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feature, are at one. It will be noticed that in each of them the details selected for presentation have been chosen solely for the sake of a common quality inherent in them-the quality of sombreness and gloom in the one case, and the quality of Sabbath quietude in the other and that they have been marshalled to convey a complete sense of this central and pervading quality. It is commonly supposed that what is called "atmosphere" in a description is dependent upon the setting forth of a multiplicity of details; but this popular conception is a fallacy. "Atmosphere" is dependent rather upon a strict selection of details pervaded by a common quality, a rigorous rejection of all others that are dissonant in mood, and an arrangement of those selected with a view to exhibiting their common quality as the pervading spirit of the scene.

This is obviously the technical basis for the "atmosphere" of a purely imaginary setting like that of the melancholy House of Usher. The effect is undeniably produced by the suppression of all details that do not contribute to the central sense of gloom. But the same device underlies (less obviously, to be sure) all such descriptions of actual places as are rich in "atmosphere." What is called "local color"-the very look and tone of a definite locality-is produced not by photographic multiplicity of details, but by a marshalling of materials carefully selected to suggest the central spirit of the place to be depicted. The camera frequently defeats itself by flinging into emphasis details that are dissonant with the informing spirit of the scene it seeks to reproduce: so also does the author who overcrowds his picture with multifarious details, however faithful they may be to fact. The true triumphs of "local coloring" have been made by men who have struck at the heart and spirit of a place -have caught its tone and timbre as George Du Maurier

did with the Quartier Latin-and have set forth only such details as tingled with this spiritual tone.

Recapitulation.-We have studied the many uses of the element of setting, and have seen that in the bestdeveloped fiction it has grown to be entirely coördinate with the elements of character and action. Novelists

have come to consider that any given story can happen only in a given set of circumstances, and that if the setting be changed the action must be altered and the characters be differently drawn. It is therefore impossible, in the best fiction of the present day, to consider the setting as divorced from the other elements of the narrative. There was a time, to be sure, when description for its own sake existed in the novel, and the action was halted to permit the introduction of pictorial passages bearing no necessary relation to the business of the story, "blocks" of setting, as it were, which might be removed without detriment to the progression of the narrative. But the practice of the best contemporary novelists is summed up and expressed by Henry James in this emphatic sentence from his essay on "The Art of Fiction":

"I cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks, nor conceive, in any novel worth discussing at all, of a passage of description that is not in its intention narrative."

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Explain and illustrate the three historic stages in the evolution of the element of setting.

2. What did Ruskin mean by "the pathetic fallacy"? 3. What are the modern uses of the element of setting? 4. Explain the process of attaining atmosphere, or local color.

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

SUGGESTED READING

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: "A Gossip on Romance." BLISS PERRY: "A Study of Prose Fiction"-Chapter VII, on "The Setting.'

Read at greater length those passages of famous fiction from which have been selected the illustrative quotations cited in this chapter.

CHAPTER VII

THE POINT OF VIEW IN NARRATIVE

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

The Importance of the Point of View.-We have now examined in detail the elements of narrative, and must next consider the various points of view from which they may be seen and, in consequence, be represented. Granted a given series of events to be set forth, the structure of the plot, the means of character delineation, the use of setting, the entire tone and tenor of the narrative, are all dependent directly on the answer to the question, Who shall tell the story?

For a given train of incidents is differently seen and judged, according to the standpoint from which it is observed. The evidence in most important murder trials consists mainly of successive narratives told by different witnesses; and it is very interesting to notice, in comparing them, how very different a tone and tenor is given to the same event by each of the observers who recounts it. It remains for the jury to determine, if possible, from a comparison of the various views of the various witnesses, what it was that actually happened. But this, in many

cases, is extremely difficult. One witness saw the action in one way, another in another; one formed a certain judgment of the character of the accused, another formed a judgment diametrically different; each has his separate sense of the train of causation that culminated in the act; the accused himself would disagree with all the witnesses. if indeed he were capable of looking on the facts without conscious or unconscious self-deception; and we may be certain that an infallible omniscient mind, cognizant of all the hidden motives, would see the matter differently still. The task of the jury is, in the main, to induce from all these tragic inconsistencies an absolute outlook upon the real truth that underlies the facts so differently seen and so variously judged.

Such an absolute outlook is hardly possible to the finite mind of man; and though it is often assumed by the writer of fiction in the telling of his tale, it can seldom be consistently maintained. (It is therefore safer to acknowledge that the absolute truth of a story, whether actual or fictitious, can never be entirely told; that the same train of incidents looks different from different points of view; and that therefore the various points of view from which any story may be looked upon should be studied carefully for the purpose of determining from which of them it is possible, in a given case, to approach most nearly a clear vision of the truth.

Two Classes, The Internal and the External. The points of view from which a story may be seen and told are many and various; but they may all be grouped into two classes, the internal and the external. A story seen internally is narrated in the first person by one of its participants; a story seen externally is narrated in the third person by a mind aloof from the events depicted. There are, of course, many variations, both of the internal and of the external point of view. These in turn must be

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