CHAPTER XV.

NARRATION.

Of men's natural impulse, mentioned at the beginning of the last chapter, to report what they observe in the world around them, narration, the report of action, is by far the most prolific outcome. Its congenial subject makes it the most spontaneous of literary types. When we inquire what ordinary men, men of the street and of common life, are interested in and talk about, we find it invariably something involving action and its result, a race, a contest, a feat of bodily prowess, a casualty. When we ask what men are readiest to relate about themselves, we find it to be something that they have lived through, and that has become an event in their experience. Thus wellnigh everything in life comes to expression in story; and the story, narrative, is the form of literature that comes nearest to making itself.1

It will not do to conclude from this, however, that narrative is the easiest to make or the least artistic when made. Very nearly the opposite is the truth. Of all the literary types narration demands perhaps the most finely adjusted art; but because the chief capability for it is supplied by natural invention, the art, while not less exacting, gets itself into form by

2

1" Our very speech is curiously historical. Most men, you may observe, speak only to narrate; not in imparting what they have thought, which indeed were often a very small matter, but in exhibiting what they have undergone or seen, which is a quite unlimited one, do talkers dilate. Cut us off from Narrative, how would the stream of conversation, even among the wisest, languish into detached handfuls, and among the foolish utterly evaporate! Thus, as we do nothing but enact History, we say little but recite it." - CARLYLE, On History, Essays, Vol. ii, p. 84.

2 See above, p. 390.

a kind of native instinct discovering its own laws of working. More must be allowed to nature in proportion as more is involved in art. The principles here traced, therefore, must, to an extent beyond the ordinary, wait upon those who are fit to apply them.

Definition of Narration. Narration is the recounting, in succession, of the particulars that together make up a transaction.

A brief analysis of this definition will reveal some of the special aims in making a narrative.

1. The word transaction, which designates the subject-matter of narration, implies not a mere agglomeration of particulars but a series, rounded and self-contained, with a character as a whole in which all the particulars share; nor does this series merely go on and stop but rather is shaped to a culmination in which the whole trend of significance comes to light and solution.

2. By the particulars that make up the transaction are meant not any and all the things that take place, but merely such as have affinities with each other in working toward the end in view. This implies rigid selection, and careful weighing of what are retained; it implies also that no particular exists for itself alone, but merely as part of a larger event.

3. These particulars are related in succession; that is to say, they have a movement, one growing out of another and preparing for a third, and all together making a chain which in its large result is remembered in the order of time. This gives the effect of the simplest associative law of thought, contiguity1; but the masterliness of its art consists largely in giving the particulars a closer interrelation of similarity, of cause and effect without seeming to do so; so that a succession apparently casual and artless becomes really a finely adjusted order of events.

1 See above, p. 443.

I. THE ART OF NARRATION.

The procedure in narrative is essentially the same whether the transaction to be narrated is real or fictitious. If real, it is still to be related with skilful progression and proportion of parts; if fictitious, it is still to have verisimilitude, as if it were real. And in either case the story, as a story, is an invention, an art-product; it is to follow the lines of construction that obtain in fiction, with such selection and proportioning, even of fact, as will give the result all the freedom and fulness of an absolute creation.1

As a built composition, the quality to which narration manifests special allegiance is continuity. Its events so obviously rise out of each other that no emphasis of a skeleton plan is needed; its particulars are so homogeneous that the theme which they support is revealed not as an affirmation but as an unfolded progress.2 Narration is thus ideally the type of finished order in thinking toward which every good thought

1 "The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, whether it is applied to the selection and illustration of a real series of events or of an imaginary series. Boswell's Life of Johnson (a work of cunning and inimitable art) owes its success to the same technical manœuvres as (let us say) Tom Jones: the clear conception of certain characters of man, the choice and presentation of certain incidents out of a great number that offered, and the invention (yes invention) and preservation of a certain key in dialogue."-STEVENSON, A Humble Remonstrance, Works, Vol. xiii, p. 346. Of Macaulay's narrative method it is said: "No historian before him ever regarded his task from the same point of view, or aimed with such calm patience and labor at the same result; no one, in short, had ever so resolved to treat real events on the lines of the novel or romance. Many writers before Macaulay had done their best to be graphic and picturesque, but none ever saw that the scattered fragments of truth could, by incessant toil directed by an artistic eye, be worked into a mosaic, which for color, freedom, and finish, might rival the creations of fancy." MORISON, Macaulay (English Men of Letters), p. 143.

