The years hurried onward, treading in their haste on one another's heels. And now they began to bring white hairs, and scatter them over the head of Ernest; they made reverend wrinkles across his forehead, and furrows in his cheeks. He was an aged man, etc. The reader passes from stage to stage without perceptible jar, guided by the thread of chronological succession and the gradual development and growing maturity of Ernest's personality. In Flute and Violin the episode gradations are emphasized by the division of the story into sections, or miniature chapters. But so intimately are they bound together by the temporal and logical inter-relations already set forth on pp. 167-72 that the final effect is one of entire coherence and natural transition from the August evening in 1809, when the parson makes his first appearance, until 1814, when "loved and revered, he passed onward to the close." This matter of episodic coördination is intimately allied to the matter of proportion and emphasis. It may be that the essential episode, or event, is, in matter of actual space assigned, inferior to the preliminary and the supplementary matter. But, if this be the case, the author must be sensitive to what we may call the potentiality of his main incident: it must possess sufficient dynamic power to impress itself on the reader, or the essential quality of the short-story is lost. Of the sixty pages of Flute and Violin, for example, perhaps not more than one tenth of that number is devoted to the elaboration of the episode that is the germ of the whole story, but the pathos of that one, its emotional force, is sufficient to make of it a centre from which all the others radiate. This nice adjustment of proportion and force is often secured by the effective device of an intense conclusion. "Hoax-plot" stories all illustrate this device, as do all those constructed on the plan already illustrated by the diagram in figure 11 on page 221. The concluding sentence reveals effectively the destination of the plot-course, and relieves the suspense that has been accumulating through the various episodes. Examples of such conclusions have already been indicated in the discussion of emphasis in plot structure. From all these considerations it is apparent that the rhetorical qualities of the short-story-coherence, emphasis, proportion—all lead ultimately back to unity as the essential and all-pervading quality of structure. If it lacks this one-ness of tone, this complete subordination of parts to the underlying motive, it fails in its very nature. And in its perfection and completeness of structure we have, as Thomas Wentworth Higginson has said, the conditions of perfect art; there is no subdivision of interest; the author can strike directly in, without preface, can move with determined step toward a conclusion, and can O highest privilege! — stop when he is done. INDEX Action in characterization. See | Bourienne, Memoirs of Napoleon, 221, 236, 249, 270. Allen, J. L., Flute and Violin, 47, Anstey, The Black Poodle, 222-24, 13. Arnold, Sweetness and Light, 8-9. Atmosphere. See Setting. Balance in massing. See Plot and Bancroft, History of the United 91-92. Bible, The, Apostles at Bethsaida, Bryce, 7-8, 117, Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, 73, 247- Cable, 84. Caricature. See Character and Carlyle, French Revolution, 51. Coherence, 172-77; exposition Definition, personage and per- Direct, 114-16. Chester, Forty Seconds, 198. novel, 217-18; in short-story, Coherence, in characterization, Collins, 59. Contrast. See Plot structure, and 57, 66, 177; Middlemarch, 5, 151; Crawford, The Novel, What it is, English prose romances, 103-104. Direct characterization. See Char-Grote, History of Greece, 51, 242. Doyle, 59. Dramatic setting. See Setting, Eliot, 106, 113, 114, 158, 166, 257; Hale, My Double and How He Un- Hamilton, Materials and Methods |