romantic till the days
of Bacon. Realism is contemporaneous with modern
science and the other applications of inductive thought.
Romance survives, of course; but it has lost the undisputed
empery of fiction which it held in ancient and in medieval
times. If Bacon had written fiction, he would have been
a realist—the first realist in the history of literature; and
this is the only reply that is necessary to those who still
maintain (if any do) that he was capable of writing the
romantic plays of Shakespeare.
If it be granted now that the realist, by induction, leads
his reader up from a consideration of imagined facts to a
comprehension of truth, and that the romantic, by deduction,
leads his reader down from an apprehension of truth
[pg 33]
to a consideration of imagined facts, we may next examine
certain advantages and disadvantages of each method in
comparison with the other.
In the first place, we notice that, while the imagined
facts of the romantic are selected merely to illustrate the
truth he wishes to convey, the imagined facts of the realist
are selected not only to illustrate, but also to support, the
truth that lies inherent in them. The realist, then, has
this advantage over the romantic in his method of expressing
truth: he has the opportunity to prove his case by
presenting the evidence on which his truth is based.
It is therefore less difficult for him to conquer credence
from a skeptical and wary reader: and we must remember
always that even though a story tells the truth, it is still
a failure unless it gets that truth believed. The romantic
necessarily demands a deeper faith in his wisdom than the
realist need ask for; and he can evoke deep faith only by
absolute sincerity and utter clearness in the presentation
of his fable. Unless the reader of "The Brushwood Boy"
and "They" has absolute faith that Mr. Kipling knows
the truth of his themes, the stories are reduced to nonsense;
for they present no evidence (through running parallel
to actuality) which proves that the author does know the
truth. Unless the reader has faith that Stevenson deeply
understands the nature of remorse, the conversation
between Markheim and his ghostly visitant becomes
incredible and vain. The author gives himself no opportunity
to prove (through analogy with actual experience)
that such a colloquy consistently presents the inner truth
of conscience.
But this great advantage of the realist—that he supports
his theme with evidence—carries with it an attendant
disadvantage. Since he lays his evidence bare before
[pg 34]
the reader, he makes it simpler for the reader to detect
him in a lie. The romantic says, "These things are so,
because I know they are"; and unless we reject him at
once and in entirety as a colossal liar, we are almost
doomed to take his word in the big moments of his story.
But the realist says, "These things are so, because they
are supported by actual facts similar to the imagined
facts in which I clothe them"; and we may answer at any
point in the story, "Not at all! On the very basis of the
facts you show us, we know better than to take your
word." In other words, when the reader disbelieves a
romance, he does so by instinct, without necessarily knowing
why; but when he disbelieves a realistic novel, he does
so by logic, with the evidence before him.
A great romantic, therefore, must have the wisdom that
convinces by its very presence and conquers credence
through the reader's intuition. Who could disbelieve
the author of "The Scarlet Letter"? We do not need to
see his evidence in order to know that he knows. A great
realist, on the other hand, while he need not have the
triumphant and engaging mental personality necessary to
a great romantic, must have a thorough and complete
equipment of evidence discerned from observation of the
actual. He must have eyes and ears, though he need
not have a soul.
A novelist of realistic bent is, therefore, almost doomed
to confine his fiction to his own place and time. In no
other period or nation can he be so certain of his evidence.
We know the enormous labor with which George Eliot
amassed the materials for "Romola," a realistic study of
Florence during the Renaissance; but though we recognize
the work as that of a thorough student, the details
still fail to convince us as do the details of her studies of
[pg 35]
contemporary Warwickshire. The young aspirant to the
art of fiction who knows himself to be an incipient realist
had therefore best confine his efforts to attempted reproduction
of the life he sees about him. He had better
accept the common-sensible advice which the late Sir
Walter Besant gave in his lecture on "The Art of Fiction":
"A young lady brought up in a quiet country village
should avoid descriptions of garrison life; a writer whose
friends and personal experiences belong to what we call
the lower middle class should carefully avoid introducing
his characters into society; a South-countryman would
hesitate before attempting to reproduce the North-country
accent. This is a very simple rule, but one to which
there should be no exception—never to go beyond your
own experience."
The incipient realist is almost obliged to accept this
advice; but the incipient romantic need not necessarily do
so. That final injunction of Besant's—"never to go
beyond your own experience"—seems somewhat stultifying
to the imagination; and there is a great deal of
very wise suggestion in Mr. Henry James' reply to it:
"What kind of experience is intended, and where does it
begin and end?... The young lady living in a village has
only to be a damsel upon 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 the military. Greater
miracles have been seen than that, imagination assisting,
she should speak the truth about some of these gentlemen."
The romantic "upon whom nothing is lost," may,
"imagination assisting," project his truth into some other
region of experience than those which he has actually
observed. Edgar Allan Poe is indubitably one of the great
masters of the art of fiction; but there is nothing in any
[pg 36]
of his stories to indicate that he was born in Boston, lived
in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York, and died in
Baltimore. "The Assignation" indicates that he had
lived in Venice,—where, in fact, he had never been;
others of his stories have the atmosphere of other times
and lands; and most of them pass in a dream-world of his
own creation, "out of space, out of time."
So long as the romantic is sure of his truth and certain
of his power to convince the reader, he need not support
his truth by an accumulation of evidence imitated from
the actual life he has observed. But on the other hand,
there is nothing to prevent his doing so; and unless he be
very headstrong,—so headstrong as to be almost unreliable,—he
will be extremely chary of his freedom.
He will not subvert the actual unless there is no other
equally effective means of conveying the truth he has to
tell. Many times a close adherence to actuality is as
advisable for the deductive author as it is for the inductive;
many times the romantic writer gains as much as
the realist by confining his fiction to his own environment
of time and place. Scott, after all, was less successful
with his medieval kings and knights than with his homely
and simple Scottish characters. Hawthorne, in "The
Marble Faun," lost a certain completeness of effect
by stepping off his own New England shadow. "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
plausibility by setting it in contemporary London.
More and more, in recent years, the romantics
have followed the lead of the realists in embodying their
truth in scenes and characters imitated from actuality.
The early stories of the thoroughly romantic Mr. Kipling
[pg 37]
were set in his own country, India, and in his own time;
and it was not until his actual experience had broadened to
other lands, that, to any great extent, his subjects broadened
geographically. In his stories of his own people,
Mr. Kipling just as faithfully portrays the every-day
existence he has actually observed as any realist. His
method is romantic always: he deduces his details from
his theme, instead of inducing his theme from his details.
He is entirely romantic in the direction of his thought;
but it is very suggestive of the tenor of contemporary
romance, to notice that he has taken the advice of the
realists and seldom gone beyond his own experience.
The range of romance is therefore far wider than the
range of realism; for all that may be treated realistically
may be treated romantically also, and much else that
may be treated romantically is hardly susceptible of realistic
treatment. Granted that a romantic have truths
enough in his head, there is scarcely any limit to the
stories he may deduce from them; while, on the other
hand, the work of the inductive novelist is limited by the
limits of his premises. But the greater freedom of romance
is attended by a more difficult responsibility. If it be
easier for the romantic to tell the truth, because he has
more ways of telling it, it is surely harder for him to tell
nothing but the truth. More often than the realist he is
tempted to assert uncertainties—tempted to say with
vividness and charm things of which he cannot quite be
sure.
But whatever may be the comparative advantages and
disadvantages of each method of exhibiting the truth,
it is absolutely certain that either method of presentment
is natural and logical; and hence all criticism that aims
to exalt romance above realism, or realism above romance,
[pg 38]
must be forever futile. Guy de Maupassant, in his
valuable preface to "Pierre et Jean," has spoken very
wisely on this point. The ideal critic, he says, should
demand of the artist merely to "create something beautiful,
in the form most convenient to him, according to his
temperament." And he states further:—"The critic
should appraise the result only according to the nature
of the effort.... He should admit with an equal interest
the contrasted theories of art, and judge the works resultant
from them only from the standpoint of their artistic
worth, accepting a priori the general ideas from which
they owe their origin. To contest the right of an author
to make a romantic or a realistic work is to wish to force
him to modify his temperament, refuse to recognize his
originality, and not permit him to employ the eye and
the intellect which nature has given him. Let us allow
him the liberty to understand, to observe, and to conceive
in whatever way he wishes, provided that he be an
artist."
Surely this is the only sane view of the situation. Therefore,
when Mr. W. D. Howells, in his dexterous little book
on "Criticism and Fiction," pleads engagingly for realism
as the only valid method for the modern novelist, and
when Stevenson, in many an alluring essay, blows blasts
upon the trumpet of romance, and challenges the realists
to show excuse for their existence, each is fighting an
unnecessary battle, since each is at the same time right
and wrong. Each is right in asserting the value of his
own method, and wrong in denying the value of the
other's. The minds of men have always moved in two
directions, and always will; and as long as men shall
write, we shall have, and ought to have, both inductive
and deductive fiction.
[pg 39]
Neither of the two methods is truer than the other; and
both are great when they are well employed. Each, however,
lends itself to certain abuses which it will be well for
us to notice briefly. The realist, on the one hand, in his
careful imitation of actual life, may grow near-sighted and
come to value facts for their own sake, forgetting that his
primary purpose in setting them forth should be to lead
us to understand the truths which underlie them. More
and more, as the realist advances in technic and gains in
ability to represent the actual, he is tempted to make
photographs of life instead of pictures. A picture differs
from a photograph mainly in its artistic repression of the
unsignificant; it exhibits life more truly because it focuses
attention on essentials. But any novel that dwells sedulously
upon non-essentials and exalts the unsignificant
obscures the truth. This is the fallacy of the photographic
method; and from this fallacy arise the tedious minuteness
of George Eliot in her more pedestrian moments, the
interminable tea-cups of Anthony Trollope, and the
mire of the imitators of Zola. Realism latterly, especially
in France, has shown a tendency to degenerate into so-called
"naturalism," a method of art which casts the unnatural
emphasis of photographic reproduction upon
phases of actual life which are base in themselves and
unsignificant of the eternal instinct which leads men more
naturally to look upward at the stars than downward at
the mud. The "naturalistic" writers are deceived in
thinking that they represent life as it really is. If their
thesis were true, the human race would have dwindled to
extinction long ago. Surely a photograph of a slattern
in the gutter is no more natural than a picture of Rosalind
in the Forest of Arden; and no accuracy of imitated
actuality can make it more significant of truth.
[pg 40]
The romantic, on the other hand, because he works
with greater freedom than the realist, may overleap himself
and express in a loose fashion general conceptions
which are hasty and devoid of truth. To this defect is
owing the vast deal of rubbish which has been foisted on
us recently by feeble imitators of Scott and Dumas père,—imitators
who have assumed the trappings and the
suits of the accredited masters of romance, but have not
inherited their clarity of vision into the inner truth of
things that are. To such degenerate romance, Professor
Brander Matthews has applied the term "romanticism";
and though his use of the term itself may be considered a
little too special for general currency, no exception can be
taken to the distinction which he enforces in the following
paragraph. "The Romantic calls up the idea of something
primary, spontaneous, and perhaps medieval, while
the Romanticist suggests something secondary, conscious,
and of recent fabrication. Romance, like many another
thing of beauty, is very rare; but Romanticism is common
enough nowadays. The truly Romantic is difficult to
achieve; but the artificial Romanticist is so easy as to be
scarce worth the attempting. The Romantic is ever
young, ever fresh, ever delightful; but the Romanticist
is stale and second-hand and unendurable. Romance
is never in danger of growing old, for it deals with the
spirit of man without regard to times and seasons; but
Romanticism gets out of date with every twist of the
kaleidoscope of literary fashion. The Romantic is eternally
and essentially true, but the Romanticist is inevitably
false. Romance is sterling, but Romanticism is
shoddy."
But the Scylla and the Charybdis of fiction-writing may
both be avoided. The realists gain nothing by hooting
[pg 41]
at the abuses of romance; and the romantics gain as little
by yawning over realism at its worst. "The conditions"—to
use a phrase of Emerson's—"are hard but equal":
and at their best, the realist, working inductively, and the
romantic, working deductively, are equally able to present
the truth of fiction.
[pg 42]
CHAPTER III
THE NATURE OF NARRATIVE
We have now considered the subject-matter of fiction
and also the contrasted attitudes of mind of the two great
schools of fiction-writers toward setting forth that subject-matter.
We must next turn our attention to the
technical methods of presenting the materials of fiction,
and notice in detail the most important devices employed
by all fiction-writers in order to fulfil the purpose of their
art.
Rhetoricians, as everybody 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 of
well-founded contradiction that the natural mood, or
method, of fiction is the first of these,—narration.
Argumentation, for its own sake, has no place in a work
of fiction. There is, to be sure, a type of novel, which is
generally called in English "the novel with a purpose,"
the aim of which is to persuade the reader to accept some
special thesis that the author holds concerning politics,
religion, social ethics, or some other of the phases of life
that are readily open to discussion. But such a novel
usually fails of its purpose if it attempts to accomplish it
by employing the technical devices of argument. It can
best fulfil its purpose by exhibiting indisputable truths
of life, without persuasive comment, ex cathedra, on the
part of the novelist. In vain he argues, denounces, or
[pg 43]
defends, appeals to us or coaxes us, unless his story in
the first place convinces by its very truthfulness. If his
thesis be as incontestable as the author thinks it is, it
can prove itself by narrative alone.
Exposition, for its own sake, is also out of place in fiction.
The aim of exposition is to explain,—an aim
necessarily abstract; but the purpose of fiction is to represent
life,—a purpose necessarily concrete. To discourse
of life in abstract terms is to subvert the natural mood of
art; and the novelist may make his meaning just as
clear by representing life concretely, without a running
commentary of analysis and explanation. Life truly represented
will explain itself. There are, to be sure, a number
of great novelists, of whom George Eliot may be taken
as the type, who frequently halt their story to write an
essay about it. These essays are often instructive in themselves,
but they are not fiction, because they do not embody
their truths in imagined facts of human life. George
Eliot is at one moment properly a novelist, and at the next
moment a discursive expositor. She would be still greater
as a novelist, and a novelist merely, if she could make her
meaning clear without digressing to another art.
Description also, in the most artistic fiction, is used
only as subsidiary and contributive to narration. The
aim of description—which is to suggest the look of
things at a certain characteristic moment—is an aim
necessarily static. But life—which the novelist purposes
to represent—is not static but dynamic. The aim
of description is pictorial: but life does not hold its pictures;
it melts and merges them one into another with
headlong hurrying progression. A novelist who devotes
two successive pages to the description of a landscape or
a person, necessarily makes his story stand still while he
[pg 44]
is doing it, and thereby belies an obvious law of life.
Therefore, as writers of fiction have progressed in art,
they have more and more eliminated description for its
own sake.
Since, then, the natural mood, or method, of fiction is
narration, it is necessary that we should devote especial
study to the nature of narrative. And in a study 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 a very simple definition; and only two words of
it can possibly demand elucidation. These words are
series and event. The word event will be explained fully
in a later section of this chapter: meanwhile it may be
understood loosely as synonymous with happening. Let
us first examine the exact meaning of the word series.
The word series implies much more than the word
succession: it implies a relation not merely chronological
but also logical; and the logical relation it implies is that
of cause and effect. In any section of actual life which
we examine, the events are likely to appear merely in
succession and not in series. One event follows another
immediately in time, but does not seem linked to it immediately
by the law of causation. What you do this morning
does not often necessitate as a logical consequence
what you do this afternoon; and what you do this evening
is not often a logical result of what you have done during
the day. Any transcript from actual life that is not
deliberately arranged and logically patterned is therefore
likely not to be a narrative. A passage from a diary,
for instance, which states events in the order of their
happening but makes no attempt to present them as
links in a chain of causation, is not, technically speaking,
[pg 45]
narrative in method. To illustrate this point, let us open
at random the 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 no right to anything in this world. To
Mr. Evelyn's, where I walked in his garden till he come
from Church, with great pleasure reading Ridley's discourse,
all my way going and coming, upon the Civil and
Ecclesiastical Law. He being come home, he and I
walked together in the garden with mighty pleasure, he
being a very ingenious man; and, the more I know him,
the more I love him. Weary to bed, after having my hair
of my head cut shorter, even close to my skull, for coolness,
it being mighty hot weather."
There is no logical continuity in the worthy diarist's
faithful chronicle of actuality. What occasioned the
weariness with which he went to bed? It could not have
been the company of Mr. Evelyn, whom he loved; it
could hardly have been the volume on the civil and
ecclesiastical law, though its title does suggest the
soporific. Was his strength, like Samson's, shorn away
with the hair of his head; or can it be that that lazy
sermon of Mr. Mills' got in its deadening effects at bed-time?
We notice, at any rate, that the diarist's remarks
need considerable re-arrangement to make them really
narrative.
Yet it is just in this way that commonly event succeeds
event in the daily life of every one. It is only in the great
passionate crises of existence that event treads upon
event in uninterrupted sequence of causation. And here
is the main formal difference between life as it actually
happens and life as it is artistically represented in history,
biography, and fiction. In every art there are two steps:
[pg 46]
first, the selection of essentials, and secondly, the arrangement
of these essentials according to a pattern. In the
art of narration, events are first selected because they
suggest an essential logical relation to each other; and they
are then arranged along the lines of a pattern of causation.
Let us compare with the haphazard passage from Pepys
a bit of narrative that is artistically patterned. Here
is the conclusion to Stevenson's story of "Markheim."
The hero, having slain a dealer in his shop on Christmas
day, spends a long time alone, ransacking the dealer's
effects and listening to the voice of conscience. He is
interrupted by a ringing of the door-bell. The dealer's
maid has returned from holidaying.—
"He opened the door and went downstairs very slowly,
thinking to himself. 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 of defeat. Life,
as he thus reviewed it, tempted him no longer; but on the
further side he perceived a quiet haven for his bark. He
paused in the passage, and looked into the shop, where
the candle still burned by the dead body. It was strangely
silent. Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind as
he stood gazing. And then the bell once more broke
out into impatient clamor.
"He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something
like a smile.
"'You had better go for the police,' said he: 'I have
killed your master.'"
The last sentence of this passage is an effect which is
logically led up to by many causes that are rapidly reviewed
in the preceding sentences. Stevenson has here
patterned a passage of life along lines of causation; he has
employed the logical method of narration: but Pepys, in
[pg 47]
the selection quoted, looked upon events with no narrative
sense whatever.
The narrative sense is, primarily, an ability to trace an
event back to its logical causes and to look forward to its
logical effects. It is the sense through which we realize,
for instance, that what happened at two o'clock to-day,
although it may not have resulted necessarily from what
happened an hour before, was the logical outcome of
something else that happened at noon on the preceding
Thursday, let us say, and that this in turn was the result
of causes stretching back through many months. A well-developed
narrative sense in looking on at life is very
rare. Every one, of course, is able to refer the headache
of the morning after to the hilarity of the night before;
and even, after some experience, to foresee the headache
at the time of the hilarity: but life, to the casual eye of the
average man, hides in the main the secrets of its series,
and betrays only an illogical succession of events. Minds
cruder than the average see only a jumble of happenings
in the life they look upon, and group them, if at all, by
propinquity in time, rather than by any deeper law of
relation. Such a mind had Dame Quickly, the loquacious
Hostess in Shakespeare's "Henry IV." Consider the
famous speech in which she accuses Falstaff of breach
of promise to marry her:—
"Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet,
sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a
sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week, when
the prince broke thy head for liking his 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, come in then and call me gossip
[pg 48]
Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar; telling
us she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst
desire to eat some; whereby I told thee they were ill for a
green wound? And didst thou not, when she was gone
down stairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity with
such poor people; saying that ere long they should call me
madam? And didst thou not kiss me and bid me fetch
thee thirty shillings? I put thee now to thy book-oath:
deny it, if thou canst."
There are, of course, many deficiencies in Dame
Quickly's mental make-up; but the one for us to notice
here is her utter lack of the narrative sense. She would
never be able to tell a story: because, in the first place,
she could not select from a muddle of events those which
bore an intelligible relation to one another, and in the
second place, she could not arrange them logically instead
of chronologically. She has no sense of series. And
although Dame Quickly's mind is an exaggeration of the
type it represents, the type, in less exaggerated form, is
very common; and everybody will agree that the average
man, who has never taken pains to train himself in narrative,
is not able in his ordinary conversation to tell with
ease a logically connected story.
The better sort of narrative sense is not merely an
abstract intellectual understanding of the relation of cause
and effect subsisting between events often disparate in
time; it is, rather, a concrete feeling of the relation. It is
an intuitive feeling; and, being such, it is possessed instinctively
by certain minds. There are people in the
world who are natural born story-tellers; all of us have
met with them in actual life: and to this class belong the
story-telling giants, like Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo,
Dumas père, Stevenson, and Mr. Kipling. Narrative
[pg 49]
is natural to their minds. They sense events in series;
and a series once started in their imagination propels
itself with hurrying progression. Some novelists, like
Wilkie Collins, have nothing else to recommend them
but this native sense of narrative; but it is a gift that is
not to be despised. Authors with something important
to say about life have need of it, in order that the process
of reading their fiction may be, in Stevenson's phrase,
"absorbing and voluptuous." In the great story-tellers,
there is a sort 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, "the joy of living")
the joy of telling tales. The joy of telling tales which shines
through "Treasure Island" is perhaps the main reason
for the continued popularity of the story. The author
is having such a good time in telling his tale that he gives
us necessarily a good time in reading it.
But many of the novelists who have had great things
to say about human life have been singularly deficient in
this native sense of narrative. George Eliot and Anthony
Trollope, for example, almost never evidence the joy of
telling tales. George Eliot's natural habit of mind was
abstract rather than concrete; she was born an essayist.
But, largely through the influence of George Henry Lewes,
she deliberately decided that fiction was the most effective
medium for expressing her philosophy of life. Thereafter
she strove earnestly to develop that sense of narrative
which, at the outset, was largely lacking in her mind.
To many readers who are not without appreciation of
the importance and profundity of her understanding of
human nature, her stories are wearisome and unalluring,
because she told them with labor, not with ease. She
[pg 50]
does not 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 and serious
of thoughts are communicated best when they are communicated
with the greatest interest.
It could hardly be hoped that a person entirely devoid
of the narrative sense should acquire it by any amount
of labor; but nearly every one possesses it in at least a
rudimentary degree, and any one possessing it at all may
develop it by exercise. A simple and common-sensible
exercise is to seize hold of some event that happens in
our daily lives, and then think back over all the antecedent
events we can remember, until we discern which ones
among them stand in a causal relation to the event we are
considering. Next, if will be well to look forward and
imagine the sort of events which will logically carry on
the series. The great generals of history have won their
most signal victories by an exercise of the narrative sense.
Holding at the moment of planning a campaign the past
and present terms of a logical series of events, they have
imagined forward and foreseen the probable progression
of the series. This may perhaps explain why the great
commanders, like Cæsar and Grant, have written such
able narrative when they have turned to literature.
The young author who is trying to develop his narrative
sense may find unending exercise in the endeavor to
ferret out the various series of events which lie entangled
in the confused and apparently unrelated successions of
incidents which pass before his observation. When he
sees something happen in the street, he will not be satisfied,
like the casual looker-on, merely with that solitary
happening; he will try to find out what other happenings
[pg 51]
led up to it, and again what other happenings must logically
follow from it. When he sees an interesting person
in a street-car, he will wonder where that person has come
from and whither he is going, what he has just done and
what he is about to do; he will look before and after, and
pine for what is not. This exercise is in itself interesting;
and if the result of it be written down, the young author
will gain experience in expression at the same time that
he is developing his sense of narrative.
It remains for us now to consider philosophically the
significance of the word event. Every event has three
elements: the thing that is done, the agents that do it,
and the circumstances of time and place under which it
is done; or, to say the matter in three words,—action,
actors, and setting. Only when all three elements conspire
can something happen. Life suggests to the mind
of a contemplative observer many possible events which
remain unrealized because only one or two of the necessary
three elements are present,—events that are waiting,
like unborn children on the other side of Lethe, until the
necessary conditions shall call them into being. We
observe a man who could do a great thing of a certain sort
if only that sort of thing were demanded to be done at the
time and in the place in which he loiters wasted. We
grow aware of a great thing longing to be done, when
there is no one present who is capable of doing it. We
behold conditions of place and time entirely fitted for a
certain sort of happening; but nothing happens, because
the necessary people are away. "Never the time and the
place and the loved one all together!" sang Robert
Browning; and then he dreamed upon an event which
was waiting to be born,—waiting for the imagined meeting
and marriage of its elements.
[pg 52]
It is the function of the master of creative narrative to
call events into being. He does this by assembling and
marrying the elements without which events cannot
occur. Granted the conception of a character who is
capable of doing certain things, he finds things of that
sort for the character to do; granted a sense of certain
things longing to be done, he finds people who will do them;
or granted the time and the place that seem expectant of
a certain sort of happening, he finds the agents proper
to the setting. There is a conversation of Stevenson's,
covering this point, which has been often quoted. His
biographer, Mr. Graham Balfour, tells us: "Either on
that day or about that time I remember very distinctly
his saying to me: 'There are, so far as I know, three ways,
and three ways only, of writing a story. You may take a
plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a character
and choose incidents and situations to develop it, or lastly—you
must bear with me while I try to make this clear'—(here
he made a gesture with his hand as if he were
trying to shape something and give it outline and form)—'you
may take a certain atmosphere and get action and
persons to express it and realize it. I'll give you an example—"The
Merry Men." There I began with the
feeling of one of those islands on the west coast of Scotland,
and I gradually developed the story to express the
sentiment with 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 by imagining the other two.
Comparatively speaking, there have been very few stories,
like "The Merry Men," in which the author has started
out from a sense of setting; and nearly all of them have
been written recently. The feeling for setting as the
[pg 53]
initial element in narrative hardly dates back further
than the nineteenth century. We may therefore best
consider it in a later and more special chapter, and devote
our attention for the present to the two methods of creating
narrative that have been most often used—that in
which the author has started with the element of action,
and that in which he has started with the element of
character.
Very few of the great masters of narrative have, like
Honoré de Balzac, employed both one and the other
method with equal success: nearly all of them have shown
an habitual mental predilection for the one or for the
other. The elder Dumas, for example, habitually devised
a scheme of action and then selected characters to
fit into his plot; and Mr. George Meredith has habitually
created characters and then devised the elements of action
necessary to exhibit and develop them. Readers, like
the novelists themselves, usually feel a predilection for
one method rather than the other; but surely each
method is natural and reasonable, and it would be unjudicious
for the critic to exalt either of them at the expense
of the other. There is plenty of material in life
to allure a mind of either habit. Certain things that are
done are in themselves so interesting that it matters comparatively
little who is doing them; and certain characters
are in themselves so interesting that it matters comparatively
little what they do. To conceive a potent train of
action and thereby foreordain the nature of such characters
as will accomplish it, or to conceive characters pregnant
with potentiality for certain sorts of deeds and thereby
foreordain a train of action,—either is a legitimate
method for planning out a narrative. That method is
best for any author which is most natural for him; he will
[pg 54]
succeed best working in his own way; and that critic is not
catholic who states that either the narrative of action or
the narrative of character is a better type of work than
the other. The truth of human life may be told equally
well by those who sense primarily its element of action
and by those who sense primarily its element of character;
for both elements must finally appear commingled in any
story that is real.
The critic may, however, make a philosophical distinction
between the two methods, in order to lead to a better
understanding of them both. The writers who sense life
primarily as action may be said to work from the outside
in; and those who sense it primarily as character may be
said to work from the inside out. The first method requires
the more objective, and the second the more subjective,
consciousness of life. Of the two, the objective
consciousness of life is (at its weakest) more elementary
and (at its strongest) more elemental than the subjective.
Stevenson, in his "Gossip on Romance," has eloquently
voiced the potency of an objective sense of action as the
initial factor in the development of a narrative. He is
speaking of the spell cast over him by certain books he
read in boyhood. "For my part," he says, "I liked a
story to begin with an old wayside inn where, 'towards
the close of the year 17—,' several gentlemen in three-cocked
hats were playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred
the Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to
windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean proportions
striding along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate.
This was further afield than my home-keeping fancy loved
to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than
the tales that I affected. Give me a highwayman and I
was full to the brim; a Jacobite would do, but the highwayman
[pg 55]
was my favorite dish. I can still hear that merry
clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; night and the
coming of day are still related in my mind with the doings
of John Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words 'post-chaise,'
the 'great north road,' 'ostler,' and 'nag' still
sound in my ears like poetry. One and all, at least, and
each with his particular fancy, we read story-books in
childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but
for some quality of the brute incident."—For the writer
who works from the outside in, it is entirely possible to
develop from "some quality of the brute incident" a
narrative that shall be not only stirring in its propulsion
of events but also profound in its significance of elemental
truth.
The method of working from the inside out—of using
a subjective sense of character as the initial factor in the
development of a narrative—is wonderfully exemplified
in the work of Ivan Turgénieff; and the method is very
clearly explained in Mr. Henry James' intimate essay on
the great Russian master. Mr. James remarks: "The
germ of a story, with him, was never an affair of plot—that
was the last thing he thought of: it was the representation
of certain persons. The first form in which a
tale appeared to him was as the figure of an individual,
or a combination of individuals, whom he wished to see
in action, being sure that such people must do something
very special and interesting. They stood before him
definite, vivid, and he wished to know, and to show, as
much as possible of their nature. The first thing was to
make clear to himself what he did know, to begin with;
and to this end he wrote out a sort of biography of each
of his characters, and everything that they had done and
that had happened to them up to the opening of the story.
[pg 56]
He had their dossier, as the French say, and as the police
has of that of every conspicuous criminal. With this
material in his hand he was able to proceed; the story all
lay in the question, What shall I make them do? He
always made them do things that showed them completely;
but, as he said, the defect of his manner and the reproach
that was made him was his want of 'architecture'—in
other words, of composition. The great thing, of course,
is to have architecture as well as precious material, as
Walter Scott had them, as Balzac had them. If one
reads Turgénieff's stories with the knowledge that they
were composed—or rather that they came into being—in
this way, one can trace the process in every line. Story,
in the conventional sense of the word—a fable constructed,
like Wordsworth's phantom, 'to startle and
waylay'—there is as little as possible. The thing consists
of the motions of a group of selected creatures, which
are not the result of a preconceived action, but a consequence
of the qualities of the actors."—And yet, for the
writer who, like Turgénieff, works from the inside out,
it is entirely possible to develop from "the qualities of the
actors" a train of action that shall be as stirring as it is
significant.
The main principle of narrative to bear in mind is that
action alone, or character alone, is not its proper subject-matter.
The purpose of narrative is to represent events;
and an event occurs only when both character and action,
with contributory setting, are assembled and commingled.
Indeed, in the greatest and most significant events, it is
impossible to decide whether the actor or the action has
the upper hand; it is impossible, in regarding such events,
for the imagination to conceive what is done and who is
doing it as elements divorced. A novelist who has started
[pg 57]
out with either element and has afterward evoked the other
may arrive by imagination at this final complete sense of
an event. The best narratives of action and of character
are indistinguishable, one from another, in their ultimate
result: they differ only in their origin: and the author who
aspires to a mastery of narrative should remember that,
in narrative at its best, character and action and even
setting are one and inseparable.
