mil— i nip If HhBh mm tfDm/fflffl& ;^u^ J*^ £^azZpZ&n>&>@'* A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION BY BLISS PERRY Professor of English Literature in Harvard University AUTHOR OF "A STUDY OF POETRY," "WALT WHITMAN," "THE AMERICAN MIND," ETC. Revised Edition BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY <&bz Ifttoerjsi&e prep? Cambti&oe tA COPYRIGHT, I902 AND I92O, BY BLISS PERRY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 3.Z * OCT -9 1920 CAMBRIDGE ♦ MASSACHUSETTS U • S • A ©CU597699 THE CHARACTERS 117 that is, that, compared with the woodpecker, the hawk, the crane, the crow represents the normal form of the bird family. Naturalists speak, indeed, of the type genus, the type species, and the type specimen, meaning thereby a division that is especially charac- teristic of the larger group which it repre- sents. And our distinction in fiction between the individual and the type would perhaps be more fully illustrated by the use of the terms " genus/ 1 " species," and " specimen." Genus, let us say, corvus ; species, corvus Americanus ; and specimen, some particular crow under observation, — for example, old " Silver-Spot/ 3 so agreeably described by Mr. Seton-Thompson. This distinction is a perfectly simple one. When we say that the fox terrier is intelligent, we mean that the type is intelligent. When I say that my fox terrier is intelligent, I have the individual in mind. Let us see how all this bears on . This distinc- the question 01 character-drawing tion applied in fiction. We will suppose that the novelist wishes to introduce into his story the figure of Abraham Lincoln. It is obvious that he must represent Lincoln as 118 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION belonging to the family of man, the genus American, the species Westerner, but that all these generic and typical traits must be further differentiated by delineating the qual- ities which distinguish the individual speci* men, Abraham Lincoln, from other Western American men. ooniusionoi But nothing is more frequent in Se!X7d- th fiction than t0 find these two naL things confused. How does it hap- pen ? First, through an attempt to describe the individual by typical traits merely. If I say that a tramp came to my back door this morning and asked for some breakfast, and that he had torn shoes, old clothes, a slouch- ing gait, the face of a drinker, I do not iden- tify him in the slightest. If I were to put the police on his trail, armed with such a description, it would fit fifty other tramps as well as the one I have in mind. It is obvious that to identify this particular individual I must be able to describe some peculiarity of person or costume which differentiates him from others of his class, or at least to de- scribe such a combination of qualities and details as is not likely to be found in the case of any other tramp. THE CHARACTERS 119 Secondly, the type and the indi- Moral vidual are often confused in char- abstractlons ' acter-drawing because the writer substitutes for the individual some moral abstraction. In the old moralities and miracle plays such characters as Good Fame, Virtuous Living, Tom Tosspot, Cuthbert Cutpurse, are nothing but signs of certain moral qualities, to be praised or reprehended according to* the pleasure of the play-wright. Even the Eliza- bethan drama, in all its wealth of individual portraiture, is constantly presenting to us personages who are mere personifications of moral qualities, and Bunyan's masterly power of characterization does not prevent some readers from considering Mr. Worldly Wise- man and Mr. Faintheart to be moral im- ages rather than men. Thirdly, the type is frequently Caricatures. confused with the individual be- cause the artist gives a caricature rather than a portrait. In pictorial caricature, as we know, certain features are exaggerated until the individual is far removed from reality. Tweed and Croker, if we are to believe the caricaturists, are not real persons. They are simply embodiments of certain abstract and 120 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION highly reprehensible moral qualities. It is easy to point out, in some of the very great- est fiction, examples o£ the fatal ease with which the writer can turn a portrait into a caricature. Sir Pitt Crawley's stinginess ap- parently tickled Thackeray's fancy so thor- oughly that he could not resist the temptation to exaggerate it until it was so much out of drawing that it robbed the character of its actuality. As compared with Sir Pitt Craw- ley, Becky Sharp's portrait shows constant restraint and a steady sense of proportion. Those personages of Dickens whom we are wont to speak of as " Dickensy i characters are all too frequently caricatures rather than portraits. Certain traits are so magnified for purposes of identification or humor that we see not the real person but only the " g a g>" *h e trick, the turn of farce, which presents him to the audience. Children de- light in this sort of thing, of course, but many older persons wonder, when they come to Dickens again, how all this false drawing could ever have given them pleasure. The causes 1^ * s more interesting, however, lLkoulear 1 *° inquire into the causes of this vision. confusion. Why is it that the THE CHARACTERS 121 artist allows himself to substitute typical for individual traits and hence to lose the power of imparting a sense of actuality to his ficti- tious personages ? It is often true, no doubt, that the author fails to see clearly what he wants to express. He falls into abstract, typical delineation through mere irresolution or inattention, or it may be the overfondness for what he may like to call the " ideal," that is, for the abstract rather than for the con- crete. To this latter predilection must be attributed the feebleness of a great deal of Romantic art. It accounts for the weakness of Scott's character-drawing of ladies in com- parison with his masterly delineation of peas- ant girls. Then, too, the prevalence of a fashionable artistic type is often fashionable types. found to overpower the artist's originality. The " Gibson girl," who is said to be due originally to the influence of a certain model in Mr. Gibson's early career as an artist, has continued not only to dominate most of Mr. Gibson's own drawings of women, but has been nothing less than an obsession, though a charming one, upon a whole school of American draughtsmen. In similar fash- 122 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION ion, there was a sort of Richard Harding Davis heroine who used to make her period- ical appearance in college stories. Indeed, college stories furnish an excellent example of the prevalence of a certain fashionable type and the consequent neglect of individ- ual portraiture. In all the college stories which have appeared in the last dozen years how few sharply characterized individuals are to be found ! It is far easier to describe the category under which a particular student belongs and to give the general traits of the " football man/' the " sport," the " grind," than it is to portray the particular person who belongs to the category. In other words, most authors of college stories content them- selves, as far as character-depiction is con- cerned, by describing the pigeon-hole rather than the man in the pigeon-hole, raiiure in I* 1 the third place, although the expression, fiction-writer may see the individ- ual with perfect distinctness, either as actually present before him or in imaginative vision, he may nevertheless^ not be able to express what he sees. He draws the general charac- teristics of the type rather than the individual characteristics of the person because his vocab- THE CHARACTERS 123 ulary is not sufficiently delicate and precise for the task of portrayal. Here, again, col- lege stories afford a useful illustration. It is not to be supposed that the authors of those stories see their fellows less distinctly, nor that they perceive imaginative types with less clearness of outline, simply because they are dealing with young men and young wo- men. The defect is chiefly to be attributed to the lack of training in flexible and precise expression. But for one or another of these three causes which have been briefly uai charao- i« 11 n .-,.... 1 , tors created. outlined, now tew individual char- acters have been created in fiction in the last ten years ! We have had certain types drawn over and over again with wearisome reiteration, but we have had few fictitious personages who have given us the impression of actuality. It must be remembered after all that the type is, in the last analysis, only a subjective abstraction, either in the reader's mind or in the mind of the artist. The mas- ters of fiction, surely, have generally con- tented themselves with creating personages and letting the type take care of itself. If the personage be so drawn as to convey a 124 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION vivid sense of reality, his individual character* istics will be firmly outlined ; and if he gives to the reader an impression of moral unity, there is little doubt that he will in the true sense contain the type. For the type, so far as it is of any artistic value, is implicit in the individual. character- Before bringing to a close the contrast. consideration of the delineation of character, we should note that some of the greatest triumphs in the portrayal of character have been due to an effective sense of charac- ter-contrast. The differences between mem- bers of the same family — as for instance between Adam and Seth Bede, Eachel and Beatrix Esmond, George and Henry War- rington — have been utilized with consum- mate effect. The same is true of those pairs or trios of friends of which the history of the drama and of the novel offers so many brilliant examples. Hamlet and Horatio, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, Mulvaney, Or- theris and Learoyd, gain immensely in sa- liency and picturesqueness of outline because they are thrown into dramatic contrast with those friends in whose presence we are wont to watch them. THE CHARACTERS 125 Character - grouping on a still character- wider scale results from those mani- group ng * fold social, economical, and political rela- tions which place differently constituted indi- viduals in clearly marked lines of relation- ship. Master and servant, mistress and maid, lover and confidant, debtor and creditor, the dwellers on the farm or in the village, the representatives of a profession, the ad- venturers in some commercial or political enterprise, are linked together by bonds which give an opportunity for striking groups of characters. Indeed, in every story, as in every play, there is commonly some unifying principle, like a love affair, a crime, a journey, a business scheme, which instantly throws all the persons of the story into some sort of relationship with one an- other. Their attitude towards certain facts instantly ranks them, as by a kind of irre- sistible physical or moral gravitation. They are thrown into main groups or subordinate groups according to the part they play in the main plot or in the sub-plot of the tale. They work out their individual destiny in harmony or in contrast with the general destiny that presides over the fate of the 126 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION personages in the narrative ; they advance or retreat, compromise, surrender, or triumph as the judgment and the insight of the writer shall dictate. But in all the manifold and subtle relations into which the persons in the story are thrown, there is an opportunity for the most searching, the most spirited, the most brilliant methods of character-de- lineation. If, as Goethe said, a character is formed in the stream of the world, the char- acters in a novel form themselves into more and more plastic outlines as the stream of the story sweeps to its close. It is, therefore, quite impossible Harmony ol ' m J *■ . x character and to conceive of characters m a novel action. without taking into consideration the actions in which those characters are involved. The two elements, character and action, should be harmoniously treated. There will always be in fiction, doubtless, examples of " plot-ridden " characters ; that is, persons whose role in the story makes them do something which they would not naturally do. A high-minded girl is made to listen at the door simply because it is de- sirable that she should be aware of a conver- sation taking place between her father and THE CHARACTERS 127 her lover. An honest man is made to com- mit a crime because a crime is essential to the particular web of circumstances which the author desires to weave. But these instances of the violation of truth in charac- ter are usually punished by the sense of dis- belief which the reader is quick to feel. It is natural that we should demand in fiction, as in life, that the character should be true to itself, that under the given circumstances it should exhibit consistent behavior. What is more, we instinctively demand in the characters that im- press us by their individuality that moral unity by virtue of which each character shows evidence of what has happened to it in the past. Just as each one of us is conscious of his past, and is also conscious of the possibilities of the future, and bears this consciousness, although perhaps without real- izing it, into every act of the present, so we desire that the men and women described for us in the pages of the novelist should give this sense of the continuity, the unbroken web of life. To enter a railroad station — * say at Buffalo — and see an east-bound ex- press standing on the track, resplendent in 128 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION paint and gilt, and ready to pull out of the station, is to receive an impression of actu- ality and power. But one has a far higher sense of power if one watches at the station this same train coming in from the West, an hour late, with vestibule and roof and win- dows covered with snow and ice, in evidence of the storm through which the train has passed. We picture to ourselves the winter landscape over which it has been flying in its struggle against time. We know that before it reaches Albany or New York that lost hour must be made up, if engine and engineer can do it. The past and the fu- ture of the train unite in their impression on our consciousness, and impart a thrilling sensation of personal force. In the same way, our vision of men and women in the greatest books of fiction is not confined to the immediate moment when they are pre- sent to our view ; we are more or less dimly conscious of the past and of the future of those characters and of all the moral po* tentialities of their lives. CHAPTER VI THE PLOT 11 Let him [the fiction-writer] choose a motive, whether of character or of passion ; carefully construct his plot so that every incident is an illustration of the motive, and every property em- ployed shall bear to it a near relation of congruity or contrast ; avoid a sub-plot, unless, as sometimes in Shakespeare, the sub- plot be a reversion or complement of the main intrigue ; . . . 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. . . . And as the root of the whole matter, let him bear in mind that his novel is not a tran- script of life, to be judged by its exactitude ; but a simplifica- tion of some side or point of life, to stand or fall by its signifi- cant simplicity." R. L. Stevenson, A Humble Remonstrance, In discussing the affiliations of what plot the novel with the play, in the means ' third chapter of this book, I have had occa- sion to say something about the plot and its relation to the theme and to the characters of the play or the novel. The word means, as its etymology implies, a weaving together* Or, still more simply, we understand by plot that which happens to the characters, — the various ways in which the forces represented 130 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION by the different personages of the story are made to harmonize or clash through external action. sources of ^ n determining the nature and plot the details of the action of a story. it is obvious that the novelist may draw on the same sources of knowledge which he uses in the construction of the characters. The plot may be suggested to him by his own observation, by memories of what he has heard or read, or through the pure gift of inventiveness. One can scarcely say that there is marked superiority in any one of these methods. Many novelists, like Haw- thorne, have been inclined to confess rue- fully : " I have seen so little of the real world, that I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories out of.' : On the other hand, the experience of writers like Dickens, Thackeray, or Mr. Kipling has crowded their memory with incidents and events admirably adapted to furnish the raw material of count- less plots. Sometimes, no doubt, it is dif- ficult to readjust such matter and make it sufficiently plastic to give free play to the imagination. The stories that come to one by inheritance through half forgotten memo- THE PLOT 131 ries of country-side legends and traditions, nar- ratives which one dimly remembers from old books or scraps of history and ballads, have often proved more stimulating to the con- structive imagination than any hints given by actual experience. Just as Liszt wrote his rhapsodies by utilizing hints and frag- ments of folk-lore and popular melodies, so Thomas Hardy finds it easy in his " Wessex Tales " to utilize the histories of decaying families, stories of adventure of long ago, strange tales that have been whispered by the hearth-fire from immemorial times. " Truth is stranger than fiction,' 3 and truth often needs to be recast by a fictive imagination before it is quite ready for the fiction- writer's hand. But this matter of plot gives lit- 0ften a mat . tie difficulty to those born story- two * lnstlnct - tellers who have the gift for conceiving char- acters in action. For these natural spinners of the yarn, to whom invention is the most easy, the most fascinating, the most capti- vating of gifts, — for a Stevenson, a Scott, a Dumas, — to block out the plot of a story is a mere bagatelle. In Scott's own words, he " took the easiest path across country," 132 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION following merely his whim or his natural in* stinct ; and one is bound to record the fact that the novels written or planned by these reckless, inveterate story-tellers afford quite as much satisfaction to technical students of plot-construction as do the more elaborate plans and devices of those writers whose in- terest lies foremost in the creation of charac- ter, and with whom the element of action is of secondary concern. piot in its Pl°t i n ^s simplest form may simplest form. concern itself with nothing more than the progress of a single character and its development and experiences at the dif- ferent stages of its career. Take, for in- stance, that admirable story by Hawthorne, " Wakefield/ 1 which concerns itself with the psychological analysis of the character of an excellent gentleman to whom it occurred one day that it would be a good plan not to go home that night, and who consequently sought lodgings in another street and stayed away from home for twenty years. Haw- thorne makes real to us the whimsical, yet singularly human and consistent motive that actuated this strange character in his aston- ishing performance ; and although the story THE PLOT 133 involves but a single personage, it would be difficult to point to any short story of equal length in which the reader feels greater in- terest. Usually, however, the plot of m J9 ! r Dealing with a story involves at least two char- twocnarac- tars. acters. They embody different forces, different ways of facing and fight- ing the world of circumstance with which they are brought into collision. In " Silas Marner,' ! for instance, the human problem involved is the influence of the love of a child on the lonely and embittered nature of a her- mit. The action of the story is designed to bring these two forces together and to note the nature of their mutual reactions. The plot of Hawthorne's " Rappaecini's Daugh- ter 3 involves the struggle between scientific curiosity and paternal love. These forces are embodied in the persons of the scientist and his daughter, and the plot is inevitably worked out by the natural laws of human character, " the truth of the human heart," under the peculiar circumstances which the author chooses to describe. And, to choose another short story of a different type, there is Mr. Kipling's " His Private Honour.' ; In 134 A STUDY OF PKOSE FICTION this story a young British lieutenant, in a moment of extreme irritation, strikes a private soldier. The act is one that calls for dis- missal from the Queen's service. What is the officer to do ? He cannot send money to the soldier — who happens to be the redoubt- able Ortheris himself — nor can he apologize to him in private. Neither can he let mat- ters drift. Ortheris, too, has his own code of pride and honor ; he too is " a servant of the Queen ; " but how is the insult to be atoned for ? The way out of this apparently hopeless muddle is a beautifully simple one, after all. The lieutenant invites Ortheris to go shooting with him, and when they are alone, asks him to "take off his coat.' : " Thank you, sir ! says Ortheris. The two men fight until Ortheris owns that he is beaten. Then the lieutenant apologizes for the original blow, and officer and private walk back to camp devoted friends. That fight is the moral salvation of Lieutenant Ouless. The plot of " His Private Honour ' is, therefore, the narrative of the struggle between two kinds of pride, the pride of the officer and that of the enlisted man, and the solution comes through Mr. Kipling's power /£~J)*~J t^-^Co™ THE PLOT 135 to make us realize the English love of fair play, the fundamental human equality which is common to both men despite the difference of their rank. It is far easier, however, to throw Three the lines of a plot into swift com- characters - plication when there are at least three char- acters involved. The attitude of two of these characters towards the third may in- stantly be utilized to establish and carry for- ward new lines of action. In " The Knight's Tale 3 of Chaucer the two young men im- prisoned in the tower catch their first glimpse of Emily, and this moment marks the first entanglement of the threads of the future plot. In Miss Wilkins's " New England Nun 5 there is an extremely skillful example of this kind of plot. The story opens with a picture of Louisa Ellis, an "old maid," sitting in her quiet room on a summer afternoon, and receiving an embarrassed visit from her betrothed lover, Joe Daggett. Their en- gagement has lasted fifteen years, while he has been absent in Australia seeking his for- tune. Each has been faithful to the other, yet now that the wedding is only a week away, disorder and confusion seem entering i, 136 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION her cloistered life in place of peace and har- mony. She does not dare tell her lover how much, after all, she dreads to marry him. He, too, has become aware that their passion is a thing of the past ; he is conscious of a love for Lily Dyer, a younger woman ; but he is as finely loyal to his old promise as Louisa herself. How does Miss Wilkins cut the knot ? By making Louisa stroll down the road one moonlight night and un- wittingly overhear a conversation between Joe and Lily, in which she learns that they love each other, but that they both believe it cruel and wrong for Joe to break his engage- ment with Louisa. It is now easy and natural for Louisa to release Joe, to see him married to Lily Dyer, and happily, prayerfully, to number her own days " like an uncloistered nun." The "tiree- I* ma y ^ e added that the essen- ciovw " re- ti a ^ elements of this three-cornered lationship. game played by two men and one woman, or two women and one man, here handled by Miss Wilkins in one of its most innocent and unsophisticated phases, present to the fiction-writer, for purely technical rea- sons, a fascinating problem. Such a three- THE PLOT 137 fold relationship inevitably involves the play of strong passions, the elements of fear, of jealousy, of danger, of surprise, of remorse ; and all of these are furnished, as it were, ready to the novelist's hand by the theme itself. As was pointed out in the chap- complication ter devoted to the drama, the ofplot " complication of the plot begins with the introduction of new incidents or new per- sonages, or with the introduction of new mo- tives growing out of the relationships which are made evident at the outset of the story. In Hawthorne's " The House of the Seven Gables " the opening of the shop marks the beginning of the complication. In " The Scarlet Letter "it is the entrance of Roger Chillingworth. It is an interesting question how far the complication of the plot may be carried out without confusing or perplex- ing the reader. Novelists of the Latin races have commonly given evidence of a greater instinct for unity, are more simple in the constructive features of their work, than those of the Teutonic races. The novels of Dickens and Thackeray probably mark the extreme limit of complexity, as regards the number of personages introduced, the 138 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION variety of sub-plots, and the length of time required for the main action of the story. There are said to be seventy-five personages in " Our Mutual Friend/' and sixty in " Van- ity Fair." In " Middlemarch : there are twenty-two persons whose portraits are painted at full length. 