SETTING
Evolution of Background in the History of Painting--The First
Stage--The Second Stage--The Third Stage--Similar Evolution of
Setting in the History of Fiction: The First Stage--The Second
Stage--The Third Stage: 1. Setting as an Aid to Action--2. Setting as
an Aid to Characterization--Emotional Harmony in Setting--The
Pathetic Fallacy--Emotional Contrast in Setting--Irony in
Setting--Artistic and Philosophical Employment--1. Setting as a Motive
toward Action--2. Setting as an Influence on Character--Setting as
the Hero of the Narrative--Uses of the Weather--Romantic and
Realistic Settings--A Romantic Setting by Edgar Allan Poe--A
Realistic Setting by George Eliot--The Quality of Atmosphere, or
Local Color--Recapitulation.
=Evolution of Background in the History of Painting: The First
Stage.=--In the history of figure painting it is interesting to study
the evolution of the element of background. This element is
non-existent in the earliest examples of pictorial art. The figures in
Pompeiian frescoes are limned upon a blank bright wall, most
frequently deep red in color. The father of Italian painting, Cimabue,
following the custom of the Byzantine mosaïcists, whose work he had
doubtless studied at Ravenna, drew his figures against a background
devoid of distance and perspective and detail; and even in the work of
his greater and more natural pupil, Giotto, the element of background
remains comparatively insignificant. What interests us in Giotto's
work at Padua and Assisi is first of all the story that he has to
tell, and secondly the human quality of the characters that he
exhibits. His sense of setting is extremely slight; and the homely
details that he presents for the purpose of suggesting the time and
place and circumstances of his action are very crudely depicted. His
frescoes are all foreground. It is the figures in the forefront of his
pictures that arrest our eye. His buildings and his landscapes are
conventionalized out of any real reference to his people. These are
examples of the first stage of evolution--the stage in which the
element of background bears no significant relation to the main
business of the picture.
=The Second Stage.=--In the second stage, the background is brought
into an artistic, or decorative, relation with the figures in the
foreground. This phase is exhibited by Italian painting at its period
of maturity. The great Florentines drew their figures against a
background of decorative line, the great Venetians against a
background of decorative color. But even in the work of the greatest
of them the background exists usually to fulfil a purpose merely
decorative, a purpose with immediate reference to art but without
immediate reference to life. There is no real reason, with reference
to life itself, why the "Mona Lisa" of Leonardo should smile
inscrutably upon us before a background of jagged rocks and cloudy
sky; and the curtains in Raphael's "Sistine Madonna" are introduced
merely as a detail of composition, and are not intended as a literal
statement that curtains hung upon a rod exist in heaven.
=The Third Stage.=--In the third stage, which is exhibited by later
painting, the background is brought into living relation with the
figures of the foreground,--a relation suggested not merely by the
exigencies of art but rather by the conditions of life itself. Thus
the great Dutch _genre_ painters, like the younger Teniers, show their
characters in immediate human relation to a carefully detailed
interior; or if, like Adrian van Ostade, they take them out of doors,
it is to show them entirely at home in an accustomed landscape.
This stage, in its modern development, exhibits an absolutely
essential relation between the foreground and the background--the
figures and the setting--so that neither could be imagined exactly as
it is without the presence of the other. Such an essential harmony is
shown in the "Angelus" of Jean-François Millet. The people exist for
the sake of giving meaning to the landscape; and the landscape exists
for the sake of giving meaning to the people. The "Angelus" is neither
figure painting nor landscape painting merely; it is both.