For the conveniences of study, however, it is well to
examine the elements of narrative one by one; and we shall
therefore devote three separate chapters to a technical
consideration of plot, and characters, and setting.
[pg 58]
CHAPTER IV
PLOT
Robert Louis Stevenson, in his spirited essay entitled
"A Humble Remonstrance," has given very valuable
advice to the writer of narrative. In concluding his
remarks he says, "And as the root of the whole matter,
let him bear in mind that his novel is not a transcript of
life, to be judged by its exactitude; but a simplification
of some side or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant
simplicity. For although, in great men, working
upon great motives, what we observe and admire is often
their complexity, yet underneath appearances the truth
remains unchanged: that simplification was their method,
and that simplicity is their excellence." Indeed, as we
have already noted in passing, simplification is the method
of every art. Every artist, in his own way, simplifies
life: first by selecting essentials from the helter-skelter
of details that life presents to him, and then by arranging
these essentials in accordance with a pattern. And we
have noted also that the method of the artist in narrative
is to select events which bear an essential logical relation
to each other and then to arrange them along the lines
of a pattern of causation.
Of course the prime structural necessity in narrative,
as indeed in every method of discourse, is unity. Unity
in any work of art can be attained only by a definite
decision of the artist as to what he is trying to accomplish,
and by a rigorous focus of attention on his purpose to
[pg 59]
accomplish it,—a focus of attention so rigorous as to
exclude consideration of any matter which does not contribute,
directly or indirectly, to the furtherance of his
aim. The purpose of the artist in narrative is to represent
a series of events—wherein each event stands in a
causal relation, direct or indirect, to its logical predecessor
and its logical successor in the series. Obviously the only
way to attain unity of narrative is to exclude consideration
of any event which does not, directly or indirectly, contribute
to the progress of the series. For this reason,
Stevenson states in his advice to the young writer, from
which we have already quoted: "Let him choose a motive,
whether of character or passion: carefully construct his
plot so that every incident is an illustration of the motive,
and every property employed shall bear to it a near relation
of congruity or contrast; ... and allow neither himself
in the narrative, nor any character in the course of the
dialogue, to utter one sentence that is not part and parcel
of the business of the story or the discussion of the problem
involved. Let him not regret if this shortens his book;
it will be better so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to
lengthen but to bury. Let him not mind if he miss a
thousand qualities, so that he keeps unflaggingly in pursuit
of the one he has chosen." And earlier in the same
essay, he says of the novel: "For the welter of impressions,
all forcible but all discreet, which life presents, it substitutes
a certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed
most feebly represented, but all aiming at the same effect,
all eloquent of the same idea, all chiming together like
consonant notes in music or like the graduated tints in a
good picture. From all its chapters, from all its pages,
from all its sentences, the well-written novel echoes and
re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to this
[pg 60]
must every incident and character contribute; the style
must have been pitched in unison with this; and if there
is anywhere a word that looks another way, the book
would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller
without it."
The only way in which the writer of narrative may
attain the unity that Stevenson has so eloquently pleaded
for is to decide upon a definite objective point, to bear in
mind constantly the culmination of his series of events,
and to value the successive details of his material only in
so far as they contribute, directly or indirectly, to the
progress of the series toward that culmination. To say
the thing more simply, he must see the end of his story
from the beginning and must give the reader always a
sense of rigorous movement toward that end. His narrative,
as a matter of construction, must be finished, before,
as a matter of writing, it is begun. He must know as
definitely as possible all that is to happen and all that is
not to happen in his story before he ventures to represent in
words the very first of his events. He must not, as some
beginners 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 itself during the progress of his composition
does or does not form a logical factor in the series.
The preliminary process of construction may be accomplished
in either of two ways. Authors with synthetic
minds will more naturally reason from causes to effects;
and authors with analytic minds will more naturally
reason from effects to causes. The former will construct
forward through time, the latter backward. Standing at
the outset of a narrative, it is possible to imagine forward
along a series of events until the logical culmination is
[pg 61]
divined; or standing at the culmination, it is possible to
imagine backward along the series to its far-away beginnings.
Thackeray apparently constructed in the former
manner; Guy de Maupassant apparently constructed in
the latter. The latter method—the method of building
backward from the culmination—is perhaps more
efficacious toward the conservation of the strictest unity.
It seems on the whole a little easier to exclude the extraneous
in thinking from effects to causes than in thinking
from causes to effects, because analysis is a stricter and
more focused mood of mind than synthesis.
But in whichever way the process of construction be
accomplished, the best stories are always built before
they are written; and that is the reason why, in reading
them, we feel at every point that we are getting somewhere,
and that the author is leading us step by step
toward a definite culmination. Although, as is usually
the case, we cannot, even midway through the story,
foresee what the culmination is to be, we feel a certain
reassurance in the knowledge that the author has foreseen
it from the start. This feeling is one of the main
sources of interest in reading narrative. In looking on at
life itself, we are baffled by a muddle of events leading
everywhither; their succession is chaotic and lacking in
design; they are not marshaled and processional; and we
have an uncomfortable feeling that no mind but that of
God can foresee their veiled and hidden culminations.
But in reading a narrative arrangement of life, we have a
comfortable sense of order, which comes of our knowledge
that the author knows beforehand whither the events
are tending and can make us understand the sequence
of causation through which they are moving to their ultimate
result. He makes life more interesting by making
[pg 62]
it more intelligible; and he does this mainly by his power
of construction.
The simplest of all structures for a narrative is a straightway
arrangement of events along a single strand of causation.
In such a narrative, the first event is the direct cause
of the second, the second of the third, the third of the
fourth, and so on to the culmination of the series. This
very simple structure is exhibited in many of the tales
which have come down to us from early centuries. It is
frequently employed in the "Gesta Romanorum," and
scarcely less frequently in the "Decameron" of Boccaccio.
It has the advantage of being completely logical and entirely
direct. But we feel, in reading stories so constructed,
that the method of simplification has been carried too far,
and that simplicity has therefore ceased to be an excellence.
Such a story is in this way misrepresentative of
life:—it fails utterly to suggest "the welter of impressions
which life presents," the sudden kaleidoscopic shifts of
actual life from one series of events to another, and the
consequent intricacy and apparent chaos of life's successive
happenings. The structure is too straightforward, too
direct, too unwavering and unhesitant.
The simplest way to introduce the element of hesitance
and wavering, and thereby make the story more truly
suggestive of the intricate variety of life, is to interrupt
the series by the introduction of events whose apparent
tendency is to hinder its progress, and in this way emphasize
the ultimate triumph of the series in attaining its
predestined culmination. Such events are not extraneous;
because, although they tend directly to dispute the progress
of the series, they tend also indirectly to further it through
their failure to arrest it. The events in any skilfully
selected narrative may, therefore, be divided into two
[pg 63]
classes: events direct or positive, and events indirect
or negative. By a direct, or positive, event is meant one
whose immediate tendency is to aid the progress of the
series toward its predetermined objective point; and by
an indirect, or negative, event is meant one whose immediate
tendency is to thwart this predetermined outcome.
It would be an easy matter, for example, in examining
"Pilgrim's Progress," to class as positive those events
which directly further the advance of Christian toward
the Celestial City, and to class as negative those events
whose immediate tendency is to turn him aside from the
straight and narrow path. And yet both classes of events,
positive and negative, make up really only a single series;
because the negative events are conquered one by one
by the preponderant power of the positive events, and
contribute therefore indirectly, through their failure, to
the ultimate attainment of the culmination.
When a straightway arrangement of positive events
along a single strand of causation is varied and emphasized
in this way by the admission of negative events,
whose tendency is to thwart the progress of the series, the
structure may be made very suggestive of that conflict
of forces which we feel to be ever present in actual life.
This structure is exhibited, for example, in Hawthorne's
little tale of "David Swan." The point of the story is
that nothing happens to David; the interest of the story
lies in the events that almost happen to him. The young
man falls asleep at noon-time under the shade of a
clump of maples which cluster around a spring beside
the highroad. Three people, or sets of people, observe
him in his sleep. The first would confer upon him
Wealth, the second Love, the third Death, if he should
waken at the moment. But David Swan sleeps deeply;
[pg 64]
the people pass on; and all that almost happened to
him subsides forever to the region of the might-have-been.
A simple series of this sort, wherein the events proceed,
now directly, now indirectly, along a single logical
line, may be succeeded by another simple series of the
same sort, which in turn may be succeeded by a third,
and so on indefinitely. In this way is constructed the
type of story known as picaresque, because in Spain,
where the type was first developed, the hero was usually
a picaro, or rogue. The narrative expedient in such
stories is merely to select a hero capable of adventure,
to fling him loose into the roaring and tremendous world,
and to let things happen to him one after another. The
most widely known example of the type is not a Spanish
story, but a French,—the "Gil Blas" of Alain René Le
Sage. As soon as Gil Blas arrives at the culmination of
one series of adventures, the author starts him on another.
Each series is complete in itself and distinct from all the
rest; and the structure of the whole book may be likened,
in a homely figure, to a string of sausages. The relation
between the different sections of the story is not organic;
they are merely tied together by the continuance of the
same central character from one to another. Any one
of the sections might be discarded without detriment to
the others; and the order of them might be rearranged.
Plays, as well as novels, have been constructed 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, the audience would not become aware
of any gap in structure. Yet a story built in this straightforward
and successive way may give a vast impression
[pg 65]
of the shifting maze of life. Mr. Kipling's "Kim," which
is picaresque in structure, shows us nearly every aspect
of the labyrinthine life of India. He selects a healthy
and normal, but not a clever, boy, and allows all India
to happen to him. The book is without beginning and
without end; but its very lack of neatness and compactness
of plan contributes to the general impression it gives
of India's immensity.
But a simple series of events arranged along a single
strand of causation, or a succession of several series of
this kind strung along one after the other, may not properly
be called a plot. The word plot signifies a weaving
together; and a weaving together presupposes the co-existence
of more than one strand. The simplest form
of plot, properly so called, is a weaving together of two
distinct series of events; and the simplest way of weaving
them together is by so devising them that, though they
may be widely separate at their beginnings, they progress,
each in its own way, toward a common culmination,—a
single momentous event which stands therefore at the
apex of each series. This event is the knot which ties
together the two strands of causation. Thus, in "Silas
Marner," the culminating event, which is the redemption
of Marner from a misanthropic aloofness from life,
through the influence of Eppie, a child 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 with
Marner, may be traced back to the unmerited wrong
which he suffered in his youth; and the other series, which
concerns itself with Eppie, may be traced back to the
clandestine marriage of Eppie's father, Godfrey Cass.
The initial event of one series has no immediate logical
relation to the initial event of the other; but each series,
[pg 66]
as it progresses, approaches nearer and nearer to the
other, until they meet and blend.
A type of plot more elaborate than this may be devised
by leading up to the culmination along three or more
distinct lines of causation, instead of merely two. In the
"Tale of Two Cities," Sydney Carton's voluntary death
upon the scaffold stands at the apex of several series of
events. And a plot may be still further complicated by
tying the strands together at other points beside the culmination.
In "The Merchant of Venice," the two chief
series of events are firmly knotted in the trial scene, when
Shylock is circumvented by Portia; but they are also
tied together, though less firmly, at the very outset of the
play, when Antonio borrows from Shylock the money
which makes it possible for Bassanio to woo and win the
Lady of Belmont. Furthermore, any event in one of the
main strands of causation may stand at the culmination
of a minor strand, and thus may form a little knot in the
general network of the plot. In the same play, the minor
strand of the elopement of Lorenzo and Jessica attains
its culmination in a scene which stands only midway
along the progress of the two main strands, that of the
bond and that of the caskets, toward their common
result in the defeat of Shylock.
But however intricately woven a plot may be, and however
many minor knots may tie together the various
strands which enter into it, there is almost always one
point of greatest complication, one big knot which ties
together all the strands at once, and stands as the common
culmination of all the series, major and minor. The
story concerns itself chiefly with telling the reader how
the major knot came to be tied; but in a plot of any complexity,
the reader naturally desires to be told how the
[pg 67]
knot became untied again. Therefore this point of
greatest complication, this culmination of all the strands
of causation which are woven in the plot, this objective
point of the entire narrative, is seldom set at the very
end of a story, but usually at a point about three quarters
of the way from the beginning to the end. The first three
quarters of the story, speaking roughly, exhibit the antecedent
causes of the major knot; and the last quarter of
the story exhibits its subsequent effects. A plot, therefore,
in its general aspects, may be figured as a complication
followed by an explication, a tying followed by an
untying, or (to say the 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 distinct series of causes which were quite
separate one from another at the time when the nouement
was begun. For this reason the dénouement shows
usually a more hurried movement than the nouement,—one
event treading on another's heels.
Undoubtedly it was this threefold aspect of a plot—1.
The Complication; 2. The Major Knot; 3. The Explication—which
Aristotle had in mind when he stated
that every story must have a beginning, a middle, and an
end. These words were not intended to connote a quantitative
equality. What Aristotle called the "middle"
may, in a modern novel, be stated in a single page, and
is much more likely to stand near the close of the book
than at the center. But everything that comes after it,
in what Aristotle called the "end," should be an effect of
which it is the cause; and everything that comes before it,
[pg 68]
in what Aristotle called the "beginning," should be,
directly or indirectly, a cause of which it is the effect.
Only under these conditions will the plot be, as Aristotle
said it should be, an organic whole. Only in this way
can it conform to the principle of unity, which is the first
principle of all artistic endeavor.
Bearing the principle of unity ever in his mind, Stevenson,
in a phrase omitted for the moment in one of the
quotations from "A Humble Remonstrance" set forth at
the beginning of this chapter, advised the fiction-writer
to "avoid a sub-plot, unless, as sometimes in Shakespeare,
the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of the main
intrigue." It seems safe to state that a sub-plot is of use
in a novel only for the purpose of tying minor knots in the
leading strands of causation, and should be discarded
unless it serves that purpose. There is no reason, however,
why a novel should not tell at once several stories
of equal importance, provided that these stories be deftly
interlinked, as in that masterpiece of plotting, "Our
Mutual Friend." In this novel, the chief expedient which
Dickens has employed to bind his different stories together
is to make the same person an actor in more than one of
them, so that a particular event that happens to him may
be at the same time a factor in both one and the other
series of events. Through the skilful use of this expedient,
Dickens has contrived to give his novel unity of
plot, in spite of the diversity of its narrative elements.
But on the other hand, in "Middlemarch," George Eliot
has told three stories instead of one. She has failed to
make her plot an organic whole by deftly interweaving
the three strands which she has spun. And therefore
this monumental novel, so great in other ways, is faulty
in structure, because it violates the principle of unity.
[pg 69]
According to the extent of complication in the plot,
novels may be grouped into two classes,—the discursive
and the compacted. Thackeray wrote novels of the
former type, Hawthorne of the latter. In "Vanity Fair"
there are over half a hundred characters; in "The Scarlet
Letter" there are three, or possibly four. The discursive
novel gives a more extensive, and the compacted novel a
more intensive, view of life. English authors for the most
part have tended toward the discursive type, and Continental
authors toward the compacted. The latter type
demands a finer and a firmer art, the former a broader
and more catholic outlook on the world.
The distinction between the two types depends chiefly
upon how much or how little of his entire story the author
chooses to tell. In actual life, as was stated in a former
chapter, there are no very ends; and it may now be added
that also there are no absolute beginnings. Any event
that happens is, in Whitman's words, "an acme of things
accomplished" and "an encloser of things to be"; and in
thinking back along its causes or forward along its effects,
we may continue the series until our thought loses itself
in an eternity. In any narrative, therefore, we are doomed
to begin and end in mid-career; and the question is merely
how extended a section of the entire imaginable and unimaginable
series we shall choose to represent to the
reader. For instance, it would be a very simple 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 of love sonnets if many other poets, such
as Shakespeare and Ronsard, had not done so before him;
and Shakespeare and Ronsard, as Mr. Sidney Lee has
proved, were literary legatees of Petrarch, the aforesaid
[pg 70]
native of Arezzo. And yet, if we were to tell the story of
how Rossetti's sonnets came to be composed, it is doubtful
if we should go further back in time than the occasion
when his friend Deverell introduced him to the beautiful
daughter of a Sheffield cutler who became the immediate
inspiration of his poetry of love.
Dickens, in many novels, of which "David Copperfield"
may be taken as an example, has chosen to tell the entire
life-story of his hero from birth up to maturity. But other
novelists, like Mr. Meredith in "The Egoist," have chosen
to represent events that pass, for the most part, in one
place, and in an exceedingly short stretch of time. It is
by no means certain that Mr. Meredith does not know
as much about the boyhood and youth of Sir Willoughby
Patterne as Dickens knew about the early years of David
Copperfield; but he has chosen to compact his novel by
presenting only a brief series of events which exhibit his
hero at maturity. Surely Turgénieff, after writing out
that dossier of each of his characters to which Mr. Henry
James referred, must have known a great many events in
their lives which he chose to omit from his finished novel.
It is interesting to imagine the sort of plot that George
Eliot would have built out of the materials of "The
Scarlet Letter." Probably she would have begun the
narrative in England at the time when Hester was a young
girl. She would have set forth the meeting of Hester and
Chillingworth and would have analyzed the causes culminating
in their marriage. Then she would have taken
the couple overseas to the colony of Massachusetts.
Here Hester would have met Arthur Dimmesdale; and
George Eliot would have expended all her powers as an
analyist of life in tracing the sweet thoughts and imperious
desires that led the lovers to the dolorous pass. The fall
[pg 71]
of Hester would have been the major knot in George
Eliot's entire narrative. It would have stood at the culmination
of the nouement of her plot: the subsequent
events would have been merely steps in the dénouement.
Yet the fall of Hester was already a thing of the past at the
outset of the story that Hawthorne chose to represent. He
was interested only in the after-effects of Hester's sin upon
herself and her lover and her husband. The major knot,
or culmination, of his plot was therefore the revelation of
the scarlet letter,—a scene which would have been only
an incident in George Eliot's dénouement. It will be seen
from this that any story which is extended in its implications
may offer a novelist materials for any one of several
plot-structures, according to whichever section of the
entire story happens most to interest his mind.
It will be seen, also, that much of the entire story must,
in any case, remain unwritten. A plot is not only, as
Stevenson stated, a simplification of life; it is also a further
simplification of the train of events which, in simplifying
life, the novelist has first imagined. The entire story,
with all its implications, is selected from life; and the plot
is then selected from the entire story. Often a novelist
may suggest as much through deliberately omitting from
his plot certain events in his imagined story as he could
suggest by representing them. Perhaps the most powerful
character in Mr. Meredith's "Evan Harrington" is
the great Mel, whose death is announced in the very first
sentence of the novel. Hawthorne, in "The Marble
Faun," never clears away the mystery of Miriam's shadowy
pursuer, nor tells us what became of Hilda when she
disappeared for a time from the sight and knowledge of
her friends.
After the novelist has selected from his entire story the
[pg 72]
materials he means to represent, and has patterned these
materials into a plot, he enjoys considerable liberty in
regard to the point at which he may commence his narrative.
He may begin at the beginning of one or another
of his main strands of causation, as Scott usually does;
or he may adopt the Homeric device, commended by
Horace, of plunging into the midst of his plot and working
his way back only afterward to its beginning. In the first
chapter of "Pendennis," the hero is seventeen years old;
the second chapter narrates the marriage of his father and
mother, and his own birth and boyhood; and at the outset
of the third chapter he is only sixteen years of age.
It is obvious that, so long as the novelist represents his
events in logical sequence, it is not at all necessary that
he should present them in chronological succession.
Stories may be told backward through time as well as
forward. Thackeray often begins a chapter with an
event that happened one day, and ends it with an event
that happened several days before; he works his way
backward from effects to causes, instead of forward from
causes to effects. In carrying on a plot which is woven
out of several strands, it is hardly ever possible to represent
events in uninterrupted chronological succession,
even when the author consistently works forward from
causes to effects; for after he has pursued one strand of his
plot to a certain point in time, he is obliged to turn backward
several days or weeks, or possibly a longer period,
to pick up another strand and carry it forward to the same
point in time at which he left the first. Retrogression in
time, therefore, is frequently not only permissible but
necessary. But it is only common-sensible to state that
chronological sequence should be sacrificed merely for
the sake of making clear the logical relation of events;
[pg 73]
and whenever juggling with chronology tends to obscure
instead of clarify that logical relation, it is evidence of
an error of judgment on the part of the narrator. Turgénieff
is often guilty of this error of judgment. He has a
disconcerting habit of bringing a new character into the
scene which stands for the moment before the eye of the
reader, and then turning the narrative backward several
years in order to recount the past life of the newcomer.
Frequently, before this parenthetic recital is completed,
the reader has forgotten the scene from which the author
turned to the digression.
In most plots, as has been stated, the nouement is more
significant than the dénouement, and the causes leading
to the tying of the major knot are more interesting than
the effects traced during the process of untying it. This
is the reason why the culmination is usually set well along
toward the conclusion of the story. Sometimes even,
when the major knot has been tied with a Gordian intricacy,
the author sets it at the very end of his narrative,
and suddenly cuts it instead of carefully untying it. But
there is no absolutely necessary reason why it should
stand at the end, or, as is more frequently the case, at a
point about three quarters 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 the
narrative proceeds to exhibit the prowess of the detective-hero
in untying it.
A well-constructed plot, like any other sort of well-articulated
pattern, is interesting in itself; and certain
novels and short-stories, like Wilkie Collins' "Moonstone"
and Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," maintain
[pg 74]
their interest almost through the element of plot
alone. But since the purpose of fiction is to represent
reality, a story will fail of the highest effect unless the
people acting in its pattern of events produce upon the
reader the illusion of living human beings. We must
therefore turn our attention next to a study of the element
of character.
[pg 75]
CHAPTER V
CHARACTERS
Before we proceed to study the technical methods of
delineating characters, we must ask ourselves what constitutes
a character worth delineating. A novelist is, to
speak figuratively, the social sponsor for his own fictitious
characters; and he is guilty of a social indiscretion,
as it were, if he asks his readers to meet fictitious people
whom it is neither of value nor of interest to know. Since
he aims to make his readers intimate with his characters,
he must first of all be careful that his characters are worth
knowing intimately. Most of us, in actual life, are
accustomed to distinguish people who are worth our
while from people who are not; and those of us who live
advisedly are accustomed to shield ourselves from people
who cannot, by the mere fact of what they are, repay us
for the expenditure of time and energy we should have to
make to get to know them. And whenever a friend of
ours asks us deliberately to meet another friend of his,
we take it for granted that our friend has reasons for believing
that the acquaintanceship will be of benefit or of
interest to both. Now the novelist stands in the position
of a friend who asks us to meet certain people whom he
knows; and he runs the risk of our losing faith in his
judgment unless we find his people worth our while.
By the mere fact that we bother to read a novel, thus
expending time which might otherwise be passed in company
with actual people, we are going out of our way to
[pg 76]
meet the characters to whom the novelist wishes to introduce
us. He therefore owes us an assurance that they
shall be even more worth our while than the average
actual person. This is not to say that they should necessarily
be better; they may, of course, be worse: but they
should be more clearly significant of certain interesting
elements of human nature, more thoroughly representative
of certain phases of human life which it is well for
us to learn and know.
In deciding on the sort of characters that will be worth
his readers' while, the novelist must of course be influenced
by the nature of the audience he is writing for.
The characters of "Little Women" may be worth the while
of children; and it is not an adverse criticism of Louisa
M. Alcott to say that they are not worth the while of
mature men and women. Similarly, it is not an adverse
criticism of certain Continental novelists to say that their
characters are decidedly unfit companions for adolescent
girls. Our judgment of the characters in a novel should
be conditioned always by our sense of the sort of readers
to whom the novel is addressed. Mr. Henry James, in
his later years, has written for the super-civilized; and his
characters should be judged by different standards than
the pirates of "Treasure Island,"—a story which was
written for boys, both young and old. One reader may
be bored by pirates, another by super-subtle cosmopolitans;
and each reader has the privilege of avoiding the
society of the characters that weary him.
But the very greatest characters of fiction are worth
everybody's while; and surely the masters need have felt
no hesitancy in asking any one to meet Sancho Panza,
Robinson Crusoe, Henry Esmond, Jean Valjean, or
Terence Mulvaney. In fact, the most amazing thing
[pg 77]
about a great fictitious figure is the multitude of very
different people that the character is capable of interesting.
Many times we willingly absent ourselves from
actual society to pass an evening in the company of a
fictitious personage of a class with which we never associate
in actual life. Perhaps in the actual world we would
never bother to converse with illiterate provincial people;
and yet we may not feel it a waste of time and energy to
meet them in the pages of "Middlemarch." For my own
part, I have always, in actual life, avoided meeting the
sort of people that appear in Thackeray's "Vanity Fair";
and yet I find it not only interesting but profitable to
associate with them through the entire 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
enter the engine-room of a liner, is yet willing enough to
meet on intimate terms Mr. Kipling's engineer, Mac
Andrew? And why is it that ladies who, in actual society,
are fastidious of their acquaintanceship, should yet
associate throughout a novel with the Sapho of Daudet?
What is the reason why these fictitious characters should
seem, for nearly every reader, more worth while than the
very same sort of people in actual life?
The reason is that great fictitious characters are typical
of their class, to an extent rarely to be noticed in any
actual member of the class they typify. They "contain
multitudes," to borrow Whitman's phrase. All idealistic
visionaries are typified in Don Quixote, all misers in
Harpagon, all hypocrites in Tartufe, all egoists in Sir
Willoughby Patterne, all clever tricksy women in Becky
Sharp, all sentimentalists in Mr. Barrie's Tommy. But
the average actual man is not of sufficient magnitude to
contain a multitude of others; he is comparatively lacking
[pg 78]
in typical traits; he is not, to such a great extent, illustrative
of life, because only in a small measure is he
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-century
America; and that is the main reason why, as an exhibition
of character, his autobiography is just as profitable
a book as the master-works of fiction. But men so representative
are rare in actual life; and the chief business of
fiction is therefore to supply them.
It is mainly by supplying this need for representative
men and women that the novelist can make his characters
worth the while of every reader. But after he has made
them quintessential of a class, he must be careful also to
individualize them. Unless he endows them with certain
personal traits that distinguish them from all other representatives
or members of their class, whether actual or
fictitious, he will fail to invest them with the illusion of
reality. Every great character of fiction must exhibit,
therefore, an intimate combination of typical and individual
traits. It is through being typical that the
character is true; it is through being individual that the
character is convincing.
The reason why most allegorical figures are ineffective
is that, although they are typical, they are not at the same
time individual. They are abstractly representative of
a class; but they are not concretely distinguishable from
other representatives or members of the class. We know
them, therefore, not as persons but merely as ideas. We
feel very little human interest nowadays in reading over
the old morality plays, whose characters are merely
[pg 79]
allegorical abstractions. But in criticising them we must
remember that they were designed not so much to be
read as to be performed upon the stage; and that the
actors who represented their abstract and merely typical
characters must necessarily have endowed them with
concreteness and with individuality. Though a character
in one of these allegorical plays might be called "Everyman,"
it was one particular man who walked and talked
upon the boards; and he evoked sympathy not so much
for the type as for the individual. But allegory written
to be read is less likely to produce the illusion of reality;
and it is only when allegorical characters are virtually
conceived as individuals, instead of mere abstractions,
that they touch the heart. Christian, in Bunyan's
"Pilgrim's Progress" is so conceived. He is entirely
representative of seventeenth-century Christianity; in a
sense he is all men of Bunyan's time and Bunyan's religion;
but he is also one man and one only, and we could never
in our thought confuse him with any other character in
or out of fiction.
But just as a character may be ineffective through
being merely typical, so also a character may be unsignificant
through being merely individual. The minor figures
in Ben Jonson's Comedies of Humours are mere personifications
of exaggerated individual traits. They are
caricatures rather than characters. Dickens frequently
commits the error of exhibiting figures devoid of representative
traits. Tommy Traddles is sharply individualized
by the fact that his hair is always standing on end; but
he exhibits no essential truth of human nature. Barkis,
who is always willin', and Micawber, who is always waiting
for something to turn up, are emphatically distinguished
from everybody else in or out of fiction; but they
[pg 80]
lack the large reality of representative characters. They
are individualities instead of individuals. They do not
exhibit an agglomeration of many different but consistent
traits rendered unified and single by a dominant and informing
characteristic, such as ambition in Macbeth,
senility in Lear, or irresoluteness in Hamlet. A great
fictitious character must be at once generic and specific;
it must give concrete expression to an abstract idea; it
must be an individualized representation of the typical
qualities of a class. It is only figures of this sort that are
finally worth while in fiction,—more worth the reader's
while than the average actual man.
But there is yet another reason why it is often more
valuable for the reader to meet fictitious characters than
to meet people of the same class in actual life; and this
reason is that during the day or two it takes to read a
novel he may review the most significant events of many
years, and thus get to know a fictitious character more
completely in a brief space of time than he could get to
know him, if the character were actual, in several years
of continuous acquaintanceship. We meet two sorts of
characters in the pages of the novelists,—characters
which may be called static, and characters which may be
called dynamic. The first remain unchanged throughout
the course of the story: the second grow up or down, as
the case may be, through the influence of circumstances,
of their own wills, or of the wills of other people. The
recurrent characters of Mr. Kipling's early tales, such as
Mrs. Hauksbee, Strickland, Mulvaney, Ortheris, and
Learoyd, are static figures. Although they do different
things in different stories, their characters remain always
the same. But Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are
dynamic figures; they grow and change throughout the
[pg 81]
novel; they are, each in his own way, bigger and wiser
people when we leave them than they were when first
we met them. To show a character developing under
stress or ripening easily beneath beneficent influences is
one of the greatest possibilities of fiction. And to exhibit
the gradual disintegration of a character, as George Eliot
does in the case of Tito Melema, is to teach us more of
the tragedy of life than we might learn in many years of
actual experience.
Only after the process of creation is completed, and a
character stands living in the mind of the novelist, need
he consider the various technical expedients which may
be employed to make the reader conscious of the character
as a personal presence. These technical expedients are
many; but they may all be grouped as phases of one or
the other of two contrasted methods of delineating character,
which may be called, for convenience, direct and indirect.
According to the first method, traits of character
are conveyed directly to the reader through some sort of
statement by the writer of the story: according to the
second method, characteristics are conveyed indirectly
to the reader through a necessary inference, on his part,
from the narrative itself. In employing the first, or
direct, method, the author (either in his own person or in
that of some character which he assumes) stands between
the reader and the character he is portraying, in the attitude,
more or less frankly confessed, of showman or
expositor. In employing the second, or indirect, method,
the author seeks to obliterate himself as much as possible
from the reader's consciousness; and having brought the
reader face to face with the character he desires to portray,
leaves the reader to make his own acquaintance
with the character. The indirect method is of course
[pg 82]
more difficult, and, when successfully employed, is more
artistic, than the direct method. But seldom is either
used to the exclusion of the other; and it would be possible
to illustrate by successive quotations from any first-rate
novel, like "The Egoist" for example, how the same
characteristics are portrayed first by the one and then by
the other method.
And each of the two methods shows itself in many
different phases. There are several distinct ways of
delineating character directly, and also several distinct
means of indirect delineation. It is perhaps serviceable
for the purposes of study to distinguish them somewhat
sharply one from another; but it must always be remembered
that the masters of fiction usually employ a commingling
of them all, without conscious awareness of any
critical distinction between them. Bearing this ever in
mind, let us venture on a critical examination of some of
the most frequently recurrent phases, first, of the direct,
and secondly, of the indirect method.