1 American fiction has appar- ently been more influenced of late by Con- tinental than by English examples, and the result has been a more marked simplicity in construction. incident and I* 1 studying the complication of situation. ^ e p| Q ^ jj. fj. en becomes advan- tageous to distinguish between incidents which reveal the true nature of the charac- ters and situations which determine char- acter. The difference in the thing is more to be insisted upon than the differentiation of names, and yet it is fair to characterize as an " incident ' any event which gives the reader a clearer insight into the constitution and motives of the personages in the story. In " The House of the Seven Gables ' ' the elabo- rate scene at the breakfast-table has for its Bole aim the presentation of the character of 1 C. F. Johnson, Elements of Literary Criticism, p. 89. New York: Harpers. THE PLOT 139 Clifford, and the whole chapter is devoted to the revelation of the finer and more aesthetic traits of his worn, delicate nature. It is for this purpose only that the breakfast-table scene finds its justification. In " Henry Esmond,' Harry's drive on the downs with Lord Mohun is the incident used to give a more complete exposition of character, as well as of the relationship gradually growing up between Harry and Rachel Esmond. It determines nothing. It simply informs us of what is going on, what must be reckoned with. On the other hand, to take another illustration from the same novel, the scene where Harry sees Beatrix descending the staircase, and also the one where Harry breaks his sword in the presence of the Pre- tender, or in " The House of the Seven Gables 3 again, in the scene where Judge Pyncheon demands entrance into the parlor and is refused, — these are situations which really determine character as well as reveal it. Esmond is a different man after those scenes have been depicted ; and Judge Pyncheon ha? himself been judged. Perhaps enough has been said in the third chapter to illustrate 140 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION the similarity between the climax in the novel and the climax in the play. In both of these parallel forms of literature there is commonly some scene which marks the greatest tension, the keenest suspense, involved in the relation of the characters. The elopement of Stephen Guest and Maggie Tulliver, Gwendolen's aw- ful moment of hesitation when Grandcourt is struggling in the water, will illustrate George Eliot's management of climax passages. In such passages the personal forces involved are for the instant in equilibrium. Thence- forward everything sweeps on to the denou- ment or catastrophe of the story. There is little difference between the novel and the play in the technical disposition of the series of incidents and situations which make up the " rising " and the " falling 5 action. There is, however, a noticeable Catastrophe. .... . distinction in the technical handling of the catastrophe. The absolute necessity in the drama of externalizing upon the stage the forces knit together in the final struggle makes compulsory the actual exhibition of various events which the novelist would pre- fer to suggest merely. Indeed, it has come to be the favorite theory with a certain THE PLOT 141 school of psychological novelists that, as life seldom presents any dramatic catastrophes, fiction had better avoid catastrophes too. In the novels of this sort nothing in particular occurs. At the close we miss the " God bless you, my children ! : and also the tragic allotment of disaster or disgrace. The char- acters live on, quite as if nothing had hap- pened, and it is only the new insight into personality, the new descriptions of the nat- ural world or of social forces, which the reader has as a reward for his pains. All this turns, as a matter of Thecimrac- course, upon the relation of the teinovel - personages to the underlying theme. In the novel of character, as opposed to the novel of incident, the author is chiefly concerned with the solution of certain problems of emotion or of will. When he has worked these out to his satisfaction, his task is finished, and he becomes relatively indifferent to the final disposition of all the personages of the tale. It is well known that Hawthorne added the present closing chapter to " The Marble Faun " at the request of his publishers, and this fact suggests the irreconcilable difference between the point of view of the romancer 142 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION absorbed in moral problems and of the reader who merely wants to know what happened a ever afterwards." The plot- I n the plot-novel, on the other novel. hand, the inner truth of character may often be neglected or distorted, pro- vided successive shocks of surprise and plea- sure are cleverly arranged. The detective story, for instance, deals chiefly with the elements of curiosity and suspense. But the curiosity, while it must be stimulating, must not be carried to the extreme of perplexity, and the suspense must not be too long sus- tained. In proportion as the stress is laid upon adventure merely, as in the picaresque novel, there need be little if any complexity in the plot. The mere succession of inci- dents, like those in Stevenson's " St. Ives," is enough to hold the fascinated attention of the reader. The weakness, however, in many of the modern types of the novel of adven- ture, is not due to placing too much stress upon mere incident as an element, but to the fact that character-interest has become a negligible quantity. If the reader does not, for the time being, believe in the reality of those characters whose adventures he is asked THE PLOT 143 to follow, he soon finds himself little con- cerned with the adventures. For, after all, as the history of the drama has shown so abun- dantly, that which perennially fascinates us in the human spectacle is the exhibition of character in action. Characters who do not act, and conversely the mere outward show and stir of movement not informed by any real intellectual or passional life, alike fail to move our interest, our hopes, or fears. The question of suspense in the Mystery and plot leads naturally to the element m y stlficatlon - of mystery. In any good story we are led to a normal interest both in what the charac- ters will do under the stress of unsuspected circumstances and in the shape which events will take. But this expectation of " some- thing evermore about to be,' : which lends in- terest to fiction as it does to life, must be dis- tinguished from that element of mystery with which many novelists have loved to surround certain of their characters, and in which they have liked to hide the intricacies of their plots. It is in this sense that Miriam in " The Marble Faun " is a mysterious character, and that there is a " mystery " in most detective stories. While this element of mystery is 144 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION by no means essential to the interest of a work of fiction, it is capable of the most artistic handling. But when the mystery becomes mystification, when both the person- ages in the story and the readers of the story are deliberately fooled by the author, the book commonly pays at last the penalty of this deception. When we learn at the end of Mrs. Radcliffe's " Mysteries of Udolpho" that all the mysterious terrors which have played such a potent role in the plot were the result of a mechanical contrivance, it is im- possible to reread the book with any of those delightful thrills of horror which the impres- sionable reader experienced upon the first reading. But between this deliberate decep- tion of the reader and the painful efforts of some realistic novelist to place the reader in possession of all the facts, there is an infinite variety of possible methods. Perhaps the critic cannot do more than say that that book is likely to give the most pleasure to the reader which presents, in accordance with the con- ventions and in the terms of art, the sense of uncertainty, the blindfold striving, the con- stant awaiting of the revelation of the coming moment, which play such an appreciable part in life itself. THE PLOT 145 Closely allied with the element of mystery is that of accident, sometimes used as a complicating but more often as a resolving force. It is accident that weaves and unravels the plot of many a novel. The hero picks up a handkerchief, or steps on a lady's train, or unwittingly insults an unknown rival, or knocks at the wrong door of an inn, and upon these trivialities hangs, or seems to hang, his entire fortune. Simi- larly, when the climax of a story has been reached, there is often in fiction, as in the drama, some petty incident, apparently acci- dental but really hidden deep in the nature of things, which determines the catastrophe. Indeed, it may be said that it i« i i * t i Retribution. matters little now frequently the novelist complicates or simplifies his plot by the introduction of the element of accident, provided the accidents seem to be thus a part of the natural order of things. Rich- ard the Lion-Hearted dies by a chance arrow, and yet what other fate would be so inevit- able to an adventurous, reckless, wandering hero ? Bill Sykes hangs himself with a noose of his own making, and yet Dickens seems to be a fellow-worker with Providence in de- 146 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION signing such an appropriate and wholly pleas* ing end for such a villain. It is a tempta- tion to the unskilled novelist to kill off his personages at a convenient time, to resort to all sorts of advantageous and unexpected devices to get rid of the superfluous figures in his story. But to link apparently acci- dental, external circumstances with inner laws of character and conduct, to make what happens to the characters a fit result of all which the characters have done or been in the past, gives an opportunity for the most profound insight into the moral structure of the world. When Judge Pyncheon tries by brute energy and with deadly hatred of pur- pose to force his way into the little parlor of the Pyncheon house, Hepzibah says to him, "God will not let you." The Judge re- plies, " We shall see." And we do see through the long hours of the ensuing night the terrible retribution which came instantly upon him. Yet Hawthorne takes pains to suggest that there may be a perfectly natural physical explanation of the sudden death of the Judge. Not the "visitation of God,' : as juries are wont to say when at their wits' end, but an inherited tendency to apoplexy, THE PLOT 147 loined with a moment of intense bodily and mental excitement, is sufficient to account for the Judge's death. An even more familiar example of extraordinary insight and truth on the novelist's part is evinced in the Tem- plar's death in " Ivanhoe." Here, too, a natural explanation is at hand. Ivanhoe has appealed to " the judgment of God ; " yet the Templar dies, Scott tells us, through the " violence of his own contending passions." But the threads of the story are drawn to- gether with so sure a hand that the reader feels certain that this dread event is fated. " 6 This is indeed the judgment of God,' said the Grand Master, looking upwards — ' Fiat voluntas tuaJ " It is hard to say, indeed, just i i_ sa I • j- • Patelnthe what we mean by tate m discussing modem the denoument or catastrophe of the modern novel. It is easy enough in com- menting on the Greek drama to point out the beginning and the end of the Nemesis action, and the conventions of the Greek drama as well as many of its moral implications have descended to us almost unbroken. Yet it is hardly possible, in a world pervaded, like our modern world, by Christian ethics and a Chris- 148 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION tian philosophy, that the old Greek theory of the role which fate plays in human affairs should still prevail. In one sense the world of art, the world revealed to us by the imagina- tion of the novelist or the poet, is a world which is neither Christian nor pagan. Even this imaginary world, however, can never be unmoral unless it be at the same time unreal. " Morality/ 1 said Mme. de Stael very finely, " is in the nature of things." The laws of human life itself, laws older than any pagan or Christian interpretation or revelation of them, assert that in any long view of life it is well with the good and ill with the wicked. It is true that in any stage of the world's progress it is possible that the individual artist may revert to an earlier, outworn type of philosophy and faith. He may cherish a pagan theory of the Christian world. Like Thomas Hardy at the close of " Tess of the D'Urbervilles," which is an admirable ex- pression of a poignant, thoughtful, yet thor- oughly pagan interpretation of life, he may utter a cynical jest at the moral order of this planet. Says Mr. Hardy, " Time, the Archsatirist, had had his joke out with Tess." THE PLOT 149 This is consistent with the theme «p oe tic of the book, but it is inconsistent ,nstlco -" with the world in which Mr. Hardy is liv- ing and with the noblest teachings of the greatest masters of his art. In assigning "poetic justice 5 to the men and women of their stories, they have succeeded most truly when they have allotted the fates of their personages in accordance with what they have conceived to be the laws of Divine Jus- tice. The profounder artists in the imagi- nary world of fiction, and the Providence, however named, who presides over the real world of nature and human life, are working on the same terms and expressing the same truth. In following the main lines of ... , p Sub-plots. action in a story, the student 01 fiction will do well to observe the different ways in which the main and the subordinate plots are related. Often the subordinate plot is the mere reflection of the greater plot, as the love affair of Lorenzo and Jessica in " The Merchant of Venice " is the obvious replica of that of Portia and Bassanio. And where the theme of the novelist is philo- 150 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION sophical or scientific, designed to show the presence in human affairs of certain lines of causation and certain modes of thinking and feeling, the lesser group of characters may often be used most skillfully to reflect, in different degrees, the main teaching of the book. Thomas Hardy's peasants furnish ex- cellent examples of this philosophizing, as do the rustics of George Eliot. Frequently the sub-plot follows inevitably upon the main plot. If the story of " Silas Marner" turns upon the redemption of a lonely old man by a child, it becomes necessary to provide a child for the purpose, and this leads to the invention of Godfrey Cass's unfortunate marriage. Very often, however, the sub- plot is joined to the main plot in a purely artificial fashion. The minor characters are designed to give variety or relief, to supply a love interest or an element of comedy, or to pique one's historical interest concerning some great person who is made to appear for the moment upon the scene. Rose and Lang- ham, although they are most attractively and carefully wrought figures, have nothing to do with the real plot of " Robert Elsmere." • \CliOl\ CW lot y^tny^r l^i^C THE PLOT 151 Savonarola has no role to play in George Eliot's " Romola ' except in so far as he is introduced to give advice to the heroine in the hour of her need, and to illustrate cer- tain characteristic phases of fifteenth century Florence. Something; has already been said i oil Plot-deter- about the danger of plot - deter- mined cnar- acters. mined characters. Where the plot requires a love episode the novelist is tempted to make a given man fall in love with a given woman "upon compulsion/' even if the natures of the two persons, as well as the cir- cumstances involved, protest against the alli- ance. There is no surer mark of the amateur in fiction than the fascination said to be exerted by certain characters who obviously have no fascination to exert. " Bright ideas ' come to characters who could never by any stretch of the imagination conceive of a bright idea. We are assured of the sudden access of courage or devotion or folly in persons in whose temperaments and characters there is no room for these traits which it becomes necessary for the unfortu- nate author to discover and utilize. 1 152 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION Finally, the action of the story latedtoset- itself should be related not only to the characters themselves, but to those circumstances and events indirectly involved in the tale, and furnishing as it were the background and setting for it. The plot of the "Tale of Two Cities," for in- stance, must do no violence to the supposed characters of Dr. Manette and Sydney Car- ton,, but it must also be faithful as far as possible to the spirit and the external facts of the French Revolution itself. Indeed, in the case of this particular book, it is well known that Dickens's imagination began to work on the period, upon the events and pas- sions of that stormy time, rather than upon the distinctive personages of the tale. He carried around in his pocket, for months be- fore he began to write the story, a copy of Carlyle's " French Revolution," familiarizing himself with the dramatic forces involved in that extraordinary epoch. When he came later to invent his personages and to assign to them their appropriate roles in the drama which they were to play, he depicted both characters and action in harmony with the enveloping circumstances, with the fears, the THE PLOT 153 hopes, the anguish, the suspense of the Revo- lution itself. If, as we saw at the conclusion of the preceding chapter, it is necessary that the characters of a novel should be con- ceived in reference to the part they are to play in the plot, we must now recognize with equal clearness that the plot itself must stand in artistic relation to the setting* CHAPTER VII THE SETTING " 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 char- acter 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 and realize it. I '11 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 stoi*y to ex- press the sentiment with which the coast affected me.' " The Life and Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Gkaham Bal- four. " It is the habit of my imagination to strive after as full a vision of the medium in which a character moves as of the char- acter itself. The psychological causes which prompted me to give such details of Florentine life and history as I have given [in Romola] are precisely the same as those which determined me in giving the details of English village life in Silas Marner or the ' Dodson ' life, out of which were developed the destinies of poor Tom and Maggie." George Eliot, quoted in her Life by J. W. Cross. Meaning oi When we read Victor Hugo's uu. wora. « Ninety-Three," Pierre Loti's " Iceland Fisherman," Tolstoi's " War and THE SETTING 155 Peace/' or, to take a modern instance, Mr. Frank Norris's " The Octopus/ 3 we are con- scious of one strong element of interest which lies outside of the sphere of character or action. This interest is provided by what we will call, for lack of a more satisfactory word, the setting. Sometimes we shall use this word as synonymous with milieu, — the circumstances, namely, that surround and condition the appearance of the characters. Sometimes the setting of the novel corre- sponds precisely to the scenic effects of the stage, in that it gives a mere background for the vivid presentation of the characters. It will ,thus be seen that in the setting, that tertium quid which is neither characters nor action, we have something corresponding to what we should call " atmosphere " if we were to speak in the terms of art, or " en- vironment ' p if we were to use the terminology of science. The novelist secures the setting BasedTl p 0n of his stories precisely as he ob- what? tains his characters and his plot ; that is, by his observation, from his reading, and from that function of the imagination which recombines and invents, using the unassorted 156 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION