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?

Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus." 2

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, l. 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

The Narrative Movement.

II.

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.

NOTE. The type of narration, then, before any refinement of art and selection is applied to it, is simply annals; setting down events as they occur, as in a diary or chronicle.

2. As, however, the narrative becomes more complex, requiring more art, there is more recognition of the inner connection of events, and accordingly an increasing effort to blend the order of time with the order of dependence.1 Sometimes, too, the order of dependence becomes so significant as temporarily to transgress chronology; so that events separated by a considerable period, being really cause and effect, may be grouped together as belonging to the same series. This is the result of a more vital interpretation of the elements of the story.

NOTE.

This is one of the liberties accorded to the philosophic way of writing history. In Motley's Dutch Republic occurs the remark: "To avoid interrupting the continuity of the narrative, the Spanish campaign has been briefly sketched until the autumn of 1557, at which period the treaty between the Pope and Philip was concluded. It is now necessary to go back to the close of the preceding year." ." 2-Sometimes, too, the story may be discarded, and events be traced backward step by step toward their source; this, however, is not so much narration as interpretation.

3. The beginning of a narrative has its claims of vigor and interest, which must not be ignored. To make this inception more effective, it is a not uncommon practice to begin the story at some dramatic point along in the plot, and then bring up what preceded in the form of an explanation, or as related by some personage of the story.

NOTE. In Carlyle's French Revolution, which is strictly chronological, several books of the history precede that incident where the courtier answers Louis XVI: "No, Sire, it is a revolution"; while M. Taine, on the other hand, taking this incident as the dramatic beginning to his history of the same epoch, afterwards brings up the causes of the Revolution to that point. It is a question of artistic beginning. — In Homer's Odyssey, Books ix-xii are taken up with Ulysses's story of his earlier wanderings,

1 See above, p. 445, 3.

2 MOTLEY, Rise of the Dutch Republic, Vol. i, p. 166.

as related by him to the Phæacians. In Virgil's Æneid, in like manner, Æneas relates, in Books ii and iii, his previous adventures, to Queen Dido. - George Eliot, at the beginning of Daniel Deronda, introduces her heroine at a gaming-table, and afterwards, when the incidents immediately connected with that scene are disposed of, goes back and relates how the heroine came to such a position; this latter history forming an essential though not very stirring part of the narrative.

2. Rate of Movement.. - The life of the narrative as a whole and the relative significance of its parts depend largely upon the rate, rapid or slow, at which the current of events is made to move. In one part the occurrences of a considerable period will bear to be dispatched in a few summarizing words; in another, deliberate labor of recounting is devoted to the action of moments. By this means a kind of descriptive rapport is maintained with events, corresponding to their importance, or the lack of it, in the scheme of the story.

1. Movement is retarded by giving with scrupulous fulness all the parts and stages of the action; also by giving descriptive and interpretative details, with the aim of making its significance stand out, filling the whole field of vision. Such slowness of movement is needed to impress the dramatic points of the story, the cardinal features on which most depends.

EXAMPLE. In Scott's Talisman 1 is related how, when Richard Cœur de Leon was making a friendly visit to Sultan Saladin, on being requested to show his far-famed strength, he clove in two an iron bar by a single blow of his sword; whereupon the Sultan, in turn, severed with his scimitar first a cushion of down, standing unsupported on its end, and then a gauze veil laid across the weapon in mid-air.

Of this scene evidently the cardinal incidents are the blows with sword and scimitar. Observe in what slow movement, that is, with what accumulation of circumstance and description, these are related: "The glittering broadsword, wielded by both his hands, rose aloft to the King's left shoulder, circled round his head, descended with the sway of some terrific engine, and the bar of iron rolled on the ground in two pieces, as a woodsman would sever a sapling with a hedging-bill." Similarly the act

1 SCOTT, The Talisman, Chap. xxvii.