A Manual of the Art of Fiction Part 8

=Uses of the Weather.=--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 ill.u.s.trate 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. 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 ent.i.tled "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 craftsmans.h.i.+p does Robert Louis Stevenson so clearly prove his mastery as in his marshalling of the weather, always vividly and truthfully described, to serve a purpose always fitting to his fictions.

=Romantic and Realistic Settings.=--Let us next consider the 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 since the romantic is not bound to imitate the actual, and fabricates his invest.i.ture 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 "Salammbo," what the authors have mainly striven for has been accuracy of detail; but in romantic historical novels, like those of Scott and Dumas pere, 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.

=A Romantic Setting by Edgar Allan Poe.=--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 pa.s.sing 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 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 l.u.s.tre 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.

=A Realistic Setting by George Eliot.=--As an example of a realistic setting, closely copying the actual, let us examine the following pa.s.sage from "Adam Bede" (Chapter XVIII):--

"You might have known it was Sunday if you had only waked up in the farmyard. The c.o.c.ks 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.sage, 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.

=The Quality of Atmosphere, or Local Color.=--These two pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages, 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 sombreness and gloom in the one case, and the quality of Sabbath quietude in the other--and that they have been marshalled to convey a complete sense of this central and pervading quality. 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 marshalling 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.

=Recapitulation.=--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 coordinate with the elements of character and action.

Novelists have come to consider that any given story can happen only in a given set of circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.sages 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 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 pa.s.sage of description that is not in its intention narrative."

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Explain and ill.u.s.trate the three historic stages in the evolution of the element of setting.

2. What did Ruskin mean by "the pathetic fallacy"?

3. What are the modern uses of the element of setting?

4. Explain the process of attaining atmosphere, or local color.

5. Adduce original instances of emotional harmony, emotional contrast, and irony in setting.

SUGGESTED READING

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: "A Gossip on Romance."

BLISS PERRY: "A Study of Prose Fiction"--Chapter VII, on "The Setting."

Read at greater length those pa.s.sages of famous fiction from which have been selected the ill.u.s.trative quotations cited in this chapter.

CHAPTER VII

THE POINT OF VIEW IN NARRATIVE

The Importance of the Point of View--Two Cla.s.ses, The Internal and the External--I. Subdivisions of the First Cla.s.s: 1. The Point of View of the Leading Actor; 2. The Point of View of Some Subsidiary Actor; 3. The Points of View of Different Actors; 4. The Epistolary Point of View.--II. Subdivisions of the Second Cla.s.s:--1. The Omniscient Point of View; 2. The Limited Point of View; 3. The Rigidly Restricted Point of View--Two Tones of Narrative, Impersonal and Personal: 1. The Impersonal Tone; 2. The Personal Tone--The Point of View as a Factor in Construction--The Point of View as the Hero of the Narrative.

=The Importance of the Point of View.=--We have now examined in 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 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 a.s.sumed 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 fict.i.tious, 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.

=Two Cla.s.ses, The Internal and the External.=--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 cla.s.ses, the internal and the external. A story seen internally is narrated in the first person by one of its partic.i.p.ants; 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.

=I. Subdivisions of the First Cla.s.s: 1. The Point of View of the Leading Actor.=--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 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 pa.s.sage, subst.i.tuting the p.r.o.noun "he" for the p.r.o.noun "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 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 a.n.a.lysis 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, a.n.a.lyze 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 compa.s.s, 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 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 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 afterward; but I insert them here, because it is at this point in the plot that they belong."

=2. The Point of View of Some Subsidiary Actor.=--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, a.n.a.lysis 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 a.n.a.lytic power of Dupin through a narrative told not by the detective himself but by a man who knew him well; and Sir Arthur 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 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 a.s.signs to Mackellar the task of narrating "The Master of Ballantrae": but when the Master disappears and Mackellar remains at home with Mr.

Henry, it is necessary for the author to invent a second personage, the Chevalier de Burke, to tell the story of the Master's wanderings.

=3. The Points of View of Different Actors.=--This last instance leads us to consider the possibility of telling different sections of the story from the points of view of different characters, a.s.signing to each the particular phase of the narrative that he is especially fitted to recount. Three quarters of the "Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is narrated in the third person, externally; but the final intimate vividness of horror is gained by s.h.i.+fting 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" 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 circ.u.mstances, 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.