fragments of experience. Tolstoi's " Sebas- topol' reproduces the author's memories of the Crimean War. " Lorna Doone " is an accurate presentation of Blackmore's study of the Doone country. In Scott's Borderland novels, as everybody knows, there is an easily successful effort to suggest the atmos- phere of his own country-side ; and together with thi$ Scott utilized all the materials fur- nished by his vast and miscellaneous reading to construct the imaginative background for his historical tales. But very few books present to us, as far as the setting is con- cerned, a strictly veracious, unaltered tran- script of life. The novel is rather what a painter would call a composition from stud- ies, and the studies are brought together from strange and unrelated sources. Yet even in the most Utopian of novels, where writers have striven to invent a new world of the future and to present their heroes and heroines in an atmosphere wholly unfamiliar to the contemporary reader, they have never succeeded in getting very far away from the earth we know. The greater triumphs of fictive genius have commonly been in those stories where the setting is that of the ordi- THE SETTING 157 nary field and stream and town, but where the imagination touches all this with a new trans- forming light. The present passion for histor- Hlstorlcal ical novels makes the subject of settin £- historical setting; one of unusual interest. If one compares the work of Scott with that of George Ebers,the novels of Kingsley and Bul- wer Lytton with those of Mr. Stanley Wey- man and Mr. Maurice Hewlett, one will be conscious of an immense gain in accuracy. The growth of historical knowledge has been constant. There has likewise been a steady increase of interest in antiquarian detail. The elaborate and painful efforts of the modern stage to secure historically correct costuming has unquestionably affected the consciences of our novelists. More than one of them has confessed the toil it has cost him to prepare himself to write a book in- volving precise knowledge of such matters as heraldry or the details of monastic life. Some of our writers have shown extraordi- nary zeal in " getting up " their subjects, and have been able, in spite of it, to mould their material with some freedom. Nevertheless, generally speaking, one may say that as the \ 158 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION standard of accuracy rises, the imagination, that other and indispensable end of the bal- ance scales, goes down. The spirit of truth to fact, as we have seen in the chapter on science, has often been hostile to the spirit of imagination. Doubtless there never were such persons as Scott's Saracens or Cooper's Red Men, but fiction would be greatly the loser if Scott and Cooper had confined them- selves to the basis of demonstrable fact. That mediaeval world in which Scott's imagination moved so delightedly and with such incompar- able vigor and variety had no existence out- side of the pages of his novels. But " Ivan- hoe "is no worse a book from the fact that such Saxons and Normans as move through its pages never wandered over actual English fields. The modern spirit of precise ob- Local color. . x x servation, however, has unquestion- ably aided many novelists in giving to their books the atmosphere of a definite locality. When a writer places the scene of his stories in the Tennessee mountains, a Californian mining camp, upon a New England hillside, or a Louisiana bayou, we can usually depend now-a-days upon a certain fidelity to fact and THE SETTING 159 sensitiveness to local coloring. He has prob- ably made an honest effort to realize in his story the impression made upon him by the landscape and the people of those quarters of the world. The same is true of those studies Occupations of great human occupations which and lnstitu- have been so frequent in modern fiction. English politics or English clerical life thus affords an effective setting for Trol- lope's stories. Captain King chooses war, Mr. Hamlin Garland farming, Mr. Richard Hard- ing Davis cosmopolitan adventure, Charles Dudley Warner the life of the unemployed rich, Mr. Zangwill the life of the unemployed poor, as the setting, the enveloping action and circumstances of their stories. Preva- lent social ideas, long-standing social institu- tions, afford similar backgrounds for the work of the novelist. It thus becomes natural to speak of Scott as the romancer of feudalism, or of Mr. Howells as the novelist of Amer- ican democracy under contemporary social conditions. Other fiction-writers have used socialism or patriotism or monasticism as fur- nishing the underlying framework for their productions. In all these cases it will be 160 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION noted that the setting is something which lies back of the characters, and which may even be considered apart from them. Let us take one of the most setting: striking instances which literature affords of the development of what was once a minor and accidental feature of the work of fiction into a recognized and im- mensely significant element of it, namely, the evolution of the use of landscape in fiction during the last century and a half. In Rous- seau's " New Heloise ' ' there was a new force" at work which the readers of that singular romance were not slow to recognize. It was the part which nature herself played in the story. The mountain, the lake, the stream, were there not merely for adornment, but as an integral part of the story itself. All the literary children of Rousseau have followed him in this recognition of the potency of natural scenery as influencing the thoughts and sentiments of human personages. In the fiction of Chateaubriand and of Victor Hugo, of George Sand, of Balzac, of Mau- passant, of Pierre Loti, there is everywhere to be traced that influence which was so ap- parent in the u New Heloise." THE SETTING 161 In England and America the in- m hteenth direct influence of Rousseau has century Instances : been scarcely less significant. In Defoe - the earlier part of the eighteenth century there is almost no landscape setting worthy of the name. Scarcely more than half a dozen passages describing natural scenery in the modern spirit will occur to the memory of the reader of Defoe. One of the most striking isolated instances of the effective use of setting is that passage in Defoe's " Cap- tain Singleton 3 which describes, in terms that Robert Louis Stevenson might have en- vied, a struggle with African wild beasts on " one windy tempestuous night : " — u During our encampment here we had several adven- tures with the ravenous creatures of that country ; and had not our fire been always kept burning, I question much whether all our fence, though we strengthened it afterwards with twelve or fourteen rows of stakes or more, would have kept us secure. It was always in the night that we had the disturbance of them, and sometimes they came in such multitudes that we thought all the lions and tigers and leopards and wolves of Africa were come together to attack us. One night, being clear moonshine, one of our men being upon the watch, told us he verily believed he saw ten thousand wild creatures of one sort or another pass by our little camp ; and as soon as ever they saw the fire 162 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION they sheered off, but were sure to howl or roar, of whatever it was, when they were past. " The music of their voices was very far from being pleasant to us, and sometimes would be so very disturb- ing that we could not sleep for it ; and often our senti- nels would call us that were awake to come and look at them. It was one windy tempestuous night, after a very rainy day, that we were indeed all called up ; for such innumerable numbers of devilish creatures came about us that our watch really thought they would attack us. They would not come on the side where the fire was ; and though we thought ourselves secure everywhere else, yet we all got up, and took to our arms. The moon was near the full, but the air full of flying clouds, and a strange hurricane of wind to add to the terror of the night ; when, looking on the back part of our camp, I thought I saw a creature within our fortification, and so indeed he was, except his haunches ; for he had taken a running leap, I suppose, and with all his might had thrown himself clear over our palisadoes, except one strong pile, which stood higher than the rest, and which had caught hold of him, and by his weight he had hanged himself upon it, the spike of the pile running into his hinder-haunch or thigh, on the inside, and by that he hung growling and biting the wood for rage. I snatched up a lance from one of the negroes that stood just by me, and, running to him, struck it three or four times into him, and despatched him." Mrs Fielding has some admirable par- Radciiffe. agraphs of out-door description, but ordinarily, even in Fielding's novels, it rains THE SETTING 163 only to delay the coach, and not to affect or symbolize the sentiments of the passengers. But with the rise of the romantic school at the end of the century came an inrush of sen- timent regarding natural scenery. In such a typical novel of this school as Anne Had- ciiffe's " Mysteries of Udolpho/ 3 hero and heroine alike tremble into tears under the slightest provocation of the landscape. Here are four representative passages : — " It was one of Emily's earliest pleasures to ramble among the scenes of nature ; nor was it in the soft and glowing landscape that she most delighted ; she loved more the wild wood- walks that skirted the mountain ; and still more the mountain's stupendous recesses, where the silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her heart, and lifted her thoughts to the God of Heaven and Earth. In scenes like these she would often linger alone, wrapped in a melancholy charm, till the last gleam of day faded from the west ; till the lonely sound of a sheep-bell, or the distant barking of a watch-dog, was all that broke the stillness of the evening. Then the gloom of the woods ; the trembling of their leaves, at intervals, in the breeze ; the bat, flitting in the twilight ; the cottage lights, now seen, and now lost — were circumstances that awak- ened her mind into effort, and led to enthusiasm and poetry." "The dawn, which softened the scenery with its 164 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION peculiar gray tint, now dispersed, and Emily watched the progress of the day, first trembling on the tops of the highest cliffs, then touching them with splendid light, while their sides and the vale below were still wrapped in dewy mist. Meanwhile the sullen gray of the eastern clouds began to blush, then to redden, and then to glow with a thousand colors, till the golden light darted over all the air, touched the lower points of the mountain's brow, and glanced in long sloping beams upon the valley and its stream. All nature seemed to have awakened from death into life. The spirit of St. Aubert was renovated. His heart was full ; he wept, and his thoughts ascended to the great Creator." " From Beaujeau the road had constantly ascended, conducting the travellers into the higher regions of the air, where immense glaciers exhibited their frozen hor- rors, and eternal snow whitened the summits of the mountains. They often paused to contemplate these stupendous scenes, and, seated on some wild cliff, where only the ilex or the larch could flourish, looked over dark forests of fir, and precipices where human foot had never wandered, into the glen — so deep, that the thunder of the torrent, which was seen to foam along the bottom, was scarcely heard to murmur. Over these crags rose others of stupendous height and fan- tastic shape ; some shooting into cones, others impend- ing far over their base, in huge masses of granite, along whose broken ridges was often lodged a weight of snow, that, trembling even to the vibration of a sound, threat- ened to bear destruction in its course to the vale. THE SETTING 165 Around, on every side far as the eye could penetrate, were seen only forms of grandeur — the long perspec- tive of mountain-tops, tinged with ethereal blue, or white with snow ; valleys of ice and forests of gloomy fir. The serenity and clearness of the air in these high regions were particularly delightful to the travellers ; it seemed to inspire them with a finer spirit, and dif- fused an indescribable complacency over their minds. They had no words to express the sublime emotions they felt. A solemn expression characterized the feel- ings of St. Aubert ; tears often came to his eyes, and he frequently walked away from his companions." • ••••••••• " In the cool of the evening, the party embarked in Montoni's gondola, and rowed out upon the sea. The red glow of sunset still touched the waves, and lingered in the west, where the melancholy gleam seemed slowly expiring, while the dark blue of the upper ether began to twinkle with stars. Emily sat, given up to pensive and sweet emotions. The smoothness of the water over which she glided, its reflected images — a new heaven and trembling stars below the waves, with shadowy outlines of towers and porticoes — conspired with the stillness of the hour, interrupted only by the passing wave or the notes of distant music, to raise those emotions to enthusiasm. As she listened to the measured sound of the oars, and to the remote war- blings that came in the breeze, her softened mind returned to the memory of St. Aubert, and to Valan- court, and tears stole to her eyes." In the earlier decades of the Nlne teentii nineteenth century this sort of century - 166 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION sentiment was left mainly to the poets. The use of landscape as an aid in powerful emo- tional effects begins again, however, with Dickens. It is noticeably rare in Thackeray, although here and there in single phrases and sentences he introduces the element of landscape with singularly delicate effect. But George Eliot, William Black, and Thomas Hardy have written whole chapters, one may almost say books, drenched with their feel- ing for the natural landscape against which their fictitious personages are relieved. In the stories of Ouida, and in some of the sketches of Lafcadio Hearn, the landscape sense runs riot. But if rightly subordinated to the human element, as is almost always the case in the novels of Turgenieff, or in the stories of Mr. Kipling or Miss Jewett, it becomes an element of extraordinary power and charm. Sometimes the landscape seems Used for m m r vividness. to be used for mere vividness, for giving us a clearer vision of the characters at some crisis of the story, or simply for painting an attractive picture. Here are a few sentences from James Lane Allen's " The Choir Invisible " which are designed THE SETTING 167 apparently to do nothing more than give us an intimate sense of the physical presence of the things and the persons described. u Near the door stood a walnut tree with widespread- ing branches wearing the fresh plumes of late May, plumes that hung down over the door and across the windows, suffusing the interior with a soft twilight of green and brown shadows. A shaft of sunbeams pene- trating a crevice fell on the white neck of a yellow col- lie that lay on the ground with his head on his paws, his eyes fixed reproachfully on the heels of the horse outside, his ears turned back towards his master. Be- side him a box had been kicked over : tools and shoes scattered. A faint line of blue smoke sagged from the dying coals of the forge towards the door, creeping across the anvil bright as if tipped with silver. And in one of the darkest corners of the shop, near a bucket of water in which floated a huge brown gourd, Peter and John sat on a bench while the story of O'Bannon's mischief -making was begun and finished. It was told by Peter with much cordial rubbing of his elbows in the palms of his hands and much light-hearted smooth- ing of his apron over his knees. At times a cloud, passing beneath the sun, threw the shop into heavier shadow ; and then the schoolmaster's dark figure faded into the tone of the sooty wall behind him and only his face, with the contrast of its white linen collar below and the bare discernible lights of his auburn hair above — his face proud, resolute, astounded, pallid, suffering — started out of the gloom like a portrait from an old canvas." 168 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION Sometimes this vividness of effect Contrast. is secured by the familiar artistic principle of contrast. The physical weari- ness of the figure in Millet's picture of " The Sower ' gains in poignancy because of the infinite peace of the evening landscape against which the figure is outlined. In similar fash- ion, in Mr. Hardy's " The Return of the Na- tive/ 1 what a Rembrandt-like feeling for light and shade is in that gambling scene on the heath when the two men throw dice by the light of glow-worms ! " The Choir Invisible ' may be used for another illustration. The second chapter introduces Mrs. Falconer at work in her frontier garden, and these fines present the singular contrast between the woman and her surroundings : — " From every direction the forest appeared to be rushing in upon that perilous little reef of a clearing — that unsheltered island of human life, newly dis- playing itself amid the ancient, blood-flecked, horror- haunted sea of woods. And shipwrecked on this island, tossed to it by one of the long tidal waves of history, there to remain in exile from the manners, the refinement, the ease, the society to which she had always been accustomed, this remarkable gentle-woman." Harmony. The principle of artistic harmony is utilized at least as frequently as THE SETTING 169 that of contrast. The Wordsworthian shep« herd seems to be, as Wordsworth indeed usu- ally conceives him, a part of the very hills where his sheep are pastured. Cooper's In- dians and frontiersmen blend into his forest backgrounds with a harmony that is the re- sult of true artistic instinct. Let us take additional illustrations from " The Choir In- visible : " — "And then more dreadful years and still sadder times ; as when one morning towards daybreak, by the edge of a darker forest draped with snow where the frozen dead lay thick, they found an officer's hat half filled with snow, and near by, her father fallen face downward." Or this : — " She quickly dropped her head again ; she shifted her position ; a band seemed to tighten around her throat ; until, in a voice hardly to be heard, she mur- mured f alteringly : ' I have promised to marry Joseph.' He did not speak or move, but continued to stand lean- ing against the lintel of the doorway, looking down on her. The color was fading from the west, leaving it ashen white. And so standing in the dying radiance, he saw the long bright day of his young hope come to its close ; he drained to its dregs his cup of bitter- ness she had prepared for him ; learned his first lesson in the victory of little things over the larger purposes of life, over the nobler planning ; bit the dust of the heart's first defeat and tragedy." 170 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION Or again : — " The next morning the parson, standing a white cold shepherd before his chilly wilderness flock, preached a sermon from the text : ' I shall go softly all my years.' While the heads of the rest were bowed during the last moments of prayer, she rose and slipped out. ' Yes,' she said to herself, gathering her veil closely about her face as she alighted at the door of her house and the withered leaves of November were whirled fiercely about her feet, 6 1 shall go softly all my years.' " It will be observed that in these thocharac- passages from Mr. Allen, as in countless similar passages from fic- tion-writers of our generation, the landscape setting actually influences the moods of his characters, and in this way plays no incon- siderable role in the evolution of the plot. M. Brunetiere, in a well known critical essay, has brought M. Zola to task for pre- tending that the varying color in the water in the gutter on different mornings should influence the action of his hero, Coupeau. But the principle which is here illustrated in its extreme form is one that cannot be neglected in a study of present-day fiction. Let us choose a more sympathetic instance of the influence of landscape on character. It shall be from Mr. James Shorthouse's u Blanche, Lady Falaise : " — THE SETTING 171 "They came back down the steep path over the strewn and withered leaves. The rain clouds were sweeping from the valley across the sun, and the bare- ness and chill of winter was on the woods and on the blackened grass. A blank depression and presentiment settled down upon Blanche's spirit. It seemed to her as if she were walking in a troubled nightmare, amid difficulties which were absurd, yet from which she was utterly unable to extricate herself. It seemed to her, at least for the moment, that in all the illimitable uni- verse, limitless as the sky and plain before them, there was truly i no other girl ; ' that in some mysterious way, struggle as she might, contemptuous as she might out- wardly seem, her fate was irrevocably bound up with his." Here is a longer and most significant pas- sage from the same story : — " He threw away his half finished cigar, and placed himself by her side, and they walked up the woodland path that wound round the paddock. George Falaise stood looking at them for a moment as they moved up the path — but only for a moment. Then he turned away and moved towards the seat before the bay- window of the drawing-room — the same seat on which he had sat that first morning when Blanche had come out to him. There he sat down to finish his cigar. " The winter sun, setting behind the oak woods on the other side of the paddock, cast a kind of false and cold halo over the place where he sat and over the front of the house. He felt deserted and neglected. He hated this man. The cold winter sky, clear and soft and delicate though it was, out of the cloud tissues 172 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION of which happy men might weave fairy colored wreath^ seemed to him dun and chill. " For about a quarter of an hour perhaps he had sat there. The rhythm of the breeze through the sur- rounding woods soothed him as did the narcotic influ- ence of his cigar, when the setting sun, just sinking behind the woods, cast a sudden glow of dying bril- liancy over the place, and above, over his head, a golden haze of glory spread itself, beneath the rain clouds and the deep winter sky. He looked up suddenly, and they were coming back. He rose, threw away the end of his cigar, and went toward them. " Damerle evidently had been talking well. What- ever he was he was no hypocrite. Whatever he felt for the moment he really felt. The climate, physical and mental, of Clyston St. Fay affected