The most obvious, and at the same time the most elementary,
means of direct portrayal is by a deliberate
expository statement of the leading traits of the character
to be portrayed. Thus, at the outset of "The Vicar of
Wakefield," the author, writing in the person of the Vicar,
thus expounds the traits of Mrs. Primrose:—
"I was ever of opinion, that the honest man who married
and brought up a large family, did more service than he
who continued single, and only talked of population.
From this motive, I had scarce taken orders a year before
I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my
wife as she did her wedding-gown, not for a fine glossy
surface, but such qualities as would wear well. To do
her justice, she was a good-natured notable woman; and
[pg 83]
as for breeding, there were few country ladies who could
show more. She could read any English book without
much spelling; but for pickling, preserving, and cookery,
none could excel her. She prided herself also upon
being an excellent contriver in housekeeping; though I
could never find that we grew richer with all her contrivances."
This elementary means of portrayal has the obvious
advantage of succinctness. The reader is told at once,
and with a fair measure of completeness, what he is to
think about the character in question. For this reason
the expedient is highly serviceable at the outset of a story.
So excellent an artist as Stevenson, in the "New Arabian
Nights," began each tale in the collection with a paragraph
in which he expounded the main traits of the
leading character. But the expedient has also several disadvantages.
In the first place, being expository, it is not
narrative in mood; it savors of the essay rather than the
story; and if it be used not at the outset but during the
course of a narrative, it halts the progress of the action.
In the second place, it is abstract rather than concrete;
it does not bring the reader into the presence of a character,
but merely into the presence of an explanation; and it
leaves the reader in an attitude exactly like that which he
holds toward certain actual people, concerning whom
he has been told a great deal by their friends, but whom
he has never met himself. The whole first chapter of
"The Vicar of Wakefield" is a series of little essays on
the various members of the Primrose family. Nothing
happens in the chapter; the characters never step bodily
into view; and we feel at the end that we have heard a
great deal of talk about people whom we should like to
meet but whom as yet we have not seen.
[pg 84]
It is therefore in certain ways more satisfactory 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 over a very low fence of white cravat (whereof
no man had ever beheld the tie, for he fastened it behind),
and there it lay, a valley between two jutting heights of
collar, serene and whiskerless before you. It seemed to
say, on the part of Mr. Pecksniff, 'There is no deception,
ladies and gentlemen, all is peace, a holy calm pervades
me.' So did his hair, just grizzled with an iron-gray,
which was all brushed off his forehead, and stood bolt
upright, or slightly drooped in kindred action with his
heavy eyelids. So did his person, which was sleek though
free from corpulency. So did his manner, which was soft
and oily. In a word, even his plain black suit, and state
of widower, and dangling double eye-glass, all tended to
the same purpose, and cried aloud, 'Behold the moral
Pecksniff!'"
This statement, being in the main concretely descriptive
rather than abstractly expository, brings us face to
face with the character at the same time that it tells us
what to think of him. And whereas we feel that we have
merely heard about Mrs. Primrose, we feel that we have
really seen Mr. Pecksniff.
It was the custom of Sir Walter Scott, at the introduction
of a character, to furnish the reader with an elaborate
set portrayal, partly expository and partly descriptive
of the traits and features of the character; and to allow
this initial direct statement to do duty through the remainder
of the novel. The trouble with this off-hand
[pg 85]
expedient is that the reader inevitably forgets the set statement
of the author before the narrative has very far
progressed. It is therefore more effective to make a
direct portrayal of character, whether expository or descriptive,
little by little rather than all in a lump; and to
present at any one time to the reader only such traits or
features as he needs to be reminded of in order to appreciate
the scene before him. Thus, in Mr. Kipling's
masterpiece, called "They," we catch this initial glimpse
of Miss Florence:—
"The garden door—heavy oak sunk deep in the thickness
of the wall—opened further: a woman in a big
garden hat set her foot slowly on 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 that
she 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 it the 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."
The point that a direct statement of characteristics
should preferably be delivered to the reader little by
little rather than all in a lump is particularly patent when
the statement is not external and objective like those
already quoted, but internal and subjective. In a certain
type of fiction, which is commonly called "the psychological
novel," the usual expedient for delineating character
is a statement partly narrative and partly expository of
what is taking place within the mind of the fictitious
person, based upon an analysis of his thoughts and his
emotions, at important moments of the story. This
[pg 86]
expedient of portraying character by mental analysis is
George Eliot's favorite technical device. Here is a typical
passage, from "The Mill on the Floss," Chapter V:—
"Maggie soon thought she had been hours in the attic,
and it must be tea-time, and they were all having their
tea, and not thinking of her. Well, then, she would stay
up there and starve herself—hide herself behind the tub,
and stay there all night; and then they would all be
frightened, and Tom would be sorry. Thus Maggie
thought in the pride of her heart, as she crept behind the
tub; but presently she began to cry again at the idea that
they didn't mind her being there. If she went down
again to Tom now—would he forgive her?—perhaps
her father would be there, and he would take her part.
But then she wanted Tom to forgive 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. This resolution
lasted in great intensity for five dark minutes behind the
tub; but then the need of being loved, the strongest need
in poor Maggie'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, but just then she heard a
quick footstep on the stairs.
"Tom had been too much interested in his talk with
Luke, in going the round of the premises, walking in and
out where he pleased, and whittling sticks without any
particular reason, except that he didn't whittle sticks at
school, to think of Maggie and the effect his anger had
produced on her. He meant to punish her, and that
business having been performed, he occupied himself
with other matters, like a practical person."—
And so on. It is only after four hundred words more
of this sort of analysis that the author tells us:—"It
[pg 87]
was Tom's step, then, that Maggie heard on the stairs."
This is George Eliot's way of portraying the characters
of two children who have quarreled.
Much is to be said in favor of this expedient of depicting
character by analysis. It is the only means by which
the reader may be informed directly of those thoughts
and emotions of a character which are the mainsprings
of his acts. And since we cannot feel that we know a
person intimately unless we understand the workings of
his mind at characteristic moments, we derive a great
advantage from this immediate presentation of his mental
processes. On the other hand, the use of the expedient
destroys the very desirable illusion that the reader is an
observer actually looking at the action, since the details
depicted do not happen to the eye but rather to the analytic
understanding. The expedient has the disadvantages of
being exceedingly abstract, and of halting happenings
while the author tells us why they happened. It is certainly
unfortunate, for instance, that it should take Tom
a whole long page to get to Maggie after she has heard
his "quick footstep on the stairs." Furthermore, this
expedient tends to destroy the illusion of reality by forcing
the reader into a mental attitude which he seldom assumes
in looking on at actual life. During actual occurrences
people almost never pause to analyze each other and
seldom even analyze themselves. They act, and watch
other people act, without a microscopic insight into
motives. And surely the purpose of narrative should be
to represent events as they seem to occur in actuality,
rather than to present a dissertation on their causes in the
manner of an essay.
An important point, however, remains to be considered.
Events are of two kinds, external and internal; things
[pg 88]
happen subjectively as well as objectively: and in representing
the sort of occurrence which takes place only
inside a person's mind, the expedient of analysis is by far
the most serviceable means of making clear the elements
of character that contribute to it. But if the same expedient
be employed habitually in the depiction of external
events as well, it is likely to give the impression of
unwarrantable vivisection. There is a certain falsity of
mood in giving an objective event a subjective rendering.
When, therefore, it is desired to depict a character by
direct comment on his actions or his personality, there is
a great advantage in allowing the comment to be made
by one of the other characters in the story, instead of by
the author himself in an attitude of assumed omniscience.
Jane Austen deftly exhibits this subtler phase of the
expedient in many admirable passages. For instance, in
Chapter XXXIII of "Emma," Mrs. Elton thus chatters
to Emma Woodhouse:—
"'Jane Fairfax is absolutely charming, Miss Woodhouse.—I
quite rave about Jane Fairfax—a sweet, interesting
creature. So mild and lady-like—and with
such talents!—I assure you I think she has very extraordinary
talents. I do not scruple to say that she plays
extremely well. I know enough of music to speak decidedly
on that point. Oh! she is absolutely charming!
You will laugh at my warmth—but upon my word, I
talk of nothing but Jane Fairfax.'"
In Chapter XXI the same character has been thus commented
on by Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley.
Emma speaks first:—
"'Miss Fairfax is reserved.'
"'I always told you she was—a little; but you will soon
overcome all that part of her reserve which ought to be
[pg 89]
overcome, all that has its foundation in diffidence. What
arises from discretion must be honoured.'
"'You think her diffident. I do not see it.'"
These passages not only serve to portray, more or less
directly, the personality of Jane Fairfax, but serve also
at the same time to portray indirectly the personalities
of the people who are talking about her. Mrs. Elton, in
particular, is very clearly exhibited. And this point leads
us to an examination of one of the most effective means
of indirect delineation.
If the mere speech of a fictitious figure be reported with
sufficient fidelity to truth, it is possible to convey through
this expedient alone a very vivid sense of character.
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 thank you, but I don't use any
tobacco you'd be likely to carry ... Bull Durham? Bull
Durham! I take it all back—every last word. Bull
Durham—here! If ever you strike Akron, Ohio, when
this fool-war's over, 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—but as true as I'm sitting here like a
blue-ended baboon in a kloof, Teddy Roosevelt's Western
tour was a maiden's sigh compared to my advertising
work.'"
"'But the general was the peach. I presume you're
acquainted with the average run of British generals, but
this was my first. I sat on his left hand, and he talked
like—like the Ladies' Home Journal. J'ever read that
[pg 90]
paper? It's refined, Sir—and innocuous, and full of
nickel-plated sentiments guaranteed to improve the
mind. He was it. He began by a Lydia Pinkham heart-to-heart
talk about my health, and hoped the boys had
done me well, and that I was enjoying my stay in their
midst.'"
These passages are taken from Mr. Kipling's story
called "The Captive." The action is laid during the
South-African war. Is it necessary to add that the
speaker is an American gun-inventor who has fought upon
the Boer side and has been captured by the British?
One point must be considered carefully. The art of
these passages lies mainly in the fact that we learn more
about Zigler indirectly, from his manner of talking, than
directly, from the things which he tells us of himself.
His statement that he comes from Akron, Ohio, is less
suggestive than his fondness for Bull Durham. Any
direct statement made by a character concerning himself
is of no more artistic value than if it were made about him
by the author, unless his manner of making it gives at the
same time an indirect evidence of his nature.
The subtlest phase of indirect delineation through
speech is a conveyance to the reader, through a character's
remarks about himself, of a sense of him different from
that which his statement literally expresses. Sir Willoughby
Patterne, in "The Egoist," talks about himself
frequently and in detail; but the reader soon learns from
the tone and manner of his utterance to discount the high
esteem in which he holds himself. By saying one thing
directly, the egoist conveys another and a different thing
indirectly to the reader.
But in fiction, as in life, actions speak louder than
words: and the most convincing way of delineating character
[pg 91]
indirectly is by exhibiting a person in the performance
of a characteristic action. If the action be visualized with
sufficient clearness and if its dominant details be presented
to the reader with adequate emphasis, a more vivid
impression of character will be conveyed than through
any sort of direct statement by the author. As an instance
of characterization through action only, without comment
or direct portrayal, let us consider the following passage
from the duel scene of "The Master of Ballantrae."
Two brothers, Mr. Henry and the Master, hate each other;
they fall to altercation over a game of cards; and the scene
is narrated by Mackellar, a servant of Mr. Henry's.—
"Mr. Henry laid down his cards. He rose to his feet
very softly, and seemed all the while like a person in deep
thought. 'You coward!' he said gently, as if to himself.
And then, with neither hurry nor any particular violence,
he struck the Master in the mouth.
"The Master sprang to his feet like one transfigured; I
had never seen the man so beautiful. 'A blow!' he cried.
'I would not take a blow from God Almighty.'
"'Lower your voice,' said Mr. Henry. 'Do you wish
my father to interfere 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, and still 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 the wall and took down a pair of swords that
[pg 92]
hung there with others, naked. These he presented to
the Master by the points. 'Mackellar shall see us play
fair,' said Mr. Henry. 'I think it very needful.'
"'You need insult me no more,' said the Master, taking
one of the swords at random. 'I have hated you all
my life.'
"'My father is but newly gone to bed,' said Mr. Henry.
'We must go somewhere forth of the house.'
"'There is an excellent place in the long shrubbery,'
said the Master.
"'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 quietude of manner he had shown throughout."
It is not necessary for Mackellar to tell us that, whereas
Mr. Henry is phlegmatic and deliberate, the Master is
impulsive and mercurial. It is not necessary for him to
attempt analysis of the emotions and thoughts of the
leading characters, since these are sufficiently evident
from what they do and say. The action happens to the
eye and ear, without the interpretation of an analytic intellect;
but the reader is made actually present at the
scene, and can see and judge it for himself. The method
is absolutely narrative and not at all expository,—entirely
objective and concrete. Surely this is the most artistic
means of portraying those elements of character which
contribute to external, or objective, events: and even what
happens inside the mind of a character may often be more
poignantly suggested by a concrete account of how he
looks and what he does than by an abstract analytic statement
of the movements of his mind. When Hepzibah
Pyncheon opens her shop in the House of the Seven
[pg 93]
Gables, her state of feeling is indicated indirectly, by what
she does and how she does it.
Perhaps the most delicate means of indirect delineation
is to suggest the personality of one character by exhibiting
his effect upon certain other people in the story. In the
third book of the "Iliad," there is a temporary truce upon
the plains of Troy; and certain elders of the city look forth
from the tower of the Scæan gates and meditate upon the
ten long years of conflict 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
wise and 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 use of this expedient is Mr. Kipling's tale of
"Mrs. Bathurst." The story is all about the woman
from whom it takes its title; but she never for a moment
appears upon the scene of action, and is portrayed entirely
through her effect upon several different men.
Here is a bit of conversation concerning her. Note her
effect upon the humorous and not especially 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-inch neck.
[pg 94]
"''Undreds,' said Pyecroft. 'So've I. How many of
'em can you remember in your own mind, settin' aside
the first—an' per'aps the last—and one 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 in ten 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 a street, but most of 'em you can live with a month
on end, an' next commission you'd be put to it to certify
whether they talked in their sleep or not, as one might
say.'"
Another very delicate expedient is to suggest a character
through a careful presentation of his habitual environment.
We learn a great deal about Roderick Usher from
the melancholy aspect of his House. It is possible to
describe a living-room in such a way as to convey a very
definite sense of its occupant before he enters it. Notice,
for example, how much we learn about Mr. and Mrs.
Boffin (especially the latter) from this descriptive passage
in Chapter V of "Our Mutual Friend." Silas Wegg has
come to fulfil his engagement to read aloud to them the
"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."—
"It was the queerest of rooms, fitted and furnished
more like a luxurious amateur tap-room than anything else
within the ken of Silas Wegg. There were two wooden
[pg 95]
settles by the fire, one on either side of it, with a corresponding
table before each. On one of these tables the
eight volumes were ranged flat, in a row like a galvanic
battery; on the other, certain squat case-bottles of inviting
appearance seemed to stand on tiptoe to exchange glances
with Mr. Wegg over a front row of tumblers and a basin
of white sugar. On the hob, a kettle steamed; on the
hearth, a cat reposed. Facing the fire between the
settles, a sofa, a footstool, and a little table formed a
centerpiece devoted to Mrs. Boffin. They were garish
in taste and color, but were expensive articles of drawing-room
furniture that had a very odd look beside the settles
and the flaring gaslight pendant from the ceiling. There
was a flowery carpet on the floor; but, instead of reaching
to the fireside, its glowing vegetation stopped short at
Mrs. Boffin's footstool, and gave place to a region of sand
and sawdust. Mr. Wegg also noticed, with admiring
eyes, that, while the flowery land displayed such hollow
ornamentation as stuffed birds, and waxen fruits under
glass shades, there were, in the territory where vegetation
ceased, compensatory shelves on which the best part of a
large pie and likewise of a cold joint were plainly discernible
among other solids. The room itself was large,
though low; and the heavy frames of its old-fashioned
windows, and the heavy beams in its crooked ceiling,
seemed to indicate that it had once been a house of some
mark standing alone in the country."
Neither Boffin nor Mrs. Boffin appears in this descriptive
paragraph; yet many of the idiosyncrasies of each are
suggested by the conglomeration of queer belongings that
they have gathered round them.
The student of the art of fiction may find profitable
exercise in practising separately the various means of
[pg 96]
portraying character which have been illustrated in this
chapter; but, as was stated at the outset, he should always
remember that these means are seldom used by the great
artists singly, but are generally employed to complement
each other in contributing to a central impression. The
character of Becky Sharp, for instance, is delineated indirectly
through her speech, her actions, her environment,
and her effect on other people, and at the same time is
delineated directly through comments made upon her by
the author and by other figures in the story, through
analysis of her thoughts and her emotions, through expository
statements of her traits, and through occasional
descriptions of her. In all of these ways does Thackeray
exert himself to give the world assurance of a woman.
It would, however, be extremely difficult to imagine
Becky Sharp divorced from her environment of London
high society. She is a part of her 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 mere representation
of setting may contribute to the delineation of character.
But setting is important in many other ways; and it is to a
special consideration of that element of narrative that we
must next turn our attention.
[pg 97]
CHAPTER VI
SETTING
In the history of figure painting it is interesting to study
the evolution of the element of background. This element
is non-existent in the earliest examples of pictorial
art. The figures in Pompeiian frescoes are limned upon
a blank bright wall, most frequently deep red in color.
The father of Italian painting, Cimabue, following the
custom of the Byzantine mosaicists, whose work he had
doubtless studied at Ravenna, drew his figures against a
background devoid of distance and perspective and
detail; and even in the work of his greater and more
natural pupil, Giotto, the element of background remains
comparatively insignificant. What interests us in Giotto's
work at Padua and Assisi is first of all the story that he
has to tell, and secondly the human quality of the characters
that he exhibits. His sense of setting is extremely
slight; and the homely details that he presents for the
purpose of suggesting the time and place and circumstances
of his action are very crudely depicted. His
frescoes are all foreground. It is the figures in the forefront
of his pictures that arrest our eye. His buildings
and his landscapes are conventionalized out of any real
reference to his people. These are examples of the first
stage of evolution,—the stage in which the element of
background bears no significant relation to the main
business of the picture.
In the second stage, the background is brought into an
[pg 98]
artistic, or decorative, relation with the figures in the foreground.
This phase is exhibited by Italian painting at
its period of maturity. The great Florentines drew their
figures against a background of decorative line, the great
Venetians against a background of decorative color.
But even in the work of the greatest of them the background
exists usually to fulfil a purpose merely decorative,—a
purpose with immediate reference to art but without
immediate reference to life. There is no real reason, with
reference to life itself, why the Mona Lisa of Leonardo
should smile inscrutably upon us before a background of
jagged rocks and cloudy sky; and the curtains in Raphael's
Sistine Madonna are introduced merely as a detail of composition,
and are not intended as a literal statement that
curtains hung upon a rod exist in heaven.
In the third stage, which is exhibited by later painting,
the background is brought into living relation with the
figures of the foreground,—a relation suggested not
merely by the exigencies of art but rather by the conditions
of life itself. Thus the great Dutch genre painters, like
the younger Teniers, show their characters in immediate
human relation to a carefully detailed interior; 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 most modern development, exhibits
an absolutely essential relation between the foreground
and the background—the figures and the setting—so
that neither could be imagined exactly as it is without the
presence of the other. Such an essential harmony is
shown in the "Angelus" of Jean-François Millet. The
people exist for the sake of giving meaning to the landscape;
and the landscape exists for the sake of giving
[pg 99]
meaning to the people. The "Angelus" is neither figure
painting nor landscape painting merely; it is both.
In the history of fiction we may note a similar evolution
in the 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 of background
in the frescoes of Pompeii. Even in the "Decameron"
of Boccaccio the stories are seldom localized:
they happen almost anywhere at almost any time. The
interest in Boccaccio's narrative, like the interest in
Giotto's painting, is centered first of all in the element
of action, and secondly in the element of character. But
his stories are all foreground. When the scene is out of
doors, it is set vaguely in a conventional landscape: when
it is indoors, it is set vaguely in a conventional palace.
Because of this, his narrative is lacking in visual appeal.
Most of his novelle read like summaries of novels,—setting
forth an abstract synopsis of the action rather than
a concrete representation of it. He tells you what happens,
instead of making it happen before the eye of your imagination.
His characters are drawn in outline merely,
instead of being livingly projected in relation to a definite
environment. The defect of his narrative, like the
defect of Giotto's painting, is mainly lack of background.
Somewhat later in the history of fiction, as in the history
of figure painting, we find instances in which the
element of setting is used for a decorative purpose, and is
brought into an artistic relation with the elements of
action and character. Such a use is made of landscape,
for example, in the "Orlando Furioso" of Ariosto and
[pg 100]
the "Faerie Queene" of Spenser. The settings depicted
by these narrative poets are essentially pictorial, and are
used as a decorative background to the action rather than
as part and parcel of it. If we seek an example in prose
rather than in poetry, we need only turn to the "Arcadia"
of Sir Philip Sidney. In this again the setting is beautifully
fashioned, but is employed merely for a decorative
purpose. The background of pastoral landscape bears
no necessary relation to the figures in the foreground. It
exists for the sake of art rather than for the sake of life.
This employment of the element of setting for a purpose
essentially pictorial subsists in many later works of fiction,
like the "Paul and Virginia" of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.
In this the setting is composed and painted for
the sake of its own sentimental beauty, and is obtruded
even at the expense of the more vital elements of character
and action. The story is, as it were, merely a motive for
decorative composition.
It is only in fiction of a more modern spirit that the
element of setting has been brought into living relation
with the action and the characters; and it is only in the
last century that the most intimate possibilities of such a
relation have been appreciated and applied. Of course
the most elementary means of making the setting "part
and parcel of the business of the story" is to employ it as
a utilitarian adjunct to the action. Granted certain
incidents that are to happen, certain scenery and properties
are useful, in the novel just as in the theater; and if
these are supplied advisedly, the setting will, as it were,
become a part of what is happening instead of remaining
merely a decorative background to the incidents. The
first English author to establish firmly this utilitarian
relation between the setting and the action was Daniel
[pg 101]
Defoe. Defoe was by profession a journalist; and the
most characteristic quality of his mind was an habitual
matter-of-factness. Plausibility was what he most desired
in his fictions; and he discerned instinctively that
the readiest means of making a story plausible was by
representing with entire concreteness and great wealth
of specific detail the physical adjuncts to the action.
The multitudinous particulars of Crusoe's island are
therefore exhibited concretely to the reader one by one,
as Crusoe makes use of them successively in what he
does.
But though in Defoe the element of setting is merged
with the element of action, it is not brought into intimate
relation with the element of character. The island is a
part of what Crusoe does, rather than a part of what he is.
But the dwelling-room of the Boffins, which was described
in the paragraph from "Our Mutual Friend" quoted
toward the end of the preceding chapter, is a part of what
the Boffins are, rather than of what they do. The setting
in the latter case is used as an adjunct to the element of
character instead of to the element of action. Fielding
and his contemporaries were the first English novelists
to make the setting in this way representative of personality
as well as useful to the plot; but the finer possibilities
of the relation between setting and character were
not fully realized until the nineteenth century. The
eighteenth-century authors, in so far as they elaborated the
element of setting, seem to have done so mainly for the
sake of greater vividness. The appeal of setting being
visual, the element was employed to illustrate the action
and to make the characters clearly evident to the eye.
By rendering a story more concrete, a definite setting rendered
it more credible. This the eighteenth-century
[pg 102]
novelists discerned; but only with the rise of the romantic
movement was the element applied to subtler uses.
A new and very interesting attitude toward landscape
setting was disclosed by Rousseau in the "Nouvelle
Héloise" and developed by his numerous followers in
early nineteenth-century romance. The writers who advocated
a "return to nature" spelled nature with a capital
N and considered it usually as an anthropomorphic
presence. As a result of this, when they developed a
natural background for their stories, they established a
sympathetic interchange of mood between the characters
and the landscape, and imagined (to use the famous
phrase of Leibnitz) a "pre-established harmony" between
the shifting moods of nature and of man. Thus the setting
was employed no longer merely to subserve the needs
of action or to give a greater vividness of visual appeal,
but was used rather to symbolize and represent the human
emotions evoked in the characters at significant moments
of the plot. When the hero was suffering with sadness,
the sky was hung with heavy clouds; 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 between his settings and his incidents. Consider
for a moment the following well-known passage
from the funeral of Little Nell ("The Old Curiosity Shop,"
Chapter LXXII):—
"Along the crowded path they bore her now; pure as
the newly-fallen snow that covered it; whose day on earth
had been as fleeting. Under the porch, where she had
sat when Heaven in its mercy brought her to that peaceful
spot, she passed again; and the old church received her
in its quiet shade.
[pg 103]
"They carried her to one old nook, where she had
many and many a time sat musing, and laid their burden
softly on the pavement. The light streamed on it through
the colored window—a window where the boughs of
trees were ever rustling in the summer, and where the
birds sang sweetly all day long. With every breath of air
that stirred among those branches in the sunshine, some
trembling, changing light would fall upon her grave....
"They saw the vault covered, and the stone fixed down.
Then, when the dusk of evening had come on, and not
a sound disturbed the sacred stillness of the place—when
the bright moon poured in her light on tomb and
monument, on pillar, wall, and arch, and most of all (it
seemed to them) upon her quiet grave—in that calm
time, when outward things and inward thoughts teem
with assurances of immortality, and worldly hopes and
fears are humbled in the dust before them—then, with
tranquil and submissive hearts, they turned away, and
left the child to God."
Here the mood of the scene is expressed almost entirely
through the element of setting; and the human emotion
of the mourners is realized and represented by the aspect
of the churchyard.
The excessive use of this expedient is deplored by John
Ruskin in a chapter of "Modern Painters" entitled "The
Pathetic Fallacy." His point is that, since concrete
objects do not actually experience human emotions, it is a
violation of artistic truth to ascribe such emotions to them.
But, on the other hand, it is indubitably true that human
beings habitually translate their own abstract feelings
into the concrete terms of their surroundings; and therefore,
in a subjective sense at least, an emotional harmony
frequently does exist between the mood of a man and the
[pg 104]
aspect of his environment. The same place may at the
same time look gloomy to a melancholy man and cheerful
to a merry one; and there is therefore a certain human
fitness in describing it as gloomy or as cheerful, according
to the feeling of the character observing it. Doubtless
to a man tremendously bereaved the very rain may seem
a weeping of high heaven; and surely there are times when
it is deeply true, subjectively, to say that the morning
stars all sing together. What we may call emotional
similarity of setting is therefore not necessarily a fallacy.
Even when it subverts the actual, as in the fable of the
morning stars, it may yet be representative of reality. In
its commoner and less exaggerative phases it is very useful
for purposes of suggestion; and only when it becomes
blatant through abuse may it be said to belie the laws of
life.
Frequently, however, emotional similarity between the
setting and the characters is less serviceable, for the sake
of emphasis, than emotional contrast. In the following
passage from Mr. Kipling's "Without Benefit of Clergy,"
the serene and perfect happiness of Holden and Ameera
is emphasized by contrast with the night-aspect of the
plague-infested city:—
"'My lord and my love, let there be no more foolish
talk of going away. Where thou art, I am. It is enough.'
She put an arm round his neck and a hand on his mouth.
"There are not many happinesses so complete as those
that are snatched under the shadow of the sword. They
sat together and laughed, calling each other openly by
every pet name that could move the wrath of the gods.
The city below them was locked up in its own torments.
Sulphur fires blazed in the streets; the conches in the
Hindu temples screamed and bellowed, for the gods were
[pg 105]
inattentive in those days. There was a service in the great
Mahomedan shrine, and the call to prayer from the
minarets was almost unceasing. They heard the wailing
in the houses of the dead, and once the shriek of a mother
who had lost a child and was calling for its return. In
the gray dawn they saw the dead borne out through the
city gates, each litter with its own little knot of mourners.
Wherefore they kissed each other and shivered."
An emotional contrast of this nature between the mood
of the characters and the mood of the setting may be
pushed to the point of irony. In a story by Alphonse
Daudet, entitled "The Elixir of the Reverend Father
Gaucher," a certain monastery is saved from financial
ruin by the sale of a cordial which Father Gaucher has
invented and distilled. But the necessity of sampling the
cordial frequently during the process of manufacturing
it leads the reverend father eventually to become an
habitual drunkard. And toward the end of the story an
ironic contrast is drawn between the solemn monastery,
murmurous with chants and prayers, and Father Gaucher
in his distillery hilariously singing a ribald drinking-song.
The uses of setting that have been thus far considered
have been artistic rather than philosophical in nature;
but very recent writers have grown to use the element not
only for the sake of illustrating character and action but
also for the sake of determining them. The sociologists
of the nineteenth century have come to regard circumstance
as a prime motive for action, and environment as
a prime influence on character; and recent writers have
applied this philosophic thesis in their employment of the
element of setting.
The way in which the setting may suggest the action is
[pg 106]
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 the passive. Now we are conscious
of a great command over our destiny; anon we are
lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking wave, and
dashed we know not how into the future. Now we are
pleased by our conduct, anon merely pleased by our
surroundings. It would be hard to say which of these
modes of satisfaction is the more effective, but the latter
is surely the more constant....
"One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in
events and places. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts
it in our mind to sit there. One place suggests work,
another idleness, a third early rising and long rambles
in the dew. The effect of night, of any flowing water,
of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open
ocean, calls up in the mind an army of anonymous desires
and pleasures. Something, we feel, should happen; we
know not what, yet we proceed in quest of it. And many
of the happiest hours of life fleet by 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 into
deep soundings, particularly torture and delight me.
Something must have happened in such places, and perhaps
ages back, to members of my race; and when I was
a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate games for
them, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit them with the
proper story. Some places speak distinctly. Certain
dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses
demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for
shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny,
[pg 107]
suggestive and impenetrable, 'miching mallecho.' The
inn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green garden
and silent, eddying river—though it is known already
as the place where Keats wrote some of his Endymion
and Nelson parted from his Emma—still seems to wait
the coming of the appropriate legend. Within these ivied
walls, behind these old green shutters, some further business
smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old Hawes Inn
at the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy.
There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a
climate of its own, half inland, half marine—in front,
the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship swinging
to her anchor; behind, the old garden with the trees.
Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck,
who dined there at the beginning of the Antiquary.
But you need not tell me—that is not all; there is some
story, unrecorded or not yet complete, which must express
the meaning of that inn more fully.... I have lived both
at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the
heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that should justify
the place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night
and called me again at morning in one unbroken round of
pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me in either worth
remark. The man or the hour had not yet come; but some
day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen's Ferry,
fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a horseman,
on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the
green shutters of the inn at Burford."
