SETTING
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 mosaicists, 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.
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.
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 most 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-Francois 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.
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 centered 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.
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.
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
theater; 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.
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.
A new and very interesting attitude toward landscape setting was
disclosed by Rousseau in the "Nouvelle Heloise" 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 colored 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 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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. Mr. 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.
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
appeared in the _Century Magazine_ for August, 1905, 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.
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
marshaling of the weather, always vividly and truthfully described, to
serve a purpose always fitting to his fictions.
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 "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.
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.
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.
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 somberness and gloom in the one case, and the quality of
Sabbath quietude in the other--and that they have been marshaled 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 marshaling 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.
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
co-ordinate 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 Mr. 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."