of a slattern in the gutter is no more natural than a picture of Rosalind in the Forest of Arden; and no accuracy of imitated actuality can make it more significant of truth.

Abuses of Romance. The romantic, on the other hand, because he works with greater freedom than the realist, may overleap himself and express in a loose fashion general conceptions which are hasty and devoid of truth. To this defect is owing the vast deal of rubbish which has been foisted on us recently by feeble imitators of Scott and Dumas père-imitators who have assumed the trappings and the suits of the accredited masters of romance, but have not inherited their clarity of vision into the inner truth of things that are. To such degenerate romance, Professor Brander Matthews has applied the term "romanticism"; and though his use of the term itself may be considered a little too special for general currency, no exception can be taken to the distinction which he enforces in the following paragraph: "The Romantic calls up the idea of something primary, spontaneous, and perhaps medieval, while the Romanticist suggests something secondary, conscious, and of recent fabrication. Romance, like many another thing of beauty, is very rare; but Romanticism is common enough nowadays. The truly Romantic is difficult to achieve; but the artificial Romanticist is so easy as to be scarce worth the attempting. The Romantic is ever young, ever fresh, ever delightful; but the Romanticist is stale and second-hand and unendurable. Romance is never in danger of growing old, for it deals with the spirit of man without regard to times and seasons; but Romanticism gets out of date with every twist of the kaleidoscope of literary fashion. The Romantic is eternally and essentially true, but the Romanticist is inevitably false. Romance is sterling, but Romanticism is shoddy."

But the Scylla and the Charybdis of fiction-writing may both be avoided. The realists gain nothing by hooting at the abuses of romance; and the romantics gain as little by yawning over realism at its worst. "The conditions"-to use a phase of Emerson's "are hard but equal": and at their best, the realist, working inductively, and the romantic, working deductively, are equally able to present the truth of fiction.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Define the difference between realism and romance. 2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the realistic method?

3. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the romantic method?

4. Which method is more natural to your own mind? 5. Upon what evidence have you based your answer to the foregoing question?

SUGGESTED READING

BLISS PERRY: "A Study of Prose Fiction"-Chapter IX, on "Realism," and Chapter X, on "Romanticism." F. MARION CRAWFORD: "The Novel: What It Is." HENRY JAMES: "The Art of Fiction."

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: Preface to "The House of the Seven Gables."

SIR WALTER BESANT: "The Art of Fiction."

GUY DE MAUPASSANT: Preface to "Pierre et Jean." WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS: "Criticism and Fiction." ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: "The Lantern-Bearers." BRANDER MATTHEWS: "Romance Against Romanticism," in "The Historical Novel."

CHAPTER III

THE NATURE OF NARRATIVE

Transition from Material to Method-The Four Methods of Discourse-1. Argumentation; 2. Exposition; 3. Description; 4. Narration, the Natural Mood of Fiction-Series and Succession -Life Is Chronological, Art Is Logical-The Narrative SenseThe Joy of Telling Tales-The Missing of This Joy-Developing the Sense of Narrative The Meaning of the Word "Event"How to Make Things Happen-The Narrative of Action-The Narrative of Character-Recapitulation

Transition from Material to Method. We have now considered the subject-matter of fiction and also the contrasted attitudes of mind of the two great schools of fiction-writers toward setting forth that subject-matter. We must next turn our attention to the technical methods of presenting the materials of fiction, and notice in detail the most important devices employed by all fiction-writers in order to fulfil the purpose of their art.

The Four Methods of Discourse-1. Argumentation.Rhetoricians, as everybody knows, arbitrarily but conveniently distinguish four forms, or moods, or methods, of discourse: namely, narration, description, exposition, and argumentation. It may be stated without fear of well-founded contradiction that the natural mood, or method, of fiction is the first of these,-narration. Argumentation, for its own sake, has no place in a work of fiction. There is, to be sure, a type of novel, which is generally called in English "the novel with a purpose,' the aim of which is to persuade the reader to accept some special thesis that the author holds concerning politics, religion, social ethics, or some other of the phases of life

that are readily open to discussion. But such a novel usually fails of its purpose if it attempts to accomplish it by employing the technical devices of argument. It can best fulfil its purpose by exhibiting indisputable truths of life, without persuasive comment, ex cathedra, on the part of the novelist. In vain he argues, denounces, or defends, appeals to us or coaxes us, unless his story in the first place convinces by its very truthfulness. If his thesis be as incontestable as the author thinks it is, it can prove itself by narrative alone.

2. Exposition.-Exposition, for its own sake, is also out of place in fiction. The aim of exposition is to explain, -an aim necessarily abstract; but the purpose of fiction is to represent life, a purpose necessarily concrete. To discourse of life in abstract terms is to subvert the natural mood of art; and the novelist may make his meaning just as clear by representing life concretely, without a running commentary of analysis and explanation. Life truly represented will explain itself. There are, to be sure, a number of great novelists, of whom George Eliot may be taken as the type, who frequently halt their story to write an essay about it. These essays are often instructive in themselves, but they are not fiction, because they do not embody their truths in imagined facts of human life. George Eliot is at one moment properly a novelist, and at the next moment a discursive expositor. She would be still greater as a novelist, and a novelist merely, if she could make her meaning clear without digressing to another art.

3. Description.-Description also, in the most artistic fiction, is used only as subsidiary and contributive to narration. The aim of description-which is to suggest the look of things at a certain characteristic momentis an aim necessarily static. But life which the novelist purposes to represent-is not static but dynamic. The

aim of description is pictorial: but life does not hold its pictures; it melts and merges them one into another with headlong hurrying progression. A novelist who devotes two successive pages to the description of a landscape or a person, necessarily makes his story stand still while he is doing it, and thereby belies an obvious law of life. Therefore, as writers of fiction have progressed in art, they have more and more eliminated description for its own sake.

4. Narration, the Natural Mood of Fiction. Since, then, the natural mood, or method, of fiction is narration, it is necessary that we should devote especial study to the nature of narrative. And in a study frankly technical we may be aided at the outset by a definition, which may subsequently be explained in all its bearings.

A narrative is a representation of a series of events. This is a very simple definition; and only two words of it can possibly demand elucidation. These words are series and event. The word event will be explained fully in a later section of this chapter: meanwhile it may be understood loosely as synonymous with happening. Let us first examine the exact meaning of the word series.

Series and Succession.-The word series implies much more than the word succession: it implies a relation not merely chronological but also logical; and the logical relation it implies is that of cause and effect. In any section of actual life which we examine, the events are likely to appear merely in succession and not in series. One event follows another immediately in time, but does not seem linked to it immediately by the law of causation. What you do this morning does not often necessitate as a logical consequence what you do this afternoon; and what you do this evening is not often a logical result of what you have done during the day. Any transcript from actual life that is not