In this way, the setting may, in many cases, exist as the
initial element of the narrative, and suggest an action
appropriate to itself. But it may do more than that. In
certain special instances the setting may not only suggest,
but may even cause, the action, and remain the deciding
[pg 108]
factor in determining its course. This is the case, for
example, in Mr. Kipling's story, "At the End of the
Passage," which opens thus:—
"Four men, each entitled to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness,' sat at a table playing whist. The thermometer
marked—for them—one hundred and one
degrees of heat. The room was darkened till it was only
just possible to distinguish the pips of the cards and the
very white faces of the players. A tattered, rotten punkah
of whitewashed calico was puddling the hot air and
whining dolefully at each stroke. Outside lay gloom of a
November day in London. There was neither sky, sun,
nor horizon,—nothing but a brown purple haze of heat.
It was as though the earth were dying of apoplexy.
"From time to time clouds of tawny dust rose from the
ground without wind or warning, flung themselves tablecloth-wise
among the tops of the parched trees, and came
down again. Then a whirling dust-devil would scutter
across the plain for a couple of miles, break, and fall
outward, though there was nothing to check its flight
save a long low line of piled railway-sleepers white with
the dust, a cluster of huts made of mud, condemned rails,
and canvas, and the one squat four-roomed bungalow
that belonged to the assistant engineer in charge of a
section of the Gaudhari State Line then under construction."
The terrible tale that follows could happen only as a
result of the fearful loneliness and, more especially, the
maddening heat of such a place as is described in these
opening paragraphs. The setting in this story causes
and determines the action.
But in many other tales by recent writers the setting
is used not so much to determine the action as to influence
[pg 109]
and mold the characters; and when employed for this
purpose, it becomes expressive of one of the most momentous
truths of human life. For what a man is at any period
of his existence is largely the result of the interaction of
two forces,—namely, the innate tendencies of his nature
and the shaping power of his environment. Mr. Meredith,
and more especially Mr. Thomas Hardy, therefore
devote a great deal of attention to setting as an influence
on character. Consider, for example, the following brief
passage from Mr. Hardy's "Tess of the D'Ubervilles":—
"Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of Froom
Vale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be
heard below the hiss of fertilization, it was impossible
that the most fanciful love should not grow passionate.
The ready hearts existing there were impregnated by their
surroundings."
Zola, in his essay on "The Experimental Novel," states
that the proper function of setting is to exhibit "the
environment which determines and completes the man";
and the philosophic study of environment reacting upon
character is one of the main features of his own monumental
series of novels devoted to the Rougon-Macquart
family. His example has been followed by a host of recent
writers; and a new school of fiction has grown up, the
main purpose of which is to exhibit the influence of certain
carefully studied social, natural, business, or professional
conditions on the sort of people who live and work among
them.
If the setting be used both to determine the action and
to mold the characters, it may stand forth as the most
important of the three elements of narrative. In Victor
Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris," the cathedral is the
leading factor of the story. Claude Frollo would be a
[pg 110]
very different person if it were not for the church; and
many of the main events, such as the ultimate tragic scene
when Quasimodo hurls Frollo from the tower-top, could
not happen in any other place. In Mr. Kipling's very
subtle story entitled "An Habitation Enforced," which
appeared in the Century Magazine for August, 1905, the
setting is really the hero of the narrative. An American
millionaire and his wife, whose ancestors were English,
settle for a brief vacation in the county of England from
which the wife's family originally came. Gradually the
old house and the English landscape take hold of them:
ancestral feelings rise to dominate them; and they remain
forever after in enforced habitation on the ancient soil.
All that has been said thus far of setting in general
applies of course to one of the most interesting of its elements,—the
weather. In simple stories like the usual
nursery tale, the weather may be non-existent. Or it
may exist mainly for a decorative purpose, like the frequent
golden oriental dawns of Spenser's poem or the
superb and colorful symphonies of sky and sea in Pierre
Loti's "Iceland Fisherman." It may be used as a utilitarian
adjunct to the action: at the end of "The
Mill on the Floss," as we have already noted, the rains
descend and the flood comes merely for the purpose of
drowning Tom and Maggie. Or it may be employed to
illustrate a character: we are told of Clara Middleton,
in "The Egoist," that she possesses the "art of dressing
to suit the season and the sky"; and therefore the look of
the atmosphere at any hour helps to convey to us a sense
of her appearance. Somewhat more artistically, the
weather may be planned in pre-established harmony with
the mood of the characters: this expedient is wonderfully
used in the wild and wind-swept tales of Fiona MacLeod.
[pg 111]
On the other hand, the weather may stand in emotional
contrast with the characters: the Master of Ballantrae and
Mr. Henry fight their duel on a night of absolute stillness
and stifling cold. Again, the weather may be used to
determine the action: in Mr. Kipling's early story called
"False Dawn," the blinding sandstorm causes Saumarez
to propose to the wrong girl. Or it may be employed as
a controlling influence over character: the tremendous
storm toward the end of "Richard Feverel," in the chapter
entitled "Nature Speaks," determines the return of
the hero to his wife. In some cases, even, the weather
itself may be the real hero of the narrative: the great eruption
of Vesuvius in "The Last Days of Pompeii" dominates
the termination of the story.
Although the weather is a subject upon everybody's
tongue, there are very few people who are capable of
talking about it with intelligence and art. Very few
writers of fiction—and nearly all of them are recent—have
exhibited a mastery of the weather,—a mastery
based at once upon a detailed and accurate observation
of natural phenomena and a philosophic sense of the
relation between these phenomena and the concerns of
human beings. Perhaps in no other detail of craftsmanship
does Robert Louis Stevenson so clearly prove his
mastery as in his marshaling of the weather, always
vividly and truthfully described, to serve a purpose always
fitting to his fictions.
Let us next consider the main difference between the
merits of a good romantic and a good realistic setting.
Since the realist leads us to a comprehension of his truth
through a careful imitation of the actual, the thing most
to be desired in a realistic setting is fidelity to fact; and
this can be attained only by accurate observation. But
[pg 112]
since the romantic is not bound to imitate the actual, and
fabricates his investiture merely for the sake of embodying
his truth clearly and consistently, the thing most to
be desired in a romantic setting is imaginative fitness to
the action and the characters; and this can sometimes be
attained by artistic inventiveness alone, without display
of observation of the actual. Verisimilitude is of course
the highest merit of either sort of setting; but whereas
verisimilitude with the realist lies in resemblance to
actuality, verisimilitude with the romantic lies rather in
artistic fitness. The distinction may perhaps be best
observed in the historical novels produced by the one and
by the other school. In the setting of realistic historical
novels, like George Eliot's "Romola" and Flaubert's
"Salammbô," what the authors have mainly striven for
has been accuracy of detail; but in romantic historical
novels, like those of Scott and Dumas père, the authors
have sought rather for imaginative fitness of setting.
The realists have followed the letter, and the romantics
the spirit, of other times and lands.
As an example of a pure romantic setting, far removed
from actuality and yet thoroughly truthful in artistic fitness
to the action and the characters, we can do no better than
examine the often-quoted opening of Poe's "Fall of the
House of Usher:"—
"During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day
in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively
low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on
horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country;
and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening
drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of
the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my
[pg 113]
spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved
by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment
with which the mind usually receives even the sternest
natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon
the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the
simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak
walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows, upon a few rank
sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with
an utter depression of soul which I can compare to
no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream
of the reveler upon opium: the bitter lapse into
every-day life, the hideous dropping off of the veil. There
was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed
dreariness of thought which no goading of the
imagination could torture into aught of the sublime....
It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement
of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the
picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to
annihilate, its capacity for sorrowful impression; and
acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous
brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre
by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder
even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled
and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly
tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows."
Certainly this setting bears very little resemblance to
the actual; but just as certainly its artistic fitness to the
tale of terror which it preludes gives it an imaginative
verisimilitude.
As an example of a realistic setting, closely copying the
actual, let us examine the following passage from "Adam
Bede" (Chapter XVIII):—
"You might have known it was Sunday if you had only
[pg 114]
waked up in the farmyard. The cocks and hens seemed
to know it, and made only crooning subdued noises; the
very bull-dog looked less savage, as if he would have been
satisfied with a smaller bite than usual. The sunshine
seemed to call all things to rest and not to labor; it was
asleep itself on the moss-grown cow-shed; on the group
of white ducks nestling together with their bills tucked
under their wings; on the old black sow stretched languidly
on the straw, while her largest young one found an excellent
spring-bed on his mother's fat ribs; on Alick, 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 the chapter where it occurs the chief characters
are going to a funeral; but it has an extraordinary verisimilitude,
owing to the author's accurate observation of
the details of life in rural England.
These two passages differ very widely from each other.
In one thing, and one only, are they alike. Each of them
exhibits the subtle quality called "atmosphere." This
quality is very difficult to define, though its presence may
be recognized instinctively in any work of graphic art,
like a painting or a description. Without attempting to
define it, we may discover the technical basis for its
presence if we seek out the sole deliberate device in which
these two passages, different as they are in every other
feature, are at one. It will be noticed that in each of
them the details selected for presentation have been
chosen solely for the sake of a common quality inherent
in them—the quality of somberness and gloom in the
one case, and the quality of Sabbath quietude in the
other—and that they have been marshaled to convey
a complete sense of this central and pervading quality.
[pg 115]
It is commonly supposed that what is called "atmosphere"
in a description is dependent upon the setting forth of a
multiplicity of details; but this popular conception is a
fallacy. "Atmosphere" is dependent rather upon a strict
selection of details pervaded by a common quality, a
rigorous rejection of all others that are dissonant in mood,
and an arrangement of those selected with a view to exhibiting
their common quality as the pervading spirit of
the scene.
This is obviously the technical basis for the "atmosphere"
of a purely imaginary setting like that of the
melancholy House of Usher. The effect is undeniably
produced by the suppression of all details that do not
contribute to the central sense of gloom. But the same
device underlies (less obviously, to be sure) all such descriptions
of actual places as are rich in "atmosphere."
What is called "local color"—the very look and tone of
a definite locality—is produced not by photographic
multiplicity of details, but by a marshaling of materials
carefully selected to suggest the central spirit of the place
to be depicted. The camera frequently defeats itself by
flinging into emphasis details that are dissonant with the
informing spirit of the scene it seeks to reproduce: so also
does the author who overcrowds his picture with multifarious
details, however faithful they may be to fact.
The true triumphs of "local coloring" have been made
by men who have struck at the heart and spirit of a place—have
caught its tone and timbre as George Du Maurier
did with the Quartier Latin—and have set forth only
such details as tingled with this spiritual tone.
We have studied the many uses of the element of setting,
and have seen that in the best-developed fiction it has
grown to be entirely co-ordinate with the elements of
[pg 116]
character and action. Novelists have come to consider
that any given story can happen only in a given set of
circumstances, and that if the setting be changed the
action must be altered and the characters be differently
drawn. It is therefore impossible, in the best fiction of
the present day, to consider the setting as divorced from
the other elements of the narrative. There was a time,
to be sure, when description for its own sake existed in
the novel, and the action was halted to permit the introduction
of pictorial passages bearing no necessary relation
to the business of the story,—"blocks" of setting, as it
were, which might be removed without detriment to the
progression of the narrative. But the practice of the
best contemporary novelists is summed up and expressed
by Mr. Henry James in this emphatic sentence from his
essay on "The Art of Fiction":—"I cannot imagine composition
existing in a series of blocks, nor conceive, in any
novel worth discussing at all, of a passage of description
that is not in its intention narrative."
[pg 117]
CHAPTER VII
THE POINT OF VIEW IN NARRATIVE
We have now examined in detail the elements of narrative,
and must next consider the various points of view
from which they may be seen and, in consequence, be
represented. Granted a given series of events to be set
forth, the structure of the plot, the means of character
delineation, the use of setting, the entire tone and tenor
of the narrative, are all dependent directly 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 in most important murder trials
consists mainly of successive narratives told by different
witnesses; and it is very interesting to notice, in comparing
them, how very different a tone and tenor is given
to the same event by each of the observers who recounts
it. It remains for the jury to determine, if possible, from
a comparison of the various views of the various witnesses,
what it was that actually happened. But this, in many
cases, is extremely difficult. One witness saw the action
in one way, another in another; one formed a certain
judgment of the character of the accused, another formed
a judgment diametrically different; each has his separate
sense of the train of causation that culminated in the act;
the accused himself would disagree with all the witnesses,
if indeed he were capable of looking on the facts without
conscious or unconscious self-deception; and we may be
[pg 118]
certain that an infallible omniscient mind, cognizant of all
the hidden motives, would see the matter differently still.
The task of the jury is, in the main, to induce from all
these tragic inconsistencies an absolute outlook upon the
real truth that underlies 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 telling of his tale, it can seldom
be consistently maintained. It is therefore safer to acknowledge
that the absolute truth of a story, whether
actual or fictitious, can never be entirely told; that the
same train of incidents looks different from different points
of view; and that therefore the various points of view
from which any story may be looked upon should be
studied carefully for the purpose of determining from
which of them it is possible, in a given case, to approach
most nearly a clear vision of the truth.
The points of view from which a story may be seen and
told are many and various; but they may all be grouped
into two classes, the internal and the external. A story
seen internally is narrated in the first person by one of
its participants; a story seen externally is narrated in the
third person by a mind aloof from the events depicted.
There are, of course, many variations, both of the internal
and of the external point of view. These in turn must be
examined, for the purpose of determining the special
advantages and disadvantages of each.
First of all, a story may be told by the leading actor
in its series of events,—the hero, as in "Henry Esmond,"
or the heroine, as in "Jane Eyre." This point of view
is of especial value in narratives in which the element of
action is predominant. The multifarious adventures of
[pg 119]
Gil Blas sound at once more vivid and more plausible
narrated in the first person than they would sound narrated
in the third. When what is done is either strange
or striking, we prefer to be told about it by the very man
who did it. "Treasure Island" is narrated by Jim
Hawkins, "Kidnapped" by David Balfour; and much of
the vividness of these exciting tales depends upon the fact
that they are told in each case by a boy who stood ever
in the forefront of the action. The plausibility of "Robinson
Crusoe" is increased by the convention that the hero
is narrating his own personal experience: in fact Defoe,
in all his fictions, preferred to write in the first person,
because what he sought primarily was plausibility of tone.
This point of view is also of supreme advantage in recounting
personal emotion. 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 a bird's, both quick and little; and there
was a dimness came before my eyes which I continually
rubbed away, and which continually returned. As for
hope, I had none; but only a darkness of despair and a
sort of anger against all the world that made me long to
sell my life as dear as I was able. I tried to pray, I remember,
but that same hurry of my mind, like a man
running, would not suffer me to think upon the words;
and my chief wish was to have the thing begin and be
done with it."
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 a bird's, both quick and little; and there was
a dimness came before his eyes which he continually
[pg 120]
rubbed away, and which continually returned. As for
hope, he had none ..." and so forth. Notice how
much vividness is lost,—how much immediacy of emotion.
The zest and tang of the experience is sacrificed,
because the reader is forced to stand aloof and observe
it from afar.
The point of view of the leading actor makes for vividness
in still another way. It necessitates an absolute
concreteness and objectivity in the delineation of the subsidiary
characters. On the other hand, it precludes
analysis of their emotions and their thoughts. The hero
can tell us only what they said and did, how they looked
in action and in speech, and what they seemed to him to
think and feel. But he cannot enter their minds and
delve among their motives. Furthermore he cannot,
without sacrificing naturalness of mood, analyze to any
great extent his own mental processes. Consequently
it is almost impossible to tell from the hero's point of view
a story in which the main events are mental or subjective.
We can hardly imagine George Eliot writing in the first
person: the "psychological novel" demands the third.
But the chief difficulty in telling a story from the leading
actor's point of view is the difficulty of characterizing
the narrator. All means of direct delineation are taken
from him. He cannot write essays on his merits or his
faults; he can neither describe nor analyze himself; he
cannot see himself as others see him. We must derive
our sense 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 not especially difficult, within
a brief compass, to delineate a character through his way
of telling things [Notice Laughton O. Zigler, in Mr. Kipling's
"The Captive," whose speech has been examined
[pg 121]
in a former chapter], it is extremely difficult to maintain
this expedient consistently throughout a lengthy novel.
Furthermore, an extended story can be told only by a
person with a well-trained sense of narrative; and it is
often hard to concede to the hero the narrative ability
that he displays. How is it, we may ask, that Jim Hawkins
is capable of such masterly description as that of
"the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut," in the
second paragraph of "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 to
the hero an adequate motive for telling his own story.
Why is it that, in the sequel to "Kidnapped," David Balfour
should write out all the intimate details of his love
for Catriona? And how is it conceivable that Jane Eyre
should tell to any one, and least of all to the general public,
the profound privacies of emotion evoked by her relation
with Mr. Rochester?
The answer is, of course, that such violations of the
hard terms of actuality are justified by literary convention;
and that if the gain in vividness be great enough, the
reader will be willing to concede, first, that the story shall
be told by the leading actor, regardless of motive, and
second, that he shall be granted the requisite mastery of
narrative. But the fact remains that it is very hard for
the hero to draw his own character except in outline;
and therefore if the emphasis is to lie less on what he does
than on the sort of person that he is, the expedient will be
ineffectual.
The main structural advantage of telling the story
through the person of the hero is that his presence as the
central figure in every event narrated makes for coherence
[pg 122]
and gives the story unity. But attendant disadvantages
are that it is often difficult to account for the hero's
presence in every scene, that he cannot be an eye-witness
to events happening at the same time in different places,
and that it is hard to account for his possession of knowledge
regarding those details of the plot which have no
immediate bearing on himself. It seems always somewhat
lame to state, as heroes telling their own stories are
frequently obliged to do, "These things I did not know
at the time, and found out only afterwards; but I insert
them here, because it is at this point in the plot that they
belong."
Many of these disadvantages may be overcome by telling
the tale from the point of view, not of the leading
actor, but of some minor personage in the story. In this
case again, analysis of character is precluded; but the
narrator may delineate the leading actor directly, through
descriptive and expository comment. In stories where
the hero is an extraordinary person, and could not without
immodesty descant upon his own unusual capabilities, it
is of obvious advantage to represent him from the point
of view of an admiring friend. Thus when Poe invented
the detective story, he wisely decided to exhibit the extraordinary
analytic power of Dupin through a narrative
told not by the detective himself but by a man who knew
him well; and Dr. A. Conan Doyle, following in his footsteps,
has invented Dr. Watson to tell the tales of Sherlock
Holmes.
The actual instance of Boswell and Johnson substantiates
the possibility of a minor actor's knowing intimately
all phases of a hero's life and character. And since the
point of view of the secondary personage is just as internal
to the events themselves as that of the leading actor, the
[pg 123]
story may be told with an immediacy, a vividness, and a
plausibility approximating closely the effect derived from
a narrative told by the hero. And there is now less difficulty
in accounting for the narrator's knowledge of all the
details of the plot. He can witness minor necessary
scenes at which the hero is not present; he can know things
(and tell them to the reader) which at the time the hero
did not know; and if his presence be withheld from an
important incident, the hero can narrate it to him afterward.
Nevertheless, it is often very difficult to maintain
throughout a long story the point of view of a minor actor
in the plot. Thackeray breaks down completely in his
attempt to tell "The Newcomes" from the point of view
of Arthur Pendennis, the hero of a former novel. Stevenson
assigns 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.
This last instance leads us to consider the possibility
of telling different sections of the story from the points of
view of different characters, assigning to each the particular
phase of the narrative that he is especially fitted to
recount. Three quarters of the "Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is narrated in the third person,
externally; but the final intimate vividness of horror is
gained by shifting to an internal point of view for the two
concluding chapters,—the first written by Dr. Lanyon,
and the last by Jekyll himself. Mr. Kipling has developed
to very subtle uses the expedient of opening a story from
the point of view of a narrator who is named simply "I"
[pg 124]
and who is not characterized in any way at all, and then
letting the story proper be told to this impersonal narrator
by several characters who are clearly delineated through
their speech and through the parts that they have played
in the tale that they are telling. This device is used in
nearly all the stories of the "Soldiers Three." The narrator
meets Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd under certain
circumstances, and gathers from them bit by bit the
various features of the story,—one detail being contributed
by one of the actors, another by another, until
out of the successive fragments the story is built up. It
is in this way also, as we have already noted, that the tale
of Mrs. Bathurst is set before the reader.
A convenient means of shifting the burden of the narrative
at any point to a certain special character is to introduce
a letter written by that character to one of the other
people in the plot. This expedient is employed with
extraordinary cleverness by Mr. Meredith in "Evan
Harrington." Most of the tale is told externally; but every
now and then the clever and witty Countess de Saldar
writes a letter in which a leading incident is illuminated
from her personal point of view.
Ever since the days of Richardson the device has frequently
been used of telling an entire story through a
series of letters exchanged among the characters. The
main advantage of this method is the constant shifting
of the point of view, which makes it possible for the
reader to see every important incident through the eyes
of each of the characters in turn. Furthermore, it is comparatively
easy to characterize in the first person when
the thing that is written is so intimate and personal as a
letter. But the disadvantage of the device lies in the fact
that it tends toward incoherence in the structure of the
[pg 125]
narrative. It is hard for the author to stick to the point
at every moment without violating the casual and discursive
tone that the epistolary style demands.
Of course a certain unity may be gained if the letters
used are all written by a single character. The chief
advantage of this method over a direct narrative written
by one of the actors is the added motive for the revelation
of intimate matters which is furnished by the fact that the
narrator is writing, not for the public at large, but only
for the friend, or friends, to whom the letters are addressed.
But a series of letters written by one person
only is very likely to become monotonous; and more is
usually gained than lost by assigning the epistolary role
successively to different characters.
We have seen that, although the employment of an
internal point of view gives a narrative vividness of action
objectivity of observation, immediacy of emotion, and
plausibility of tone, it is attended by several difficulties
in the delineation of the characters and the construction
of the plot. It is therefore in many cases more advisable
for the author to look upon the narrative externally and to
write it in the third person. But there are several different
ways of doing this; for though a story viewed externally
is told in every case by a mind distinct from that of any of
the characters, there are many different stations in which
that mind may set itself, and many different moods in
which it may recount the story.
First of all (to start with a phase that contrasts most
widely with the internal point of view) the external mind
may set itself equidistant from all the characters and may
assume toward them an attitude of absolute omniscience.
The story, in such a case, is told by a sort of god, who is
cognizant of the past and future of the action while he is
[pg 126]
looking at the present, and who sees into the minds and
hearts of all the characters at once and understands them
better than they do themselves.
The main practical advantage in assuming the god-like
point of view is that the narrator is never obliged to account
for his possession of intimate information. He can observe
events which happen at the same time in places
widely separated. Darkness cannot dim his eyes; locked
doors cannot shut him out. He can be with a character
when that character is most alone. He can make clear
to us the thoughts that do not tremble into speech, the
emotions that falter and subside into inaction. He can
know, and can convey to us, how much of a person's real
thought is expressed, and how much is concealed, by the
language that he uses. And the reader seeks no motive
to account for the narrator's revelation of the personal
secrets of the characters.
The omniscient point of view is the only one that permits
upon a large scale the depiction of character through
mental analysis. It is therefore usually used in the
"psychological novel." It was employed always by
George Eliot, and has been selected almost always by Mr.
Meredith. It is, of course, invaluable for telling the sort
of story whose main events are mental, or subjective. A
spiritual experience which does not translate itself into
concrete action can be viewed adequately only from the
god-like point of view. But when it is employed in the
narration of objective events, the writer runs the danger
of undue abstractness. A certain vividness—a certain
immediacy of observation—are likely to be lost, because
of the aloofness from the characters of the mind that sees
them.
This point of view is at once the most easy and the
[pg 127]
most difficult that the author may assume. Technically
it is the easiest, because the writer is absolutely free in
the selection and the patterning of his narrative materials:
but humanly it is the most difficult, because it is hard for
any man consistently to play the god, even toward his own
fictitious creatures. Although George Eliot assumes
omniscience of Daniel Deronda, the consensus of opinion
among men of sound judgment is that she does not really
know her hero. Deronda is in truth a lesser person than
she thinks him; and her assumption of omniscience breaks
down. In fact, unless an author is gifted with the god-like
wisdom of Mr. Meredith, he is almost sure to break
down in the effort to sustain the omniscient attitude consistently
throughout a complicated novel.
Therefore, in assuming a point of view external to the
characters, it is usually wiser for the author to accept a
compromise and to impose certain definite limits upon his
own omniscience. Thus, while maintaining the prerogative
to enter at any moment the minds of one or more of
his characters, he may limit his observation of the others
to what was actually seen and heard of them by those of
whose minds he is omniscient. In such a case, although
the author tells the story in the third person, he virtually
sees the story 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 that wherein the novelist's
omniscience is limited to a single character.
This special point of view is employed with consummate
art by Jane Austen. In "Emma," for example, she portrays
every intimate detail of the heroine's thoughts and
feelings, entering Emma's mind at will, or looking at her
from the outside with omniscient eyes. But in dealing
with the other characters, the author limits her own
[pg 128]
knowledge to what Emma knew about them, and sees them
consistently through the eyes of the heroine. Hence the
story, although written by Jane Austen in the third person,
is really seen by Emma Woodhouse and thought of
in the first. Similarly, in "Pride and Prejudice," Elizabeth
Bennet is the only character that the author permits
herself to analyze at any length: the others are seen
objectively, merely as Elizabeth saw them. The reader
is made acquainted with every step in the heroine's
gradual change of feeling toward Mr. Darcy; but of the
change in Darcy's thoughts and feelings toward Elizabeth
the reader is told nothing until she herself discovers it.
Of course, in applying this device, it is possible for the
author, at certain points in the narrative, to shift his
limited omniscience from one of the characters to another.
In such a case, although the story is told throughout consistently
in the third person, one scene may be viewed
from the standpoint of one of the characters, another
from that of another character, and so on.
Imagine for a moment two adjacent rooms with a single
door between them which is locked; and suppose a character
alone in each of the rooms,—each person thinking of
the other. Now an author assuming absolute omniscience
could tell us what each of them was thinking at the self-same
moment: the locked door would not be a bar to him.
But an author telling the story from the attitude of limited
omniscience could tell us only what one of them was
thinking, and would not be able to see beyond the door.
Whether or not he would find himself at liberty to choose
which room he should be cognizant of, would depend of
course on whether he was maintaining the same point of
view throughout his story or was selecting it anew for
every scene. In the first case, the one character whom
[pg 129]
he could see would be determined in advance: in the
other, he should have to decide from the point of view of
which of them that special scene could be the more effectively
set forth.
The attitude of limited omniscience is more easy to
maintain than that of a god-like mind intimately cognizant
of all the characters at once; and furthermore, the employment
of the more restricted point of view is more likely to
produce the illusion of life. In actual experience, we see
only one mind internally,—our own; all other people we
look upon externally: and a story, therefore, which lays
bare to us one mind and only one is more in tune with life
itself than a story in which many minds are searched by
an all-seeing eye. Also, a story told in the third person
from the point of view which has been illustrated from
Jane Austen's novels enjoys nearly every advantage of a
narrative told in the first person by the leading actor,
without being encumbered by certain of the most noticeable
disadvantages.
For the sake of concreteness, however, it is often advisable
for the author writing in the third person to
restrict his point of view still further, and, foregoing
absolutely the prerogative of omniscience, to limit himself
to an attitude merely observant and entirely external
to all the characters. In such a case the author wears, as
it were, an invisible cap like that of Fortunatus, which permits
him to move unnoticed among his characters; and
he reports to us externally their looks, their actions, and
their speech, without ever assuming an ability to delve
into their minds. This rigidly external point of view
is employed frequently by Guy de Maupassant in his
briefer fictions; but although it is especially valuable in the
short story, it is extremely difficult to maintain through
[pg 130]
the extensive compass of a novel. The main advantage
of this point of view is that it necessitates upon the part
of the author an attitude toward his story which is at all
moments visual rather than intellectual. He does not
give a ready-made interpretation of his incidents, but
merely projects them before the eyes of his readers and
allows to each the privilege of interpreting them for himself.
But, on the other hand, the reader loses the advantage
of the novelist's superior knowledge of his creatures;
and, excepting in dramatic moments when the motives
are self-evident from the action, may miss the human
purport of the scene.
In employing every phase of the external point of view
except the one which has been last discussed, the author
is free to choose between two very different tones of narrative,—the
impersonal and the personal. He may either
obliterate or emphasize his own personality as a factor in
the story. The great epics and folk-tales have all been
told impersonally. Whatever sort of person Homer may
have been, he never obtrudes himself into his narrative;
and we may read both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"
without deriving any more definite sense of his personality
than may be drawn from the hints which are given us by
the things he knows about. No one knows the author of
"Beowulf" or of the "Nibelungen Lied." These stories
seem to tell themselves. They are seen from nobody's
point of view, or from anybody's—whichever way we
choose to say it. Many modern authors, like Sir Walter
Scott, instinctively assume the epic attitude toward their
characters and incidents: they look upon them with a
large unconsciousness of self and depict them just as any
one would see them. Other authors, like Mr. William
Dean Howells, strive deliberately to keep the personal
[pg 131]
note out of their stories: self-consciously they triumph
over self in the endeavor to leave their characters
alone.
But novelists of another class prefer to admit frankly
to the reader that the narrator who stands apart from all
the characters and writes about them in the third person
is the author himself. They give a personal tone to the
narrative; they assert their own peculiarities of taste and
judgment, and never let you forget that they, and they
alone, are telling the story. The reader has to see it
through their eyes. It is in this way, for example, that
Thackeray displays his stories,—pitying his characters,
admiring them, making fun of them, or loving them, and
never letting slip an opportunity to chat about the matter
with his readers.
Mr. Howells, in Section XV of his "Criticism and Fiction,"
comments adversely on Thackeray's tendency "to
stand about in his scene, talking it over with his hands in
his pockets, interrupting the action, and spoiling the
illusion in which alone the truth of art resides"; and in a
further sentence he condemns him as "a writer who had
so little artistic sensibility, that he never hesitated on any
occasion, great or small, to make a foray among his
characters, and catch them up to show them to the reader
and tell him how beautiful or ugly they were; and cry
out over their amazing properties." This sweeping condemnation
of the narrative attitude of one of the best-beloved
of the great masters sounds just a little bigoted.
It is true, of course, that the strictest artists in fiction, like
Guy de Maupassant, prefer to tell their tales impersonally:
they leave their characters rigidly alone, and allow
the reader to see them without looking through the author's
personality. But there is a type of literature wherein the
[pg 132]
chief charm for the reader lies in the fact that he is permitted
to see things through the author's mind. When
we read Charles Lamb's essay on "The South Sea House,"
we read it not so much to look at the deserted and memorable
building as to look at Elia looking at it. Similarly
many readers return again and again to "The Newcomes"
not so much for the pleasure of seeing London high society
as for the pleasure of seeing Thackeray see it. The
merit, or the defect, of the method in any case is a question
not of rules and regulations but of the tone and
quality of the author's mind. Whether or not he may
safely obtrude himself into his fictions depends entirely
on who he is. This is a matter more of personality than
of art: and what might be insufferable with one author
may stand as the main merit of another. For instance,
the greatest charm of Mr. J. M. Barrie's novels emanates
from the author's habit of emphasizing the personal relation
between himself and his characters. The author's
many-mooded attitude toward Sentimental Tommy is a
matter of human interest just as much as anything that
Tommy feels himself.
Let us admit, then, in spite of Mr. Howells, that the
author of fiction has a right to assert himself as the narrator,
provided that he be a person of interest and charm.