=Similar Evolution of Setting in the History of Fiction: The First
Stage.=--In the history of fiction we may note a similar evolution in
the element of setting. The earliest folk-tales of every nation happen
"once upon a time," and without any definite localization. In the
"Gesta Romanorum," that medieval repository of accumulated narratives,
the element of setting is nearly as non-existent as the element of
background in the frescoes of Pompeii. Even in the "Decameron" of
Boccaccio the stories are seldom localized: they happen almost
anywhere at almost any time. The interest in Boccaccio's narrative,
like the interest in Giotto's painting, is centred first of all in the
element of action, and secondly in the element of character. But his
stories are all foreground. When the scene is out of doors, it is set
vaguely in a conventional landscape: when it is indoors, it is set
vaguely in a conventional palace. Because of this, his narrative is
lacking in visual appeal. Most of his _novelle_ read like summaries of
novels,--setting forth an abstract synopsis of the action rather than
a concrete representation of it. He _tells_ you what happens, instead
of _making_ it happen before the eye of your imagination. His
characters are drawn in outline merely, instead of being livingly
projected in relation to a definite environment. The defect of his
narrative, like the defect of Giotto's painting, is mainly lack of
background.
=The Second Stage.=--Somewhat later in the history of fiction, as in
the history of figure painting, we find instances in which the element
of setting is used for a decorative purpose, and is brought into an
artistic relation with the elements of action and character. Such a
use is made of landscape, for example, in the "Orlando Furioso" of
Ariosto and the "Faerie Queene" of Spenser. The settings depicted by
these narrative poets are essentially pictorial, and are used as a
decorative background to the action rather than as part and parcel of
it. If we seek an example in prose rather than in poetry, we need only
turn to the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney. In this again the setting
is beautifully fashioned, but is employed merely for a decorative
purpose. The background of pastoral landscape bears no necessary
relation to the figures in the foreground. It exists for the sake of
art rather than for the sake of life. This employment of the element
of setting for a purpose essentially pictorial subsists in many later
works of fiction, like the "Paul and Virginia" of Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre. In this the setting is composed and painted for the sake
of its own sentimental beauty, and is obtruded even at the expense of
the more vital elements of character and action. The story is, as it
were, merely a motive for decorative composition.
=The Third Stage: 1. Setting as an Aid to Action.=--It is only in
fiction of a more modern spirit that the element of setting has been
brought into living relation with the action and the characters; and
it is only in the last century that the most intimate possibilities
of such a relation have been appreciated and applied. Of course the
most elementary means of making the setting "part and parcel of the
business of the story" is to employ it as a utilitarian adjunct to
the action. Granted certain incidents that are to happen, certain
scenery and properties are useful, in the novel just as in the
theatre; and if these are supplied advisedly, the setting will, as
it were, become a part of what is happening instead of remaining
merely a decorative background to the incidents. The first English
author to establish firmly this utilitarian relation between the
setting and the action was Daniel Defoe. Defoe was by profession a
journalist; and the most characteristic quality of his mind was an
habitual matter-of-factness. Plausibility was what he most desired
in his fictions; and he discerned instinctively that the readiest
means of making a story plausible was by representing with entire
concreteness and great wealth of specific detail the physical
adjuncts to the action. The multitudinous particulars of Crusoe's
island are therefore exhibited concretely to the reader one by one,
as Crusoe makes use of them successively in what he does.
=2. Setting as an Aid to Characterization.=--But though in Defoe the
element of setting is merged with the element of action, it is not
brought into intimate relation with the element of character. The
island is a part of what Crusoe does, rather than a part of what he
is. But the dwelling-room of the Boffins, which was described in the
paragraph from "Our Mutual Friend" quoted toward the end of the
preceding chapter, is a part of what the Boffins are, rather than of
what they do. The setting in the latter case is used as an adjunct to
the element of character instead of to the element of action. Fielding
and his contemporaries were the first English novelists to make the
setting in this way representative of personality as well as useful to
the plot; but the finer possibilities of the relation between setting
and character were not fully realized until the nineteenth century.
The eighteenth-century authors, in so far as they elaborated the
element of setting, seem to have done so mainly for the sake of
greater vividness. The appeal of setting being visual, the element was
employed to illustrate the action and to make the characters clearly
evident to the eye. By rendering a story more concrete, a definite
setting rendered it more credible. This the eighteenth-century
novelists discerned; but only with the rise of the romantic movement
was the element applied to subtler uses.
