EXAMPLE. Sir Gareth's combat with the four bandit knights of the fords, each fiercer and stronger than the one before, ends with a surprise which every circumstance has elaborately prepared to heighten. The last knight of the four is the most grewsome and dreaded of all; here is the description of him as he advances to battle: at last "But when the prince Here is the issue of the combat: "At once Sir Lancelot's charger fiercely neigh'd, And Death's dark war-horse bounded forward with him. That Death was cast to ground, and slowly rose. But with one stroke Sir Gareth split the skull. Half fell to right and half to left and lay. And stay the world from Lady Lyonors. They never dream'd the passes could be past.'" 1 4. The element of aposiopesis. Sometimes, when an important event has been so fully anticipated that it suggests itself, it is left to the reader's imagination to complete. This is especially the case when it is an event whose details would be disagreeable or distasteful or harrowing. But apart also from what it spares the reader, this silence throws the event from its repulsive realistic detail back upon its inner significance, on which the imagination can exercise itself unlimited. EXAMPLES. - The following suggests the carrying out of the execution of a criminal, as observed by friends of the victim. 1 TENNYSON, Gareth and Lynette, 11. 1342-1350; 1365-1378. "Upon the cornice of a tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes were riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck, something moved slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a black flag. “Justice' was done, and Time, the Archsatirist, had had his joke out with Tess. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless; the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on." 1 The death of Sydney Carton, a self-sacrificed victim of the Terror in France, is suggested in a similar way, by aposiopesis. He is one of a company whose successive executions are numbered off one by one by the knitting women. Number Twenty-Two, a woman, precedes him :She kisses his lips; he kisses hers; they solemnly bless each other. The spare hand does not tremble as he releases it; nothing worse than a sweet, bright constancy is in the patient face. She goes next before him - is gone; the knitting women count Twenty-Two. "I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.' “The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces, the pressing on of many footsteps in the outskirts of the crowd, so that it swells forward in a mass, like one great heave of water, all flashes away. Twenty-Three. . . They said of him about the city that night, that it was the peacefullest man's face ever beheld there. Many added that he looked sublime and prophetic." 2 II. THE VEHICLE OF THE STORY. Of any ordinary course of events there is, and must be, more in the story than the telling of the story. A plain recount of particulars one after another, in the manner and spirit of annals, leaves the narration bald, uncolored, unsignalized; and it is only events of commanding or sublime import that will bear such simple treatment. Most subjects of narration require some vehicle, which shall convey not the 1 HARDY, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, p. 455. 2 DICKENS, A Tale of Two Cities, Bk. iii, Chap. xv. events alone but the shadings, the settings, the traits of human and moral interest which serve to make events stand out as worth the telling. This vehicle of the story, in its various aspects, is to narration what accessories are to description. NOTE. · Of narrative plot, as of other plans of discourse, the truth indeed holds that "the greater the occasion the more apt men are to be simple.”1 And in a supremely great series of events, as for instance the story of Creation in the first chapter of Genesis, the use of any but the simplest vehicle of language would be an impertinence; the events are so large as to scorn any outside help. But most stories must deal with the small occurrences of life, things which in themselves, without some deeper connotation, would have hardly more interest than entries in a diary. It is not in these alone, but in what the vehicle of the story brings along with them, that readers are interested; while as soon as the events themselves rise into greatness and importance, the accessory vehicle is naturally toned down, or kept plain and severe. The vehicle of the story may be some medium of treatment, or may be devised from a subsidiary use of narration itself. Each of these calls here for notice. I. The Supporting Medium. particulars, which of course always exists as the inner thread of the movement, there are inwoven various processes of treatment, which singly or in combination serve to give depth or zest or buoyancy or color. These constitute a medium through which the story, with its various involvements, gets itself told and interpreted. The chief of these are the working of character, the dialogue, and description. - With the annalistic recount of I. The Characters of a Story. — Mere skill in the construction of plot, with its residual impression of ingenuity or mystery, stirs at best only a crude and transient interest. The reader's 1 HIGGINSON, Contemporaries, p. 315. inner demand is for something deeper. The story must rise out of real life; must be moulded on lines of human motive, human character; must be a transcript from the natural experience of a soul.1 What gives it a plea upon men's attention is the fact that its events are compelled by laws of human nature, and estimated by the moral standards that obtain in ordered human society. All this is best embodied in the characters of the story, which, by living their life before our eyes, and interacting with each other, produce, though in fiction, a true and living history.2 The importance of this element of narration is seen in the fact that it is the characters of a story that are most vital, that are remembered longest, and that become household names and companions. And writers are held high among the world's benefactors who succeed in adding permanently to the company some new name, some vital strain of character portrayal. In the management of character the main difficulty is to make it individual and natural. Conceived, as it must to some degree be, on standards of motive and endowment, it is apt to become a mere personified abstraction, or a mere vehicle for didacticism; this is to be guarded against. The problem is, while the character embodies an abstract type, to express this in words and acts of an individual; to make a unique experience portray some trait of universal recognizable human nature. The ability to do this cannot come merely from the library or from inner consciousness; it requires intimate sympathy with men and the affairs of men, and imagination to put one's self in men's place. 1 "The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study." BROWNING, Dedication of Sordello. 2"The true plot comes out of the character; that is, the man does not result from the things he does, but the things he does result from the man, and so plot comes out of character; plot aforethought does not characterize."- W. D. HOWELLS. NOTE. - The great characters of fiction have the strange quality of becoming more real and companionable than the personages of history; we have their words, their cast of mind, their impulses of heart, and these live with us longer than the things they are represented to have done. Think, for instance, of Hamlet and Othello and Lear, and what they stand for; of Sir Roger de Coverley and Parson Adams and My Uncle Toby; of Sam Weller and Micawber and Becky Sharp and Colonel Newcome. It is with such characters, and their world of ideal and idiosyncrasy, that the deep and vital elements of literature are inwoven. 2. The Dialogue. - If in the characters is involved the profounder fibre of the story, from the management of the dialogue comes largely its more buoyant and popular effect. Uncritical readers-whose preferences, in fact, ought to be consulted like a story "with lots of conversation in it." The dialogue serves, as it were, to aërate the movement, which else might grow ponderous and slow. In the give and take of conversation, too, character itself appears, to speak for itself; and many accessory and descriptive elements slip in lightly and unobtrusively in the words that are said. And through it all is traceable the forward movement and the approaching end or crisis. The prime feature to note in dialogue is that it must not exist for itself. Its office is solely to be, in some direct application, the vehicle of a story. Though it may seem, and ought to seem, as casual and spontaneous as everyday speech, it is, as matter of fact, managed from point to point, and steered to an end. Any word of conversation that does not contribute to one or more of these three things to advance the story, to throw light on character, or to supply some necessary descriptive element, is superfluous. Brilliant and sprightly as it may be in itself, it is irrelevant, and so a blemish, an excrescence. As to the style of dialogue, the fact that it has to be steered to an end is apt, in the case of young writers, to make it stiff and didactic, or goody-goody. It is in fact a most delicate working-tool to manage. Two elements must be reconciled in |