It remains for us to consider the various moods in which,
in such a case, the writer may look upon his story. The
self-obliterating author endeavors to hide his own opinion
of the characters, in order not to interfere with the reader's
independence of judgment concerning them; but the
author who writes personally does not hesitate to reveal,
nor even to express directly, his admiration of a character's
merits or his deprecation of a character's defects. You
will seek in vain, in studying the fictitious people of Guy
[pg 133]
de Maupassant, for any indication of the author's approval
or disapproval of them; and there is something very admirable
in this absolute impassiveness of art. But on
the other hand, there is a certain salutary humanness
about an author who loves or hates his characters just as
he would love or hate the same sort of people in actual
life, and writes about them with the glow of personal
emotion. Mr. Barrie often disapproves of Tommy;
sometimes he feels forced to scold him; but he loves him
for a' that: and we feel instinctively that the hero is the
more truthfully delineated for being represented by a
friend.
It will be gathered from the foregoing discussion of the
various points of view in narrative that no one of them
may be pronounced absolutely better than the others. But
this much may be said dogmatically:—there is always
one best point of view from which to tell any given short-story;
and although in planning a novel the author works
with far less technical restriction, there is almost always
one best point of view from which to tell a given novel.
Therefore, it is advisable for the author to determine as
early as possible, from a studious consideration of his
materials, what is the best point of view from which to
tell the story he is planning, and thereafter to contemplate
his narrative from that standpoint and that only. Furthermore,
the interest of art demands that the point of view
selected shall, if possible, be maintained consistently
throughout the telling of the story. This, however, is a
very difficult matter; and only in very recent years have
even the best writers grown to master it. The novels
which have been told without a single violation of this
principle are very few in number. But the fact remains
that any unwarrantable break-down in the point of view
[pg 134]
selected diseconomizes the attention of the reader. It
is unfortunate, for instance, that Thomas Bailey Aldrich,
in "Marjorie Daw," should have found it necessary, after
telling almost the entire tale in letters, to shift suddenly
to the external point of view and end the story with a
few pages of direct narrative. Such an unexpected variation
of method startles and to some extent disrupts the
attention of the reader, and thereby detracts from the
effect of the thing to be conveyed.
Mr. Henry James and Mr. Kipling exhibit, in their
several ways, extraordinary mastery of point of view; and
their works may very profitably be studied for examples
of this special phase of artistry in narrative. The very
title of Mr. James' "What Maisie Knew" proclaims the
rigidly restricted standpoint from which the narrative
material is seen. In Mr. Kipling's recent tale, "A Deal
in Cotton," which appeared in Collier's Weekly for Christmas,
1907, the interest is derived chiefly from the trick
of telling the story twice,—first from the point of view of
Adam Strickland, and the second time from the point of
view of Adam's native body-servant, who knew many
matters that were hidden from his master.
In certain special cases the point of view has been
made, so to speak, the real hero of the story. Some years
ago Mr. Brander Matthews, in collaboration with the
late H. C. Bunner, devised a very clever narrative entitled
"The Documents in the Case." It consisted merely
of a series of numbered documents, widely different in
nature, presented with neither introduction nor comment
by the authors. The series contained clippings from
various newspapers, personal letters, I. O. U's, race-track
reports, pawn-tickets, letter-heads, telegrams, theater programs,
advertisements, receipted bills, envelopes, etc. In
[pg 135]
spite of the diversity of these materials, the authors succeeded
in fabricating a narrative which was entirely
coherent and at all points clear. The main interest, however,
lay in the novelty and cleverness of the point of view;
and though such an exaggerated technical expedient may
be serviceable now and then for a special sort of story, it
is not of any general value. A point of view that attracts
attention to itself necessarily distracts attention from the
story that is being represented; and in a narrative of serious
import, the main emphasis should be thrown upon the
thing that is told rather than upon the way of telling it.
[pg 136]
CHAPTER VIII
EMPHASIS IN NARRATIVE
The features of any object that we contemplate may
with intelligent judgment be divided into two classes,
according as they are inherently essential, or else merely
contributory, 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 be changed, the
object would still retain its individuality, however much
its aspect might be altered. And in general it may be
said that we do not understand an object until we are
able to set intelligently in one group or the other every
feature it presents to our attention.
In contemplating natural objects, it is often difficult to
distinguish those features which are merely contributory
from those which are inherently essential; but it ought not
to be difficult to do so in contemplating a work of art.
For it is possible for the artist—in fact it is incumbent
upon him—to help the observer to distinguish clearly
between the essential and the contributory details of the
object he has fabricated. By employing certain technical
expedients in exhibiting his work, the artist is able to communicate
to the observer his own intelligent distinction between
its more important, and its less important, features.
He does this by casting emphasis upon the necessary details
and gathering out of emphasis the subsidiary ones.
[pg 137]
The importance of the principle of emphasis is recognized
in all the arts; for it is only by an application of this
principle that the artist can gather and group in the
background the subsidiary elements of his work, while
he flings into vivid relief those elements that embody the
essence of the thing he has to say. The halo with which
the Byzantine mosaicists surrounded the faces of their
saints, the glory of golden light that gleams about the
figure of Christ in heaven in Tintoretto's decorations, the
blank bright walls of the Doge's palace undermined by
darkling and shadowy arcades, the refrain of a Provençal
song, the sharp shadow under the visor of Verrocchio's
equestrian statue, the thought-provoking chiaroscuro of
Rembrandt's figure paintings—these expedients are all
designed to attract attention to the essential elements of
a whole of many parts. By technical devices such as
these, emphasis must be given to the central truth of a
work of art in order that the observer may not look instead
at the mere accidents of its investiture. Where many
elements are gathered together for the purpose of representing
an idea, some of them must be more important
than the others because they are to a greater extent imbued
with it inherently; and the artist will fail of his purpose
unless he indicates clearly which elements are essential
and which are merely subsidiary.
Scarcely any other work of art, excepting a Gothic
cathedral or a theatrical performance, is made of elements
more multifarious than those of a fictitious narrative.
The details of a novel are so many and so various that
the author needs at all times a nice understanding and a
careful application of the principle of emphasis. It is
therefore advisable that the present chapter should be devoted
to the enumeration and illustration of the different
[pg 138]
technical devices which are employed by artists in narrative
to cast the needed emphasis on the essential features
of their stories.
First of all, it is obviously easy to emphasize by position.
In any narrative, or section of a narrative, that is designed
to be read in a single sitting, the last moments are of necessity
emphatic because they are the last. When the reader
lays the narrative aside, he remembers most vividly the last
thing that has been presented to his attention; and if he
thinks back to the earlier portions of the story, he must do
so by thinking through the concluding passage. Therefore,
it is necessary in the short-story, and advisable in the
chapters of a novel, to reserve for the ultimate position
one of the most inherently important features of the narrative;
for surely it is bad art to waste the natural emphasis
of position by casting it upon a subsidiary feature.
The importance of this simple expedient will readily
be recognized if the student will gather together a hundred
short-stories written by acknowledged masters and
examine the last paragraph of each. Consider for a
moment the final sentences of "Markheim," which we
have already quoted in another connection:—
"He confronted the maid upon the threshold with
something like a smile.
"'You had better go for the police,' said he: 'I have
killed your master.'"
The entire story is summed up in the concluding phrase;
and the final sentence rings ever after in the reader's
memory.
Here, to cite a new example, is the conclusion of Poe's
"The Masque of the Red Death":—
"And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red
Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one
[pg 139]
by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls
of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of
his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with
that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods
expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death
held illimitable dominion over all."
The sense of absolute ruin which we derive from this
impressive paragraph is, to a considerable extent, due to
the emphasis it gains from its finality. The effect would
unquestionably be subtracted from, if another paragraph
should be appended and should steal away its importance
of position.
In order to derive the utmost emphasis from the terminal
position, the great artist Guy de Maupassant, in
his short-stories, developed a periodicity of structure by
means of which he reserved the solution of the narrative,
whenever possible, until the final sentences. This periodic
structure is employed, for example, in his well-known story
of "The Necklace" ("La Parure"). It deals with a poor
woman who loses a diamond necklace that she has borrowed
from a rich friend in order to wear at a ball. She
buys another exactly like it and returns this in its place.
For ten years she and her husband labor day and night
to pay off the debts they have incurred to purchase the
substituted jewels. After the debts are all paid, the woman
tells her friend of what had happened. Then follows
this last sentence of the story:—
"'Oh, my poor Mathilde. But mine were false. At
most they were worth five hundred francs!'"
Next to the last position, the most emphatic place in a
brief narrative, or section of a narrative, is of course the
first. The mind of the reader receives with an especial
vividness whatever is presented to it at the outset. For
[pg 140]
this reason it is necessary in the short-story, and advisable
in the chapters of a novel, to begin with material that not
only is inherently essential but also strikes the key-note
of the narrative that is to follow. Edgar Allan Poe is
especially artistic in applying this principle of emphasis
by initial position. We have already quoted, in another
connection, the solemn opening of "The Fall of the House
of Usher," with its suggestion of immitigable gloom of
setting as the dominant note of the narrative. In "The
Cask of Amontillado," wherein the thing to be emphasized
is the element of action, Poe begins with this
sentence: "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had
borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult,
I vowed revenge": and we know already that the story is
to set forth a signal act of vengeance. In "The Tell-Tale
Heart," which is a study of murderous madness, and deals
primarily with the element of character, the author opens
thus:—
"True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I
had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not
dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing
acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth.
I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?
Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can
tell you the whole story."
In general it may be said that any pause in a narrative
emphasizes by position whatever immediately precedes it,
and also (though to a considerably less extent) whatever
immediately follows it. For this reason many masters of
the short-story, like Daudet and de Maupassant, construct
their narratives in sections, in order to multiply the
number of terminal and initial positions. Asterisks
[pg 141]
strung across the page not only make the reader aware of
the completion of an integral portion of the story, but also
focus his attention emphatically on the last thing that has
been said before the interruption. The employment of
points de suspension—a mark of punctuation consisting
of a series of successive dots ...—which is so frequent
with French authors, is a device which is used to interrupt
a sentence solely for the sake of emphasis by pause.
The instances which we have selected to illustrate the
expedient of emphasizing by position have been chosen for
convenience from short-stories; but the same principle
may be applied with similar success in constructing the
chapters of a novel. Certain great but inartistic novelists,
like Sir Walter Scott, show themselves to be singularly
obtuse to the advantage of placing emphatic material in
an emphatic position. Scott is almost always careless of
his chapter endings: he allows the sections of his narrative
to drift and straggle, instead of rounding them to an
emphatic close. But more artistic novelists, like Victor
Hugo for example, 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. The
hunchback, Quasimodo, has flung the archdeacon, Claude
Frollo, from the tower-top of Notre Dame. This paragraph
then brings the chapter to an end:—
"Quasimodo then raised his eye to the gypsy, whose
body he saw, depending from the gibbet, shudder afar
under her white robe with the last tremblings of death-agony;
then he lowered it to the archdeacon, stretched
out at the foot of the tower and no longer having human
form; and he said with a sob that made his deep chest
heave: 'Oh! all that I have loved!'"
[pg 142]
A chapter ending may be artistically planned either
(as in the foregoing instance) to sum up with absolute
finality the narrative accomplishment of the chapter, or
else, by vaguely foreshadowing the subsequent progress
of the story, to lure the reader to proceed. The elder
Dumas possessed in a remarkable degree the faculty of
so terminating one chapter as to allure the reader to an
immediate commencement of the next. He did this most
frequently by introducing a new thread of narrative in a
phrase of the concluding sentence, and thereby 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 last chapter of a novel with a
complicated plot is often of necessity devoted to tying or
untying minor knots in the straggling threads of the
general network. Therefore, the most emphatic place
in an extended narrative is not at the very end, but rather
at the close of the chapter which sets forth the culmination.
Also, although many great novels, like "The
Scarlet Letter," have begun at an emphatic moment in
the plot, many others have opened slowly and have presented
no important material until the narrative was well
under way. "The Talisman" of Scott, "The Spy" of
Fenimore Cooper, and many another early nineteenth-century
romance, began with a solitary horseman whom
the reader was forced to follow for several pages before
anything whatever happened. Latterly, however, novelists
have learned from writers of short-stories the art of
opening emphatically with material important to the plot.
Another means of emphasis in narrative is by proportion.
More time and more attention should be given to
essential scenes than to matters of subsidiary interest.
[pg 143]
The most important characters should be given most to
say and do; and the amount of attention devoted to the
others should be proportioned to their importance in the
action. Becky Sharp stands out sharply from the half a
hundred other characters in "Vanity Fair," because more
time is devoted to her than to any of the others. Similarly,
in "Emma" and "Pride and Prejudice," as we
have noted in the preceding chapter, the heroine is in each
case emphasized by the fact that she is set forth from
a more intimate point of view than the minor people in the
story. It is wise, for the sake of emphasis by proportion,
to draw the major characters more completely and more
carefully than the minor; and much may therefore be
said, on this ground, in defense of Dickens' habit of
drawing humanly only the leading characters in his
novels and merely sketching in caricature the subsidiary
actors.
It is sometimes possible, in special cases, to emphasize
ironically by inverse proportion. An author may deliberately
devote several successive pages to dwelling on
subsidiary matters, only to emphasize sharply a sudden
paragraph or sentence in which he turns to the one thing
that really counts. But this ironical expedient is, of
course, less frequently serviceable than that of emphasis
by direct proportion.
Undoubtedly the easiest means of inculcating a detail
of narrative is to repeat it again and again. Emphasis
by iteration is a favorite device of Dickens. The reader
is never allowed to forget the catch-phrase of Micawber
or the moral look of Pecksniff. In many cases, to be
sure, the reader wishes that he might escape the constantly
recurrent repetition; but Dickens occasionally
applies the expedient with subtle emotional effect. In
[pg 144]
"A Tale of Two Cities," for example, the repeated references
to echoing footsteps and to the knitting of Madame
Defarge contribute a great deal to the sense of imminent
catastrophe.
Certain modern authors have developed a phase of
emphasis by iteration which is similar to the employment
of the leit-motiv in the music-dramas of Richard Wagner.
In the Wagnerian operas a certain musical theme is
devoted to each of the characters, and is woven into the
score whenever the character appears. Similarly, in the
later plays of Henrik Ibsen, certain phrases are repeated
frequently, to indicate the recurrence of certain dramatic
moods. Thus, in "Rosmersholm," reference is made to
the weird symbol of "white horses," whenever the mood of
the momentary scene foreshadows the double suicide which
is to terminate the play. Students of "Hedda Gabler"
need not be reminded of the emphasis flung by iteration
on the phrases, "Vine-leaves in his hair," "Fancy that,
Hedda!" "Wavy-haired Thea," "The one cock on the
fowl-roost," and "People don't do such things!" The
same device may be employed just as effectively in the
short-story and the novel. A single instance will suffice
for illustration. Notice, in examining the impressive talk
of the old lama in Mr. Kipling's "Kim," how much emphasis
is derived from the continual recurrence of certain
phrases, like the "Search for the River," "the justice of
the Wheel," "to acquire merit," and so forth.
A narrative expedient scarcely distinguishable in effect
from simple iteration is the device of parallelism of structure.
For example, in Hawthorne's story of "The White
Old Maid," the first scene and the last, although they are
separated in time by many, many years, take place in the
same spacious chamber, with the moonbeams falling in
[pg 145]
the same way through two deep and narrow windows,
while waving curtains produce the same ghostly semblance
of expression on a face that is dead.
Emphasis in narrative is also attained by antithesis,—an
expedient employed in every art. In most stories it is
well so to select the characters that they will set each other
off by contrast. In the great duel scene of the "Master
of Ballantrae," from which a selection has been quoted in
a previous chapter, the phlegmatic calm of Mr. Henry is
contrasted sharply with the mercurial hot-headedness of
the Master; and each character stands forth more vividly
because of its opposition to the other. Of the two women
who are loved by Tito Melema, the one, Tessa, is simple
and childish, the other, Romola, complex and intellectual.
The most interesting stories present a constant contrast
of mutually foiling personalities; and whenever characters
of varied views and opposing aims come nobly to the
grapple in a struggle that vitally concerns them, the
tensity of the situation will be augmented if the difference
between the characters is marked. This expedient is
therefore of especial importance in the drama. Othello
seems more poignantly emotional in the presence of the
coldly intellectual Iago. In "The School for Scandal,"
Charles and Joseph Surface are much more effective
together than either of them would be alone. The whole-hearted
and happy-go-lucky recklessness of the one sets
off the smooth and smug dissimulation of the other; the
first gives light to the play, and the second shade. Hamlet's
wit is sharpened by the garrulous obtuseness of Polonius;
the sad world-wisdom of Paula Tanqueray is
accentuated by the innocence of Ellean. Similarly, to
return to the novel for examples, we need only instance the
contrast in mind between Sherlock Holmes and Dr.
[pg 146]
Watson, the contrast in mood between Claude Frollo and
Phœbus de Châteaupers, the contrast in ideals between
Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen Grandcourt.
The expedient of antithesis is also employed effectively
in the balance of scene against scene. The absolute
desolation which terminates "The Masque of the Red
Death" is preceded by "a masked ball of the most unusual
magnificence." In Scott's "Kenilworth," we pass
from the superb festivities which Leicester institutes in
honor of Queen Elizabeth, to the lonely prison where Amy
Robsart, his discarded wife, is languishing. Victor Hugo
is, in modern fiction, the greatest master of antithesis of
mood between scene and scene. His most emphatic
effects are attained, like those of Gothic architecture, by
a juxtaposition of the grotesque and the sublime. Often,
to be sure, he overworks the antithetic; and entire sections
of his narrative move like the walking-beam of a ferry-boat,
tilting now to this side, now to that. But in spite
of his excess in employing this device, his practice should
be studied carefully; for at his best he illustrates more
convincingly than any other author the effectiveness of
emphasis by contrast.
The subtlest way of employing this expedient is to present
an antithesis of mood within a single scene. Dame
Quickly's account of Falstaff's death touches at once the
heights of humor and the depths of pathos. At the close
of "Mrs. Bathurst," the tragic narrative is interrupted
by the passage of a picnic-party singing a light love-song.
Shylock, in his great dialogue with Tubal, is at the same
moment plunged in melancholy over the defection of his
daughter and flushed with triumph because he has Antonio
at last within his clutches. Each emotion seems more
potent because it is contrasted with the other. In Mr.
[pg 147]
Kipling's "'Love-o'-Women,'" the tragic effect is enhanced
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 on the 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 long an' very long, an' he tuk his spache betune his
teeth wid a wrench that shuk him.
"'I'm dyin', Aigypt—dyin',' he says; ay, those were
his words, for I remimber the name he called her. He
was turnin' the death-color, but his eyes niver rowled.
They were set—set on her. Widout word or warnin'
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 a fine big woman."
Another rhetorical expedient from which 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 of
importance,—each incident carrying the interest to a
higher level than that of the preceding. The same is
true of the structure of a novel from the outset to the
moment of the culmination; but of course it is rarely
possible in the dénouement to carry the interest any higher
than the level it attained at the point of greatest complication.
Climacteric progressiveness of structure is effectively
exhibited in Mr. Henry James' tale of mystery and
terror, "The Turn of the Screw." The author on horror's
head horrors accumulates, in a steadily ascending scale.
But, on the other hand, many stories have been marred
by the introduction of a very striking scene too early in
[pg 148]
the structure, after which there has succeeded of necessity
an appreciable diminution in the interest. The reason why
sequels to great novels have rarely been successful is that
it has been impossible for the author in the second volume
to sustain a climacteric rise of interest from the level where
he left off in the first.
A means of emphasis less technical and more psychological
than those which have been hitherto discussed is that
which owes its origin to surprise. Whatever hits the reader
unexpectedly will hit him hard. He will be most impressed
by that for which he has been least prepared. Chapter
XXXII of "Vanity Fair" passes in Brussels during the
battle of Waterloo. The reader is kept in the city with
the women of the story while the men are fighting on the
field a dozen miles away. All day a distant cannonading
rumbles on the ear. At nightfall the noise stops suddenly.
Then, at the end of the 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 for George, who was
lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart."
This statement of George Osborne's death is emphasized
in several ways at once. It is made emphatic by
position, since it is placed at the very end of a long chapter;
by inverse proportion, since it is set forth in a single
phrase after many pages that have been devoted to less
important matters; but most of all by the startle of surprise
with which it strikes the reader. Likewise, the
last sentence of de Maupassant's "The Necklace," quoted
earlier in this chapter, is emphatic by surprise as well as
by position; and the same is true of the clever and unexpected
close of H. C. Bunner's "A Sisterly Scheme,"
in many ways a little masterpiece of art.
[pg 149]
In tales of mystery, the interest is maintained chiefly
by the deft manipulation of surprise; but even in novels
wherein the aim to mystify is very far from being the
primary purpose of the author, it is often wise to keep a
secret from the reader for the sake of the emphasis by surprise
which may be derived at the moment of revelation.
In "Our Mutual Friend" the reader is led for a long time
to suppose that the character of Mr. Boffin is changing
for the worse; and his interest is stimulated keenly when
he discovers ultimately that the apparent degeneration
has been only a pretense.
In the drama this expedient must be used with great
delicacy, because a sudden and startling shock of surprise
is likely to scatter the attention of the spectators and
flurry them out of a true conception of the scene. The
reader of a novel, when he discovers with surprise that
he has been skilfully deceived through several pages,
may pause to reconstruct his conception of the narrative,
and may even re-read the entire passage through which
the secret has been withheld from him. But in the
theater, the spectators cannot stop the play while they
reconstruct in retrospect their judgment of a situation;
and therefore, in the drama, a moment of surprise should
be carefully led up to by anticipatory suggestion. Before
Lady Macbeth is disclosed walking in her sleep, her
doctor and her waiting-gentlewoman are sent on to tell
the audience of her "slumbery agitation." This is
excellent art in the theater; 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 is complete.
An even more interesting form of emphasis in narrative
is emphasis by suspense. Wilkie Collins is accredited
with having said that the secret of holding the attention
[pg 150]
of one's readers lay in the ability to do three things:
"Make 'em laugh; make 'em weep; make 'em wait."
Still abide these three; and the greatest is the last. The
ability to make the reader wait, through many pages and
at times through many chapters, is a very valuable asset
of the writer of fiction; but this ability is applied to best
advantage when it is exercised within certain limitations.
In the first place, there is no use in making the reader
wait unless he is first given an inkling of what he is to wait
for. The reader should be tantalized; he should be made
to long for the fruit that is just beyond his grasp; and he
should not be left in ignorance as to the nature of the
fruit, lest he should long for it half-heartedly. A vague
sense of "something evermore about to be" is not as interesting
to the reader as a vivid sense of the imminence
of some particular occurrence that he wishes ardently to
witness. The expedient of suspense is most effective
when either of two things and only two, both of which
the reader has imagined in advance, is just about to
happen, and the reader, desirous of the one and apprehensive
of the other, is kept waiting while the balance
trembles. In the second place, there is seldom any use
in making the reader wait unless he is given in the end
the thing he has been waiting for. A short-story may
occasionally set forth a suspense which is never to be
satisfied. Frank R. Stockton's famous tale, "The Lady
or the Tiger?", ends with a question which neither the
reader nor the author is able to answer; and Bayard
Taylor's fascinating short-story, "Who Was She?", never
reveals the alluring secret of the heroine's identity. But
in an extended story an unsatisfied suspense is often less
emphatic than no suspense at all, because the reader in
the end feels cheated by the author who has made him
[pg 151]
wait for nothing. There are, of course, exceptions to this
statement. In "The Marble Faun," Hawthorne is undoubtedly
right in never revealing the shape of Donatello's
ears, even though the reader continually expects the
revelation; but, in the same novel, it is difficult to see what,
if anything, is gained by making the reader wait in vain
for the truth about the shadowy past of Miriam.
Emphasis in narrative may also be attained by imitative
movement. Whatever is imagined to have happened
quickly should be narrated quickly, in few words and in
rapid rhythm; and whatever is imagined to have happened
slowly should be narrated in a more leisurely manner,—sometimes
in a greater number of words than are absolutely
necessitated by the sense alone,—the words being
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 the story, it takes the
hero a whole paragraph, containing no less than three
hundred words, to mount the four-and-twenty steps to
the first floor of the house. In the following passage
from "The Masque of the Red Death," notice how
much of the effect is due to imitative movement in the
narrative:—
"But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad
assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole party,
there were found none who put forth hand to seize him;
so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the Prince's
person; and, while the vast assembly, as if with one
impulse, shrank from the centers of the rooms to the
walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same
solemn and measured step which had distinguished him
from the first, through the blue chamber to the purple—through
[pg 152]
the purple to the green—through the green to
the orange—through this again to the white—and even
thence to the violet, ere a decided movement had been
made to arrest him. It was then, however, that the
Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame
of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly
through the six chambers, while none followed him on
account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all."
The specter and the Prince pass successively through the
same series of rooms; but it takes the former fifty-one
words to cover the distance, whereas it takes the latter only
six.
In every story that is artistically fashioned, the methods
of emphasis enumerated in this chapter will be found to
be continually applied. Its essential features will be
rendered prominent by position (terminal or initial), by
proportion (direct or inverse), by iteration or parallelism,
by antithesis, by climax, by surprise, by suspense, by imitative
movement, or by a combination of any or all of
these. The necessity of emphasis is ever present; the
means of emphasis are simple; and any writer of narrative
who knows his art will endeavor to employ them
always to the best advantage.
[pg 153]
CHAPTER IX
THE EPIC, THE DRAMA, AND THE NOVEL
Throughout the present volume, the word fiction has
been used with a very broad significance, to include every
type of literary composition whose purpose is to embody
certain truths of human life in a series of imagined facts.
The reason for this has been that the same general artistic
methods, with very slight and obvious modifications, are
applicable to every sort of narrative which sets forth
imagined people in a series of imagined acts. Nearly all
of the technical principles which have been outlined in the
six preceding 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 materials and 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
necessarily the same, whatever be its mood or its medium.
The methods of constructing plots, of delineating characters,
of employing settings, do not differ appreciably
whether a narrative be written in verse or in prose; and in
either case the same selection of point of view and variety
of emphasis are possible. Therefore, in this volume, no
attempt has hitherto been made to distinguish one type
of fictitious narrative from another.
Such a distinction, if it be attempted at all, should be
made only on the broadest and most general lines. First
[pg 154]
of all, it should be admitted that, in an inquiry concerned
solely with the methods of fiction, no technical distinction
is possible between the narrative that is written in verse
and the narrative that is written in prose. The two differ
in the mood of their materials and the medium through
which they are expressed; but they do not differ distinctly
in methods of construction. As far as plot and characters
and setting are concerned, Sir Walter Scott went to work
in the Waverley Novels, which are written in prose, just
as he had gone to work in "Marmion" and "The Lady
of the Lake," which are written in verse. In his verse
he said things with the better art, in his prose he had more
things to say; but in each case his central purpose was the
same: and nothing can be gained from a critical dictum
that "Ivanhoe" is fiction and that "Marmion" is not.
In the history of every nation, fiction has been written
earliest in verse and only afterwards in prose. What we
loosely call the novel was developed late in literature, at a
time after prose had supplanted verse as the natural
medium for narrative. Therefore, and therefore only,
have we come to regard the novel as a type of prose literature.
For there is no inherent reason why a novel may
not be written in verse. There is a sense in which Mrs.
Browning's "Aurora Leigh," Owen Meredith's "Lucile,"
and Coventry Patmore's "The Angel in the House," to
mention works of very different quality and caliber, may
be regarded more properly as novels than as poems. The
story of "Maud" inspired Tennyson to poetic utterance,
and he told the tale in a series of exquisite lyrics; but the
same story might have been used by a different author as
the basis for a novel in prose. The subject of "Evangeline"
was suggested to Longfellow by Hawthorne; and if
the great prose poet had written the story himself, it would
[pg 155]
not have differed essentially in material or in structural
method from the narrative as we know it through the
medium of the verse romancer. M. François Coppée has
composed admirable short-stories in verse as well as in
prose. "The Strike of the Iron-Workers" ("La Grève des
Forgerons"), which is written in rhymed Alexandrines,
does not differ markedly in narrative method from "The
Substitute" ("Le Remplaçant"), which is written in prose.
To be sure, the former is a poem and the latter is not; but
only a very narrow-minded critic would call the latter a
short-story without applying the same term also to the
former. Therefore, the question whether a certain fictitious
tale should be told in verse or in prose has no place
in a general discussion of the materials and methods of
fiction. It is a matter of expression merely, and must be
decided in each case by the temperamental attitude of the
author toward his subject-matter.
Eliminating, therefore, as unprofitable any attempt at
a critical distinction between fiction that is written in
verse and fiction that is written in prose, we may yet
derive a certain profit from a distinction along broad and
general lines between three leading moods of fiction,—the
epic, the dramatic, and what (lacking a more precise
term) we may call the novelistic. Certain materials of
fiction are inherently epic, or dramatic, or novelistic, as
the case may be. Also, an author, according to his
mental attitude toward life and toward the subject-matter
of his fictions, may cast his stories either in the
epic, the dramatic, or the novelistic mood. In order to
understand this distinction, we must examine the nature
of the epic and the drama, and then study the novel in
comparison with these two elder types of fiction.
The great epics of the world, whether, as in the case of
[pg 156]
the Norse sagas and possibly of the Homeric poems, they
have been a gradual and undeliberate aggregation of
traditional ballads, or else, as in the case of the "Æneid"
and "Paradise Lost," they have been the deliberate production
of a single conscious artist, have attained their
chief significance from the fact that they have summed up
within themselves the entire contribution to human
progress of a certain race, a certain nation, a certain
organized religion. The glory that was Greece is epitomized
and sung forever in the "Iliad,"—the grandeur that
was Rome, in the "Æneid." All that the Middle Ages
gave the world is gathered and expressed in the "Divine
Comedy" of Dante: all of medieval history, science,
philosophy, scholarship, poetry, religion may be reconstructed
from a right reading and entire understanding
of this single monumental poem. If you would know
Portugal in her great age of discovery and conquest and
national expansion, read the "Lusiads" of Camoëns.
If you would know Christianity militant against the embattled
legions of the Saracens, read the "Jerusalem
Liberated" of Tasso. If you would know what the
Puritan religion once meant to the greatest minds of England,
read the "Paradise Lost" of Milton.
The great epics have attained this resumptive and historical
significance only by exhibiting as subject-matter
a vast and communal struggle, in which an entire race,
an entire nation, an entire organized religion has been
concerned,—a struggle imagined as so vast that it has
shaken heaven as well as earth and called to conflict not
only men but also gods. The epic has dealt always with
a struggle, at once human and divine, to establish a great
communal cause. This cause, in the "Æneid," is the
founding of Rome; in the "Jerusalem Liberated" it is
[pg 157]
the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre; in the "Faerie
Queene" 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. Whatever nations, whatever races, whatever
gods oppose the founding of Rome or the liberation
of Jerusalem must be conquered, because in either case
the epic cause is righteous and predestined to prevail.