=Emotional Harmony in Setting.=--A new and very interesting
attitude toward landscape setting was disclosed by Rousseau in the
"Nouvelle Héloise" and developed by his numerous followers in early
nineteenth-century romance. The writers who advocated a "return to
nature" spelled nature with a capital N and considered it usually
as an anthropomorphic presence. As a result of this, when they
developed a natural background for their stories, they established a
sympathetic interchange of mood between the characters and the
landscape, and imagined (to use the famous phrase of Leibnitz) a
"pre-established harmony" between the shifting moods of nature and
of man. Thus the setting was employed no longer merely to subserve
the needs of action or to give a greater vividness of visual appeal,
but was used rather to symbolize and represent the human emotions
evoked in the characters at significant moments of the plot. When
the hero was suffering with sadness, the sky was hung with heavy
clouds; and when his mind grew illumined with a glimmering of hope,
the sun broke through a cloud-rift, casting light over the land.
Dickens is especially fond of imagining an emotional harmony between
his settings and his incidents. Consider for a moment the following
well-known passage from the funeral of Little Nell ("The Old Curiosity
Shop," Chapter LXXII):--
"Along the crowded path they bore her now; pure as the newly-fallen
snow that covered it; whose day on earth had been as fleeting. Under
the porch, where she had sat when Heaven in its mercy brought her to
that peaceful spot, she passed again; and the old church received her
in its quiet shade.
"They carried her to one old nook, where she had many and many a time
sat musing, and laid their burden softly on the pavement. The light
streamed on it through the coloured window--a window where the boughs
of trees were ever rustling in the summer, and where the birds sang
sweetly all day long. With every breath of air that stirred among
those branches in the sunshine, some trembling, changing light would
fall upon her grave....
"They saw the vault covered, and the stone fixed down. Then, when the
dusk of evening had come on, and not a sound disturbed the sacred
stillness of the place--when the bright moon poured in her light on
tomb and monument, on pillar, wall, and arch, and most of all (it
seemed to them) upon her quiet grave--in that calm time, when outward
things and inward thoughts teem with assurances of immortality, and
worldly hopes and fears are humbled in the dust before them--then,
with tranquil and submissive hearts, they turned away, and left the
child to God."
Here the mood of the scene is expressed almost entirely through the
element of setting; and the human emotion of the mourners is realized
and represented by the aspect of the churchyard.
=The Pathetic Fallacy.=--The excessive use of this expedient is
deplored by John Ruskin in a chapter of "Modern Painters" entitled
"The Pathetic Fallacy." His point is that, since concrete objects do
not actually experience human emotions, it is a violation of
artistic truth to ascribe such emotions to them. But, on the other
hand, it is indubitably true that human beings habitually translate
their own abstract feelings into the concrete terms of their
surroundings; and therefore, in a subjective sense at least, an
emotional harmony frequently does exist between the mood of a man
and the aspect of his environment. The same place may at the same
time look gloomy to a melancholy man and cheerful to a merry one;
and there is therefore a certain human fitness in describing it as
gloomy or as cheerful, according to the feeling of the character
observing it. Doubtless to a man tremendously bereaved the very rain
may seem a weeping of high heaven; and surely there are times when
it is deeply true, subjectively, to say that the morning stars all
sing together. What we may call emotional similarity of setting is
therefore not necessarily a fallacy. Even when it subverts the
actual, as in the fable of the morning stars, it may yet be
representative of reality. In its commoner and less exaggerative
phases it is very useful for purposes of suggestion; and only when
it becomes blatant through abuse may it be said to belie the laws of
life.
=Emotional Contrast in Setting.=--Frequently, however, emotional
similarity between the setting and the characters is less serviceable,
for the sake of emphasis, than emotional contrast. In the following
passage from Mr. Kipling's "Without Benefit of Clergy," the serene and
perfect happiness of Holden and Ameera is emphasized by contrast with
the night-aspect of the plague-infested city:--
"'My lord and my love, let there be no more foolish talk of going
away. Where thou art, I am. It is enough.' She put an arm round his
neck and a hand on his mouth.