1

2 See above, pp. 426, 436. "The art of narration is the art of writing in hooks and eyes. The principle consists in making the appropriate thought follow the appropriate thought, the proper fact the proper fact; in first preparing the mind for what is to come, and then letting it come. This can only be achieved by keeping continually and insensibly before the mind of the reader some one object, character, or image, whose variations are the events of the story, whose unity is the unity of it."-BAGEHOT, Literary Studies, Vol. ii, p. 253.

sequence tends; its art being so perfect as to conceal its processes, and to seem artless.1

I.

The End: to which all is Related as Forecast. -The prime requisite in narration is that the end be kept in view from the beginning, and that every part be shaped and proportioned with more or less direct reference to it. A culmination of some kind always impends, exerting its attraction on every stage of progress. Thus, in its larger field of invention, narration suggests the analogy of the suspended sentence2; it is suspension, expectancy, on a large scale, and expressed in events. 1. As Influence to subdue Details.

The most practical result of keeping an end in view is, that thereby a criterion of choice and rejection is always present, and the details fall into balance and proportion according as they obey the attraction of the end. From the plan as thus controlled some things naturally fall out as extraneous, some receive rapid or subdued treatment as unimportant, some are put in emphasis as cardinal elements of the composition. Of all these the foreseen end is the silent controller.1

1 Thus best realizing the Manner of Progress laid down for universal observance, P. 439, above. 2 See above, pp. 279, 350.

8" Our art is occupied, and bound to be occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making them typical; not so much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as in marshalling all of them towards a common end. For the welter of impressions, all forcible but all discreet, which life presents, it substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most feebly represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or like the graduated tints in a good picture. From all its chapters, from all its pages, from all its sentences, the well-written novel echoes and re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to this must every incident and character contribute; the style must have been pitched in unison with this; and if there is anywhere a word that looks another way, the book would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller without it."— STEVENSON, A Humble Remonstrance, Works, Vol. xiii, p. 349.

4" Keeping the beginning and the end in view, we set out from the right startingplace and go straight towards the right destination; we introduce no event that

This influence of the end may be illustrated both directly and by contrast.

I. The contrast -failure to keep an end in view - is seen in the narratives of the untutored; to whom it has never occurred that one fact is more important than another; who waste time in fixing some date or circumstance that is of no consequence; who take as much pains with utterly irrelevant details as with essential; who cannot skip anything that occurred without losing their reckoning. All this is mainly because they have not set before them some end, some goal, to which the course of their story is to be steered.1

EXAMPLE. In the following a person of this cast of mind sets out to tell how she had just received a note containing a bit of news: "But where could you hear it?' cried Miss Bates. 'Where could you possibly hear it, Mr. Knightley?

For it is not five minutes since I received Mrs. Cole's note no, it cannot be more than five - or at least ten - for I had got my bonnet and spencer on, just ready to come out — I was only gone

does not spring from the first cause, and tend to the great effect; we make each detail a link joined to the one going before and the one coming after; we make, in fact, all the details into one entire chain, which we can take up as a whole, carry about with us, and retain as long as we please." - PRYDE, Studies in Composition, p. 26.

...

1"In the narrations of uneducated people . . . there is a want of prospectiveness and a superfluous amount of regressiveness. People of this sort are unable to look a long way in front of them, and they wander from the right path. They get on too fast with one half, and then the other hopelessly lags. They can tell a story exactly as it is told to them, . . . but they can't calculate its bearings beforehand, or see how it is to be adapted to those to whom they are speaking, nor do they know how much they have thoroughly told and how much they have not. 'I went up the street, and then I went down the street; no, first went down and then but you do not follow me; I go before you, sir.' Thence arises the complex style usually adopted by persons not used to narration. They tumble into a story and get on as they can.". HOT, Literary Studies, Vol. i, p. 145.

BAGE

"Those insufferably garrulous old women, those dry and fanciless beings who spare you no detail, however petty, of the facts they are recounting, and upon the thread of whose narrative all the irrelevant items cluster as pertinaciously as the essential ones, the slaves of literal fact, the stumblers over the smallest abrupt step in thought, are figures known to all of us. Comic literature has made her profit out of them. Juliet's nurse is a classical example. George Eliot's village characters and some of Dickens's minor personages supply excellent instances." - JAMEs, Psychology, Vol. i, p. 570.