As a result of this, the characters in the great epics are
memorable mainly because of the part that they play in
advancing or retarding the victory of the vast and social
cause which is the subject of the story. Their virtues and
their faults are communal and representative: they are
not adjudged as individuals, apart from the conflict in
which they figure: and, as a consequence, they are rarely
interesting in their individual traits. It is in rendering
the more intimate and personal phases of human character
that epic literature shows itself, when compared with
the modern novel, inefficient. The epic author exhibits
little sympathy for any individual who struggles against
the cause that is to be established. Æneas' dallying with
Dido and subsequent desertion of her is of little interest
to Virgil on the ground of individual personality: what
interests him mainly is that so long as Æneas lingers
with the Carthaginian queen, the founding of Rome is
being retarded, and that when at last Æneas leaves her,
he does so to advance the epic cause. Therefore Virgil
regards the desertion of Dido as an act of heroic virtue
on the part of the man who sails away to found a nation.
A modern novelist, however (and this is the main point
to be considered in this connection), would conceive the
whole matter more personally. He would be far less
interested at the moment in the ultimate founding of Rome
[pg 158]
than he would be in the misery of the deserted woman;
and instead of considering Æneas as a model of heroic
virtue, would adjudge him as personally base. From
this we see that the novelistic attitude toward character
is much more intimate than the epic attitude. The wrath
of Achilles is significant to Homer, not so much because
it is an exhibition of individual personality as because
it is a factor in jeopardizing the victory of the Greeks.
Considered as types of individual character, most of
Homer's heroes are mere boys. It is the cause for which
they fight that gives them dignity: embattled Greece must
repossess the beauty which a lesser race has reft away
from it. Even Helen herself is merely an idea to be
fought for; she is not, as a woman, interesting humanly.
It is only in infrequent passages, such as the scene of
parting between Andromache and Hector, that the ancient
epics reveal the intimate attitude toward character
to which we have grown accustomed in the modern
novel.
Because the epic authors have been interested always
in communal conflict rather than in individual personality,
they have seldom made any use of the element of love,—the
most intimate and personal of all emotions. There
is no love in Homer, and scarcely any love in Virgil and
in Milton. Tasso, to be sure, uses a love motive as the
basis for each of the three leading strands of his story;
but because of this, his epic, though gaining in modernity
and charm, loses something of the communal immensity—the
impersonal dignity—of the "Iliad" and the
"Æneid." On the other hand, novelistic authors, since
they have been interested mainly in the revelation of
intimate phases of individual personality, have seized
upon the element of love as the leading motive of their
[pg 159]
stories. And this is one of the main differences, on the
side of content, between epic and novelistic fiction.
Certain great works of fiction stand upon the borderland
between the epic and the novel. "Don Quixote"
is, for instance, such a work. It is epic in that it sums
up and expresses the entire contribution of Spain to the
progress of humanity. It is resumptive of the nation
that produced it: all phases of Spanish life and character,
ideals and temperament, are epitomized within it. But,
on the other hand, it is novelistic in the emphasis it casts
on individual personality,—the intimacy with which it
focuses the interest not so much upon a nation as upon
a man.
The epic, in the ancient sense, is dead to-day. Facility
of intercommunication between the nations has made us
all citizens of the world; and an increased sense of the
relativity of national and religious ideals has made us
catholic of other systems than our own. Consequently
we have lost belief in a communal conflict so absolutely
just and necessary as to call to battle powers not only
human but divine. Also, since the French Revolution,
we have grown to set the one above the many, and to believe
that, of right, society exists for the sake of the individual
rather than the individual for the sake of society.
Therefore the novel, which deals with individual personality
in and for itself, is more attuned to modern life than
the epic, which presents the individual mainly in relation
to a communal cause which he 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 novel than as the epic of the
great cause of abolition. Underlying many of the works
[pg 160]
of Erckmann-Chatrian is an epic purpose to advance the
cause of universal peace by a depiction of the horrors of
war. Balzac had in mind the resumptive phase of epic
composition when he planned his "Human Comedy"
(choosing his title in evident imitation of that of Dante's
poem), and started out to sum up all phases of human life
in a single monumental series of narratives. So also the
late Frank Norris had an epic idea in his imagination
when he planned a trilogy of novels (which unhappily
he died before completing) to exhibit what the great wheat
industry means to the modern world.
In the broad and social sense, the epic is undeniably
a greater type of fiction than the novel, because it is more
resumptive of life in the large, and looks upon humanity
with a vaster sweep of vision; but in the deep and personal
sense, the novel is the greater, because it is more capable
of an intimate study of individual emotion. And it is
possible, as we have seen, that modern fiction should be
at once epic and novelistic in content and in mood,—epic
in resuming all aspects of a certain phase of life and in
exhibiting a social struggle, and novelistic in casting
emphasis upon personal details of character and in depicting
intimate emotions. Probably no other author has
succeeded better than Emile Zola in combining the epic
and the novelistic moods of fiction; and the novels in the
Rougon-Macquart series are at once communal and personal
in their significance.
It is somewhat simpler to trace a distinction both in
content and in mood between novelistic and dramatic
fiction, because the latter is produced under special conditions
which impose definite limitations upon the author.
A drama is, in essence, a story devised to be presented by
actors on a stage before an audience. The dramatist,
[pg 161]
therefore, works ever under the sway of three influences
to which the novelist is not submitted:—namely, the
temperament of the actors by whom his plays are to be
performed, the physical conditions of the theater in which
they are to be produced, and the psychologic nature of
the audience before which they are to be presented. The
combined force of these three external influences upon
the dramatist accounts for all of the essential differences
between the drama and the novel.
First of all, because of the influence of his actors, the
dramatist is obliged to draw character through action,
and to eliminate from his work almost every other means
of characterization. He must therefore select from life
such moments as are active rather than passive. His
characters must constantly be doing something; they may
not pause for careful contemplation. Consequently the
novelist has a wider range of subject than the dramatist,
because he is able to consider life more calmly, and to
concern himself, if need be, with thoughts and feelings
that do not translate themselves into action. In depicting
objective events in which the element of action is
paramount, the drama is more immediate and vivid; but
the novel may depict subjective events which are quite
beyond the presentation of actors in a theater. Furthermore,
since he is not obliged to think of actors, the novelist
has a greater freedom in creating characters than the
dramatist. The great characters of the drama have been
devised by playwrights who have already attained command
of the theater of their place and time, and who
therefore have fashioned their parts to fit the individual
actors they have found ready to perform them. Consequently
they have endowed their characters with the
physical, and even to some extent the mental, characteristics
[pg 162]
of certain actual actors. M. Rostand's Cyrano de
Bergerac is not merely Cyrano, but also M. Constant
Coquelin; M. Sardou's La Tosca is not merely La Tosca,
but also 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 the actual,
the dramatist is extremely likely to be betrayed into untruthfulness.
In the last scene of "Hamlet," the Queen
says of the Prince, "He's fat and scant of breath." This
line was of course occasioned by the fact that Richard
Burbage was corpulent during the season of 1602. But
the eternal truth is that Prince Hamlet is a slender man;
and Shakespeare has here been forced to belie the truth
in order to subserve the fact. On the other hand, the
dramatist is undoubtedly aided in his great aim of creating
characters by holding in mind certain actual people who
have been selected to represent them; and what the novelist
gains in range and freedom of characterization, he is likely
to lose in concreteness of delineation.
Secondly, the form and structure of the drama in any
age is imposed upon the dramatist by the size and shape
and physical appointments of the theater he is writing
for. Plays must be built in one way to fit the theater
of Dionysius, in another way to fit the Globe upon the
Bankside, in still another way to fit the modern electric-lighted
stage behind a picture-frame proscenium. The
dramatist, in constructing his story, is hedged in by a
multitude of physical restrictions, of which he must make
a special study in order to force them to contribute to the
presentation of his truth instead of detracting from it.
In this regard, again, the novelist works with greater
freedom. Seldom is his labor subjected to merely physical
[pg 163]
restrictions from without. Sometimes, to be sure,
certain arbitrary conditions of the trade of publishing
have exercised an influence over the structure of the
novel. In England, early in the nineteenth century, it
was easier to sell a three-volume novel than a tale of lesser
compass; and many a story of the time had to be pieced out
beyond its natural and truthful length in order to meet
the demands of the public and the publishers. But such
a case, in the history of the novel, is exceptional. In
general, the novelist may build as he chooses. He may
tell a tale, long or short, happening in few places or in
many; and is not, like the dramatist, confined in place to
no more than four or five different settings, and in time
to the two hours' traffic of the stage. The novel, therefore,
is far more serviceable than the drama as a medium for
exhibiting the gradual growth of character,—the development
of personality under influences extending over long
periods of time and exerted in many different places.
Thirdly, the very content of the drama is determined
by the fact that a play must be devised to interest a multitude
rather than an individual. The novelist writes for a
reader sitting alone in his library: whether ten such readers
or a hundred thousand ultimately read a book, the author
speaks to each of them apart from all the others. But
the dramatist must plan his story to interest simultaneously
a multitude of heterogeneous observers. The drama,
therefore, must be richer in popular appeal; but the novel
may be subtler in appealing to the one instead of to the
many. Since the novelist addresses himself to a single
person only, or to a limitless succession of single persons,
he may choose the sort of reader he will write for; but the
dramatist must please the many, and is therefore at
the mercy of the multitude. He writes less freely than the
[pg 164]
novelist, since he cannot pick his auditors. His themes,
his thoughts, and his emotions are restricted by the limits
of popular appreciation.
This important condition is potent in determining the
proper content of dramatic fiction. For it has been found
in practice that the only thing that will keenly interest a
crowd is a struggle between character and character.
Speaking empirically, the late Ferdinand Brunetière,
in his preface to "Annales du Théatre et de la Musique"
for 1893, stated that the drama has dealt always with a
struggle between human wills; and his statement, formulated
in the catch-phrase, "No struggle, no drama,"
has since become a commonplace of dramatic criticism.
The reason for this is simply that characters are interesting
to a crowd mainly in those crises of emotion that bring
them to the grapple. A single individual, like the reader
of a novel, may be interested intellectually in those gentle
influences beneath which a character unfolds itself as
mildly as a blowing rose; but to the gathered multitude a
character does not appeal except in moments of contention.
Hence the drama, to interest at all, must present its
characters in some struggle of the wills,—whether it be
merely flippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice,
or gentle, as in that of Viola and Orsino, or terrible, with
Macbeth, or piteous, with Lear. The drama, therefore, is
akin to the epic, in that it must represent a struggle; but
it is more akin to the novel, in that it deals with human
character in its individual, rather than its communal,
aspects. But in range of representing characters, the
drama is more restricted than the novel; for though the
novelist is at liberty to exhibit a struggle of individual
human wills whenever he may choose to do so, he is not,
like the dramatist, prohibited from representing anything
[pg 165]
else. In covering this special province, the drama is undeniably
more vivid and emphatic; but many momentous
phases of human experience are not contentious but contemplative;
and these the novel may reveal serenely, without
employment of the sound and fury 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 forth action with emotion for its motive.
But the novelist, in motivating action, may be more considerate
and intellectual, since his appeal is made to the
individual mind. In its psychologic processes, the crowd
is more commonplace and more traditional than is the
individual. The drama, therefore, is less serviceable
than the novel as a vehicle for conveying unaccustomed
and advanced ideas of life. The crowd has no speculation
in its eyes: it is impatient of original thought, and of
any but inherited emotion: it evinces little favor for the
original, the questioning, the new. Therefore if an author
holds ideas of religion, or of politics, or of social law that
are in advance of his time, 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 has more
patience for intellectual consideration.
Furthermore, the novelist need not, like the dramatist,
subserve the immediate necessity for popular appeal.
The dramatic author, since he plans his story for a heterogeneous
multitude of people, must incorporate in the
same single work of art elements that will interest all
classes of mankind. But the novelistic author, since he
is at liberty to pick his auditors at will, may, if he choose,
write only for the best-developed minds. It is an element
of Shakespeare's greatness that his most momentous plays,
like "Hamlet" and "Othello," are of interest to people who
[pg 166]
can neither read nor write, as well as to people of educated
sensibilities. But it is an evidence of Mr. Meredith's
greatness that his novels are caviare to the general. Mr.
Kipling's "They" is the greater story because it defends
itself from being understood by those it is not really for.
In exhibiting the subtler and more delicate phases of
human experience, the novel far transcends the drama.
The drama, at its deepest, is more poignant; but the
novel, at its highest, is more exquisite.
The proper material for the drama is, as we have seen,
a struggle between individual human wills, motivated by
emotion rather than by intellect, and expressed in terms
of objective action. In representing such material, the
drama is supreme. But the novel is wider in range; for
besides exhibiting (though less emphatically) this special
aspect of human life, it may embody many other and
scarcely less important phases of individual experience.
Of late, an effort has been made to break down the barrier
between the novel and the drama: many stories, which
have been told first in the novelistic mood, have afterward
been reconstructed and retold for presentation in the
theater. This attempt has succeeded sometimes, but
has more often failed. Yet it ought to be very easy to
distinguish a novel that may be dramatized from a novel
that may not. Certain scenes in novelistic literature, like
the duel in "The Master of Ballantrae," are essentially
dramatic both in content and in mood. Such scenes may
be adapted with very little labor to the uses of the theater.
Certain novels, like "Jane Eyre," which exhibit an emphatic
struggle between individual human wills, are
inherently capable of theatric representment. But any
novel in which the main source of interest is not the clash
of character on character, in which the element of action
[pg 167]
is subordinate, or in which the chief appeal is made to the
individual (instead of the collective) mind, is not capable
of being dramatized successfully.
It is impossible to determine whether, at the present
day, the novel or the drama is the more effective medium
for embodying the truths of human life in a series of
imagined facts. Dramatic fiction has the greater depth,
and novelistic fiction has the greater breadth. The latter
is more extensive, the former more intensive, in its artistry.
This much, however, may be decided definitely. The
novel, at its greatest, may require a vaster sweep of wisdom
on the part of the author; but the drama is technically
more difficult, since the dramatist, besides mastering all
of the general methods of fiction which he necessarily
employs in common with the novelist, must labor in conformity
with a special set of conditions to which the
novelist is not submitted. Mr. Meredith may be a greater
author than Mr. Arthur Wing Pinero; but Mr. Pinero is
of necessity more rigid in his mastery of structure.
[pg 168]
CHAPTER X
THE NOVEL, THE NOVELETTE, AND THE SHORT-STORY
Turning our attention from the epic and the drama,
and confining it to the general type of fiction which in the
last chapter was loosely named novelistic, we shall find it
possible to distinguish somewhat sharply, on the basis of
both material and method, between three several forms,—the
novel, the novelette, and the short-story. The
French, who are more precise than we in their use of
denotative terms, are accustomed to divide their novelistic
fiction into what they call the roman, the nouvelle,
and the conte. "Novel" and "novelette" are just as
serviceable terms as roman and nouvelle; in fact, since
"novelette" is the diminutive of "novel," they express
even more clearly than their French equivalents the relation
between the two forms they designate. But it is
greatly to be regretted that we do not have in English a
distinctive word that is the equivalent of conte. Edgar
Allan Poe used the word "tale" with similar meaning;
but this term is so indefinite and vague that it has been
discarded by later critics. It is customary at the present
day to use the word "short-story," which Professor
Brander Matthews has suggested spelling with a hyphen
to indicate that it has a special and technical significance.
The French apply the term roman to extensive works
like "Notre Dame de Paris" and "Eugénie Grandet";
and they apply the term nouvelle to works of briefer compass
but similar method, like the "Colomba" and the
[pg 169]
"Carmen" of Prosper Mérimée. In English we may
class as novels works 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 work of less extent, and covers
a smaller canvas, than the novel (or roman). The distinction
is quantitative but not qualitative. The novelette
deals with fewer characters and incidents than the
novel; it usually limits itself to a stricter economy of time
and place; it presents a less extensive view of life, with
(most frequently) a more intensive art. But these differences
are not definite enough to warrant its being considered
a species distinct from the novel. Except for the
restrictions imposed by brevity of compass, the writer of
novelettes employs the same methods as the writer of
novels; and, furthermore, he sets forth similar materials.
More and more in recent years, the novel has tended to
shorten to the novelette. A stricter sense of art has led
to the exclusion of digressive and discursive passages;
and the hurry and preoccupation of contemporary readers
has militated against the leisurely and rambling habit of
the authors of an earlier time. The lesson of excision
and condensation has been taught by writers as different
in tone as Mérimée, Turgénieff, and Stevenson. "The
three-volume novel is extinct," as Mr. Kipling stated in
the motto prefixed to the poem called "The Three-Decker,"
in which, with a commingling of satire and sentiment,
he chanted its requiem. It was nearly always, in
the matter of structure, a slovenly form; and there is
therefore little cause for regret that the novelette seems
destined to supplant it. For the novelette accomplishes
[pg 170]
the same purpose as the novel, with necessarily a more
intensive emphasis of art, and with a tax considerably less
upon the time and attention of the reader.
But the conte, or short-story, differs from the novel and
the novelette not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively,
not only in length, but also in kind. In such contes as
"The Necklace" of de Maupassant and "The Last Class"
of Daudet, in such short-stories as "Ligeia," "The Ambitious
Guest," "Markheim," and "Without Benefit of
Clergy," the aim of the author is quite distinct from that
of the writer of novels and of novelettes. In material and
in method, as well as in extent, these stories represent
a type that is noticeably different.
The short-story, as well as the novel and the novelette,
has always existed. The parable of "The Prodigal Son,"
in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel according to Luke,
is just as surely a short-story in material and method as
the books of "Ruth" and "Esther" are novelettes in
form. But the critical consciousness of the short-story
as a species of fiction distinct in purpose and in method
from the novel dates only from the nineteenth century.
It was Edgar Allan Poe who first designated and realized
the short-story as a distinct form of literary art. In the
scholarly and thorough introduction to his collection of
"American Short Stories,"1 Professor Charles Sears
Baldwin points out that Poe, more than any of his predecessors
in the art of fiction, felt narrative as structure.
It was he who first rejected from the tale everything that
was, from the standpoint of narrative form, extraneous,
and made the narrative progress more direct. The essential
features of his structure were (to use Professor
[pg 171]
Baldwin's words) harmonization, simplification, and gradation.
He stripped his stories of every least incongruity.
What he taught by his example was reduction to a straight
predetermined course; and he made clear to succeeding
writers the necessity of striving for unity of impression
through strict unity of form.
Poe was a critic as well as a teller of tales; and what he
inculcated by example he also stated by precept. In his
now famous review of Hawthorne's "Tales," published
originally in Graham's Magazine for May, 1842, he thus
outlined his theory of the species:—
"The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length,
for reasons already stated in substance. As it cannot be
read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense
force derivable from totality. Worldly interests
intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, annul,
or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions
of the book. But simple cessation in reading would, of
itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief
tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fulness
of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour
of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer's control.
There are no external or extrinsic influences—resulting
from weariness or interruption.
"A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise,
he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his
incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a
certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then
invents such incidents—he then combines such events
as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived
effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the out-bringing
of this effect, then he has failed in his first step.
In the whole composition there should be no word written,
[pg 172]
of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one
preëstablished design. And by such means, with such
care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves
in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred
art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the
tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed;
and this is an end unattainable by the novel.
Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the
poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided."
From the very outset, the currency of Poe's short-stories
was international; and his concrete example in
striving for totality of impression exerted an immediate
influence not only in America but even more in France.
But his abstract theory, which (for obvious reasons) did
not become so widely known, was not received into the
general body of critical thought until much later in the
century. It remained for Professor Brander Matthews,
in his well-known essay on "The Philosophy of the Short-story,"
printed originally in Lippincott's Magazine for
October, 1885,2 to state explicitly what had lain implicit
in the passage of Poe's criticism already quoted, and to
give a general currency to the theory that the short-story
differs from the novel essentially,—and not merely in
the matter of length. In the second section of his essay,
Professor Matthews stated:—
"A true short-story is something other and something
more than a mere story which is short. A true short-story
differs from the novel chiefly in its essential unity of
impression. In a far more exact and precise use of the
word, a short-story has unity as a novel cannot have it.
[pg 173]
Often, it may be noted by the way, the short-story fulfils
the three false unities of the French classic drama: it shows
one action, in one place, on one day. A short-story deals
with a single character, a single event, a single emotion,
or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation.
Poe's paradox that a poem cannot greatly exceed a hundred
lines in length under penalty of ceasing to be one
poem and breaking into a string of poems, may serve to
suggest the precise difference between the short-story and
the novel. The short-story is the single effect, complete
and self-contained, while the novel is of necessity broken
into a series of episodes. Thus the short-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 its best it impresses the reader with the
belief that it would be spoiled if it were made larger, or if
it were incorporated into a more elaborate work....
"In fact, it may be said that no one has ever succeeded
as a writer of short-stories who had not ingenuity, originality,
and compression; and that most of those who
have succeeded in this line had also the touch of
fantasy."
On the basis of these theories, the present writer essayed
a few years ago to formulate within a single sentence a
definition of the short-story. Thus: The aim of a short-story
is to produce a single narrative effect with the greatest
economy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis.3
Because of its succinctness, this sentence needs a little
[pg 174]
explanation. A narrative effect 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 only one of these elements, without involving
the other two. The sketch most often deals with character
or setting divested of the element of action; but in the
short-story something has to happen. In this regard, the
short-story is related more closely to the novel than to
the sketch. But although in the novel any two, or all three,
of the narrative elements may be so intimately interrelated
that no one of them stands out clearly from the others,
it is almost always customary in the short-story to cast a
marked preponderance of emphasis on one of the elements,
to the subversion of the other two. Short-stories,
therefore, may be divided into three classes, according as
the effect which they purpose to produce is primarily an
effect of action, or of character, or of setting. "The
Masque of the Red Death" produces an effect of setting,
"The Tell-Tale Heart" an effect of character, and "The
Cask of Amontillado" an effect of action. For the sake
of economy it is incumbent on the author to suggest at the
outset which of the three sorts of narrative effect the story
is intended to produce. The way in which Poe accomplished
this in the three stories just mentioned may be seen
at once upon examination of the opening paragraph of
each. Having selected his effect, the author of a short-story
should confine his attention to producing that, and
that alone. He should stop at the very moment when his
pre-established design has been attained; and never during
the progress of his composition should he turn aside for
the sake of a lesser effect not absolutely inherent in his
single narrative purpose. Stevenson insisted on this
[pg 175]
focus of attention in a passage of a personal letter addressed
to Mr. Sidney Colvin:—
"Make another end to it? Ah, yes, but that's not the
way I write; the whole 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 story consists in. To make
another end, that is to make the beginning all wrong.
The dénouement of a long story is nothing, it is just 'a full
close,' which you may approach and accomplish as you
please—it is a coda, not an essential member in the
rhythm; but the body and end of a short-story is bone
of the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning."
The phrase "single narrative effect," with all its implications,
should now be clear. The phrase "with the
greatest economy of means" implies that the writer of a
short-story should tell his tale with the fewest necessary
number of characters and incidents, and should project
it in the narrowest possible range of place and time. If
he can get along with two characters, he should not use
three. If a single event will suffice for his effect, he should
confine himself to that. If his story can pass in one place
at one time, he must not disperse it over several times and
places. But in striving always for the greatest possible
conciseness, he must not neglect the equally important
need of producing his effect "with the utmost emphasis."
If he can gain markedly in emphasis by violating the
strictest possible economy, he should do so; for, as Poe
stated, undue brevity is exceptionable, as well as undue
length. Thus the parable of "The Prodigal Son," which
might be told with only two characters—the father and
the prodigal—gains sufficiently in emphasis by the introduction
of a third—the good son—to warrant this
violation of economy. The greatest structural problem
[pg 176]
of the writer of short-stories is to strike just the proper
balance between the effort for economy of means—which
tends to conciseness—and the effort for the utmost
emphasis—which tends to amplitude of treatment.
There can be no doubt that the short-story, thus rigidly
defined, exists as a distinct form of fiction,—a definite
literary species obeying laws of its own. Now and again
before the nineteenth century, it appeared unconsciously.
Since Poe, it has grown conscious of itself, and has been
deliberately developed to perfection by later masters, like
Guy de Maupassant. But it must be admitted frankly
that brief tales have always existed, and still continue to
exist, which stand entirely outside the scope of this rigid
and rather narrow definition. Professor Baldwin, after
a careful examination of the hundred tales in Boccaccio's
"Decameron," concluded that only two of them were
short-stories in the modern critical sense,4 and that only
three others approached the totality of impression that
depends on conscious unity of form. If we should select
at random a hundred brief tales from the best contemporary
magazines, we should find, of course, that a larger
proportion of them would fulfil the definition; but it is
almost certain that the majority of them would still be
stories that merely happen to be short, instead of true
short-stories in the modern critical sense. Yet these
brief fictions, which are not short-stories, and for which
we have no name, are none the less estimable in content,
and sometimes present a wider view of life than could be
encompassed within the rigid limits of a technical short-story.
Hawthorne's tales stand higher in the history of
literature than Poe's, because they reveal a deeper insight
[pg 177]
into life, even though the great New England dreamer
often violates the principle of economy of means, and constructs
less firmly than the mathematically-minded Poe.
Washington Irving's brief tales, such as "Rip Van Winkle"
and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which are not
short-stories in the technical sense of the term, are far
more valuable as representations of humanity than many
a structural masterpiece of Guy de Maupassant. "For
my part," Irving wrote to one of his friends, "I consider
a story merely as a frame on which to stretch the materials;
it is the play of thought, and sentiment, and language,
the weaving in of characters, lightly yet expressively
delineated; the familiar and faithful exhibition of scenes
in common life; and the half-concealed vein of humor
that is often playing through the whole,—these are
among what I aim at, and upon which I felicitate myself
in proportion as I think I succeed." There is much to
be said in favor of this meandering and leisurely method;
and authors too intent upon a merely technical accomplishment
may lose the genial breadth of outlook upon
life which men like Irving have so charmingly displayed.
Let us admit, therefore, that the story-which-is-merely-short
is just as worthy of cultivation as the technical
short-story.
But if there exist many brief tales which are not short-stories,
so also there exist certain short-stories which
are not brief. Mr. Henry James' "The Turn of the
Screw" is a short-story, in the technical sense of the
term, although it contains between two and three hundred
pages. Assuredly it is not a novelette. It aims to produce
one narrative effect, and only one; and it is difficult
to imagine how the full force of its cumulative mystery
and terror could have been created with greater economy
[pg 178]
of means. It is a long short-story. Stevenson's "Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," which is conceived, and for the
most part executed, as a short-story, is longer than the
same author's "The Beach of Falesá," which is conceived
and executed as a novelette. Dr. Edward Everett Hale's
famous short-story, "The Man Without a Country," is
long enough to be printed in a little volume by itself.
The point to be remembered, therefore, is that the two
different types of brief fiction are to be distinguished one
from the other not by comparative length but by structural
method. The critic may formulate the technical laws of
the stricter type; but it must not be forgotten that these
laws do not apply (and there is no reason whatever that
they should) to those other estimable narratives which,
though brief, stand outside the definition of the short-story.
Bearing in mind this limitation of the subject, we may
proceed to a further study of the strict short-story type.
In an admirable essay on "The Short Story,"5 Professor
Bliss Perry has discussed at length its requirements
and restrictions. Admitting that writers of short-stories
usually cast a marked preponderance of emphasis on one
of the three elements of narrative, to the subversion of the
other two, Professor Perry calls attention to the fact that
in the short-story of character, "the characters must be
unique, original enough to catch the eye at once." The
writer does not have sufficient time at his disposal to
reveal the full human significance of the commonplace.
"If his theme is character-development, then that development
must be hastened by striking experiences." Hence
[pg 179]
this class of short-story, as compared with the novel,
must set forth characters more unusual and unexpected.
But in the short-story of action, on the other hand, the
plot may be sufficient unto itself, and the characters may
be the merest lay figures. The heroine of "The Lady
or the Tiger," for example, is simply a woman—not any
woman in particular; and the hero of "The Pit and the
Pendulum" is simply a man—not any man in particular.
The situation itself is sufficient to hold the reader's interest
for the brief space of the story. Hence, although, in the
short-story of character, the leading actor is likely to be
strikingly individualized, the short-story of action may
content itself with entirely colorless characters, devoid
of any personal traits whatever. Professor Perry adds
that in the class of short-story which casts the main
emphasis on setting, "both characters and action may be
almost without significance"; and he continues,—"If
the author can discover to us a new corner of the world,
or sketch the familiar scene to our heart's desire, or illumine
one of the great human occupations, as war, or
commerce, or industry, he has it in his power, through
this means alone, to give us the fullest satisfaction."
From the fact that the short-story does not keep the
powers of the reader long upon the stretch, Professor
Perry deduces certain opportunities afforded to short-story
writers but denied to novelists,—opportunities,
namely, "for innocent didacticism, for posing problems
without answering them, for stating arbitrary premises,
for omitting unlovely details and, conversely, for making
beauty out of the horrible, and finally for poetic symbolism."
Passing on to a consideration of the demands
which the short-story makes upon the writer, he asserts
that, at its best, "it calls for visual imagination of a high
[pg 180]
order: the power to see the object; to penetrate to its
essential nature; to select the one characteristic trait by
which it may be represented." Furthermore, it demands
a mastery of style, "the verbal magic that recreates for
us what the imagination has seen." But, on the other
hand, "to write a short-story requires no sustained power
of imagination"; "nor does the short-story demand of its
author essential sanity, breadth, and tolerance of view."
Since he deals only with fleeting phases of existence,—"not
with wholes, but with fragments,"—the writer of
the short-story "need not be consistent; he need not think
things through." Hence, in spite of the technical difficulties
which beset the author of short-stories, his work
is, on human grounds, more easy than that of the novelist,
who must be sane and consistent, and must be able to
sustain a prolonged effort of interpretive imagination.
These points have been so fully covered and so admirably
illustrated by Professor Perry that they do not call
for any further discussion in this place. But perhaps
something may be added concerning the different equipments
that 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 novelist and the
writer of short-stories by their attitudes toward life, we
may say that they divide this verse between them. Balzac,
George Eliot, and Mr. Meredith look at life in the large;
they try to "see it whole" and to reproduce the chaos
of its intricate relations: but Poe, de Maupassant, and
Mr. Kipling aim rather to "see steadily" a limited phase
of life, to focus their minds upon a single point of experience,
and then to depict this point briefly and strikingly.
It follows that the novelist requires an experience of life
[pg 181]
far more extensive than that which is required by the
writer of short-stories. The great novelists have all been
men of mature years and accumulated wisdom. But if
an author knows one little point of life profoundly, he
may fashion a great short-story, even though that one
thing be the only thing he knows. Of life as it is actually
lived, of genuine humanity of character, of moral responsibility
in human intercourse, Edgar Allan Poe knew
nothing; and yet he was fully equipped to produce what
remain until this day the most perfect examples of the
short-story in our language. It is therefore not surprising
that although the great novels of the world have
been written for the most part by men over forty years of
age, the great short-stories have been written by men in
their twenties and their thirties. Mr. Kipling wrote two
or three short-stories which are almost great when he was
only seventeen. Steadiness of vision is a quality of mind
quite distinct from the ability to see things whole. "Plain
Tales from the Hills" are in many ways the better stories
for being the work of a lad of twenty: whatever Mr.