him, with an intensity which it would not have exerted upon another man less easily affected in other ways. George Falaise even, who felt himself, so to speak, a stranger and a pilgrim everywhere else ; to whom this silent village, this home where Blanche lived, was the only spot upon earth, so far as he knew the earth, where he seemed really to breathe — even he did not feel this excited revulsion and contrast of feeling and enthusiasm. Damerle had been speaking of high and sacred things and of the work which lay before them, for the girl's face was flushed, and her whole being and nature seemed instinct with a strange happiness and beauty which was not of earth. Never before, at any time, and most surely never afterwards, did George Falaise see her look like that, — the departing flash of sunset around her, the set purpose of devotion, the glory of THE SETTING 173 unselfish love, the beauty which God gave to woman, all around her for a moment as they came up the path. " The angry, disappointed, perturbed spirit left him at this sight. All self-seeking, all self even, was lost in delight. He felt, in spite of himself, a supreme stillness and calm, a sense of result, of something, long wished for, being gained. It is a great mystery why such things are ; but to him, to whom so much had been given, had been added also the priceless gift of unselfish love. To what issue can love tend but to the happiness of the loved ? The perfect vision that awaits love must surely be this. At this happy moment, as it seems to me, many of us might well envy him ; yet at that moment the one thing in the wide universe that was denied him was the one thing upon which his heart was set. " As they came up the path the sunset glow faded from the sky above, and what a moment before had been a glory of yellow light was now gray and dark. They went back into the house." A more familiar illustration is in George Meredith's " Richard Feverel/' where the great storm scene towards the close of the story develops a new sentiment in the hero and affects profoundly the dramatic situa- tion. Mr. Thomas Hardy, in his pantheistic interpretation of nature, finds it still easier to emphasize the intimate relation of his characters with their natural surroundings, 174 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION and over and over again in his novels he has made nature itself take a hand in the evolu- tion of the plot. u 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 im- pregnated by their surroundings." Tess of the U Urbervilles. Determining It is even possible to assert that the incident* ^ gett j[ ng not on l y a ff eC ts the situations of the novelist, but that it fre- quently determines the nature of the inci- dents that are to take place. This is pecu- liarly true, of course, in the novels which deal primarily with some occupation or handi- craft. But even in novels of adventure, the novelist is compelled by the very force of circumstances to keep close to mere adven- ture. In a book like " A Gentleman of France " one is tempted to think that any- thing may happen, but after all only those things may happen there which are pertinent to the road, the camp, or the court during the progress of a particular campaign. In other words, the writer of adventure, who is THE SETTING 175 apparently enjoying such unhampered free- dom, is in reality working within closely drawn lines of limitation ; he is bound by the very terms of his implied contract with his readers to supply them with adventure and with little more. We know pretty well, therefore, what is going to happen. It is in novels like " A Nest of Nobles/' or " Anna Karenina," or " Adam Bede," or "The Choir Invisible/ 3 that we cannot tell what will hap- pen, because anything may happen. Finally, it is the setting of a story Glvlllg ^^ which often gives the deepest unity totlieboolL to the work as a whole. The setting is used to emphasize the fundamental idea of the book, to accentuate the theme, to bring all the characters of the story into proper per- spective. In a railway novel the scream of the whistle may be heard in every chapter. The characters of the story, from the presi- dent of a great system down to the humblest employee, all stand in certain definite rela- tions to " the road." It is " the road " whicl affects their feelings, their ambitions, their ac- tions, and one need not have the anthropo- morphic imagination of Zola to conceive of a railway as a monster, either beneficent or ma* 176 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION lign, which dominates the individual fate of every personage in such a novel. But in truth it is Zola who has given to our generation the most impressive examples of this myth-mak- ing instinct, which gives institutions like the department store, occupations like mining or farming, great campaigns like the Franco- Prussian War, great cities like Kome and Paris, each a personality of its own. In such cases one may freely grant that the setting is distorted, thrown into unnatural propor- tions, and frequently depicted with a morbid imagination that recalls the worst obsessions of romanticism. Indeed, it is largely because of this element in his work that Zola has been called by many keen critics essentially romantic rather than realistic. But what- ever the justice of this criticism, there is no denying that beyond most other novelists of our own day he has succeeded in making the setting of his novels reveal the essential unity of the book. That germinal idea which first stimulated the creative imagina- tion of the author remains with the reader as a haunting impression long after the persons and the action of the tale have faded from the memory. CHAPTER VIII THE FICTION-WBITER "Quelle que soit la formule, il n'y a jamais au fond des ceuvres que ce que les hommes y mettent." F. Brunetiere, Le Boman Naturaliste. 11 Every artist is a thinker, whether he knows it or not ; and ultimately no artist will be found greater as an artist than he was as a thinker." David Masson, British Novelists. " There is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very near together; that is in the light of the very obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer. In propor- tion as that intelligence is fine will the novel, the picture, the statue partake of the substance of beauty and truth." Henry James, The Art of Fiction. We are entering once more upon Anew phase a new phase of our subject. In the of the sul)lect * last three chapters we have been studying the materials, whether of character or plot or setting, which are at the disposition of the literary - artist. We are now to study the use made of these materials by individual men. What we have hitherto done may be likened to an investigation of the general 178 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION relations of the art of painting, let us say, to the other arts ; then, applying a closer scru- tiny, we have watched the various colors upon the palette of the painter, and have noted some of the technical processes by means of which these pigments are utilized. We have now to scrutinize the painter him- self. For after all, the use of the The man ho- . 1 hind the materials of any art depends upon the man who employs them. The words of the great French critic, quoted as the first motto for this chapter, have been repeated in various forms by most of the writers who have thought deeply upon the expression of personality by means of art. It is conveyed in the famous formula u Art is a bit of nature seen through a temperament/ 5 as well as in the more technical definition of the writer on aesthetics, that the artist is " the middle term between content and ex- pression.'' Yet this interest in the story- writer himself is a more or less modern factor in the development of fiction. As we recede towards mediaeval times, the fascina- tion of the story becomes increasingly de- pendent upon the tale itself rather than THE FICTION-WRITER 179 upon the individuality of the teller ; and it is undeniable that the modern interest in literary personality has its seamy side. Per- sonal gossip about famous novelists has often taken the place of real criticism. No details of family history have been consid- ered too sacred to be offered to the public. In an age when a man is scarcely blamed for selling his father's love-letters for hard cash, it is not to be expected that the reading pub- lic will respect the reticences and reserves of private life. And one is forced to admit that an acquaintance with a fiction- writer's real experience of men and things, a famil- iarity with the more marked phases of his career, a knowledge of his friendships and his politics, of the things he hated, of the books he loved, is of great significance in the interpretation of his literary work. One can scarcely understand Balzac's novels with- out knowing something of Balzac himself ; and if, as Hawthorne has reminded us, the details of an author's biography often hide the man instead of revealing him, it is never- theless true that even in Hawthorne's own case a knowledge of his history affords one of the readiest modes of penetrating to the 180 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION essential nature of his productions in litera* ture. The novelist's ^^ e fiction-writer's use of the experience, materials of his art is conditioned first by his experience. Experience provides the starting point for the work of the con- structive imagination ; it is a pier sunk into the solid earth from which the arch is sprung into the unknown. Here is a man who pro- fesses to interpret life for us. Well, what sort of life has he himself known ? What kind of men and women has it been his lot to encounter in his journey through the world ? Upon his answer to these questions depends very often his artistic verdict upon life itself; that is, his handling of the ele- ments of character and action in the fictional world of his stories. It must be borne in mind, however, as we have seen in a previ- ous chapter, that extensive experience with men and things is often not so important a factor as intensive experience. ** The Story of an African Farm " can be told, provided the writer has insight and imagination, by one who has never left the boundaries of the farm. It is not the number of men and cities which the novelist has seen that counts THE FICTION-WRITER 181 so much as do the eyes out of which he has looked and the brain which has reflected upon these observations. For experience at best furnishes suggestions rather than com- plete details. Said George Eliot : — u It is invariably the case that when people discover certain points of coincidence in a fiction with facts that happen to have come within their knowledge, they believe themselves able to furnish a key to the whole. That is amusing enough to the author, who knows from what widely sundered portions of experience — from what a combination of subtle, shadowy sugges- tions, with certain actual objects and events — his story has been formed." In another of her letters she wrote : — "There is not a single portrait in 'Adam Bede/ only the suggestions of experience wrought up into new combinations." Secondly, the fiction-writer's use Th0 novellst ' S of the materials of his craft turns ihou z M - upon his thought as well as upon his experi- ence. That is an admirable passage in Pro- fessor Masson's book upon " British Nov- elists : " "Every artist is a thinker, whether he knows it or not ; and ultimately no artist will be found greater as an artist than he was as a thinker." Sidney Lanier had this distinction in mind when he said of Edgar 182 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION Allan Poe that Poe did not know enough to be a great poet. He did not mean that a man rises in the capacity to produce poetry in accordance with the amount of informa- tion he possesses, but rather that one very real test of a poet's greatness is his power to coordinate the results of experience, to reflect upon the diverse phenomena of human life, and to construct, at least to some degree, a philosophical unity from the confused im- pressions which life offers. Yet the artist's power of thought is but one of the elements by which his work is to be judged. Dickens was surely not a thinker in the sense in which George Eliot was a thinker, nor was Dumas a thinker in the sense in which that word may be applied to Balzac. There is here, as everywhere in the world of art, a variety of equipment and a difference of gifts. Thirdly, this difference is never Emotion. 1 ' 1 i-iji • .1 more sharply marked than in the varying capacities of different writers for feel- ing and expressing emotion — emotion called forth by their experience of life and reflection upon its phenomena. With a certain type of fiction-writers, as for instance Trollope, THE FICTION-WRITER 183 the capacity for emotion seems to be defec- tive, though this does not prevent admirable work within certain limits. But there is no limitation which more sharply sets the bounds for a man's possible achievement. In other writers, of whom Dickens is the readiest ex- ample, we are constantly called upon to ob- serve the evidence of overwrought emotion. Dickens is forever bidding us laugh or cry where Trollope simply asks us to look. Fre- quently, too, a work of fiction seems to owe its origin to the author's instinctive love or hatred for certain objects. There is where the novel and the eulogy on the one side, and the novel and the satire on the other, touch hands. Here is a striking illustra- tion of hatred furnishing the artistic motive for an extraordinary masterpiece of fiction. Flaubert, writing of his " Madame Bovary," says to a correspondent : — " They think me in love with the real, whereas I execrate it : it is out of hatred of it that I have under- taken this book. . . . Do you really believe that this mean reality, whose reproduction disgusts you, does not make my gorge rise as much as yours ? If you knew me better, you would know that I hold the every- day life in detestation. Personally I have always kept myself as far away from it as I could. But 184 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION aesthetically I wanted this time, and only this time, to exhaust it thoroughly." More significant still is the in* Imagination. „ ° . . iiuence or the artist s imagination upon his use of the materials of his art. It is a kind of resultant of his experience, thought, and emotion. Imagination, in the words of the Century Dictionary, is " The act or power of presenting to consciousness objects other than those directly and at that time produced by the action of the senses." Without at- tempting any arbitrary classification, we may note that the imagination of the novelist is constantly dealing with two classes of what we agree to call realities, and also with two classes of what are commonly designated as unrealities. Dealing with What do we mean by these realities. « rea lities"? In the first place, the imagination of the story-teller is con- tinually at work in depicting things in the physical world as they are. The objects and events upon which the light of the imagina- tion is turned are brought home to the ev- ery-day consciousness of the matter-of-fact reader. Defoe does not meddle in the least with " things as they are ; " he contents THE FICTION- WRITER 185 himself with painting exact, vivid pictures of them, without seeming to alter his facts by a hair's breadth. He achieves a triumph of the artistic imagination ; but it is equally a triumph of that imagination when the artist portrays the work of those spiritual forces which are not to be apprehended by the physical senses. For in dealing with the mysteries of personality, with the prof ounder forces of the spiritual world, the imagination is penetrating to another and more veritable reality ; not what Hawthorne called " the big, solid, tangible unrealities ' of the actual world, but that world which is no less eter- nal for being unseen. I remember hearing a clever woman say of a man who reproached a certain novelist for lack of imagination : " Mr. A. forgets that imagination consists in seeing things as they are, and not as they are not." As for u unrealities," there are Deallng wlth J— two fields where the writer's im- ^"a 11 * 168 - agination is called upon to display itself. There is first a mysterious borderland, a shadowy half-world, between the realm of unquestioned spiritual forces and the realm where the fear of superstition holds full sway* 186 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION The novelists of the " School of Terror/' at the end of the eighteenth century, reveled to their hearts' desires in this ghostly atmos- phere of apparitions, portents, spirits, witches, and devils. As mankind advances in intel- ligence and scientific knowledge, it is con- stantly reducing the territory of the unknown, beating back this frontier of darkness and evil. Many of the phenomena, therefore, which in one generation would be accredited to demoniac possession, witchcraft, or the mysterious influence of other personalities, are in a later generation, as the history of hypnotism and telepathy so abundantly proves, capable of scientific demonstration. Such subjects still offer a tempting field, perhaps a field more tempting than ever to the imagination of the fiction-writer; but the theme itself becomes transferred, with the advance of civilization, from the realm of the unreal to the realm of the real. And finally, the imagination frequently exhibits its power in dealing with a second variety of the unreal, namely, the physical world of things as they are not. Nothing in the work of Victor Hugo or of Dickens is more impressive and masterful than the " pathetic THE FICTION-WRITER 187 fallacy " by means of which they love to distort our vision of the physical world, and seem to make its external phenomena and its secret forces sympathize with the spirit and the fate of their human char- acters. Such passages do violence, indeed, to the demonstrable truth of fact, but they often succeed in interpreting a higher truth of spiritual emotion, — the u truth of the human heart/ 2 which Hawthorne thought it the function of the romancer to express. These illustrations of the four Th.6 " lour fields in which the imagination dis- stages of plays itself will possibly throw some light upon Mr. Brander Matthews's frequently discussed theory concerning the four stages in the evolution of fiction. He has remarked with indisputable acuteness that the development of fiction has been from " the Impossible to the Improbable, thence to the Probable, and finally to the Inevita- ble." It is a convenient formula to bear in mind; but one must also remember that fic- tion displays a constant tendency towards reversion to primitive types, and that in any stage of the development of literature, writ- ers may arise who rely for their power upon 188 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION modes of thought and feeling which the race has apparently outgrown. Limitations of In studying the artistic produc- personality, tiveness of any man, it is necessary to take into account the limitations of his personality. Browning's line, " and thus we half -men struggle/' may as pertinently be applied to the novelist as to any other mem- ber of the human family. Those limitations of thought, experience, and emotion which have just been discussed, as well as the de- ficiencies in moral insight which we have still to notice, must always be set down on the debit side of an author's real accomplish- ment. Even if he have the very highest en- dowment in the range of activities already indicated, he may lack that final creative im- pulse, that surplusage of vitality, which drives him to the making of a genuine book. Limitations No less sharply defined limita- of the ago. tions are to be traced in the in- fluence of the author's generation upon his own productiveness. The history of litera- ture furnishes abundant illustration of authors born out of due time. Matthew Arnold's well known criticism of the poet Gray turns not only upon the fact that Gray " never THE FICTION-WRITER 189' spoke out," but upon the causes that un- derlay this fact; namely, the influence of a prosaic age upon the sensitive mind of the academic poet. There have been many belated romanticists like Cervantes, belated Elizabethans like Charles Lamb, and few of them have been able to say as Lamb did so cheerily : " Hang the age ! I '11 write for antiquity." It is only a rarely endowed in- telligence that is thus able to make its own choice of company. Ordinarily, a man is forced to speak the speech and think the thoughts of his own generation ; and a novel-writer, let us say in France, in the full tide of the scientific impulse of the seventies, finds it quite impossible to com- pose such books as he might have written had he been born in the romantic generation of the thirties. And every writer, furthermore, Thenove i lars has a special public, — provided he s * eclal P nbUc - be lucky enough to have any public at all, — and this public soon develops a peculiar capacity for requiring from the novelist a certain product, and no other. It is in vain for men like Defoe and Stockton to write books differing essentially from those by 190 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION which their first and great reputation was won. Some writers grow cynical under this enforced duty to produce a single kind of composition, and it has not infrequently happened that while the author's popular reputation has been sustained by works which he himself views in the light of " pot- boilers ! pure and simple, he has found his deepest artistic satisfaction in producing a limited amount of work appealing to the most fastidious taste. There died not long ago a German artist who supported his fam- ily by painting comic little cherubic nudi- ties, and satisfied his real artistic cravings, meantime, by painting crucifixions which the public never cared to buy. This is only an extreme instance of a distinction which affects more or less directly the output of every novelist who works for the public. After he has become widely known, there is a definite commercial demand that he should turn out work in a particular vein, and he departs from it at his peril. Thack- eray is not the only famous British novelist who has complained of the limitations en* forced by the British Public upon the free presentation of the facts of life. Yet it is THE FICTION- WRITER 191 doubtless better that the British Public should warn a novelist that he must not trespass upon a certain territory, than that it should order him to confine himself to questionable topics if he would satisfy the popular taste. After all, those writers are not the least fortunate who, like Jane Aus- ten and Oliver Goldsmith, have written mas- terpiebes and quietly put them away in the drawer, leaving it to others, after an inter- val of years, to discover