"There are not many happinesses so complete as those that are snatched
under the shadow of the sword. They sat together and laughed, calling
each other openly by every pet name that could move the wrath of the
gods. The city below them was locked up in its own torments. Sulphur
fires blazed in the streets; the conches in the Hindu temples screamed
and bellowed, for the gods were inattentive in those days. There was a
service in the great Mahomedan shrine, and the call to prayer from the
minarets was almost unceasing. They heard the wailing in the houses of
the dead, and once the shriek of a mother who had lost a child and was
calling for its return. In the gray dawn they saw the dead borne out
through the city gates, each litter with its own little knot of
mourners. Wherefore they kissed each other and shivered."
=Irony in Setting.=--An emotional contrast of this nature between the
mood of the characters and the mood of the setting may be pushed to
the point of irony. In a story by Alphonse Daudet, entitled "The
Elixir of the Reverend Father Gaucher," a certain monastery is saved
from financial ruin by the sale of a cordial which Father Gaucher has
invented and distilled. But the necessity of sampling the cordial
frequently during the process of manufacturing it leads the reverend
father eventually to become an habitual drunkard. And toward the end
of the story an ironic contrast is drawn between the solemn monastery,
murmurous with chants and prayers, and Father Gaucher in his
distillery hilariously singing a ribald drinking-song.
=Artistic and Philosophical Employment.=--The uses of setting that
have been thus far considered have been artistic rather than
philosophical in nature; but very recent writers have grown to use the
element not only for the sake of illustrating character and action but
also for the sake of determining them. The sociologists of the
nineteenth century have come to regard circumstance as a prime motive
for action, and environment as a prime influence on character; and
recent writers have applied this philosophic thesis in their
employment of the element of setting.
=1. Setting as a Motive Toward Action.=--The way in which the setting
may suggest the action is thus discoursed upon by Stevenson in his
"Gossip on Romance":--
"Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.
The pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts--the active and the
passive. Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny;
anon we are lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking wave, and
dashed we know not how into the future. Now we are pleased by our
conduct, anon merely pleased by our surroundings. It would be hard to
say which of these modes of satisfaction is the more effective, but
the latter is surely the more constant....
"One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and
places. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sit
there. One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early rising
and long rambles in the dew. The effect of night, of any flowing
water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open
ocean, calls up in the mind an army of anonymous desires and
pleasures. Something, we feel, should happen; we know not what, yet we
proceed in quest of it. And many of the happiest hours of life fleet
by us in this vain attendance on the genius of the place and moment.
It is thus that tracts of young fir, and low rocks that reach into
deep soundings, particularly torture and delight me. Something must
have happened in such places, and perhaps ages back, to members of my
race; and when I was a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate
games for them, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit them with the
proper story. Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry
aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain
coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide
their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, 'miching mallecho.' The
inn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green garden and silent,
eddying river--though it is known already as the place where Keats
wrote some of his "Endymion" and Nelson parted from his Emma--still
seems to wait the coming of the appropriate legend. Within these ivied
walls, behind these old green shutters, some further business
smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old Hawes Inn at the Queen's
Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy. There it stands, apart from
the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half
marine--in front, the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship
swinging to her anchor; behind, the old garden with the trees.
Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined
there at the beginning of the "Antiquary." But you need not tell
me--that is not all; there is some story, unrecorded or not yet
complete, which must express the meaning of that inn more fully.... I
have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on
the heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that should justify the
place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night and called me
again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and suspense,
nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour had not
yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen's
Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a horseman, on
a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green shutters of the
inn at Burford."
In this way, the setting may, in many cases, exist as the initial
element of the narrative, and suggest an action appropriate to itself.