Kipling saw at that very early age he envisaged steadily
and expressed with the glorious triumphant strength of
youth. But if at the same period he had attempted a
novel, the world undoubtedly would have found out how
very young he was. He would have been incapable of
slicing a cross-section clean through the vastitude of
human life, of seeing it whole, and of representing the
appalling intricacy of its interrelations. On the other
hand, most of the mature men who have been wise enough
to do the latter, have shown themselves incapable of focusing
their minds steadily upon a single point of experience.
Wholeness and steadiness of vision—few are the men
who, like Sophocles, have possessed them both. The
[pg 182]
same author, therefore, has almost never been able to
write great short-stories and great novels. Scott wrote
only one short-story,—"Wandering Willie's Tale" in
"Redgauntlet"; Dickens also wrote only one that is
worthy of being considered a masterpiece of art,—"A
Child's Dream of a Star"; and Thackeray, Cooper, George
Eliot, and Mr. Meredith have written none at all. On
the other hand, Poe could not possibly have written a
novel; Guy de Maupassant shows himself less masterly
in his more extended works; and Mr. Kipling has yet to
prove that the novel is within his powers. Hawthorne
is the one most notable example of the man who, beginning
as a writer of short-stories, has developed in maturer
years a mastery of the novel.
Unlike the short-story, the novel aims to produce a
series of effects,—a cumulative combination of the elements
of narrative,—and acknowledges no restriction
to economy of means. It follows that the novel, as a
literary form, requires far less attention than the short-story
to minute details of art. Great novels may be
written by authors as careless as Scott, as lazy as
Thackeray, or as cumbersome as George Eliot; for if a
novelist gives us a criticism of life which is new and true,
we forgive him if he fails in the nicer points of structure
and style. But without these nicer points, the short-story
is impossible. The economy of means that it demands
can be conserved only by rigid restriction of structure;
and the necessary emphasis can be produced only by
perfection of style. The great masters of the short-story,
like Poe and Hawthorne, Daudet and de Maupassant,
have all been careful artists: they have not, like Thackeray,
been slovenly in structure; they have not, like Scott, been
regardless of style. The artistic instinct shows itself
[pg 183]
almost always at a very early age. If a man is destined
to be an artist, he usually exhibits a surprising precocity
of expression at a period when as yet he has very little
to express. This is another reason why the short-story,
as opposed to the novel, belongs to youth rather than to
age. Though a young writer may be obliged to acknowledge
inferiority to his elders in maturity of message, he
may not infrequently transcend them in fineness of technical
accomplishment.
Another point that remains to be considered, before we
relinquish this general discussion in order to devote our
attention more particularly to a technical study of the
structure of the short-story, is that, although the novel
may be either realistic or romantic in general method, the
short-story is almost of necessity obliged to be romantic.
In the brief space allotted to him, it is practically impossible
for the writer of short-stories to induce a general
truth from particular imagined facts imitated from
actuality: it is far simpler to deduce the imagined details
of the story from a central thesis, held securely in the
author's mind and suggested to the reader at the outset.
It is a quicker process to think from the truth to facts
than to think from facts to the truth. Daudet and de
Maupassant, who worked realistically in their novels,
worked romantically in their contes; and the great short-stories
of our own language have nearly all been written
by romantic authors, like Poe, Hawthorne, Stevenson,
and Mr. Kipling.
[pg 184]
CHAPTER XI
THE STRUCTURE OF THE SHORT-STORY
Since the aim of a short-story is to produce a single
narrative effect with the greatest economy of means that
is consistent with the utmost emphasis, it follows that,
given any single narrative effect,—any theme, in other
words, for a short-story—there can be only one best way
to construct the story based upon it. A novel may be
built in any of a multitude of ways; and the selection of
method depends more upon the temperament and taste
of the author than upon inherent logical necessity. But in
a short-story the problem of the author is primarily structural;
and structure is a matter of intellect instead of a
matter of temperament and taste. Now, the intellect
differs from the taste in being an absolute and general,
rather than an individual and personal, quality of mind.
There is no disputing matters of taste, as the Latin proverb
justly says; but matters of intellect may be disputed logically
until a definite decision is arrived at. Hence,
although the planning of a novel must be left to the individual
author, the structure of a short-story may be considered
as a matter impersonal and absolute, like the
working out of a geometrical proposition.
The initial problem of the writer of short-stories is to
find out by intellectual means the one best way of constructing
the story that he has to tell; and, in order to
solve this problem, there are many questions he must take
up and decide. First of all, he must conserve the need
[pg 185]
for economy of means by considering how many, or rather,
how few, characters are necessary to the narrative, how
few distinct events he can get along with, and how narrow
is the compass of time and place within which he may
compact his material. He must next consider all the
available points of view from which to tell the given story,
and must decide which of them will best subserve his
purpose. Next, in deciding on his means of delineating
characters, of representing action, of employing setting,
he must be guided always by the endeavor to strike a
just balance between (on the one hand) the greatest
economy of means and (on the other) the utmost emphasis.
And finally, to conserve the latter need, he must, in planning
the narrative step by step, be guided by the principle
of emphasis in all its phases.
The natural emphasis of the initial and the terminal
position is, in the short-story, a matter of prime importance.
The opening of a perfectly constructed tale fulfils
two purposes, one of which is intellectual and the other
emotional. Intellectually, it indicates clearly to the
reader whether, in the narrative that follows, the element
of action, or of character, or of setting is to be predominant,—in
other words, which of the three sorts of narrative
effect the story is intended to produce. Emotionally, it
strikes the key-note and suggests the tone of the entire
story. Edgar Allan Poe, in his greatest tales, planned his
openings infallibly to fulfil these purposes. He began a
story of setting with description; a story of character with
a remark made by, or made about, the leading actor; and
a story of action with a sentence pregnant with potential
incident. Furthermore, he conveyed in his very first
sentence a subtle sense of the emotional tone of the entire
narrative.
[pg 186]
In opening his short-stories, Hawthorne showed himself
far inferior to his great contemporary. Only unawares
did he occasionally hit upon the inevitable first
sentence. Often he wasted time at the beginning by
writing an unnecessary introduction; and frequently he
began upon the wrong track, by suggesting character at
the outset of a story of action, or suggesting setting at the
outset of a story of character. The tale of "The Gentle
Boy," for instance, which was one of the first to attract
attention to his genius, begins unnecessarily with an historical
essay of three pages; and it is not until the narrative
is well on its way that the reader is able to sense the one
thing that it is all about.
Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in his earlier stories, employed
a method of opening which is worthy of careful critical
consideration. In "Plain Tales from the Hills" and the
several volumes that followed it within the 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 theme
of the story he was about to tell. "This is what the story
is to deal with," he would say succinctly: "Now listen to
the tale itself." This method is extremely advantageous
on the score of economy. It gives the reader at the outset
an intellectual possession of the theme; and knowing
from the very beginning the effect designed to be produced,
he can follow with the greater economy of attention
the narrative that produces it. But, on the other
hand, the method is inartistic, in that it presents explicitly
what might with greater subtlety be conveyed implicitly,
and subverts the mood of narrative by obtruding exposition.
In his later stories, Mr. Kipling has discarded for
the most part this convenient but too obvious expedient,
and has revealed his theme implicitly through the narrative
[pg 187]
tenor and emotional tone of his initial sentences.
That the latter method of opening is the more artistic
will be seen at once from a comparison of examples.
This is the 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 many unnecessary troubles;
and may, possibly, come to extreme grief simply from
ignorance of the proper proportions of things.
"Let a puppy eat the soap in the bath-room or chew a
newly blacked boot. He chews and chuckles until, by
and by, he finds out that blacking and Old Brown Windsor
made him very sick; so he argues that soap and boots
are not wholesome. Any old dog about the house will
soon show him the unwisdom of biting big dogs' ears.
Being young, he remembers and goes abroad, at six
months, a well-mannered little beast with a chastened
appetite. If he had been kept away from boots, and
soap, and big dogs till he came to the trinity full-grown
and with developed teeth, consider how fearfully sick
and thrashed he would be! Apply that notion to the
'sheltered life,' and see how it works. It does not sound
pretty, but it is the better of two evils.
"There was a Boy once who had been brought up
under the 'sheltered life' theory; and the theory killed
him dead...."
And so on. At this point, after the expository introduction,
the narrative proper begins. Consider now the
opening of a later story, "Without Benefit of Clergy."
This is the first sentence:—"But if it be a girl?" Notice
how much has already been said and suggested in this
[pg 188]
little question of six words. Surely the beginning of this
story is conducted with the better art.
But, in the structure of the short-story, the emphasis
of the terminal position is an even more important matter.
In this regard again Poe shows his artistry, in stopping
at the very moment when he has attained completely his
pre-established design. His conclusions remain to this
day unsurpassed in the sense they give of absolute finality.
Hawthorne was far less firm in mastering the endings of
his stories. His personal predilection for pointing a
moral to adorn his tale led him frequently to append a
passage of homiletic comment which was not bone of the
bone and blood of the blood of the narrative itself. In
the chapter on emphasis, we have already called attention
to Guy de Maupassant's device of periodic structure, by
means of which the solution of the story is withheld till
the concluding sentences. This exceedingly effective
expedient, however, is applicable only in the sort of story
wherein the element of surprise is inherent in the nature
of the theme. In no other single feature of construction
may the work of the inexperienced author 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 word is "She"] and proceeded well; but when
he approached his conclusion, the young author did not
know where to stop. His story really ended at the words,
"And she never came back"; for at that point his pre-established
design had been entirely effected. But instead
of closing there, he appended four unnecessary paragraphs,
dealing with the subsequent life of his heroine,—all of
which was, to use his own familiar phrase, "another
story." Poe and de Maupassant would not have made
[pg 189]
this mistake; and neither would Mr. Kipling after he had
grown into mastery of artistic method.
In his very interesting paper on "The Philosophy of
Composition," Edgar Allan Poe outlined step by step
the intellectual processes by which he developed the
structure of "The Raven," and fashioned a finished poem
from a preconceived effect. It is greatly to be regretted
that he did not write a similar essay outlining in detail
the successive stages in the structure of one of his short-stories.
With his extraordinarily clear and analytic
intellect, he fashioned his plots with mathematical precision.
So rigorously did he work that in his best stories
we feel that the removal of a sentence would be an amputation.
He succeeded absolutely in giving his narrative
the utmost emphasis with the greatest economy of means.
If we learn through and through how a single perfect
story is constructed, we shall have gone far toward understanding
the technic of story-building as a whole. Let us
therefore analyze one of Poe's short-stories,—following
in the main the method which he himself pursued in his
analysis of "The Raven,"—in order to learn the successive
steps by which any excellent short-story may be
developed from its theme. Let us choose "Ligeia" for
the subject of this study, because it is very widely known,
and because Poe himself considered it the greatest of his
tales. Let us see how, starting with the theme of the
story, Poe developed step by step the structure of his
finished fabric; and how, granted his pre-established
design, the progress of his plan was in every step inevitable.1
[pg 190]
The theme of "Ligeia" was evidently suggested by
those lines from Joseph Glanvill which, quoted as a motto
for the story, are thrice repeated during the course of the
narrative:—
"And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who
knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For
God is but a great will, pervading all things by nature of
its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels,
nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness
of his feeble will."
Poe recognized, with the English moralist, that the
human will is strong and can conquer many of the ills
that flesh is heir to. If it were still stronger, it could do
more mighty things; and if it were very much stronger,
it is even conceivable that it might vanquish death, its
last and sternest foe. Now it was legitimate for the purposes
of fiction to imagine a character endowed with a
will strong enough to conquer death; and a striking narrative
effect could certainly be produced by setting forth
this moral conquest. This, then, became the purpose
of the story: to exhibit a character with a superhuman
will, and to show how, by sheer force of volition, this
person conquered death.
Having thus decided on his theme, the writer of the
story was first forced to consider how many, or rather,
how few, characters were necessary to the narrative.
One, at least, was obviously essential,—the person with
the superhuman will. For esthetic reasons Poe made this
character a woman, and called her Ligeia; but it is evident
that structurally the story would have been the same if
he had made the character a man. The resultant narrative
would have been different in mood and tone; but it
would not have been different in structure. Given this
[pg 191]
central character, it was not perhaps evident at first that
another person was needed for the tale. But in all
stories which set forth an extraordinary being, it is necessary
to introduce an ordinary character to serve as a
standard by which the unusual capabilities of the central
figure may be measured. Furthermore, in stories which
treat of the miraculous, it is necessary to have at least one
eye-witness to the extraordinary circumstances beside the
person primarily concerned in them. Hence another
character was absolutely needed in the tale. This second
person, moreover, had to be intimately associated with
the heroine, for the two reasons already considered. The
most intimate relation imaginable was that of husband
and wife; he must therefore be the husband of Ligeia.
Beside these two people,—a woman of superhuman will,
and her husband, a man of ordinary powers,—no other
character was necessary; and therefore Poe did not (and
could not, according to the laws of the short-story) introduce
another. The Lady of Tremaine, as we shall see
later on, is not, technically considered, a character.
The main outline of the story could now be plotted.
Ligeia and her husband must be exhibited to the reader;
and then, in her husband's presence, Ligeia must conquer
death by the vigor of her will. But in order to do
this, she must first die. If she merely exerted her will to
ward off the attacks of death, the reader would not be convinced
that her recovery had been accomplished by other
than ordinary means. She must die, therefore, and must
afterwards resurrect herself by a powerful exertion of
volition. The reader must be fully convinced that she
did really die; and therefore, before her resurrection, she
must be laid for some time in the grave. The story,
then, divided itself into two parts: the first, in which
[pg 192]
Ligeia was alive, terminated with her death; and the
second, in which she was dead, ended with her resurrection.
Having thus arrived at the main outline of his plot, Poe
was next forced to decide on the point of view from which
the story should be told. Under the existing conditions,
any one of three distinct points of view may have seemed,
at the first glance, available: that of the chief character,
that of the secondary character, and that of an external
omniscient personality. But only a little consideration
was necessary to show that only one of these three could
successfully be employed. Obviously, the story could
not be narrated by Ligeia: for it would be awkward to
let an extraordinary woman discourse about her own
unusual qualities; and furthermore, she could hardly
narrate a story involving as one of its chief features her
stay among the dead without being expected to tell the
secrets of her prison-house. It was likewise impossible
to tell the tale from the point of view of an external omniscient
personality. In order that the final and miraculous
incident might seem convincing, it had to be narrated not
impersonally but personally, not externally but by an eye-witness.
Therefore, the story must, of course, be told
by the husband of Ligeia.
At this point the main outline was completed. It then
became necessary for Poe to plan the two divisions of the
story in detail. In the first part, no action was necessary,
and very little attention had to be paid to setting. It
was essential that all of the writer's stress should be laid
on the element of character; for the sole purpose of this
initial division of the story must be to produce upon the
reader an extremely emphatic impression of the extraordinary
personality of Ligeia. As soon as the reader
[pg 193]
could be sufficiently impressed with the force of her character,
she must be made to die; and the first part of the
story would be finished. But at this point Poe was
obliged to choose between the direct and the indirect
means of delineating character. Should Ligeia be
depicted directly by her husband, or indirectly, through
her own speech? In other words, should this first half of
the story be a description or a conversation? The matter
was easy to decide. The method of conversation was
unavailable; because a dialogue between Ligeia and her
husband would keep the attention of the reader hovering
from one to the other, whereas it was necessary for the
purpose of the tale to focus all of the attention on Ligeia.
She must, therefore, be depicted directly by her husband.
Having concluded that he must devote the entire first half
of his story to this description, Poe employed all his powers
to make it adequate and emphatic. The description
must, of course, be largely subjective and suggestive, and
must be pervaded with a sense of something unfathomable
about the person described. In order that (reverting
to the language of Poe's own critical dictum) "his
very initial sentence" might "tend to the out-bringing of
this effect," the author wrote, "I cannot for my soul
remember how, when, or even precisely where I first
became 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 her resurrection. The main stress of
the story now ceased to be laid on the element of character.
The element of action, furthermore, was subsidiary
in the second part of the tale, as it had been already in
the first. All that had to happen was the resurrection of
[pg 194]
Ligeia; and this the reader had been forced by the very
theme of the story to foresee. The chief interest in the
second part must therefore lie in determining where and
when and how this resurrection was accomplished. A
worthy setting must be found for the culminating event.
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 the grave, to begin an elaborate description of
the stage settings of his final scene. The place must be
wild and weird and arabesque. It must be worthy to
receive a resurrected mortal revisiting the glimpses of 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 been buried (must have been buried, as we have seen),
and her body had been given to the worms. Yet now she
must be revived. And it would not be sufficient to let her
merely walk bodily into the fantastic apartment where
her husband, dream-haunted, was waiting to receive her;
for the point to be emphasized was not so much the mere
fact of her being once more alive, as the fact that she had
won her way back to life by the exertion of her own
extraordinary will. The reader must be shown not only
the result of her triumph over death, but the very process
of the struggle through which by sheer volition she forced
her soul back into the bodily life. If only her body were
present, so that the reader could be shown its gradual
obsession by her soul, all would be easily accomplished;
but, by the conditions of the story, her body could not be
present: and the difficulty of the problem was extreme.
But here Poe hit upon a solution of the difficulty.
Would not another dead body do as well? Surely Ligeia
[pg 195]
could breathe her life into any discarded female form.
Therefore, of course, her husband must marry again,
solely in order that his second wife should die. The
Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine is, therefore, as I
have already hinted, not really a character, but only a
necessary adjunct to the final scene, an indispensable
piece of stage property. In order to indicate this fact,
Poe was obliged to abstain carefully from describing her
in detail, and to seek in every possible way to prevent
the reader's attention from dwelling long upon her.
Hence, although, in writing the first part of the story, he
devoted several pages to the description of the heroine, he
dismissed the Lady Rowena, in the second part, with only
two descriptive epithets,—"fair-haired and blue-eyed,"
to distinguish her briefly from the dark-eyed and raven-haired
Ligeia.
With the help of this convenient body, it was easy for
Poe to develop his final scene. The intense struggle of
Ligeia's soul to win its way back to the world could be
worked up with enthralling suspense: and when at last
the climax was reached and the husband realized that his
lost love stood living before him, the purpose of the story
would be accomplished, Ligeia's will would have done
its work, and there would be nothing more to tell. Poe
wrote, "These are the full, and the black, and the wild
eyes—of my lost love—of the Lady—of the LADY
LIGEIA": and the story was ended.
For it must be absolutely understood that with whatever
may have happened after that moment of entire
recognition this particular story does not, and cannot,
concern itself. Whether in the next moment Ligeia dies
again irrevocably, or whether she lives an ordinary lifetime
and then ultimately dies forever, or whether she
[pg 196]
remains alive eternally as a result of the triumph of her
will, are questions entirely beyond the scope of the story
and have nothing to do with the single narrative effect
which Poe, from the very outset, was planning to produce.
At no other point does he more clearly display his mastery
than in his choice of the perfect moment at which to end
his story.
It would, of course, be idle to assert that Poe disposed
of all the narrative problems which confronted him while
constructing this story precisely in the order I have indicated.
Unfortunately, he never explained in print the
genesis of any of his stories, and we can only imagine the
process of his plans with the aid of his careful analysis of
the development of "The Raven." But I think it has
been clearly shown that the structure of "Ligeia" is at all
points inevitably conditioned by its theme, and that no
detail of the structure could be altered without injuring
the effect of the story; and I am confident that some
intellectual process similar to that which has been outlined
must be followed by every author who seeks to construct
stories as perfect in form as Poe's.
The student of short-story structure is therefore advised
to submit several other masterpieces of the form to a
process of intellectual analysis similar to that which we
have just pursued. By so doing he will become impressed
with the inevitability of every structural expedient that is
employed in the best examples of the type. For a further
illustration of this inevitability 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, fulfils the
modern critical concept of the short-story, in that it produces
a single narrative effect with the greatest economy
[pg 197]
of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis.
For the purposes of this study, let us set aside the religious
implications of the parable, and consider it as an ordinary
work of fiction. The story should more properly be
called "The Forgiving Father," rather than "The Prodigal
Son"; because the single narrative effect to be wrought
out is the extent of a father's forgiveness toward his erring
children. Two characters are obviously needed for the
tale,—first a father to exercise forgiveness, and second,
a child to be forgiven. Whether this child were a son or a
daughter would, of course, have no effect on the mere
structure of the story. In the narrative as we know it,
the erring child is a son. In pursuance of the greatest
economy of means, the story might be told with these two
characters only, because the effect to be wrought out is
based on the personal relation between them,—a relation
involving no one else. But fatherly forbearance exercised
toward an only child might seem a trait of human weakness
instead of patriarchal strength; and the father's forgiveness
will be greatly accentuated if, beside the prodigal,
he has other children less liable to error. Therefore, in
pursuance of the utmost emphasis, it is necessary to add
a third character,—another son who is not allured into
the way of the transgressor. The story must necessarily
be narrated by an external omniscient personality: it must
be seen and told from a point of view aloof and god-like.
The father could not tell it, 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 whole and to narrate
it without prejudice. The story opens perfectly, with the
very simple sentence, "A certain man had two sons."
Already the reader knows that he is to be told a story of
character (rather than of action or of setting) concerning
[pg 198]
three people, the most important of whom is the certain
man who has been mentioned first. Consider, in passing,
how faulty would have been such another opening as this,
for instance,—"Not long ago, in a city of Judea"....
Such an initial sentence would have suggested setting,
instead of suggesting character, as the leading element
in the story. Very properly, the first of the two sons to
be singled out specifically is the more important of the
two, the prodigal: "And the younger of them said to
his father, 'Father, give me the portion of goods that
falleth to me.'" Thus in only two sentences the reader
is given the entire basis of the story. The swift and
simple narrative that follows is masterly in absolute conciseness.
The younger son takes his journey into a far
country, wastes his substance in riotous living, begins to
be in want, suffers and repents, and returns to seek the
forgiveness of his father. Wonderfully, beautifully, his
father loves and pities and forgives him: "For this my son
was dead and is alive again; he was lost, and is found."
At this point the story would end, if it were told with only
two characters instead of three. But emphasis demands
that the elder son should now make an entirely reasonable
objection to the reception of the prodigal; because the
great love which is the essence of the father's character
will shine forth much more brightly when he overrules
the objection. He does so in the same words he had used
in the first moment of emotion: "For this thy brother was
dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found."
These beautiful words, which now receive the emphasis
of iteration as well as the emphasis of terminal position,
sum up and complete the entire pre-established design.
This story, which contains only five hundred words,
is a little masterpiece of structure. It embodies a narrative
[pg 199]
theme of profound human import; it exhibits three
characters so clearly and completely drawn that the
reader knows them better than he knows many a hero of
a lengthy novel; and it displays an absolute adjustment
between economy and emphasis in its succinct yet touching
train of incidents. Furthermore, it is also, in the
English version of the King James translators, a little
masterpiece of style. The words are simple, homely, and
direct. Most of them are of Saxon origin, and the majority
are monosyllabic. Less than half a dozen words
in the entire narrative contain more than two syllables.
And yet they are set so delicately together that they fall
into rhythms potent with emotional effect. How much
the story gains from this mastery of prose may be felt at
once by comparing with the King James version parallel
passages from the standard French Bible. The English
monosyllabic refrain, with its touching balance of rhythm,
loses nearly all of its esthetic effect in the French translation:
"Car mon fils, que voici, était mort, mais il est ressuscité;
il était perdu, mais il est retrouvé." And that very
moving sentence about the elder son, "And he was angry,
and would not go in: therefore came his father out and
entreated him," becomes in the French Bible, "Mais il se
mit en colère, et ne voulut point entrer; et son père étant
sorti, le priait d'entrer." No especial nicety of ear is
necessary to notice that the first is greatly written, and
the second is not.
And this leads us to the general consideration that even
a perfectly constructed story will fail of the uttermost
effect unless it be at all points adequately written. After
Poe had, with his intellect, outlined step by step the
structure of "Ligeia," he was obliged to confront a further
problem,—a problem this time more emotional than
[pg 200]
intellectual—the problem of writing the story with the
thrilling and enthralling harmony of that low, musical
language which haunts us like the echo of a dream. It is
one thing to build a story; it is quite another thing to
write it: and in Poe's case it is evident that an appreciable
interval of time must have elapsed between his accomplishment
of the first, and his undertaking of the second,
effort. He built his stories intellectually, in cold blood;
he wrote them emotionally, in esthetic exaltation: and
the two moods are so distinct and mutually exclusive that
they must have been successive instead of coexistent.
Some authors build better than they write; others write
better than they build. Seldom, very seldom, is a man
equipped, 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 be pitched
throughout in tune with the emotional significance of the
narrative effect to be produced. Any sentence which is
tuned out of harmony will jangle and disrupt the unity
of mood, which is as necessary to a great short-story as
it is to a great lyric poem. Hawthorne, though his
structure was frequently at fault, proved the greatness
of his art by maintaining, through sheer mastery of style,
an absolute unity of mood in every story that he undertook.
Mr. Kipling has not always done so, because he
has frequently used language more with manner than with
style; but in his best stories, like "The Brushwood Boy"
and "They," there is a unity of tone throughout the
writing that sets them on the plane of highest art.
[pg 201]
CHAPTER XII
THE FACTOR OF STYLE
The element of style, which has just been touched upon
in reference to the short-story, must now be considered in
its broader aspect as a factor of fiction in general.
Hitherto, in examining the methods of fiction, we have
confined our attention for the most part to the study of
structural expedients. The reason is that structure,
being a matter merely of the intellect, can be analyzed
clearly and expounded definitely. Like any other intellectual
subject—geometry, for instance—structure may
be taught. But style, although it is in fiction a factor
scarcely less important, is not a matter merely of the
intellect. It is not so easily permissible of clear analysis
and definite exposition; and although it is true that, in a
certain sense, it may be learned, it is also true that it cannot
be taught.
The word "style" comes trippingly to the tongue of
every critic; but it has never yet been satisfactorily defined.
Famous phrases have been made about it, to be sure;
but most of these, like that corrupted from Buffon's cursory
remark in his discourse of reception into the Academy—"Le
style est de l'homme même,"—are lofty admissions
of the impossibility of definition. By this fact we are fortified
in our opinion that style is a matter of feeling rather
than of intellect. Avoiding, therefore, as unwise any
attempt at definition, we may yet succeed in clarifying
our ideas regarding style if we circle round the subject.
[pg 202]
At the outset, in order to narrow the compass of the
circle, let us admit that the familiar phrase "bad style"
is a contradiction of terms. Basically, there is no such
thing as 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 utterances made with style,
the one may be more imbued with that quality than is the
other; but even this secondary distinction is a matter of
more and less, rather than of better and worse. Style,
then, is a quality possessed in a greater or less degree, or
else not possessed at all. This much being granted, we
may investigate with clearer minds the philosophic aspect
of the subject.
Language makes to the mind of the reader or the listener
an appeal which is twofold. First, it conveys to his intellect
a definite meaning through the content of the words
that are employed; and secondly, it conveys to his sensibilities
an indefinite suggestion through their sound. Consciously,
he receives a meaning from the denotation of the
words; subconsciously, he receives a suggestion from their
connotation. Now, an utterance has the quality of style
when these two appeals of language—the denotative and
the connotative, the definite and the indefinite, the intellectual
and the sensuous—are so co-ordinated as to produce
upon the reader or the listener an effect which is, not dual,
but indissolubly single. And an utterance is devoid of
the quality of style when, although it conveys a meaning
to the intellect through the content of the words, it does
not reinforce that conveyance of meaning by a cognate
and harmonic appeal to the senses through their sound.
In the latter case the language produces upon the recipient
an effect which is, not single, but dual and divorced.
[pg 203]
The matter may be made more clear by the examination
of concrete examples. The following sentence, for instance,
is devoid of style: "The square on the hypothenuse
of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares
on the other two sides": for, although by its content it
conveys to the intellect a meaning which is entirely clear
and absolutely definite, it does not by 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 ear are so co-ordinated 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 mere melody of m's and r's and l's as by the content,
or denotation, of the words. For instance, the word
"innumerable," which denotes to the intellect merely
"incapable of being numbered," is in this connection made
to suggest to the senses the murmuring of bees. That
one word, therefore, accomplishes a dual service, and
contributes to the expression of the general idea in one
way through its content and in another through its
sound.
This co-ordination of the two appeals is the origin and
the essence of the quality of style. But the question now
demands to be considered,—how may this co-ordination
be effected? The first detail we must attend to is the
choice of words. Tennyson's task, in the lines that we
have just considered, was comparatively easy. He was
writing about certain sounds; and it was not especially
[pg 204]
difficult for him to imitate those sounds with the words
that he selected to denote them. His device was the
obvious one which is called, by rhetoricians, onomatopœia.
In every language those words which are denotative of
sounds are nearly always also imitative of them. Such
words, as, for example, "whisper," "thunder," "rattle,"
are in themselves stylistic. Alone, and apart from any
context, they incorporate that cognate appeal of significance
and sound which is the secret of style. Thus far
the matter is extremely simple. But there are also many
words which denote other things than sounds and yet
somehow convey subtly to the ear a sensuous suggestion
of their content. Such words, for instance, are "mud,"
"nevermore," and "tremulous." Any child could tell
you that words like these "sound just like what they
mean"; and yet it would be impossible for the critical
intellect to explain exactly wherein lies the fitness between
sound and sense in such a word as "mud." The fitness,
however, is obviously there. If we select from several
languages words which are identical in denotation, we
are likely to find that, because of their difference in sound,
they connote different phases of the idea which they contain.
For example, the English word "death" has a
spiritual sound; whereas the German "der Tod" sounds
terrible and grim, and the French "la mort" sounds horrid
and bizarre. In content, these three words are indistinguishable;
but in style they differ very widely. Their
diversity of connotation is obviously inherent in their
sound; and yet, though the difference may be heard at
once, it seems inexplicable by the intellect.
But by far the greatest number of stylistic words owe
their connotation not so much to their sound alone, as to
their capacity for evoking memories. They awake the
[pg 205]
psychologic process of association. Such are the words
which lie close to the heart of every one's experience,—words
like "home," "sorrow," "mother," "youth," and
"friends." Whenever such a word is used, it conveys to
the reader or the listener not only the specific meaning
intended by the momentary context, but also a subsidiary
and subconscious recollection of many phases of his personal
experience. All of the indisputably magic words
possess this associative or memorable quality. Saying one
thing definitely, they evoke a concordant harmony of subconscious
and shadowy suggestion. Expressing a message
in the present, they recall remembered beauty from the
past. Thus it is with the words of those two 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 the reader, they remind him of many,
many others.
But the choice of suggestive and memorable words is
only the first step toward mastery of style. The perfect
marriage of significance and sound is dependent not so
much upon the words themselves as upon the way in
which they are arranged. The art of style, like every
other art, proceeds by an initial selection of materials and
a subsequent arrangement of them in accordance with a
pattern. In style, the pattern is of prime importance;
and therefore, in order to understand the witchery of
writing, we must next consider technically the patterning
of words.
This phase of the subject has been clearly expounded
and deftly illustrated by Robert Louis Stevenson in his
[pg 206]
essay "On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature,"1
This essay is, so far as I know, the only existing
treatise on the technic of style which is of any practical
value to the incipient artist. It should therefore be read
many times and mastered thoroughly by every student of
the mystery of writing. Since it is now easily accessible,
it will not be necessary here to do more than summarize
its leading points,—stating them in a slightly different
way in order that they may better fit the present context.