that these produc- tions were masterpieces. No doubt it seemed at the moment as if " The Vicar of Wake- field " anil " Pride and Prejudice" represented wasted time and effort. But work done in this tranquil fashion is often surer of immor- tality than the novel which is " syndicated " from one end of the country to the other. The work of the novelist is very T he novelist's directly affected by his philosophy p* 11030 ^- of life. Yet it is by no means necessary that he should be conscious of the view of the world which he in reality maintains. Here and there, indeed, there have been memorable examples of a novelist writing to illustrate, or to reduce to absurdity, some philosophi- cal theory of the universe. Voltaire's " Can* 192 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION dide " was written to ridicule the " whatever is, is right ' theory, made famous by Leibnitz, Bolingbroke, and Pope. In Turgenieff's novels there is a tolerably complete exposi- tion of political and philosophical nihilism. The philosophical theory of pessimism has never been more brilliantly exemplified than in the novels of Flaubert, and the middle and later stories of George Eliot drew much of their inspiration from the tendencies of positivism and agnosticism. These writers are all what Professor Masson would classify as " thought men " rather than " fact men.' ! If they may not all have been able to pass an academic examination in the history of philosophy, each of them had a more or less distinct theory of the scheme of human life and its relations, or lack of relations, to the unseen world of spirit. His practical I* frequently happens that novel- doctrine. j g j. g w j 1Q } iave troubled themselves very little with philosophical theories and generalizations about human life have never- theless with a fine unconsciousness delivered themselves clearly as to the meaning of life. Scott teaches us to be brave, Kingsley to be manly, Dickens to be kind. Mr. Henry THE FICTION-WRITER 193 James instructs us that life is an art, and that to play the game properly requires in- finite finesse. Such writers may not realize precisely the impression which they have conveyed. They do betray, however, con- sciously or unconsciously, the view of life which they have formed. They " give them- selves away," not necessarily in any one book, nor in the productions of any one phase of their creative activity, but rather in the totality of their work. It is as im- possible to mistake the every-day temper, the moral attitude of a writer who has ex- pressed himself in a dozen books, as it would be to misunderstand entirely his action and his motives if we were to watch him through a dozen years of his life. In discussing the ethical aim of "Art and the fiction-writer, we trench upon morals *" the ground of the old debate concerning art and morality. Has art — the sphere of aes- thetic enjoyment — anything at all to do with morals — the sphere of conduct ? If these two fields do touch each other, what is the nature of their relations ? These questions have been asked and answered 194 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION more insistently and more bitterly concerning fiction tlian any other of the arts. The artist is a Let us begin by endeavoring to human Demg. trace the connec ti on between the general moral attitude of the novelist and his excellence in his profession. We have already quoted the definition of art : " A bit of nature seen through a temperament/ 9 It is true that this definition emphasizes but a single function of the artist's complex task, yet that function is an essential one. The artist's own personality is as it were the crucible through which the " bit of nature " — the material for art — must pass in order to be changed into the work of art. What- ever affects personality, therefore, instantly and inevitably affects the work upon which the artist is engaged. Now sin is the nega- tion of personality. It turns a man into a brute. It minimizes the life of the spirit, until the spiritual faculties disappear. No- body denies this. The artist is a man like the rest of us. He is a moral being, and running the same moral risks as you and I, and presumably greater risks, owing to his finer organization. To say that his person- ality is not affected by the morality or im- THE FICTION-WRITER 195 morality of his life is to place the artist out- side the pale of humanity. It is to deny him the very attributes that make him a man. To declare that an artist's art is in exact ratio with the morality of his private life would be an exaggeration, yet it would probably be nearer the truth than to say that his life and his art are wholly unrelated quantities. We should note that the honest Lal}or ltsell a labor of the artist is in itself a moralfactor - moral factor. We who are inclined to look merely at the finished art product, and not into the workshop where the product is wrought, are constantly tempted to under- rate the moral qualities which the excellent workman must possess. One of the most suggestive passages in Ruskin's lecture on " Art and Morals " is this : — 11 The day's work of a man like Mantegna or Paul Veronese consists of an unfaltering, uninterrupted suc- cession of movements of the hand more precise than those of the finest fencer : the pencil leaving one point and arriving at another, not only with unerring precision at the extremity of the line, but with an unerring and yet varied course — sometimes over spaces a foot or more in extent — yet a course so determined everywhere that either of these men could, and Veronese often does, draw a finished profile, or any other portion of 196 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION the contour of a face, with one line, not afterwards changed. Try, first, to realize to yourselves the mus- cular precision of that action, and the intellectual strain of it ; for the movement of a fencer is perfect in prac- ticed monotony ; but the movement of the hand of a great painter is at every instant governed by direct and new intention. Then imagine that muscular firmness and subtlety ; and that instantaneously selective and ordinant energy of the brain, sustained all day long, not only without fatigue, but with a visible joy in the exertion, like that which an eagle seems to take in the wave of his wings ; and this all life long, and through long life, not only without failure of power, but with visible increase of it, until the actually organic changes of old age. And then consider, so far as you know anything of physiology, what sort of an ethical state of body and mind that means ! — ethic through ages past ! what fineness of race there must be to get it, what exquisite balance and symmetry of the vital powers ! And then, finally, determine for yourselves whether a manhood like that is consistent with any viciousness of soul, with any mean anxiety, any gnawing lust, any wretchedness of spite or remorse, any consciousness of rebellion against law of God or man, or any actual, though unconscious, violation of even the least law to which obedience is essential for the glory of life, and the pleasing of its Giver.' ' What Ruskin, with characteristic eloquence, has here said of the painter is scarcely less true of the novelist. A task honestly under- taken, patiently carried through, is in itself THE FICTION-WRITER 197 a bit of morality. There is something very fine in Emile Zola's steady devotion, for twenty long years, to a single artistic plan : the com- pletion of the Kougon-Macquart series of novels. Fifteen hundred words a morning, every morning in the week, every week for twenty years ; no wonder M. Zola bears the worn, tired, patient face of the worker. Even though the Rougon-Macquart series proves, as time goes by, to have been a huge blun- der, this does not lessen one's respect for such an example of fidelity to an imagined duty. Fidelity to Such a duty is of "Latoorareest course a very different thing from orare -" the religious consecration which made Fra Angelic o breathe a prayer whenever he lifted his brush. " He who has not art," says Goethe, in a tone of Olympian condescension, "let him have religion.' 3 But Fra Angel- ico's painting was no worse for his prelim- inary prayer. The religious nature has often enough found a supreme expression through the arts. In a very true sense a man's art may be his religion, and where the religious element seems left out of an artist's nature, the great world's verdict commonly is that there is a defect in that man's art. 198 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION Witness the plays and poems of the Olympian Goethe himself. a complete In a11 this I . am sim V l J claiming man - that the novelist, like the poet or the painter, should be as far as possible a com- plete man. A defective moral organization, a deficient spirituality, will in the long run count as surely against him as a dull wit or a clumsy hand. But precisely how does an artist's and tech- immorality affect his work ? George TilmiA Eliot's dictum that " A filthy mind makes filthy art ' is doubtless sound, but it does not explain the process in question. We must look for the results of immoral conduct at the point where the specific immorality affects the artist's handling of the medium in which he works. One may declare with ab- solute confidence that Paderewski is neither a drunkard nor an opium-eater ; if he were, it would be physically impossible for him to retain his marvelously perfect control over the muscles of his fingers. He might perhaps be a miser or a thief without affecting his technique as a pianist ; but no miser or thief ever had the freedom and serenity of mind which are essential for the composition of THE FICTION-WRITER 199 great music. Benvenuto Cellini was a noto- rious liar, sensualist, and murderer ; yet as a silversmith and designer he was one of the most admirable workmen of the Renaissance. Here one may perhaps say that the effect of Benvenuto's immoralities was negative ; if he had not been so bad a man, he might have cared to attempt some of the more noble tasks to which contemporary artists devoted themselves. In Browning's poem, theft and treachery clip the wings of Andrea del Sarto's imagination, although he remains, as he was before his sin, the "faultless' painter. Such discussions turn largely upon the importance assigned to the element of technique in assess- ing the value of an artist's work. The more stress laid on technique the less important does the question of morality become, unless immorality results in actual unsteadiness of eye or hand. Or, to put the matter a little dif- The general f erently, we may say that the moral law " element enters into every art in proportion as that art touches human life and charac- ter. All the arts, indeed, group themselves about human life, but they do not all stand towards life upon terms of equal intimacy. A 200 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION mediaeval sculptor, chiseling grotesque gar- goyles for the eaves of a cathedral, is work- ing in a realm of art pretty thoroughly re- moved from human life and character. So is an impressionist landscape painter who is striving merely to reproduce, as cleverly as may be, certain color tones ; or a composer of old-fashioned Italian opera, basing artificial melodies upon the echoes of artificial feeling. Such artistic activities as these may be com- pared with Cellini's exquisite cutting of cameos; if the workman's hand and eye retain their normal power, his goodness or badness of heart is a matter of secondary concern. But in the composition of great music, or great poetry, or great fiction, mere manual dexterity occupies a subordinate place. The interpretation of life and char- acter becomes now the artist's all-important task, and a characterless, conscienceless man has no apparatus wherewith to decipher char- acter and conscience. He cannot interpret what he cannot comprehend. The old argu- ment of Quintilian that the good orator must be a good man — an argument that has never been successfully controverted — holds with equal force in the realm of fiction. A W asis&rtJ*ht> && afforded to sicleration oi another aspect 01 our the writer. 1 i • theme ; namely, the opportunity which the short story, as a distinct type of literature, gives to the writer. We have seen indirectly that it enables him to use all his material, to spread before us any hints in the fields of character or action or setting which his notebook may contain. Mr. Henry James's stories very often impress one as chips from the workshop where his novels were built, — or, to use a less mechanical metaphor, as an exploration of a tempting side path, of whose vistas he had caught a passing glimpse while pursuing some of his retreating and elusive major problems. It is obvious, likewise, that the short story gives a young writer most valuable experience at the least loss of time. He can tear up and try again. Alas, if he only would do so a little oftener ! He can test his fortune with the public through the magazines, without waiting to write his immortal book. For THE SHORT STORY 317 older men in whom the creative impulse is comparatively feeble, or manifested at long intervals only, the form of the short story makes possible the production of a small quantity of highly finished work. But these incidental advantages to the author himself are not so much to our present purpose as are certain artistic opportunities which his strict limits of space allow him. In the brief tale, then, he may ' ' J Didacticism. be didactic without wearying his audience. Not to entangle one's self in the interminable question about the proper lim- its of didacticism in the art of fiction, one may assert that it is at least as fair to say to the author, " You may preach if you wish, but at your own risk,' 3 as it is to say to him, " You shall not preach at all, because I do not like to listen.' 3 Most of the greater Eng- lish fiction-writers, at any rate, have the hom- iletic habit. Dangerous as this habit is, uncomfortable as it makes us feel to get a sermon instead of a story, there is sometimes no great harm in a sermonette. " This is not a tale exactly. It is a tract," are the opening words of one of Mr. Kipling's stories, and the tale is no worse — and likewise, it is true, no 318 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION better — for its profession of a moral pur- pose. Many a tract, in this generation so suspicious of its preachers, has disguised it- self as a short story, and made good reading, too. For that matter, not to grow quite un* mindful of our white-robed, white-bearded company sitting all this time by the gate of Jaffa, there is a very pretty moral even in the artless tale of Aladdin's Lamp. \/i posing The story - writer, furthermore, problems. k as ^-g a( j van t a g e over the novel- ist, that he can pose problems without an- swering them. When George Sand and Charles Dickens wrote novels to exhibit cer- tain defects in the organization of human society, they not only stated their case, but they had their triumphant solution of the difficulty. So it has been with the drama, until very recently. The younger Dumas had his own answer for every one of his pro- blem-plays. But with Ibsen came the fashion of staging the question at issue, in unmis- takable terms, and not even suggesting that one solution is better than another. " Here are the facts for you,' 3 says Ibsen ; " here are the modern emotions for you ; my work is done." In precisely similar fashion does THE SHORT STORY 319 a short story writer like Maupassant fling the facts in our face, brutally, pitilessly. We may make what we can of them ; it is no- thing to him. He poses his grim problem with surpassing skill, and that is all. A novel written in this way grows intolerable, and one may suspect that the contemporary problem-novel is apt to be such an unspeak- able affair, not merely for its dubious themes and more than dubious style, but because it reveals so little power to " lay ' the ghosts it raises. Again, the short story writer is Arbitrary always asking us to take a great premises - deal for granted. He begs to be allowed to state his own premises. He portrays, for instance, some marital comedy or tragedy, ingeniously enough. We retort, " Yes ; but how could he have ever fallen in love with her in the first place ? " " Oh," replies the author off-hand, " that is another story." But if he were a novelist, he would not get off so easily. He might have to write twenty chapters, and go back three generations, to show why his hero fell in love with her in the first place. All that any fiction can do — very naturally — is to give us, as we com- 320 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION monly say, a mere cross-section of life. There are endless antecedents and consequents with which it has no concern ; but the cross-sec- tion of the story-writer is so much thinner that he escapes a thousand inconveniences, and even then considers it beneath him to explain his miracles. What is more, the laws of brevity Omission ol , i i • unlovely and unity of effect compel him to details. ... . omit, in his portrayal of life and character, many details that are unlovely. Unless, like some very gifted fiction-writers of our time, he makes a conscientious search for the repulsive, it is easy for him to paint a pleasant picture. Bret Harte's earliest stories show this happy instinct for the aesthetic, for touching the sunny places in the lives of ex- tremely disreputable men. His gamblers are exhibited in their charming mood ; his out- casts are revealed to us at the one moment of self-denying tenderness which insures our sympathy. Such a selective method is per- fectly legitimate and necessary ; " The Luck of Roaring Camp " and " The Outcasts of Poker Flat " each contains but slightly more than four thousand words. All art is selec- tive, for that matter ; but were a novelist to THE SHORT STORY 321 take the personages of those stories and ex- hibit them as full-length figures, he would be bound to tell more of the truth about them, unpleasant as some of the details would be. Otherwise he would paint life in a wholly wrong perspective. Bret Harte's master, Charles Dickens, did not always escape this temptation to juggle with the general truth of things ; the pupil escaped it, in these early stories at least, simply because he was work- ing on a different scale. The space limits of the short story „ ... , .„ . , The horrible. allow its author likewise to make artistic use of the horrible, the morbid, the dreadful — subjects too poignant to give any pleasure if they were forced upon the atten- tion throughout a novel. " The Black Cat,' " The Murders in the Rue Morgue," " A Descent into the Maelstrom/ 1 are admirable examples of Poe's art ; but he was too skill- ful a workman not to know that that sort of thing if it be done at all must be done quickly. Four hundred pages of " The Black Cat " would be impossible. And last in our list of the dis- i mpresS ion- tinct advantages of the art form lsm ' we are considering is the fact that it allows 322 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION a man to make use of the vaguest sugges- tions, a delicate symbolism, a poetic impres- sionism, fancies too tenuous to hold in the stout texture of the novel. Wide is the scope of the art of fiction ; it includes even this borderland of dreams. Poe's marvelous " Shadow, a Parable/' " Silence, a Fable ; " Hawthorne's "The Hollow of the Three Hills," or " The Snow -Image ; ' many a prose poem that might be cited from French and Russian writers, — these illustrate the strange beauty and mystery of those twilight places where the vagrant imagination hovers for a moment and flutters on. It will be seen that all of the The under- lying opportunities that have been enu- principle. merated — the opportunity, 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 hor- rible, and finally for poetic symbolism — are connected with the fact that in the short story the powers of the reader are not kept long upon the stretch. The reader shares in the large liberty which the short story affords to the author. This type of prose literature, THE SHORT STORY 323 like the lyric in poetry, is such an old, and simple, and free mode of expressing the art- ist's personality ! As long as men are inter- esting to one another, as long as the infinite complexities of modern emotion play about situations that are as old as the race, so long will there be an opportunity for the free de- velopment of the short story as a literary form. Is there anything to be said upon the other side? Are the distinct J^J s: advantages of this art form accom- imft * lnatl011 ' panied by any strict conditions, upon con- formity to which success depends ? For the brief tale demands, of one who would reach the foremost skill in it, two or three qualities that are really very rare. It calls for visual imagination of a high order : the power to see the object ; to pene- trate to its essential nature ; to select the one characteristic trait by which it may be re- presented. A novelist informs you that his heroine, let us say, is seated in a chair by the window. He tells you what she looks like : her attitude, figure, hair and eyes, and so forth. He can do this, and very often seems 324 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION to do it, without really seeing that individual woman or making us see her. His trained pencil merely sketches some one of the same general description, of about the equivalent hair and eyes, and so forth, seated by that general kind of window. If he does not suc- ceed in making her real to us in that pose, he has a hundred other opportunities before the novel ends. Recall how George Eliot pictures Dorothea in " Middlemarch,' 3 now in this position, now in that. If one scene does not present her vividly to us, the chances are that another will, and in the end, it is true, we have an absolutely distinct image of her. The short story writer, on the other hand, has but the one chance. His task, compared with that of the novelist, is like bringing down a flying bird with one bullet, instead of banging away with a whole hand- ful of birdshot and having another barrel in reserve. Study the descriptive epithets in Stevenson's short stories. How they bring down the object ! What an eye ! And what a hand S No adjective that does not paint a picture or record a judgment ! And if it were not for a boyish habit of showing off his skill and doing trick shots for us out THE SHORT STORY 325 of mere superfluity of cleverness, what judge of marksmanship would refuse Master Robert Louis Stevenson the prize ? An imagination that penetrates to the very heart of the matter ; a verbal magic that recreates for us what the imagination has seen, — these are the tests of the tale-teller's genius. A novel may be high up in the second rank — like Trollope's and Bulwer-Lytton's — and lack somehow the literary touch. But the only short stories that survive the year or the decade are those that have this verbal finish, — " fame's great antiseptic, style." To say that a short story at its best should have imagination and style is simple enough. To hunt through the magazines of any given month and find such a story is a very different matter. Out of the hundreds of stories printed every week in every civilized country, why do so few meet the supreme tests? To put it bluntly, does this form of literature present peculiar attrac- tions to mediocrity ? For answer, let us look at some what it fans of the qualities which the short *£gE£* Story fails to demand from those power * who use it. It will account in part for the number of short stories written. 