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Part 8 (1/2)

A Manual of the Art of Fiction Clayton Meeker Hamilton 107720K 2022-07-22

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=Uses of the Weather.=--All that has been said thus far of setting in general applies of course to one of the most interesting of its elements,--the weather. In simple stories like the usual nursery tale, the weather may be non-existent. Or it may exist mainly for a decorative purpose, like the frequent golden oriental dawns of Spenser's poem or the superb and colorful symphonies of sky and sea in Pierre Loti's ”Iceland Fisherman.” It may be used as a utilitarian adjunct to the action: at the end of ”The Mill on the Floss,” as we have already noted, the rains descend and the flood comes merely for the purpose of drowning Tom and Maggie. Or it may be employed to ill.u.s.trate a character: we are told of Clara Middleton, in ”The Egoist,” that she possesses the ”art of dressing to suit the season and the sky”; and therefore the look of the atmosphere at any hour helps to convey to us a sense of her appearance. Somewhat more artistically, the weather may be planned in pre-established harmony with the mood of the characters: this expedient is wonderfully used in the wild and wind-swept tales of Fiona MacLeod. On the other hand, the weather may stand in emotional contrast with the characters: the Master of Ballantrae and Mr. Henry fight their duel on a night of absolute stillness and stifling cold. Again, the weather may be used to determine the action: in Mr. Kipling's early story called ”False Dawn,” the blinding sandstorm causes Saumarez to propose to the wrong girl. Or it may be employed as a controlling influence over character: the tremendous storm toward the end of ”Richard Feverel,” in the chapter ent.i.tled ”Nature Speaks,” determines the return of the hero to his wife. In some cases, even, the weather itself may be the real hero of the narrative: the great eruption of Vesuvius in ”The Last Days of Pompeii” dominates the termination of the story.

Although the weather is a subject upon everybody's tongue, there are very few people who are capable of talking about it with intelligence and art. Very few writers of fiction--and nearly all of them are recent--have exhibited a mastery of the weather,--a mastery based at once upon a detailed and accurate observation of natural phenomena and a philosophic sense of the relation between these phenomena and the concerns of human beings. Perhaps in no other detail of craftsmans.h.i.+p does Robert Louis Stevenson so clearly prove his mastery as in his marshalling of the weather, always vividly and truthfully described, to serve a purpose always fitting to his fictions.

=Romantic and Realistic Settings.=--Let us next consider the main difference between the merits of a good romantic and a good realistic setting. Since the realist leads us to a comprehension of his truth through a careful imitation of the actual, the thing most to be desired in a realistic setting is fidelity to fact; and this can be attained only by accurate observation. But since the romantic is not bound to imitate the actual, and fabricates his invest.i.ture merely for the sake of embodying his truth clearly and consistently, the thing most to be desired in a romantic setting is imaginative fitness to the action and the characters; and this can sometimes be attained by artistic inventiveness alone, without display of observation of the actual. Verisimilitude is of course the highest merit of either sort of setting; but whereas verisimilitude with the realist lies in resemblance to actuality, verisimilitude with the romantic lies rather in artistic fitness. The distinction may perhaps be best observed in the historical novels produced by the one and by the other school. In the setting of realistic historical novels, like George Eliot's ”Romola” and Flaubert's ”Salammbo,” what the authors have mainly striven for has been accuracy of detail; but in romantic historical novels, like those of Scott and Dumas pere, the authors have sought rather for imaginative fitness of setting. The realists have followed the letter, and the romantics the spirit, of other times and lands.

=A Romantic Setting by Edgar Allan Poe.=--As an example of a pure romantic setting, far removed from actuality and yet thoroughly truthful in artistic fitness to the action and the characters, we can do no better than examine the often-quoted opening of Poe's ”Fall of the House of Usher”:--

”During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been pa.s.sing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium: the bitter lapse into every-day life, the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.... It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate, its capacity for sorrowful impression; and acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled l.u.s.tre by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even more thrilling than before--upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.”

Certainly this setting bears very little resemblance to the actual; but just as certainly its artistic fitness to the tale of terror which it preludes gives it an imaginative verisimilitude.

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

”You might have known it was Sunday if you had only waked up in the farmyard. The c.o.c.ks and hens seemed to know it, and made only crooning subdued noises; the very bull-dog looked less savage, as if he would have been satisfied with a smaller bite than usual. The suns.h.i.+ne seemed to call all things to rest and not to labor; it was asleep itself on the moss-grown cow-shed; on the group of white ducks nestling together with their bills tucked under their wings; on the old black sow stretched languidly on the straw, while her largest young one found an excellent spring-bed on his mother's fat ribs; on Alick, the shepherd, in his new smock-frock, taking an uneasy siesta, half-sitting, half-standing on the granary steps.”

There is no obvious imaginative fitness in this pa.s.sage, since in the chapter where it occurs the chief characters are going to a funeral; but it has an extraordinary verisimilitude, owing to the author's accurate observation of the details of life in rural England.

=The Quality of Atmosphere, or Local Color.=--These two pa.s.sages differ very widely from each other. In one thing, and one only, are they alike. Each of them exhibits the subtle quality called ”atmosphere.” This quality is very difficult to define, though its presence may be recognized instinctively in any work of graphic art, like a painting or a description. Without attempting to define it, we may discover the technical basis for its presence if we seek out the sole deliberate device in which these two pa.s.sages, different as they are in every other feature, are at one. It will be noticed that in each of them the details selected for presentation have been chosen solely for the sake of a common quality inherent in them--the quality of sombreness and gloom in the one case, and the quality of Sabbath quietude in the other--and that they have been marshalled to convey a complete sense of this central and pervading quality. It is commonly supposed that what is called ”atmosphere” in a description is dependent upon the setting forth of a multiplicity of details; but this popular conception is a fallacy. ”Atmosphere” is dependent rather upon a strict selection of details pervaded by a common quality, a rigorous rejection of all others that are dissonant in mood, and an arrangement of those selected with a view to exhibiting their common quality as the pervading spirit of the scene.

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

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

Novelists have come to consider that any given story can happen only in a given set of circ.u.mstances, and that if the setting be changed the action must be altered and the characters be differently drawn. It is therefore impossible, in the best fiction of the present day, to consider the setting as divorced from the other elements of the narrative. There was a time, to be sure, when description for its own sake existed in the novel, and the action was halted to permit the introduction of pictorial pa.s.sages bearing no necessary relation to the business of the story,--”blocks” of setting, as it were, which might be removed without detriment to the progression of the narrative. But the practice of the best contemporary novelists is summed up and expressed by Henry James in this emphatic sentence from his essay on ”The Art of Fiction”:--”I cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks, nor conceive, in any novel worth discussing at all, of a pa.s.sage of description that is not in its intention narrative.”

REVIEW QUESTIONS

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

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

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

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

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