Every normal sentence, unless it be extremely brief, contains
a knot, or hitch. Up to a certain point, the thought
is progressively complicated; after that, it is resolved.
Now, the art of style demands that this natural implication
and explication of the thought should be attended by a
cognate implication and explication of the movement of
the sentence. Unless the hitch in the rhythm coincides
with the hitch in the thought, the two appeals of the sentence
(to the intellect and to the ear) will contest against
each other instead of combining to accomplish a common
effect. Therefore the first necessity in weaving a web of
words is to conquer an accordance between the intellectual
progression of the thought and the sensuous progression
of the sound. The appeal of rhythm to the human ear is
basic and elemental; and style depends for its effect more
upon a mastery of rhythmic phrase than upon any other
individual detail. In verse, the technical problem is two-fold:
first, to suggest to the ear of the reader a rhythmic
pattern of standard regularity; and then, to vary from the
regularity suggested, as deftly and as frequently as may
be possible without ever allowing the reader for a moment
[pg 207]
to forget the fundamental pattern. In prose, the writer
works with greater freedom; and his problem is therefore
at once more easy and more difficult. Instead of starting
with a standard pattern, he has to invent a web of rhythm
which is suited to the sense he wishes to convey; and then,
without ever disappointing the ear of the reader by unnecessarily
withholding an expected fall of rhythm, he
must shatter every inkling of monotony by continual and
tasteful variation.
But language, by its very nature, offers to the ear not
only a pattern of rhythm but also a pattern of letters. A
mastery of literation is therefore a necessary element of
style. Effects indisputably potent in suggestion may be
gained by running a recurrence of certain letters, deftly
for a time withheld,—since blatancy must always be
avoided,—and yet triumphant in harmonious return.
The great sentences of literature which echo in our ears
because their sound is married to their meaning will be
found upon examination to incorporate an intricate pattern
of tastefully selected letters. Thus it is with the following
sentence of Sir Thomas Browne's, wherein it is difficult to
decide whether the rhythm or the literation contributes
the larger share to its symmetry of sound:—"But the
iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and
deals with the memory of men without distinction to
merit of perpetuity." Thus it is, again, with this sentence
from Ruskin's "Seven Lamps of Architecture":—"They
are but the rests and monotones of the art; it is to its
far happier, far higher, exaltation that we owe those fair
fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with wild fancies
and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and quainter than ever
filled the depths of midsummer dream; those vaulted
gates, trellised with close leaves; those window-labyrinths
[pg 208]
of twisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses
of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower; the only
witnesses, perhaps, that remain to us of the faith and fear
of nations." So it is also with these sentences from De
Quincey's "The English Mail-Coach":—"The sea, the
atmosphere, the light, bore each an orchestral part in this
universal lull. Moonlight, and the first timid tremblings
of the dawn, were by this time blending; and the blendings
were brought into a still more exquisite state of unity by a
slight silvery mist, motionless and dreamy, that covered
the woods and fields, but with a veil of equable transparency."
A more detailed study of style along these lines would
lead us to considerations too minutely technical for the
purpose of the present volume. Style, in its highest
development, belongs only to the finest art of literature;
and it must be admitted that literature is not always, nor
even perhaps most frequently, a fine art. Of the four
rhetorical moods, or methods, of discourse, exposition
lends itself the least to the assistance of the quality of
style. Explanations are communicated from intellect to
intellect. Words, in exposition, must be chosen chiefly
with a view to definite denotation. The expository
writer must be clear at any cost; he must aim to be precise
rather than to be suggestive. Style is considerably more
important as an adjunct to argumentation; since in order
really to persuade, a writer must not only convince the
reader's intellect but also rouse and conquer his emotions.
But it is in narrative and in description that the quality
of style is most contributive to the maximum effect. To
evoke a picture in the reader's mind, or to convey to his
consciousness a sense of movement, it is advisable (I am
tempted to say necessary) to play upon his sensibilities
[pg 209]
with the sound of the very sentences that are framed to
convey a content to his intellect.
Since narrative is the natural mood of fiction, and since
description is more often introduced than either argument
or exposition, it follows that the writer of fiction
must always reckon with the factor of style. It is true
that stories may be written without style; it is even true
that many of the greatest stories have been devoid of this
indefinable quality: but it is not therefore logical to argue
that the factor of style may be neglected. How much
it may be made to contribute to the attainment of the aim
of fiction will be recognized instinctively upon examination
of any wonderfully written passage. Let us consider,
for example, the following paragraphs from "Markheim."
After Markheim has killed the dealer, and gone up-stairs
to ransack the belongings of the murdered man, he suffers
an interval of quietude amid alarms.—
"With the tail of his eye he saw the door—even glanced
at it from time to time directly, like a besieged commander
pleased to verify the good estate of his defenses. But in
truth he was at peace. The rain falling in the street
sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other
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. How stately, how comfortable was the
melody! How fresh the youthful voices! 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;
children afield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers on the
brambly common, kite-fliers in the windy and cloud-navigated
sky; and then, at another cadence of the hymn,
back again to church, and the somnolence of summer
[pg 210]
Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson (which
he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean
tombs, and the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments
in the chancel.
"And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was
startled to his feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting
gush of blood, went over him, and then he stood transfixed
and thrilling. A step mounted the stair slowly and
steadily, and presently a hand was laid upon the knob,
and the lock clicked, and the door opened."
Anybody who has ears to hear will immediately appreciate
how much the effect of this passage is enhanced by
the masterly employment of every phase of style which
we have hitherto discussed. If, instead of writing,
"Presently the notes of a piano were wakened to the
music of a 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 tin pans, instead of the
measured melody he had in mind. And let it be particularly
noted that the phrase suggested for comparison is,
in intellectual content alone, scarcely distinct from the
original. How little is the difference in denotation, how
great the difference in suggestion! The brief phrase,
"Kite-fliers in the windy and cloud-navigated sky," seems
to blow us bodily upward into the air:—here is mastery
of rhythm. "The somnolence of summer Sundays," is
whispery and murmurous with s's, m's and n's:—here
(more obviously) is mastery of literation. In the second
paragraph, notice how the rhythm suddenly hurries when
Markheim is startled to his feet; and in the last sentence,
consider the monotonous and measured slowness of the
movement, ominous with pauses.
Every now and then a critic steps forward with the statement
[pg 211]
that style in fiction is not a deliberate and conscious
conquest, that the sound of sentences is accidental and
may therefore not be marshaled to contribute to the sense,
and that preoccupation with details of rhythm and of
literation is an evidence of a finical and narrow mind.
To such a statement no answer is necessary but the wholesome
advice to re-read, aloud and carefully, several passages
on a par with that from "Markheim" which we
have just examined. Very evidently Stevenson knew
intuitively what he was about when he planned his rhythmic
patterns and his literate orchestral harmonies.
I say "intuitively"; because, as I admitted at the outset,
style is, with the author, a matter of feeling rather
than of intellect. But matters may be planned with
sensibility as well as with intelligence. The writer with
the gift of style forehears a web of rhythm into which he
weaves such words as may be denotative of his thought;
and all the while that he is striving to be definite and
clear, he carries in his mind a subtle sense of the harmonic
accompaniment of consonants, the melodious eloquence
of vowels.
By what means a writer may attain to mastery of style is
a question not to be answered by the intellect. Matters
of sensibility are personal, 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 of pure reason all men rightly
minded think alike, each man differs from every other in
the process of emotion.
This is the reason why style, beside being (as we asserted
[pg 212]
at the outset) an absolute quality, possessed or not possessed
by any literary utterance, is also in every case a
quality personal to the author who attains it. In this
regard, Buffon was right in stating that style is a phase of
the man himself. Any work that is accomplished by the
intellect alone belongs to man in general rather than to
one man in particular; but any work that is accomplished
by the sensibilities incorporates those profounder qualities
by virtue of which each man stands distinct from every
other. By studying the structure of an author's work,
we can estimate his intellect: by studying the style, we can
estimate that subtler entity which is the man himself.
At the close of our study of the materials and methods
of fiction, it is advisable that we should consider in general
the relation between form and content,—the respective
value of methods and materials. Primarily, there are
two groups of worthy fiction,—that which is great mainly
on account of its content, and that which is great mainly
on account of its form. It would be unwise, of course, to
overestimate the single and inherent value of either
material or method. Some comparison, however, may
be made between the merits of the one group and the
other.
In the first place, it must be noted that, as far as the
general reader is concerned, the appeal of any work of
fiction depends far more upon its content than upon its
form. The average reader knows little and cares less
about the technical methods of the art. What he demands
above all is interesting subject-matter. He seeks,
in the popular phrase, "a good story"; he wishes to be
told interesting things about interesting people; and he
does not feel especially concerned about the question
[pg 213]
whether or not these things are told him in an interesting
way. The matter, rather than the manner, is the element
that most allures him.
There are many reasons that tempt the critic to accept
without reservation the general reader's view. For instance,
many of the most important works of fiction have
been inefficient in mere art. The "Don Quixote" of
Cervantes is indubitably one of the very greatest novels in
all literature, for the reason that it contains so vast a
world. Yet it is very faulty both in structure and in style.
The author seems to have built it little by little, as he
went along; and he changed his plan so often during the
process of construction that the resultant edifice, like the
cathedral of St. Peter's, is architecturally incoherent. He
showed so little regard for unity that he did not hesitate
to halt his novel for half a hundred pages while he set
before the reader the totally extraneous novelette of "The
Curious Impertinent," which he happened to find lying
idle in his desk. How little he was a master of mere style
may be felt at once by comparing his plays with those of
Calderon. Yet these technical considerations do not
count against the value of his masterpiece. All of Spain
is there resumed and uttered, all pains that the idealist
in any age must suffer, all the pity and the glory of aspiration
misapplied.
Scott has no style, and Thackeray has no structure;
but these technical defects go down before their magnitude
of message. Scott teaches us the glory and the greatness
of being healthy, young, adventurous, and happy; and
Thackeray, with tears in his eyes that humanize the sneer
upon his lips, teaches us that the thing we call Society,
with a capital S, is but a vanity of vanities. If we turn
from the novel to the short-story, we shall notice that
[pg 214]
certain themes are in themselves so interesting that the
resultant story could not fail to be effective even were it
badly told. It is perhaps unfair to take as an example
Mr. F. J. Stimson's tale called "Mrs. Knollys," because
his story is both correctly constructed and beautifully
written; but merely in theme this tale is so effective that
it could have endured a less accomplished handling. The
story runs as follows:2—A girl and her husband, both
of whom are very young, go to the Alps for their honeymoon.
The husband, in crossing a glacier, falls into a
crevasse. His body cannot immediately be recovered;
but Mrs. Knollys learns from a scientist who is making a
study of the movement of the ice that in forty-five years
the body will be carried to the end of the glacier. Thereafter
she regards her husband as absent but not lost, and
lives her life in continuous imagined communion with him.
At the end of the allotted time, she returns and finds his
body. She is then a woman in her sixties; but her husband
is, in aspect, still a boy of twenty-one. She has
dreamt of him as growing old beside her: she finds him
sundered from her by half a century of change.—Even
in a bald and ineffective summary the interest of this narrative
effect must be apparent. The story scarcely needed
to be told as well as Mr. Stimson told it.
We must admit, then, that, from the standpoint of the
author as well as from that of the general reader, material
may often be regarded as more important than method.
But the critic is not therefore justified in stating that style
and structure may with impunity be dispensed with.
Other things being equal, the books that have lived the
[pg 215]
longest are those which have been executed with admirable
art. The decline in the fame 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 their
original publication; for the conditions of life in the
forest primeval must necessarily assume a more especial
interest to a world that, in its immediate experience, is
rapidly forgetting them. But Cooper wrote very carelessly
and very badly; and as we advance to a finer
appreciation of the art of fiction, we grow more and
more distracted from the contemplation of his message
by his preposterous inequalities of craftsmanship.
Novels like the "Leatherstocking Tales" may be most
enjoyed (I had almost said appreciated best) by readers
with an undeveloped sense of art. This would seem a
very strange admission at the close of a study devoted to
the art of fiction, were it not for the existence of that other
group of stories whose importance lies in method even
more than in material. A lesser thing done perfectly is
often more significant than a bigger thing done badly.
Jane Austen is likely to live longer than George Eliot,
because she conveyed her message, less momentous
though it were, with a finer and a firmer art. Jane Austen's
subjects seem, at the first glance, to be of very small
account. From English middle-class society she selects
a group of people who are in no regard remarkable, and
thereafter concerns herself chiefly with the simple question
of who will ultimately marry whom. But by sedulously
dwelling on the non-essentials of life, she contrives
to remind the reader of its vast essentials. By talking to
us skilfully about the many things that do not matter,
she suggests to us, inversely and with unobtrusive irony,
the few things that really do. Her very message, therefore,
[pg 216]
is immediately dependent upon her faultless art. If
she had done her work less well, the result would have
been non-significant and wearisome.
Poe and de Maupassant are shining examples of the
class of authors who are destined to live by their art alone.
Poe, in his short-stories, said nothing of importance to
the world; and de Maupassant said many matters which
might more decorously have remained untalked of. But
the thing they meant to do, they did unfalteringly; and
perfect workmanship is in itself a virtue in this world
of shoddy compromise and 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 their swiftness of propulsion and exultant eloquence
of style.
And fully to appreciate this class of fiction, some technical
knowledge of the art is necessary. Washington Irving's
efforts must, to a great extent, be lost on readers who are
lacking in the ear for style. He had very little to say,—merely
that the Hudson is beautiful, that the greatest sadness
upon earth arises from the early death of one we love,
that laughter and tears are at their deepest indistinguishable,
and that it is very pleasant to sit before the fire of an
old baronial hall and remember musingly; but he said this
little like a gentleman,—with a charm, a grace, an easy
urbanity of demeanor, that set his work forever in the
class of what has been well done by good and faithful
servants.
There is a very fine pleasure in watching with awareness
the doing of things that are done well. Hence, even
for the casual reader, it is advisable to study the methods
of fiction in order to develop a more refined delight in
[pg 217]
reading. It would seem that a detective story, in which
the interest is centered mainly in the long withholding of
a mystery, would lose its charm for a reader to whom its
secret has been once revealed. But the reader with a
developed consciousness of method finds an interest evermore
renewed in returning again and again to Poe's
"Murders in the Rue Morgue." After his first surprise
has been abated, 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 may derive another and a different
interest by watching it from the wings. To use a familiar
form of words, Jane Austen is the novelist's novelist,
Stevenson the writer's writer, Poe the builder's builder;
and in order fully to appreciate the work of artists such
as these, it is necessary (in Poe's words) to "contemplate
it with a kindred art."
But the critic should not therefore be allured into setting
method higher than material and overestimating
form at the expense of content. The ideal to be striven
for in fiction is such an intimate interrelation between the
thing said and the way of saying it that neither may be
contemplated apart from the other. We are touching
now upon a third and smaller group of fiction, which
combines the special merits of the two groups already
noted. Such a novel as "The Scarlet Letter," such a
short-story as "The Brushwood Boy," belong in this
third and more extraordinary class. What Hawthorne
has to say is searching and profound, and he says it with
an equal mastery of structure and of style. "The Scarlet
Letter" would be great because of its material alone,
even had its author been a bungler; it would be great
because of its art alone, even had he been less humanly
endowed with understanding. But it is greater as we
[pg 218]
know it, in its absolute commingling of the two great
merits of important subject and commensurate art.
But in studying "The Scarlet Letter" we are conscious
of yet another element of interest,—an interest derived
from the personality of the author. The same story told
with equal art by some one else would interest us very
differently. And now we are touching on still another
group of worthy fiction. Many stories endure more
because of the personality of the men who wrote them than
because of 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 important mainly
because of the nature of the man who penned it,—a
man who, in an age infected with the fever of growing
up, remained at heart a little child, looking upon the
memorable world with eyes of wonder.
These, then, are the three merits to be striven for in
equal measure by aspirants to the art of fiction: momentous
material, masterly method, and important personality.
To discover certain truths of human life that are eminently
worth the telling, to embody them in imagined facts with
a mastery both of structure and of style, and, behind and
beyond the work itself, to be all the time a person worthy
of being listened to: this is, for the fiction-writer, the
ultimate ideal. Seldom, very seldom, have these three
contrarious conditions revealed themselves in a single
author; seldom, therefore, have works of fiction been
created that are absolutely great. It would be difficult
for the critic to select off-hand a single novel which may be
accepted in all ways as a standard of the highest excellence.
But if the term fiction be regarded in its broadest
significance, it may be considered to include the one
[pg 219]
greatest work of art ever fashioned by the mind of man.
The "Divine Comedy" is supreme in subject-matter.
The facts of its cosmogony have been disproved by modern
science, the religion of which it is the monument has
fallen into disbelief, the nation and the epoch that it summarizes
have been trampled under the progress of the
centuries; but in central and inherent truth, in its exposition
of the struggle of the beleaguered human soul to win
its way to light and life, it remains perennial and new.
It is supreme in art. With unfaltering and undejected
effort the master-builder upreared in symmetry its century
of cantos; with faultless eloquence he translated into
song all moods the human heart has ever known. And
it is supreme in personality; because in every line of it
we feel ourselves in contact with the vastest individual
mind that ever yet inhabited the body of a man. We
know (to quote the Poet'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 learned how salt his food who fares upon another's
bread,—how steep his path who treadeth up and down
another's stairs. But Dante saw and conquered,—realizing
what he had to do, knowing how to do it, being
worthy of his work. Therefore, singly among authors,
he deserves the sacred epithet his countrymen apply to
him,—divine.
"The Divine Comedy" is the supreme epic of the world.
The supreme novel remains to be written. It is doubtful
[pg 220]
if human literary art may attain completeness more than
once. But as our authors labor to embody truths of
human life in arranged imagined facts, they should constantly
be guided and inspired by the allurement of the
ultimate ideal. The noblest work is evermore accomplished
by followers of the gleam. Let us, in parting
company, paraphrase the sense of a remark made centuries
ago by Sir Philip Sidney,—that model of a scholar and a
gentleman:—It is well to shoot our arrows at the moon;
for though they may miss their mark, they will yet fly
higher than if we had flung them into a bush.
[pg 221]
INDEX
Addison, Joseph, xi;
Sir Roger de Coverley, xii.
Alcott, Louisa M., 76;
Little Women, 76.
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 134;
Marjorie Daw, 134.
Ambitious Guest, The, 170.
American Short Stories, 170.
Amiel, Henri-Frédéric, 7.
Andersen, Hans Christian, 9.
Angel in the House, The, 154.
An Habitation Enforced, 110.
Ariosto, Ludovico, 99;
Orlando Furioso, 99.
At the End of the Passage, 108.
Aubignac, Abbé d', xiv, xvi;
Pratique du Théâtre, xiv.
Austen, Jane, 4, 19, 26, 88, 127, 128, 215, 217;
Emma, 88, 127, 143;
Pride and Prejudice, 128, 143.
Baldwin, Charles Sears, 170, 171, 176;
American Short Stories, 170.
Balzac, Honoré de, x, xii, xiii, 53, 56, 153, 160, 180;
Eugénie Grandet, 168;
Human Comedy, 160.
Beach of Falesá, The, 178.
Besant, Sir Walter, xxi, 35;
The Art of Fiction, 35.
Beyle, Henri, see Stendhal.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 154;
Aurora Leigh, 154.
Brunetière, Ferdinand, x, 164;
History of Classical French Literature, x.
Bunner, Henry Cuyler, 134, 148;
A Sisterly Scheme, 148;
The Documents in the Case, 134.
Bunyan, John, 79;
Pilgrim's Progress, 63, 79.
[pg 222]
Camoëns, 156;
The Lusiads, 156.
Carlyle, Thomas, 8;
Heroes and Hero-Worship, 8.
Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland, 16.
Cask of Amontillado, The, 140, 174.
Chateaubriand, René de, 16.
Child's Dream of a Star, A, 182.
Cooper, James Fenimore, xii, 26, 142, 182, 215;
Leatherstocking Tales, 215;
The Last of the Mohicans, 169;
The Spy, 142.
Coppée, François, 155;
The Strike of the Iron-Workers, 155;
The Substitute, 155.
Crawford, F. Marion, xxi, 24;
The Novel: What It Is, 24.
Criticism and Fiction, 38, 131.
Curious Impertinent, The, 213.
D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 4, 16.
Daudet, Alphonse, 77, 105, 140, 170, 182, 183;
Sapho, 17, 77;
The Elixir of the Reverend Father Gaucher, 105;
The Last Class, 170.
De Quincey, Thomas, 7, 208;
The English Mail-Coach, 208.
Dickens, Charles, xvii, 21, 68, 70, 79, 102, 143, 182;
A Child's Dream of a Star, 182;
A Tale of Two Cities, 66, 144;
David Copperfield, 70;
Martin Chuzzlewit, 84;
Our Mutual Friend, 68, 94, 101, 149;
Pickwick Papers, xxii;
The Old Curiosity Shop, 102, 103.
Documents in the Case, The, 134.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 122, 145.
Eliot, George, xiii, xx, 4, 10, 18, 23, 27, 31, 34, 39, 43, 49, 68, 70, 71, 81, 86, 87, 112, 120, 126, 127, 180, 182, 215;
Adam Bede, 18, 31, 113;
Daniel Deronda, 127, 146;
Middlemarch, 68, 77;
Romola, 25, 34, 112, 145;
Silas Marner, 27, 65;
The Mill on the Floss, 10, 86, 110.
[pg 223]
Elixir of the Reverend Father Gaucher, The, 105.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 41, 78;
Representative Men, 78.
English Mail-Coach, The, 208.
Evan Harrington, 71, 124.
Experimental Novel, The, 109.
Franklin, Benjamin, 78;
Autobiography of, 78.
Freytag, Gustav, xxi;
Technic of the Drama, xxi.
Froude, James Anthony, xx.
Goethe, J. W. von, xvi;
Conversations with Eckermann, xvi.
Goldsmith, Oliver, xi;
The Vicar of Wakefield, 82, 83.
Goncourt, Jules and Edmond de, 26.
Gummere, Francis B., xiii.
Hale, Edward Everett, 178;
The Man Without a Country, 178.
Hardy, Thomas, 109;
Tess of the D'Ubervilles, 109.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, xiii, 5, 13, 18, 19, 25, 27, 28, 29, 36, 63, 69, 71, 144, 151, 154, 171, 176, 182, 183, 186, 188, 200, 217;
David Swan, 63;
The Ambitious Guest, 170;
The Gentle Boy, 186;
The House of the Seven Gables, 5, 25, 28;
The Marble Faun, 36, 71, 151;
The Scarlet Letter, xxii, 13, 18, 27, 34, 69, 70, 71, 142, 217;
The White Old Maid, 144.
Heroes and Hero-Worship, 8.
House of the Seven Gables, The, 5, 25, 28.
Howells, William Dean, 38, 130, 131, 132;
Criticism and Fiction, 38, 131;
The Rise of Silas Lapham, 169.
Hugo, Victor, xii, xx, 23, 24, 48, 109, 141, 146;
Les Miserables, 24;
Notre Dame de Paris, 109, 141, 146, 168.
Huxley, Thomas Henry, xvii.
[pg 224]
Ibsen, Henrik, 10, 144;
Rosmersholm, 144;
Hedda Gabler, 144.
Iceland Fisherman, The, 110.
Irving, Washington, 4, 177, 216;
Rip Van Winkle, 177;
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 177.
James, Henry, 19, 25, 35, 55, 70, 76, 116, 134, 147, 177;
Daisy Miller, 169;
The Art of Fiction, 25, 116;
The Turn of the Screw, 147, 177;
What Maisie Knew, 134.
Jerusalem Liberated, 156.
Kipling, Rudyard, 9, 20, 21, 33, 36, 37, 48, 65, 77, 80, 85, 104, 108, 110, 111, 120, 123, 134, 144, 147, 153, 166, 169, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 188, 189, 200;
A Deal in Cotton, 134;
An Habitation Enforced, 110;
At the End of the Passage, 108;
False Dawn, 111;
How the Elephant Got His Trunk, 9;
Just So Stories, 21;
Kim, 65, 144;
Lispeth, 188;
"Love-o'-Women," 147;
Mrs. Bathurst, 93, 124, 146;
Only a Subaltern, 11;
Plain Tales from the Hills, 181, 186, 188;
Soldiers Three, 124;
The Brushwood Boy, 26, 33, 200, 217;
The Captive, 90, 120;
The Light that Failed, 169;
They, 20, 33, 85, 166, 200;
Thrown Away, 187;
Without Benefit of Clergy, 19, 104, 170, 187.
Kreutzer Sonata, The, xviii.
Lady of the Lake, The, 154.
Lady or the Tiger?, The, 150, 179.
Lamb, Charles, 132, 218;
Dream-Children, 218;
Essays of Elia, 218;
The South Sea House, 132.
Last Days of Pompeii, The, 111.
Last of the Mohicans, The, 169.
Leatherstocking Tales, 215.
Le Breton, André, xi, xix.
Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The, 177.
Leibnitz, Baron G. W. von, 102.
Le Sage, Alain René, 64;
Gil Blas, 64, 119.
Light That Failed, The, 169.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 154, 219;
Evangeline, 154.
Loti, Pierre, 110;
The Iceland Fisherman, 110.
Lowell, James Russell, xiii, 5.
[pg 225]
Man Without a Country, The, 178.
Manzoni, Alessandro, xii.
Matthews, Brander, 40, 134, 168, 172;
The Documents in the Case, 134;
The Philosophy of the Short-Story, 172.
Maupassant, Guy de, 38, 61, 131, 133, 139, 140, 148, 170, 176, 177, 180, 182, 183, 188, 216;
Pierre et Jean, 38;
The Necklace, 139, 148, 170.
Merchant of Venice, The, 66.
Meredith, George, 26, 53, 70, 71, 109, 124, 126, 166, 167, 180, 182;
Evan Harrington, 71, 124;
The Egoist, 70, 82, 90, 110;
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 111.
Meredith, Owen, 154;
Lucile, 154.
Merimée, Prosper, 169;
Carmen, 169;
Colomba, 168.
Millet, Jean-François, 98.
Mill on the Floss, The, 10, 86, 110.
Molière, J. B. P., xv, 64, 162;
Les Facheux, 64;
Le Tartufe, xv, 6;
L'Etourdi, 64.
Motley, John Lothrop, xx.
Murder in the Rue Morgue, The, 73, 217.
New Arabian Nights, 25, 83.
Nouvelle Héloise, La, 102.
Novel, The: What It Is, 24.
Old Curiosity Shop, The, 102, 103.
Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The, 111.
Patmore, Coventry, 154;
The Angel in the House, 154.
[pg 226]
Philosophy of Composition, The, 189.
Philosophy of the Short-Story, The, 172.
Pilgrim's Progress, 63, 79.
Pinero, Arthur Wing, 145, 167.
Pit and the Pendulum, The, 179.
Poe, Edgar Allan, 26, 35, 73, 112, 122, 138, 140, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 199, 200, 216, 217;
Ligeia, 170, 189, 190, 196, 199;
The Assignation, 36;
The Cask of Amontillado, 140, 174;
The Fall of the House of Usher, 94, 112, 115, 140;
The Masque of the Red Death, 138, 146, 151, 174;
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, 73, 217;
The Philosophy of Composition, 189;
The Pit and the Pendulum, 179;
The Raven, 189, 196;
The Tell-Tale Heart, 140, 174.
Pride and Prejudice, 128, 143.
Rabelais, François, x, 16.
Rise of Silas Lapham, The, 169.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 69, 70.
Rostand, Edmond, 162;
Cyrano de Bergerac, 162.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 102;
La Nouvelle Héloise, 102.
Ruskin, John, 103, 207;
Modern Painters, 103;
Seven Lamps of Architecture, 207.
Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 100;
Paul and Virginia, 100.
Sardou, Victorien, 162;
La Tosca, 162.
Scarlet Letter, The, xxii, 13, 18, 27, 34, 69, 70, 71, 142, 217.
School for Scandal, The, 145.
Scott, Sir Walter, xii, 18, 19, 23, 24, 36, 40, 48, 56, 72, 84, 130, 141, 142, 146, 154, 182, 213;
Kenilworth, 146, 169;
Marmion, 154;
Redgauntlet, 182;
The Lady of the Lake, 154;
The Talisman, 142;
Wandering Willie's Tale, 182;
Waverley, 18.
Seven Lamps of Architecture, The, 207.
Shakspere, William, xv, 7, 10, 11, 32, 47, 68, 69, 153, 162, 165;
As You Like It, 10;
Hamlet, xv, 6, 7, 80, 162, 165;
Henry IV, 47;
King Lear, 80;
Macbeth, 5, 80, 149;
Othello, 145, 165;
Romeo and Juliet, 12;
The Merchant of Venice, 66.
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Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 145;
The School for Scandal, 145.
Spielhagen, Friedrich, xxi;
Technic of the Novel, xxi.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, xvii, xviii, xix, 14, 21, 25, 31, 33, 36, 38, 46, 48, 54, 58, 59, 60, 68, 71, 83, 106, 111, 169, 174, 178, 183, 205, 217;
A College Magazine, 211;
A Gossip on Romance, 54, 106;
A Humble Remonstrance, 58, 68;
Kidnapped, 13, 119, 121;
Markheim, xix, 33, 46, 138, 151, 170, 209, 211;
New Arabian Nights, 25, 83;
On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature, 206;
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, xix, 31, 36, 123, 178;
The Beach of Falesá, 178;
The Lantern Bearers, 21;
The Master of Ballantrae, 91, 111, 123, 145, 166;
The Merry Men, 52;
The Treasure of Franchard, 169;
Treasure Island, 49, 50, 76, 119, 121.
Stimson, F. J., 214;
Mrs. Knollys, 214.
Stockton, Frank R., 150;
The Lady or the Tiger?, 150, 179.
Strike of the Iron-Workers, The, 155.
Study of Prose Fiction, A, 26, 178.
Tale of Two Cities, A, 66, 144.
Tasso, Torquato, 156, 158;
Jerusalem Liberated, 156.
Taylor, Bayard, 150;
Who Was She?, 150.
Tell-Tale Heart, The, 140, 174.
Teniers, David, the younger, 98.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 154, 203;
Maud, 154;
The Princess, 203.
Tess of the D'Ubervilles, 109.
Thackeray, William Makepeace, xiii, 12, 19, 24, 25, 61, 69, 72, 77, 96, 123, 131, 132, 182, 213;
Henry Esmond, 25, 118;
Pendennis, 72;
The Newcomes, 123, 169;
The Virginians, 25;
Vanity Fair, xxii, 18, 69, 77, 96, 143, 148.
Tolstoi, Count Leo, xviii, 4;
Anna Karénina, xviii;
The Kreutzer Sonata, xviii;
War and Peace, xxii.
[pg 228]
Treasure of Franchard, The, 169.
Trollope, Anthony, 39, 49.
Turn of the Screw, The, 147, 177.
Vicar of Wakefield, The, 82, 83.
Wandering Willie's Tale, 182.
White Old Maid, The, 144.
Zola, Emile, 4, 26, 39, 109, 160;
The Experimental Novel, 109;
The Rougon-Macquart Series, 109, 160.
Writing Books Index