326 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION Very obviously, to write a short story requires no sustained power of imagination. So accomplished a critic as Mr. Henry James believes that this is a purely artificial distinction ; he thinks that if you can im- agine at all, you can keep it up. Bus- kin went even farther. Every feat of the imagination, he declared, is easy for the man who performs it : the great feat is pos- sible only to the great artist ; yet if he can do it at all, he can do it easily. But as a mat- ter of fact, does not the power required to hold steadily before you your theme and per- sonages and the whole little world where the story moves correspond somewhat to the strength it takes to hold out a dumb-bell? Any one can do it for a few seconds ; but in a few more seconds the arm sags ; it is only the trained athlete who can endure even to the minute's end. For Hawthorne to hold the people of " The Scarlet Letter ' steadily in focus from November to February, to say nothing of six years' preliminary brood- ing, is surely more of an artistic feat than to write a short story between Tuesday and Fri- day. The three years and nine months of unremitting labor devoted to " Middlemarch ' THE SHORT STORY 327 does not in itself afford any criterion of the value of the book ; but given George Eliot's brain power and artistic instinct to begin with, and then concentrate them for that pe- riod upon a single theme, and it is no wonder that the result is a masterpiece. " Jan van Eyck was never in a hurry,' 1 says Charles Reade of the great Flemish painter in " The Cloister and the Hearth/' — " Jan van Eyck was never in a hurry, and therefore the world will not forget him in a hurry.' 2 This sus- tained power of imagination, and the patient workmanship that keeps pace with it, are not demanded by the brief tale. It is a short distance race, and any one can run it indif- ferently well. Nor does the short story demand of its author essential sanity, breadth, and tolerance of view. How morbid does the genius of a Hoffmann, a Poe, a Mau- passant seem when placed alongside the sane and wholesome art of Scott and Fielding and Thackeray ! Sanity, balance, naturalness ; the novel stands or falls, in the long run, by these tests. But your short story writer may be fit for a madhouse and yet compose tales that shall be immortal. In other words, we 328 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION do not ask of him that he shall have a phi- losophy of life, in any broad, complete sense. It may be that Professor Masson, like a true Scotchman, insisted too much upon the intel- lectual element in the art of fiction when he declared, " Every artist is a thinker whether he knows it or not, and ultimately no artist will be found greater as an artist than he was as a thinker." But he points out here what must be the last of the distinctions we have drawn between the short story and the novel. When we read " Old Mortality," or " Pen- dennis," or " Daniel Deronda," we find in each book a certain philosophy, " a chart or plan of human life." Consciously or uncon- sciously held or formulated, it is nevertheless there. The novelist has his theory of this general scheme of things which enfolds us all, and he cannot write his novel without be- traying his theory. " He is a thinker whether he knows it or not." Deals with. But the short story writer, with all fragments. respect to him, need be nothing of the sort. He deals not with wholes, but with fragments ; not with the trend of the great march through the wide world, but with some particular aspect of the procession as it passes. THE SHORT STORY 329 His story may be, as we have seen, the merest sketch of a face, a comic attitude, a tragic incident ; it may be a lovely dream, or a hor- rid nightmare, or a page of words that haunt us like music. Yet he need not be consist- ent ; he need not think things through. One might almost maintain that there is more of an answer, implicit or explicit, to the great problems of human destiny in one book like " Vanity Fair " or " Adam Bede " than in all of Mr. Kipling's two or three hundred short stories taken together — and Mr. Kip- ling is perhaps the most gifted story-teller of our time. Does not all this throw some light Easy litera . upon the present popularity of the ture * short story with authors and public alike? Here is a form of literature easy to write and easy to read. The author is often paid as much for a story as he earns from the copy- rights of a novel, and it costs him one tenth the labor. The multiplication of magazines and other periodicals creates a constant mar- ket, with steadily rising prices. The quali- ties of imagination and style that go to the making of a first-rate short story are as rare as they ever were, but one is sometimes 330 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION tempted to think that the great newspaper and magazine reading public bothers itselt very little about either style or imagination. The public pays its money and takes its choice. And there are other than these me- chanical and commercial reasons why the short story now holds the field. It is a kind of writing perfectly adapted to our over- driven generation, which rushes from one task or engagement to another, and between times, or on the way, snatches up a story. Our habit of nervous concentration for a brief period helps us indeed to crowd a great deal of pleasure into the half -hour of read- ing ; our incapacity for prolonged attention forces the author to keep within that limit, or exceed it at his peril. Affecting It has been frequently declared other forms. that th j g popu l ar i ty f fte short story is unfavorable to other forms of imagi- native literature. Many English critics have pointed out that the reaction against the three-volume novel, and particularly against George Eliot, has been caused by the univer- sal passion for the short story. And the short story is frequently made responsible for the alleged distaste of Americans for the THE SHORT STORY 331 essay, We are told that nobody reads mag- azine poetry, because the short stories are so much more interesting. In the presence of all such brisk Does any t, 0(1 y generalizations, it is prudent to ex- taow? ercise a little wholesome skepticism. No one really knows. Each critic can easily find the sort of facts he is looking for. American short stories have probably trained the public to a certain expectation of technical excel- lence in narrative which has forced American novel-writers to do more careful work. But there are few of our novel-writers who exhibit a breadth and power commensurate with their opportunities, and it is precisely these quali- ties of breadth and power which an appren- ticeship to the art of short story writing seldom or never seems to impart. The wider truth, after all, is that literary criticism has no apparatus delicate enough to measure the currents, the depths and the tideways, the reactions and interactions of literary forms. Essays upon the evolution of literary types, when written by men like M. Brunetiere, are fascinating reading, and for the moment almost persuade you that there is such a thing as a real evolution of types, that is, 332 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION a definite replacement of a lower form by a higher. But the popular caprice of an hour upsets all your theories. Mr. Howells had no sooner proved, a few years ago, that a certain form of realism was the finally evolved type in fiction, than the great read- ing public promptly turned around and bought " Treasure Island." That does not prove " Treasure Island" a better story than " Silas Lapham ; " it proves simply that a trout that will rise to a brown hackle to-day will look at nothing but a white miller to-morrow ; and that when the men of the ice age grew tired of realistic anecdotes somebody yawned and poked the fire and called on a romanticist. One age, one stage of culture, one mood, calls for stories as naive, as grim and primitive in their stark savagery as an Icelandic saga ; another age, another mood, — nay, the whim that changes in each one of us between morn- ing and evening, — chooses stories as delib- erately, consciously artificial as " The Fall of the House of Usher." Both types are ad- mirable, each in its own way, provided both stir the imagination. For the types will come and go and come again ; but the human hunger for fiction of some sort is never sated. THE SHORT STORY 333 Study the historical phases of the art of fiction as closely as one may, there come moments — perhaps the close of a chapter is an appropriate time to confess it — when one is tempted to say with Wilkie Collins that the whole art of fiction can be summed up in three precepts : " Make 'em laugh ; make 'em cry ; make 'em wait." The important thing, the really The wonder- suggestive and touching and won- world " derful thing, is that all these thousands of contemporary and ephemeral stories are laughed over and cried over and waited for by somebody. They are read, while the " large still books " are bound in full calf and buried. Do you remember Pomona in " Rud- der Grange : reading aloud in the kitchen every night after she had washed the dishes, spelling out with blundering tongue and beating heart : " Yell — after — yell — re- sounded — as — he — wildly — sprang," — or " Ha — ha — Lord — Marmont — thundered — thou — too — shalt — suffer " ? We are all more or less like Pomona. We are chil- dren at bottom, after all is said, children un- der the story-teller's charm. Nansen's stout- hearted comrades tell stories to one another 334 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION while the Arctic ice drifts onward with the Fram ; Stevenson is nicknamed The Tale- Teller by the brown-limbed Samoans ; Chi- nese Gordon reads a story while waiting — hopelessly waiting — at Khartoum. What matter who performs the miracle that opens for us the doors of the wonder- world ? It may be one of that white-bearded company at the gate of Jaffa ; it may be an ardent French boy pouring out his heart along the bottom of a Paris newspaper; it may be some sober- suited New England woman in the decorous pages of " The Atlantic Monthly ; " it may be some wretched scribbler writing for his supper. No matter, if only the miracle is wrought ; if we look out with new eyes upon the many-featured, habitable world; if we are thrilled by the pity and the beauty of this life of ours, itself brief as a tale that is told ; if we learn to know men and women better, and to love them more. CHAPTER Xm PRESENT TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN FIC- TION. " The literature of a people should be the record of its joys and sorrows, its aspirations and its shortcomings, its wisdom and its folly, the confidant of its soul. We cannot say that our own as yet suffices us, but I believe that he who stands, a hundred years hence, where I am standing now, conscious that he speaks to the most powerful and prosperous community ever devised or developed by man, will speak of our literature with the assur- ance of one who beholds what we hope for and aspire after, be- come a reality and a possession forever." James Russell Lowell, Our Literature, (1889.) " Democracy in literature, as exemplified by the two great modern democrats in letters, Whitman and Tolstoi, means a new and more deeply religious way of looking at mankind, as well as at all the facts and objects of the visible world. It means, furthermore, the finding of new artistic motives and values in the people, in science and the modern spirit, in liberty, frater- nity, equality, in the materialism and industrialism of man's life as we know it in our day and land — the carrying into imagina- tive fields the quality of common humanity, that which it shares with real things and with all open-air nature, with hunters, farm- ers, sailors, and real workers in all fields." John Burroughs, Democracy and Literature, In concluding this study of the _ , j *? J Difficulties art of prose fiction, let me attempt of an adequate . survey. a survey of the present tendencies 336 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION of the fiction of our own country. It goes without saying that such a survey presents difficulties of no ordinary kind. The field at which one must glance is so vast, the varie- ties of production are so numerous, the charac- teristics of the phenomena to be examined so changeable in their nature from year to year, that anything like an exact appreciation of our national fiction is out of the question. One must content oneself with suggestions, rather than with any detailed exposition ; with a statement of some of the conditions that enter into the question, rather than with any elaborate attempt at reaching a fixed formula. a knowledge ^ ne danger should be avoided of the past. a ^. ^ ou t se t — a danger never so insistent in its pressure as at present — the danger, namely, of being too contempora- neous in one's point of view. Even in trying to take account of contemporary tendencies, a historic sense is the most valuable equipment for the task of criticism. A knowledge of what has been already accomplished in the world of fiction is essential if one is to have any sense of perspective, any power of valu- ing new claimants to the honors of the craft. TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN FICTION 337 The heavens are full of literary comets in these days, and their course can be measured only by reference to the fixed stars. Those trite sentences of advice to young readers, " When a new book comes out, read an old one/' " Read no book until it is fifty years old/ 3 were never more applicable than now, and in the field of fiction. The multiplica- tion of periodicals issued in the interest of publishing houses, and for very practical reasons devoted to the glorification of new writers more or less at the expense of old ones, the personal gossip about the literary heroes of the hour, tend to confuse all one's ideas of proportion. A people gifted, like ourselves, with a sense of humor will sooner or later discount the extravagant adjectives used in the commercial exploitation of new books. But meanwhile there is a mischief in it all ; and the mischief is that the mind of the reading public is systematically jour- nalized. The little men, by dint of keeping their names before us, pass in many quarters for great men. The historic sense is bewil- dered, benumbed ; and when we attempt an appraisal of fiction- writers and of the art of fiction itself our opinions are sadly con- temporaneous. 338 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION ao back Before our judgment of a cui> iifty years. ren j. b 00 k or a current tendency can have any particular value, we must un- derstand the work of American novelists for at least the last half century. And it is a somewhat curious fact that if we wish to point to American fiction-writers who have won a secure place in the world's literature, we must go hack fifty years or more to find our men. When an intelligent foreign critic asks us what writers of fiction America has to show, of quality and force worthy to be compared with the masters of the art else- where, whom can we name? Fenimore Cooper for one : the author of " The Leather Stocking Tales," " The Spy," and "The Pilot ; " the creator of Natty Bumppo, and Chingachgook, and Long Tom Coffin. His rank is unquestioned. And so is the rank of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who has a reserved seat for immortality if any one has. And there is a third candidate for universal hon- ors, a short story writer, Edgar Allan Poe. Hawthorne, Cooper, Poe ; these men are be- yond the need and the reach of literary log- rolling. TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN FICTION 339 But when we have mentioned Th0 otlier these three Americans, we have names ' nearly or quite exhausted, not indeed our riches in native fiction, but the roll-call of those who by common consent have won through the art of fiction a permanent fame. Irving's reputation is rather that of an essay- ist, pioneer in a certain field of fiction though he was. One would hesitate to place beside the names of Cooper, Hawthorne, and Poe the name of the author of " Uncle Tom's Cabin," although no American book has ever had so wide a vogue in other countries, or wakened such intense emotion in our own, Bret Harte would have some suffrages, no doubt ; and many a critic would linger in- quiringly and affectionately over the names of Mark Twain, Howells, Aldrich, Stockton, James, Cable, Crawford, and many another living writer of admirable workmanship and honorable rank. But I suppose that there are few critics who would deliberately select among these later men a fourth to be placed in equality of universal recognition with that great trio who more than half a century ago were in the fullness of their power. 340 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION Quantity and However, three such men are quality. enough to give distinction to the first hundred years of American fiction-writ- ing. If we institute a comparison in quality between American and English and Conti- nental fiction, we have simply to point to Hawthorne alone. In bulk his contribution to the world's pleasure in the form of books is slender when set alongside the volumes of Scott or Dickens or Dumas, but in point of quality the quiet New Englander is easily the peer of the greatest story-writers of the world. Even when judged by the more un- satisfactory test of quantity of production, American fiction can nearly or quite hold its own with the fiction of England, France, or Germany. The figures of the book market, while interesting enough to the curious minded, are vitiated, for one who is trying to estimate the American output of fiction, by the fact of the immense circulation of some novels which are literature only by courtesy, but which affect statistics just as much as if they were literature. If we apply the test of mere quantity of production, we must take into account not only all these books that are " borderland dwellers ' between literature TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN FICTION 341 and non-literature, but an immense supply of fiction that does not even pretend to be lit- erature any more than a clever space-reporter for a Sunday newspaper pretends that his work is literature. But putting all such books aside, it is still possible to select twenty or twenty-five American story- writers of the past forty years who have published enough good books to place American fiction well alongside of American poetry, and certainly far in advance of American music, painting, sculpture, or architecture. From this body of work is it pos- p reva ient sible to draw any conclusions as to ^f^ the character of our fiction ? Can soU * we indicate the tendencies which have been prevalent in the past, which are now oper- ative, and which consequently are likely to characterize to a greater or less extent the American novel of the future ? There are at least three tendencies to which attention should be drawn. I cannot do better than follow here the suggestions of Professor Richardson, 1 who thinks that the first is the production of novels of the soil, that is, the 1 Charles F. Richardson, American Literature. 2 vols. New York : Putnam, 1889. 