down to speak to Patty again about the pork — Jane was standing in the passage were not you, Jane? - for my mother was so afraid that we had not any salting-pan large enough. So I said, I would go down and see, and Jane said, Shall I go down instead? for I think you have a little cold, and Patty has been washing the kitchen.". "Oh, my dear," said I — well, and just then came the note.'" 1 2. The most palpable illustration of masterly skill in making the end absolutely control the course and proportion of the story is seen in the anecdotes of the professional raconteur, who may be regarded as representing the art of story-telling in its prime essentials. His stories are frankly told, not for the story's sake, but for the sake of some point or sentiment in which their whole significance is focalized; and to this point he subordinates everything, passing over preliminaries with a rapid touch, cutting out everything that is not indispensable to the main interest, using description with utmost parsimony; so that the end for which the story exists strikes the hearers with all possible clearness and directness.2 66 EXAMPLE. The following anecdote is told to illustrate the truth that through the physical horrors of warfare, Poetry discerns the redeeming nobleness." Notice by the parsimony of introduction and description, by the steady forward movement, and by the way descriptive explanations are introduced piecemeal and just where needed, how subservient everything is to the foreseen end. "A detachment of troops was marching along a valley, the cliffs overhanging which were crested by the enemy. A serjeant, with eleven men, chanced to become separated from the rest by taking the wrong side of a ravine, which they expected soon to terminate, but which suddenly deepened into an impassable chasm. The officer in command signalled to the party an order to return. They mistook the signal for a command to charge; the brave fellows answered with a cheer, and charged. At the summit of a steep mountain was a triangular platform, defended by a breastwork, behind which were seventy of the foe. On they went, charging up one of those fearful paths, eleven against seventy. The contest 1 JANE AUSTEN, Emma, Chap. xxi. 2 For anecdotes told compendiously as a means of amplification, see above, p. 470. could not long be doubtful with such odds. One after another they fell; six upon the spot, the remainder hurled backward; but not until they had slain nearly twice their own number. "There is a custom, we are told, among the hillsmen, that when a great chieftain of their own falls in battle, his wrist is bound with a thread either of red or green, the red denoting the highest rank. According to custom, they stripped the dead, and threw their bodies over the precipice. When their comrades came, they found their corpses stark and gashed; but round both wrists of every British hero was twined the red thread!" 1 When, however, we speak of the end of a story, we may have two different things in mind; or, as may be otherwise expressed, a twofold interest: the interest of workmanship or plot, and the interest of purpose or motive. In every seriously meant story these two distinct ends exist, both equally essential to its integrity. 2. The Constructive End, or Dénouement. -The forecast of this end, with the steps necessary to bring it about, is the artistic interest of the story, the interest derived from a skilful piece of invention. Quite apart from the characters revealed, or the scenery and atmosphere described, or the moral sentiment enforced, the reader is aware first of all of a chain of incident and event which supports and conducts all the other elements of the story, and in which its artistry is concentred. This is called the plot. It is to the story what plan is to an essay. It requires steady movement to an end, or dénouement, yet through enough intricacy of incident and motive to maintain interest in the novelty of its situations and to give an unexpected turn to its final solution. NOTE. As a piece of invention a plot must strike a just balance between novelty and verisimilitude: on the one hand, it must be new and strange enough to enliven interest, not offending by dulness or commonplace; on the other, it must assume itself to be real,2 and produce the effect 1 An incident of Sir Charles Napier's campaign against the robber tribes of Upper Scinde, cited in ROBERTSON, Lectures and Addresses, p. 804. 2 "It is impossible to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regard himself as an historian and his narrative as a history. It is only as an of what might reasonably take place, not offending by an assumption of fiction or by an ingenuity so great as to seem arbitrary. As soon as the strings and levers by which the mechanism is worked become visible, the illusion is lost and the real art goes with it; as soon as the interest of plot becomes the sole interest, we are reading a puzzle, not a living story. 