But it may do more than that. In certain special instances the setting
may not only suggest, but may even cause, the action, and remain the
deciding factor in determining its course. This is the case, for
example, in Mr. Kipling's story, "At the End of the Passage," which
opens thus:--
"Four men, each entitled to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness,' sat at a table playing whist. The thermometer marked--for
them--one hundred and one degrees of heat. The room was darkened till
it was only just possible to distinguish the pips of the cards and the
very white faces of the players. A tattered, rotten punkah of
whitewashed calico was puddling the hot air and whining dolefully at
each stroke. Outside lay gloom of a November day in London. There was
neither sky, sun, nor horizon--nothing but a brown purple haze of
heat. It was as though the earth were dying of apoplexy.
"From time to time clouds of tawny dust rose from the ground without
wind or warning, flung themselves tablecloth-wise among the tops of
the parched trees, and came down again. Then a whirling dust-devil
would scutter across the plain for a couple of miles, break, and fall
outward, though there was nothing to check its flight save a long low
line of piled railway-sleepers white with the dust, a cluster of huts
made of mud, condemned rails, and canvas, and the one squat
four-roomed bungalow that belonged to the assistant engineer in charge
of a section of the Gaudhari State Line then under construction."
The terrible tale that follows could happen only as a result of the
fearful loneliness and, more especially, the maddening heat of such a
place as is described in these opening paragraphs. The setting in this
story causes and determines the action.
=2. Setting as an Influence on Character.=--But in many other tales by
recent writers the setting is used not so much to determine the action
as to influence and mold the characters; and when employed for this
purpose, it becomes expressive of one of the most momentous truths of
human life. For what a man _is_ at any period of his existence is
largely the result of the interaction of two forces,--namely, the
innate tendencies of his nature and the shaping power of his
environment. George Meredith, and more especially Mr. Thomas Hardy,
therefore devote a great deal of attention to setting as an influence
on character. Consider, for example, the following brief passage from
Mr. Hardy's "Tess of the D'Ubervilles":--
"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 impregnated
by their surroundings."
Zola, in his essay on "The Experimental Novel," states that the proper
function of setting is to exhibit "the environment which determines
and completes the man"; and the philosophic study of environment
reacting upon character is one of the main features of his own
monumental series of novels devoted to the Rougon-Macquart family. His
example has been followed by a host of recent writers; and a new
school of fiction has grown up, the main purpose of which is to
exhibit the influence of certain carefully studied social, natural,
business, or professional conditions on the sort of people who live
and work among them.
This incentive has been developed to manifest advantage in America by
such novelists as Mrs. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mr. George W. Cable,
Mr. Hamlin Garland, Mrs. Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, Jack London, Mr.
Booth Tarkington, and Mr. Stewart Edward White. Each of these
authors--and many others might be mentioned--has attained a special
sort of eminence by studying minutely the effect upon impressionable
characters of a particular environment. The manifold diversity of life
in the many different districts of the United States affords our
fiction-writers a predestined opportunity to endeavor to make the
nation acquainted with itself.
=Setting as the Hero of the Narrative.=--If the setting be used both
to determine the action and to mold the characters, it may stand forth
as the most important of the three elements of narrative. In Victor
Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris," the cathedral is the leading factor of
the story. Claude Frollo would be a very different person if it were
not for the church; and many of the main events, such as the ultimate
tragic scene when Quasimodo hurls Frollo from the tower-top, could not
happen in any other place. In Mr. Kipling's very subtle story entitled
"An Habitation Enforced," which is included in his "Actions and
Reactions," the setting is really the hero of the narrative. An
American millionaire and his wife, whose ancestors were English,
settle for a brief vacation in the county of England from which the
wife's family originally came. Gradually the old house and the English
landscape take hold of them; ancestral feelings rise to dominate them;
and they remain forever after in enforced habitation on the ancient
soil.
=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
illustrate 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 entitled "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 craftsmanship
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 investiture 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 "Salammbô," what the authors have mainly
striven for has been accuracy of detail; but in romantic historical
novels, like those of Scott and Dumas père, 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 passing 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
lustre 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
passage from "Adam Bede" (Chapter XVIII):--
"You might have known it was Sunday if you had only waked up in the
farmyard. The cocks 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 sunshine
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 passage, 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 passages
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 passages, 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 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.