342 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION presentation of American types and scenes- The service of Fenimore Cooper in this direc* tion was a most important one. Before his time, Brockden Brown, for instance, had treated American themes, yet in so romantic a fashion as to disguise the reality. But Feni- more Cooper's backwoodsmen and sailors and frontier landscapes have the verity of nature herself. Hawthorne, too, did for New Eng- land, by very different methods, but with an equal honesty of rendering, what Cooper did for northern New York. Before the war, notes Professor Richardson, there were few attempts to delineate American home life in the various sections of the country ; but the improvement in American minor fiction since 1861 is largely owing to the attempt to de- scribe American life as it is. This tendency is growing more and more marked with every year ; it is very little, if at all, affected by the present revival of romanticism ; it has been helped, rather than hindered, by the sudden crop of historical novels. If every American county has not its novelist, its painter of manners, — as Scotland is said to have had, — at least every state can show fiction-writ- ers who aim to delineate local conditions as TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN FICTION 343 faithfully as they may, and there is every reason for thinking that this movement will be permanent. A second characteristic which Excellence In has hitherto marked American fie- a limited tion, and one that follows closely upon the first, is its excellence in a limited field, rather than any largeness of creative activity. The qualities which a foreign critic would be inclined to postulate theoretically about our fiction, reasoning from our im- mense territory, our still youthful zest, our boundless faith in ourselves, our resources, — in short, the general " bigness " of things American, — are precisely the qualities which our fiction has hitherto lacked. Instead of fertility of resource, consciousness of power, great canvases, broad strokes, brilliant color- ing, we find a predominance of small canvases, minute though admirable detail, neutral tints, an almost academic restraint, a consciousness of painting under the critic's eye. Ameri- can fiction lacks breadth and power. What Walt Whitman tried, with very imperfect success one must admit, to do in the field of u All- American ' poetry, if I may use the phrase, no one has even attempted to do in 344 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION fiction. Some magazine critics have expressed the opinion that the cause of this is to be found in the fact that the conventional stand- ards, the critical atmosphere, of the eif ete At- lantic seaboard have hitherto been dominant in our literature. They profess to believe that when the " literary centre " of the coun- try is established at Chicago, or Indianapolis, or thereabouts, our fiction will assume a scale proportionate to the bigness of our continent. But this matter is not so simple as it looks, and the question whether excellence in a small way rather than largeness of creative activity will continue to characterize Ameri- can fiction is still to be solved. We may find some light thrown upon it in considering the relation of sectional to national fiction. _ . , , A third fact impressed upon the Fundamental * r morality. student of the American novel is its fundamental morality. It is optimistic. Its outlook upon life is wholesome. The stain of doubtful morality or flaring immo- rality which has often tinged English and Con- tinental fiction, and made both the English and the American stage at times unspeakably foul, has left scarcely any imprint as yet upon the better known American story-writers. TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN FICTION 345 Our greater magazines have remained for the most part unsoiled. Bad as our " yellow " newspapers are, brazen as our stage often is, people who want the sex-novel, and want it prepared with any literary skill, have to import it from across the water. The outlook for the morality of the distinctively American novel seems assured. If our professional novelists have, in the last five years, withstood the temptation to win notoriety and money by risque books, we can confidently say of the American fiction of the future, that while it may not be national, and may not be great, it will have at least the negative virtue of being clean. We are now in a position to esti- mate the conditions which must be sentative" met by an American writer who hopes that his books may be in some true sense representative of the national life. Why does not the " great American novel' which we talk about, and about which we prophesy, get itself written ? One difficulty in the path of the representative American novel has already been pointed out indi- rectly. It lies in the immensity of the field 346 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION to be covered; the complexity of the phenom- ena which literature must interpret ; the mixture of races, customs, traditions, beliefs, ideals, upon this continent. We are a united nation, and have never been more conscious of the national life and more proud of it than since the twentieth century began its course. But literature is an affair of race as well as of nationality. Study the variety of names upon the signboards of any city ; watch the varying racial types in the faces of your fel- low citizens as you travel east or west, north or south. Who can be an adequate spokes- man for all this ? Homer is Greece, but Greece was a hand's breadth in comparison with us ; Dante is Florence, a single city ; Moliere, Paris, another city ; even Shakespeare, the u myriad-minded,' : was the spokesman of but one little island, though that was the England of Elizabeth. But the truth is that not one of these men was probably conscious of speaking for his country and his time. It is only a Balzac, a sort of gigantic child, who dares to set himself deliberately to the task of representing all France, and thereby the entire Human Comedy. As civilization wid- ens, as more and more subtle differentiations TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN FICTION 347 make themselves manifest in society, the task becomes increasingly greater. In a Walt Whitman rhapsody a man might venture to speak for " these States/' but a writer of prose, in possession of his senses, would per- force decline any such prophetic function. Then, too, the tendency to the sectional production of sectional fiction, to ttcUoiL which allusion has just been made, has pre- vented our fiction from taking on even the semblance of national quality. By dint of keeping their eyes on the object, many of our best writers have studied but the narrowest of fields. They do not represent, or pretend to represent, with adequacy the entirety even of that limited province for which they stand as representative authors. We speak, for in- stance, of Mr. Cable, Miss Murf ree, Mr. Page, Mr. Allen, Miss Johnston, Mr. Harris, Miss King, and a half dozen more, as representa- tives of the South in contemporary fiction ; but they exhibit as many Souths as there are writers. Who can select any one book of these skilled story-tellers and say, " Here is the South represented through the art of fiction " ? Or take New England, as inter- preted by such excellent and such differed 348 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION writers as Mrs. Stowe, Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins, Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. Mrs. Stowe shows one New England, Miss Wilkins another ; each is marvelously true to the local color selected ; but you cannot take " Old Town Folks " and " Deephaven " and " Pembroke " and u A Singular Life '? and say " Here is New England." At best you can say " Here is a part of New England.' 2 Now if there is a difference in passing from the Vermont or Massachusetts of Miss Wilkins to the Maine of Miss Jewett, think of the dif- ference in passing from these to the Virginia of Mr. Page, the Northwest of Mr. Garland, the California of Bret Harte, the Alaska of Mr. Jack London ! If we can scarcely find a thoroughly representative sectional novel, how shall we expect a representative national novel ? international An additional element in the influences. denationalizing of our fiction lies in the fact that ours is peculiarly a day of international influences in literature. Com- munication between the book-producing coun- tries of the world is now so easy, the work of foreign authors so accessible, international gossip so entertaining and necessary to us, TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN FICTION 319 that it sometimes seems as if literature were adopting the socialists' programme of doing away with national lines altogether, of creat- ing a vast brotherhood of letters in which the accident of residence in Belgium or Scot- land or South Dakota counts for nothing. So far as Continental fiction makes its influ- ence felt in this country, it touches not so much the mass of readers as those who them- selves are producers of fiction. In some inter- esting statistics showing the hundred novels most often drawn from American public libraries, in the order of their popularity, gathered by Mr. Mabie for " The Forum " a few years ago, the absence of modern French and Russian masters from the list was most noticeable. The American public does not read Turgenieif and Tolstoi, Flaubert and Daudet, Bjornson and D'Annunzio so very much ; indeed it reads them very little. But wherever writers of fiction gather, it is names like these that are discussed. And even for the general public, a book's foreign reputation is impressive, although the book may be little read here. A London reputa- tion, particularly, may make the fortune of a novel on this side of the Atlantic. For all our 350 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION talk about outgrowing colonialism, we have never been more colonial than at present, though we call this spirit cosmopolitanism. A very pretty essay might be written to prove that the much-praised cosmopolitanism of some of our successful young novelists is only a sort of varnished provincialism, the real fibre of it differing not so very much from the innocent provincialism of the man who comes back from his first ten weeks' trip abroad and tells you buoyantly that he has " been everywhere and seen everything.' 1 Genntne pro- Now a genuine provincialism, as vinciaiism. fae history of literature abundantly proves, is not a source of weakness. It is a strength. Carlyle was provincial. Scott was provincial. Burns and Wordsworth and Whit- tier were provincial. They were rooted in the soil, and by virtue of that they became repre- sentative. In our own political life, who have been our most truly representative men ? Webster, the rugged son of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, spoke as no other man spoke, "for the country and the whole coun- try." It was the gaunt rustic President from Kentucky and Illinois who has become, in Lowell's noble phrase, " our first American.' 5 TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN FICTION 351 Perhaps these figures outside the 7 . A representa- field of literature will help us to see tive man of the conditions for a representative national figure in literature. Those condi- tions can be met only by a powerful person- ality in harmony with its age. The person- ality must be great enough to take up into itself the great thoughts and feelings of its time, and transform them, personalize them, use them, and not be overwhelmed by them. Such a personality represents its age and country, not by the method of extension so much as by the method of intension, not by a wide superficial acquaintance with cities and with men, but by seeing deeply, and thinking deeply, and feeling deeply. It is by means of such power that Cooper and Hawthorne are American, as Fielding is Eng- lish, Victor Hugo French, and Turgenieff Russian. If the future grants us sufficiently powerful individuals, thoroughly American- ized, we shall have representative American novelists. A further question forces itself 1 Democracy. upon us, and one by no means easy to answer. How is our fiction to be affected by the vast democratic movement which is 352 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION changing the face of society throughout the civilized world ? There is at the present moment a reaction against liberalism in England and upon the continent, and a corre- sponding reaction against republicanism here. These reactions are more wide-spread than at any time for sixty years past, but they have been brought about by peculiar conditions, and no one supposes that they will ultimately block the wheels of advancing democracy. " The people will conquer in the end," as Byron prophesied as long ago as 1821. Now how will this triumph of the people affect literature ? Are we to have an epoch of distinctively democratic art, and if we are, what sort of fiction can we imagine as flourish- ing in that epoch ? Said J. A. Symonds, in his essay on " Democratic Art," — " In past epochs the arts had a certain unconscious and spontaneous rapport with the nations which begat them, and with the central life-force of those nations at the moment of their flourishing. Whether that cen- tral energy was aristocratic, as in Hellas, or monarchic, as in France, or religious, as in mediaeval Europe, or intellectual, as in Renaissance Italy, or national, as in Elizabethan England, or widely diffused like a fine gust of popular intelligence, as in Japan, signified comparatively little. Art expressed what the people TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN FICTION 353 had of noblest and sincerest, and was appreciated by the people." Can there be anything like this in the new era toward which we are hastening? Mr. Symonds himself was compelled to give up the question as at present unanswerable. It is undeniable that the aristocratic tradi- tion still holds firm in almost all the arts. " Kings, princesses, and the symbols of chiv- alry/' says the English critic Mr. Gosse, " are as essential to poetry as we now con- ceive it, as roses, stars, or nightingales/ ' and he does not see what will be left if this romantic phraseology is done away with. " We shall certainly have left," retorted John Burroughs, "what we had before these aristocratic types and symbols came into vogue, namely, nature, life, man, God." But can poets and novelists find new artis- tic material in the people, the plain people who are so soon to hold the field? Walt Whitman declared, in a fine passage of his " Democratic Vistas," — " Literature, strictly considered, has never recog- nized the People, and whatever may be said, does not to-day. I know nothing more rare even in this coun- try than a fit scientific estimate and reverent appro* 354 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION ciation of the People — of their measureless wealth o: latent power and capacity, their vast artistic contrasts of lights and shades, with, in America, their entire reliability in emergencies, and a certain breadth of historic grandeur, of peace or war, far surpassing all the vaunted samples of book-heroes ... in all the records of the world." "The divine The question is simply this: average." u j| ow w i}} a ]} ^ e phenomena of a great democratic society be able to touch the poet or novelist imaginatively? " And I think no one has felt the significance of this ques- tion more adequately than Whitman. He has tried to answer it in his not very clearly expressed phrase about recognizing " the divine average." What he means by the di- vine average is simply the presence of the divine in average human beings. If we grant the presence of that element in the u average sensual man/' — an element which appeals to the sense of beauty and sublimity, which fires the imagination of the artist, — then democratic art is possible. Without it there can never be any democratic art, and we had better stick to kings and princesses, to Prisoners of Zenda and Gentlemen of France. But if one has read Dickens or George Eliot or Kipling, or any of the Ameri- i TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN FICTION 355 can novelists who have been faithful to the actual life of these United States, one knows that an art of fiction is even now in existence which does recognize the people, which re- veals, however imperfectly, the diviner quali- ties in the life of the ordinary man. How is the art of fiction destined Future to be changed as this recognition is typos " more and more widely made ? Will the real- istic or romantic type of fiction be best fitted to the needs of the coming democracy ? Per- haps this question, too, cannot be answered, and yet one or two assertions may fairly be made. Democracy insists increasingly upon conformity to ordinary types. It is a pitiless leveler, whether up or down. It is fatal to eccentricities, to extravagant personal char* acteristics, in a word, to a large part of the field from which romantic fiction draws its power. Romantic types of character, as far as they have external marks of peculiarity, are probably destined to extinction. And our sense of wonder at outward things is steadily diminishing. Marvels have grown stale to us. We no longer gape over the telegraph, the telephone, the " wireless ; ' we shall gape at the flying machine for a few 356 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION days at longest. There will be one day no more unexplored corners o£ the world, no " road to Mandalay." We shall be forced to turn inward to discover the marvelous ; " Cathay and all its wonders " must be found in us or nowhere. The effect of all this upon fiction will be unmistakable. If novels of the outward life, of conformity to known facts and types, are written, they will be real- istic in method ; the old romantic fiction machinery will become the veriest lumber. There will come again an age of realism in fiction, if a fiction is desired which keeps close to life. We may imagine that the readers of that age will smile at Victor Hugo and praise " Middlemarch." But the history of literature has taught us that men have al- ways craved what I may call the fiction of compensation, the fiction that yields them what life cannot yield them. And as the inner world will then be the marvelous world, I imagine the fiction of compensation will take the form, not of adventures in South Seas and Dark Continents, but of the psycho- logical romance, pure and simple. Readers will then smile at " Treasure Island 3 and praise " Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN FICTION 357 If all this appears, as perhaps it Future well may, too fanciful a picture, let th8mes - us turn to the kind of subjects with which merican novelists of the immediate future eem likely to occupy themselves. That here will be very shortly — if indeed there is not already — a reaction against over-pro- duction of Colonial, Revolutionary, and other types of American historical fiction, cannot be doubted. But this is chiefly because the supply has temporarily outrun the demand. The story of our own ancestors and their struggles upon American soil will never lose its essential fascination when depicted, not by a horde of imitative weaklings, but by masters of the fictive art. The marvelous epic of the settlement of the western half of the continent still waits an adequate reciter. We have had already a legion of Civil War stories, and yet we have not begun to see the wealth of material which that epoch holds for the true imaginative artist. The romance of labor, of traffic, of politics, in our strangely composite civilization, has been perceived by a few writers ; but how much is still to be told ! For American social life is chan- A changlll g ging, taking account of itself before worl(L 858 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION our eyes, readjusting itself, and a thousand subtle, delightful, forceful themes are thus laid open to the novelist. He will follow in the wake of all these social movements of the twentieth century as the sea-birds follow the steamer, sure of finding the fit morsel soon or late. But that simile is inapt ; the novelist is not like a creature watching the course of a mechanism ; he is a creature en- raptured with something that is itself alive, changing from hour to hour, unfolding, per- fecting itself from generation to generation. We talk of human nature being ever the same ; but nothing is falser to the facts of life and the process of the world's growth. Brute nature does remain the same. The ape and tiger of this hour are, so far as we know, exactly the same ape and tiger that our ancestors fought in the stone age. But the ape and tiger in us dies, though slowly ; the brute passions are not destined forever to sway the balance in our lives. The human spirit changes, widens, grows richer and more beautiful with the infinite years of man's history upon this planet. And over against this wonderful process of development stands the novelist, himself a part of it all, and yet TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN FICTION 359 one of its interpreters. If, watching that changing human spectacle, he finds no stories to tell, discovers no charm or beauty or so- lemnity, it is not because these things are not there, but because his eyes are holden. We need have no fear that the TechniquB future American novelist will fail and imagi- in power of expression. The tech- nical finish of his work is assured by the standard that has been already reached. Decade by decade one can mark the steady development of the American novelist in all that pertains to mere craftsmanship. But the value of his work will not turn primarily upon its technical excellence on the side of form. Cleverness of hand he will certainly possess ; but as I have said more than once already, cleverness of hand is not enough. If his work is to have any significant place in the literature of the world, he must learn to see and feel and think, and what he sees and feels and thinks will depend solely upon what he is himself. The " great American novel ' will probably never be written by a man who suspects that he is doing anything of the sort. It is quite likely to come, as other greater things than novels come, 360 A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION " without observation." You and I — Gen- tle Reader with whom I am parting company — may never see it, but ultimately nothing is so certain as the triumph of the things of the spirit over the gross material forces of American civilization. Summer itself is not so sure in its coming as the imagination in its own time. APPENDIX APPENDIX SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY The first chapter of this book gives an outline of the method of studying fiction which has been fol- lowed throughout the volume. Teachers and students who may desire to do further work for themselves along the lines here suggested, or in other fields of investigation, are advised to give that first chapter a second reading, in the light thrown upon it by the book as a whole. It will help them to remember the specific purpose of this volume, and to see the rela- tion between its method and that of other works to which the attention of the student should now be called. Some of my readers will be solitary students, free to follow any path they like into the pleasant fields of the theory and practice of story-writing. Others will be members of reading circles and clubs, where there is a definite although perhaps not very strenuous line of study mapped out in advance. Still others will, I hope, belong to school and college classes, bent upon serious endeavor to learn as much as possible about an art which has established its significance and value as an interpreter of modern life. In the bibliographies and other aids and suggestions for study which I shall now give, I have endeavored to keep in mind these 364 APPENDIX varying requirements of my readers. Some of the work outlined is extremely elementary. But I have also indicated some tasks which will need the full pow- ers of the student. The arrangement of this supple- mentary work is such, however, that teachers will find no difficulty, I trust, in selecting from it such courses of reading and topical exercises as shall best suit the spe- cific needs of their classes. I cannot urge too strongly the advisability of a detailed analytic study of some one representative novel, and, if possible, an acquaints ance with the entire production of one of the greater novelists, before attempting more than a bird's-eye view of any national fiction as a whole. The average college student, in particular, needs training in the analysis of a single work, and in steady reflection upon the pro blems presented by it, far more than he needs a greater familiarity with the novelists of his own day. Most of us will remain readers of fiction all our lives long, but the chosen time for the serious study of fiction is in those golden years when we first perceive the treasures of thought and imagination, the breathing images of passionate human life, revealed to us by the novelists. BIBLIOGRAPHY a. Introductory : ^Esthetics. Since the method fol- lowed in our study is primarily that of aesthetic criti- cism, the student of the art of fiction should, if possi- ble, acquaint himself in some degree with the theory of the Fine Arts and their place in human life. For a APPENDIX 365 general survey of the field of ^Esthetics, see the arti- cles u ^Esthetics," by James Sully, and u Fine Arts," by Sidney Colvin, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Bald- win Brown's The Fine Arts (University Extension Manuals, Scribners) is a useful