3. The Didactic End, or Purpose. What raises the plot above the character of a mere puzzle or ingenious contrivance is the fact that a seriously meant story exists in order to embody a truth; it has an end important enough to justify all the preparation made to reach it, and to survive the reading as a lesson of life. Despite the popular clamor against stories with a moral purpose, this is the unspoken demand of every reader; we are impatient of a story that merely uses up time and leaves no impression of wisdom or moral vigor.1 The failure to conduct the action to a worthy culmination is what Horace satirizes in his well-known lines: “Quid dignum tanto feret hic promissor hiatu ? It is not, in fact, against the existence of a purpose that the popular criticism is directed; rather against its obtrusiveness and insistency, as if the story were conceived as a sermon or a moral apologue. The didactic end must be so inwrought with the story — never absent, never asserting itself— that it will be received as a matter of course. It is by some called the "soul of the story"; by others the conception. It is to historian that he has the smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere; to insert into his attempt a back-bone of logic, he must relate events that are assumed to be real. This assumption permeates, animates all the work of the most solid story-tellers." - JAMES, Partial Portraits, p. 116. This is said in the course of a criticism on Anthony Trollope, who, as the critic says, "took a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-believe." 1 "Some central truth should be embodied in every work of fiction, which cannot indeed be compressed into a definite formula, but which acts as the animating and informing principle, determining the main lines of the structure and affecting even its most trivial details.” — STEPHEN, Hours in a Library, Vol. i, p. 204 (first edition). 2 HORACE, Epistola ad Pisones de Arte Poetica, 1, 138. the story what the theme is to an essay1: an influence to give character, worth, dignity to every part. By its working presence the story is motived, that is, kept to a justifying level of conception, and closed to elements that have no sufficient basis in human nature or that offend refined instincts. It is in this pervading sense that the story is shaped to a didactic end.2 EXAMPLES. - Hawthorne's avowed purpose in The House of the Seven Gables is to teach the truth "that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief." The footnote below, however, will indicate how he makes the purpose pervasive rather than outstanding. See also the examples of narrative themes on p. 427, above. Instances of stories with purpose strongly emphasized though not quite impairing the artistic structure, are found in Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona. In some of the novels of Dickens and Charles Reade the moral purpose is so prominent as to incur the reproach of being lugged in; as instanced in Bleak House, which attacks the defects of the English Chancery courts, and Little Dorrit, which in a similar way attacks the English red-tape system in matters of government and justice. 4. Preliminary Ends, or Situations. -The final end, or dénouement, is not the only solution point toward which the course of a story tends. Generally some more immediate goal is in view, some dramatic point or, as it is called, situation, which for the time being serves as a landmark of progress. Thus the story advances not equably but by stages, and never on a dead level; there is always to be fostered in the reader's mind 1 See above, p. 426. 2" When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod, - or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly, thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first." HAWTHORNE, The House of the Seven Gables, Preface, p. 14. a sense either of a crest of event reached or of approach to something important. This shows itself, as will be pointed out in the next section, in the character of the movement, which, with greater or less intensity, is always aware of some end, principal or preliminary. NOTE. How much both of the artistic skill and of the moral significance of a story may reside in a cardinal situation may be judged from the following remark on a situation in George Eliot's Middlemarch: “The great act of Dorothea in paying her visit to Rosamond to counsel and comfort her, and to save Lydgate, at the very moment when her own life seemed to have been left to her desolate - I confess that it affects me as a stroke of pathos hardly less than sublime. This is the true climax of the interest of the novel. And it is worth noting that the climax is a moral climax." 1 II. The Narrative Movement. If the aim of the story, always present and operative, is to bring about some end, supreme or subordinate, the course of the story must always be vital with action, or anticipation, or preparation, shaping itself to the solution that is impending. All is a concatenation, an interlinking, with this outcome in view. This character of the narrative is called its movement; and some of its main features may here be noted. 1. Continuity of Movement.. The narrative movement is especially exacting with regard to the succession of details: its parts must be a palpable and regularly advancing series from beginning to end. In general, therefore, that order is to be observed in which each earlier particular will best prepare for and lead to what succeeds. 1. The most natural way to secure this, the intrinsic order, so to say, of narration, is the chronological - the order of time. Whatever liberty is taken with this order in minor points, this must be the general progress recalled by the reader, as he endeavors to recollect the whole. 1 WILKINSON, A Free Lance in the Field of Life and Letters, p. 33. |