handbook. Bosanquet's voluminous History of JEsthetic (Macmillan) is ex- tremely valuable to the advanced student. See also his Three Lectures on JEsthetic (N. Y., 1919), and K. Gordon's ^Esthetics (N.Y., 1909). Most of the standard treatises upon ^Esthetics are indicated in the card catalogue of any good library; for an extended bibliography, consult Gayley and Scott, Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism (Ginn & Co., 1899). b. Introductory: Poetics. After this preliminary survey of the field of ^Esthetics, the student is recom- mended to acquaint himself with some of the many helpful discussions of poetic theory. How closely the field of Poetics is allied to that of Prose Fiction we have already seen in the second and third chapters. The most famous of all treatises on Poetics is that of Aristotle. There are many good translations ; the admirable one by Professor S. H. Butcher (Macmil- lan, 2d ed., 1898) is enriched by interpretative essays dealing with the disputable passages. A general bibli- ography for Poetics, with brief comment upon the im- portant treatises, will be found in Gayley and Scott. The article on " Poetry " by Theodore Watts in the Encyclopaedia Britannica is noteworthy. Gummere's Poetics (Ginn & Co.) is an excellent brief handbook ; see also his Beginnings of Poetry (Macmillan, 1901) and W. J. Courthope's Life in Poetry — Law in Taste (Macmillan, 1901). Volumes like Stedman's Nature and Elements of Poetry (Houghton Mifflin Co.) and 366 APPENDIX C. C. Everett's Poetry, Comedy, and Duty (Houghton Mifflin Co.) are stimulating. See also FairchilcTs Mak- ing of Poetry (N. Y., 1912), Eastman's Enjoyment of Poetry (N. Y., 1913), Neilson's Essentials of Poetry (Boston, 1912), Newbolt's New Study of English Po- etry (N. Y., 1919), Lowes's Convention and Revolt in Poetry (Boston, 1919), Untermeyer's New Era in American Poetry (N. Y., 1919), and the bibliography in Bliss Perry's Study of Poetry (Boston, 1920). That portion of the territory of Poetics which is occupied with the Theory of the Drama is especially important for the student of fiction. Useful books are Frey tag's Technique of the Drama (Eng. trans., S. C. Griggs & Co.), Elisabeth Woodb ridge's The Drama; its Law and Technique (Allyn & Bacon), Alfred Hen- nequin's Art of Play Writing (Houghton Mifflin Co.), Price's Technique of the Drama (Brentano), Moulton's Ancient Classical Drama and Shakespeare as a Dra- matic Artist (Macmillan), Clayton Hamilton's Theory of the Theatre (N. Y., 1910), Studies in Stagecraft (N. Y., 1914), and Problems of the Playwright (N. Y., 1917), William Archer's Play-making (London, 1912), Brander Matthews's Study of the Drama (Boston, 1910), Hen- derson's Changing Drama (N. Y., 1914), and G. P. Baker's Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (N. Y., 1907) and Dramatic Technique (Boston, 1919). c. Prose Fiction: Historical. Two admirable sketches of the history of English prose fiction are Walter Raleigh's The English Novel (Scribners, 1894) and Wilbur L. Cross's The Development of the English Novel (Macmillan, 1899). Dunlop's History of Prose Fiction (2 vols., revised edition by Wilson, Bohn, 1896) is a standard work of reference. F. M. Warren's APPENDIX 367 History of the Novel Previous to the Seventeenth Cen- tury (Holt, 1895), Jusserand's English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare (London, 1890), Saintsbury's The English Novel (N. Y., 1913), Hopkins and Hughes's English Novel before the Nineteenth Century (Boston, 1915), Chandler's Literature of Roguery (2 vols., Bos- ton, 1907), W. L. Phelps's Advance of the English Novel (N. Y., 1916), E. A. Baker's Descriptive Guide to the Best Fiction (N. Y., 1913), the Bibliographical Notesin the Appendix to Cross, and the Bibliography pref- aced to the first volume of Wilson's edition of Dunlop. d. Prose Fiction : Philosophical and Critical. Sug- gestive discussions of general tendencies in modern fic- tion are found in F. H. Stoddard's The Evolution of the English Novel (Macmillan, 1899), Sidney Lanier's The English Novel (Scribners, revised edition, 1897), D. G. Thompson's Philosophy of Fiction in Literature (Long- mans, 1890), Zola's Le Roman Experimental (Eng. trans., Cassell, N. Y.), Brunetiere's Le Roman Na- turaliste (Paris), Spielhagen's Beitrage zur Theorie und Technik des Romans (Berlin), C. T. Winchester's Prin- ciples of Literary Criticism (Macmillan), Howells's Criticism and Fiction (Harpers), F. Marion Crawford's The Novel : What It Is (Macmillan), Sir Walter Besant's lecture on " The Art of Fiction " (Cupples, Upham & Co., Boston, 1885), Henry James's essay in rejoinder on "The Art of Fiction" in Partial Portraits (Macmillan), R. L. Stevenson's " A Humble Remonstrance " addressed to Mr. James (reprinted in Memories and Portraits), Bran- der Matthews's The Historical Novel and Other Es- says and Aspects of Fiction (Scribners), Paul Bourget's "Reflexions sur l'Art du Roman" in Etudes et Por- traits* See also Whitcomb's The Study of a Novel 368 APPENDIX (Boston, 1905), Home's Technique of the Novel (N. Y., 1908), Maxcy's Rhetorical Principles of Narration (Boston, 1911), W. L. Phelps's Essays on Modern Novelists (N. Y., 1910), Wilson Follett's The Modern Novel (N. Y., 1918), Clayton Hamilton's Man- ual of the Art of Fiction (N. Y., 1918), and Stuart Sherman's Contemporary Literature (N. Y., 1917). e. Prose Fiction : Special Topics. Articles upon the various aspects of fiction have been frequent in periodi- cal literature, especially since 1880. For these, consult Poole's Index to Periodical Literature. Excellent com- ment upon novels and novelists is to be found in reviews and critical articles in periodicals ; if Poole's Index is not at hand, the index to the periodical itself will often put the student upon the track of helpful material. Biog- raphies of the great novelists, and their Notebooks and Letters, are full of suggestive comment upon their art. The footnotes to the various chapters of the present work give occasional references to books bearing par- ticularly upon the subject of each chapter ; but as I have wished to keep the text as free as possible from notes, I will add here a few suggestions for special reading in connection with some of the main topics of the book. In studying chapter iii. for instance, it will be well to take as supplementary reading some of the books already mentioned under b, and especially Gummere's Poetics and Watts's article. For chapter iii., note especially Freytag, Woodbridge, Hamilton, Archer, Matthews, and Baker. For chapter iv., note Edward Dowden's Studies in Literature, J. Wedgwood on " The Ethics of Liter- ature " in Contemporary Review, January, 1897, and W. J. Stillman on " The Revival of Art " in the At- lantic 9 vol. lxx. APPENDIX 369 In connection with chapters v., vi., and vii., the most profitable work is a first-hand study of the practice of various novelists, as indicated below under II. Topics for Study. For chapter viii., see Ruskin's " Art and Morals " in Lectures on Art, D. G. Thompson, chapter xiii., Lanier, chapter xii., Stoddard, chapter v., John La Farge's Considerations on Painting, Lecture II. (Macmillan), Charles F. Johnson's Elements of Liter' ary Criticism, chapter iv. (Harpers), andS. Sherman's Contemporary Literature, chapter xi. In connection with the discussion of Realism in chap- ter ix», see Howells's Criticism and Fiction, the chapter on Realism in W. C. Brownell's French Art (Scribners), ValdeVs Preface to Sister St. Sulpice (Crowell), Cross, chapters v. and vi., and Hamilton's Manual, chapter ii. Romanticism (chapter x.) is discussed in many recent volumes, such as the books of Beers and Phelps referred to on p. 262. See also Pater's essay in the Postscript of Appreciations, F. H. Hedge's article in the Atlantic, vol. lvii., T. S. Omond's The Triumph of Romance (Scrib- ners), W. P. Ker's Epic and Romance (Macmillan), P. E. More's Drift of Romanticism (Boston, 1913), and consult the Bibliography furnished by Professor Beers. For chapter xi., see the references in the text to Minto, Clark, Gardner, Brewster, and Baldwin, and the critical essays of James, Stevenson, Brunetiere, Bourget, and other acute contemporary students of literary form. For chapter xii., compare Poe's criticism of Haw- thorne in Graham's Magazine, 1842 (in vol. vii. of the Stedman-Woodberry edition; Stone & Kimball), Brander Matthews's The Philosophy of the Short-Story (Long- mans, 1901), VV. M. Hart's Hawthorne and the Short 370 APPENDIX Story (Berkeley, Cal., 1900), J. Berg Esenwein's Writ- ing the Short Story (N. Y., 1908) and Studying the Short Story (N. Y., 1912), K M. Albright's The Short Story (N. Y., 1907), W. B. Pitkin's Art and Business of Story Writing (N. Y., 1912), H. S. Canby's The Short Story in English (N. Y., 1909) and A Study of the Short Story (N. Y., 1913), Notestein and Dunn's The Modern Short Story (N. Y., 1914) , and H. T. Baker's The Contemporary Short Story (Boston, 1916); Edward J. O'Brien has collected in annual volumes the best short stories appearing in 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, and 1919 (Boston) ; see Blanche Colton Williams's How to Study 'The Best Short Stories' (Boston, 1919). Collections of various short stories are now numerous: see Waite and Taylor's Modern Masterpieces of Short Prose Fiction (N Y., 1911), Stuart Sherman's A Book of Short Stories (N. Y., 1916), C. S. Baldwin's American Short Stories (N. Y., 1904), Sherwin Cody's The World's Greatest Short Stories (Chicago, 1902), Campbell and Rice's A Book of Narratives (Boston, 1917), C. L. Maxcy's Representative Narratives (Bos- ton, 1914). For chapter xiii., see Walt Whitman's " Democratic Vistas," Lowell's address on " Democracy," J. A. Symonds's " Democratic Literature " in Essays Specu- lative and Suggestive, W. H. Crawshaw's Literary Interpretation of Life, chapters v.-vii. (Macmillan), C. F. Richardson's American Literature, vol. ii. (Put- nam, 1889), W. C. Bronson's Short History of Amer- ican Literature (Heath, 1901), Barrett Wendell's His- tory of Literature in America (Scribners, 1901), and A. G. Newcomer's American Literature (Scott, Fores- man & Co., 1901). Compare also F. L. Pattee's A His- APPENDIX 371 tory of American Literature since 1870 (N. Y., 1916), and Bliss Perry's The American Mind (Boston, 1912) and The Spirit of American Literature (N. Y., 1918), /. Representative English Novels. To students desir- ing to understand the historical development of English fiction in its main outlines, the following list of typical productions is suggested : Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1590), Bunyan's Pilgrim' 'sPr -ogress (167 '8-84) , Swift's Tale of a Tub (1704), Defoe's Captain Singleton (1720) , Richardson's Pamela (1740) , Fielding's Amelia (1751), Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1812), Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1820), Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), Thack- eray's Vanity Fair (1847-48), Dickens's David Copper- field (1849-50), Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72), Hardy's Re- turn of the Native (1878), Stevenson's Treasure Lsland (1883), Meredith's Diana of the Crossways (1884), Kipling's Jungle-Book (1894), Conrad's Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), Butler's Way of All Flesh (1903), De Morgan's Joseph Vance (1906), Bennett's Old Wives 9 Tale (1908), Wells's Tono-Bungay (1909), Galsworthy's The Patrician (1911). g. Representative American Novels. The following stories are fairly representative of the tendencies of American fiction: Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), Irving's Sketch Book (1819), Cooper's Last of the Mohi- cans (1826), Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Ara- besque (1839), Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter (1850), Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Bret Harte's Luck of Roaring Camp (1870), Eggleston's Hoosier School- master (1871), Clemens's [Mark Twain] Tom Sawyer 372 APPENDIX (1876), Henry James's The American (1877), Howells's Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Cable's Grandissimes (1880), Harris's Uncle Remus (1880), Miss Wilkins's Humble Romance (1887), James Lane Allen's Ken- tucky Cardinal (1894), Weir Mitchell's Hugh Wynne (1897), Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), Jack London's Call of the Wild (1903), Edith Wharton's House of Mirth (1905), Winston Churchill's Coniston (1906), O. Henry's Voice of the City (1908), Margaret Deland's Iron Woman (1911), Dorothy Canfield's Bent Twig (1915), Booth Tarkington's The Turmoil (1915). II TOPICS FOR STUDY It cannot be emphasized too often that the aim of this Study of Prose Fiction is to help students to use their own eyes and minds. Topics for independent study may be assigned in connection with almost all the chapters in the book, but v., vi., and vii. are par- ticularly well adapted for this kind of work. For in- stance, the student may be asked to write a brief paper, as the result of independent study in any author, of one or more of the following topics : — 1. Character-Studies. (See chapter v.) A character embodying but one quality or passion. A complex character with one trait in predominance. A complex character consisting of evenly balanced opposing forces. A character involved in a conscious moral struggle, successful or otherwise ; in an uncon- scious moral struggle. Deterioration, with or without a struggle. A character developing under prosperity j APPENDIX 373 adversity ; old age ; influence of other personalities ; of religion, art, philosophy. A character illustrating professional, class, or national traits. A character ful- filling the requirements of its role as villain, lover, heroine, etc. A "plot-ridden " character. Character* contrasts : in the family ; among friends ; in wider relations. Character-grouping . as regards the unify- ing principle, subordination of parts, place in the book as a whole. 2. Studies in Plot. (See chapter vi.) An incident as revealing character. A situation as determining character. A climax in its relation to the theme. A catastrophe as poetic justice ; as illus- trative of the individual philosophy of the writer ; as unsatisfactory to the reader. Plot complication and resolution as dictated by character. Accident as a complicating force; a resolving force. Fate as a re- solving force. Mystification in plot. Anticlimax in plot. Plot as determined by the characters. Sustain- ing of plot-interest. A perfect plot. A sub-plot as reflecting, depending upon, or artificially joined to the main plot. A plot as influenced by the setting. 3. Studies in Setting. (See chapter vii.) A given novel as illustrating the time and place of its setting; for instance, the Egyptian, Oriental, Greek, Roman, or mediaeval world. The setting of a novel whose scenes are laid in a part of America with which you are personally familiar ; for instance, a Tennessee, Virginia, New York, New England, California story. A setting making artistic use of one of the great occu- pations of men : as politics, war, commerce, manufao 374 APPENDIX turing, farming, mining, travel, student life, life of the unemployed poor, the unemployed rich. A setting fur- nished by institutions or ideas prevalent in society : as feudalism, democracy, socialism, patriotism, religion. The sea, the mountains, the city, the village, the coun- try, as setting for a given story. A landscape setting which harmonizes with the characters ; contrasts with the characters ; affects the incidents ; determines the situations ; gives unity to the book. Ill ORIGINAL WORK IN CONSTRUCTION This book is not designed, of course, to give training to " young writers " in practical craftsmanship. But it is often a stimulus to the intelligent and sympathetic reading of fiction to attempt for one's self some of the practical problems with which novelists are constantly called upon to deal. For class-room work, in partic- ular, some such exercises as the following will be found interesting : — 1. Read the opening chapters of any novel until you feel sure that the main characters are all introduced ; then block out a plot which shall accord with your view of the characters. 2. Bead until the complication is well advanced ; then block out the remainder of the plot. 3. Read until you are sure the catastrophe is immi- nent ; then sketch in detail a catastrophe which shall harmonize with the foregoing plot. 4. Construct a diagram of a plot involving but two or three persons, indicating the lines of complication, the climax or turning point, and the d^noument. APPENDIX 375 5. Construct a similar diagram, indicating the situ- ations or steps by which the action advances to the cli- max, and thence to the catastrophe. 6. Describe a room or a house so that each detail shall serve to indicate the character of the occupant. 7. Write a conversation which indirectly reveals a character ; describe an action which directly reveals a character. 8. Describe an important situation, sketching briefly the antecedent and subsequent plot-movement. 9. Write a closing chapter, indicating the steps by which it is reached. 10. Describe a group of characters suitable for a sub-plot, with the briefest indication of their connec- tion with the main plot. IV PRACTICE IN ANALYSIS In studying representative novels, whether in the class-room or by one's self, it is well to read with pen- cil in hand, and to endeavor to sum up, as clearly as possible, the outline of the story, as regards plot, char- acters, and design. A simple method of analysis is here given, as applied to Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair. I. Aim. Where did Thackeray get his title ? What light is thrown by the title, the author's preface, and the references to Vanity Fair throughout the novel, upon the aim and spirit of the book ? In other words, What is Thackeray trying to do ? II. (a) Characters. Fiction exhibits characters in I 376 APPENDIX action, by means of narration and description. Study the opening chapters of Vanity Fair with the aim of getting a clear conception of the characters there pre- sented, before the complication of the story really begins. (b) Plot. After doing this we must study the char- acters as they are thrown together, influenced by one another, and developed by means of the action. It will therefore be necessary, before examining the char- acters in complication with one another, to trace the action, or plot, of the novel. The plot of Vanity Fair may, for convenience, be summarized under seven divisions. 1. Introduction. (Chapters 1-11, inclusive.) The opening six chapters are concerned with Amelia, Re- becca, the Osbornes, the Sedleys, and Dobbin ; the next five chapters describe the Crawleys. 2. Development (12-26.) This division treats mainly of Miss Crawley, Rebecca's conquests, the Sedley failure, Dobbin's affection for Amelia, and George Osborne's disinheritance. 3. The Waterloo Campaign. (27-32.) Here is the first great crisis of the book. Its significance in the plot, aside from George Osborne's death, lies in its definite revelations of character, particularly of Joseph Sedley, Dobbin, and Rebecca. 4. Struggles and Trials. (33-46.) This division cov- ers many years of time. Rebecca is successfully fight- ing her way up in the world, and Amelia is struggling vainly against poverty. Chapter 39 is important as affecting Rebecca's position. Note that chapter 37 prepares the way for division 5, just as chapter 43 is a preparation for division 6. APPENDIX 377 5. Lord Steyne. (47-55.) Here is the second and greatest crisis of the story. It contains the culmination of Rebecca's success, and the catastrophe. Chapter 50 is inserted here to show the lowest point of Amelia's fortunes. 6. Our Friend the Major. (56-61.) The re-intro- duction of two characters, and the deaths of two others, mark the turning point in Amelia's struggles, just as division 5 shows the turn in Rebecca's. 7. Denotement. Note Rebecca's degradation, her tem- porary influence over Amelia, Dobbin's departure, re- call, and marriage, the end of Joseph Sedley, and Rebecca's final position in the world. (c) Setting. Having mastered the plot, in its main and subordinate features, it will be well to review defi- nitely the circumstances of time and place in which the action is laid ; as for instance, London life in the period 1814-30, Queen's Crawley under Sir Pitt, Brussels in 1815, the Rawdon Crawley establishment in Curzon Street, Gaunt House, or the town of Pum- pernickel. Be able to reproduce this historical and local setting as far as possible. (d) Review each character, first by itself, then in contrast with the other characters with which it is most closely grouped, and determine lastly what is the function of each character in the plot as a whole. Dis- tinguish carefully between the characters that are un- modified by the action of the story, as Sir Pitt or Mrs. O'Dowd, and those whose development is affected by the action, as Rawdon Crawley or Rebecca. III. Style. If we understand what Thackeray aimed to do in writing Vanity Fair, and what he has actu- ally done, we are ready to criticise his manner of doing 378 APPENDIX it, that is, his style. Judging from Vanity Fair alone, what inferences can you draw as to Thackeray's (a) cre- ation of character, (b) invention of plot, and (c) power of narration and description ; in other words, his gifts as a story-teller ? REVIEW QUESTIONS The questions to be asked of the student, in review- ing the works of fiction selected for his study, will naturally vary widely. The queries made by one teacher will not suit another at every point. But I have thought it worth while to give here a few examples of review questions, based upon such different material as Scott's Ivanhoe, some selected short stories of Poe and Hawthorne, and George Eliot's Middlemarch. They may serve as hints for better questions, if nothing more. a. Ivanhoe. 1 I. The function of the opening chapter of a novel is ordinarily to give a picture of the time or place in which the story is to move, or to introduce some of the minor — occasionally the leading — characters, or to strike the keynote of the dramatic action. If it is prevailingly narrative, rather than descriptive, it usually deals with an event from which the subsequent events of the book distinctly take their origin, or an event or scene which must be explained before the reader can advance into the story, or one to the explanation of which the entire book is to be devoted. Which of 1 Reprinted by permission from the annotated edition of Ivanhoe, edited by Bliss Perry. Longmans, Green Wood, A.M., M.D., Teachers College, Columbia University. PUBLIC SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION. By E. P. Cubberley. RURAL LIFE AND EDUCATION. By E. P. Cubberley. HEALTH WORK IN THE SCHOOLS. By E. B. Hoag, M.D., and L. M. Terman, Leland Stanford Junior University. MEASURING THE RESULTS OF TEACHING. By W. S. 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