tunes of the house of Osbaldistone and of Ballantræ are of greater structural importance than is the personality of Baillie Nicol Jarvie or of James Durie.

SETTING DEFINED

Setting may be defined as the background of the action in a narrative; it usually presents (1) the time and (2) the place of that action. If we revert to our original definition of narration, we shall see that setting is not an integral part of the process, but is rather a device for the more effective presentation of the action. In so far as this is true, setting would seem, as a matter of rhetorical consideration, to be allied to emphasis. Again, however, as a definite exposition of place and time often enter into and harmonize the constituent parts of the entire action, giving an essential one-ness of effect to the account in its entirety, setting is closely associated also with unity. Happiness presents an excellent illustration of the pervading harmony of effect that may come from artistic setting.

Setting may be divided into two distinct classes: (a) expository and (b) dramatic. Expository setting presents background for the clearer understanding of the action; that is, its function is purely intellectual. Dramatic setting, on the other hand, is emotional; its purpose is to intensify the action, to make it more effective, more vivid, more thrilling.

EXPOSITORY AND DRAMATIC SETTING

When the newspaper account of a political convention, of a railway accident, or of a robbery is prefaced by a carefully elaborated exposition of the scene of action, abounding in painstaking detail and accompanied by photographic illustration, its purpose is not only to in

crease interest in the account but to identify, to make thoroughly intelligible to the reader, the details that follow. The appeal is to the understanding; not to the emotions.

The following undergraduate attempts at expository setting, based upon actual observation, serve this intellectual purpose. The subject from which each one is drawn appears in the appended cut.

A comparison of the two examples illustrates also how the power of observation varies in different persons: the author of the first sketch is apparently gifted with the ability to catch essential details; and the author of the second is not, with the result that the outlines of his picture are so vague, so lacking in definiteness, as to furnish scant material for one who should attempt from the details presented to reproduce the object described.

(a) Before entering the village by the main street, as I was returning from a walk one October afternoon, I stopped at the bridge over the little stream which at the foot of the last hill runs nearly north and south. While I was resting there, leaning on the railing at the side of the bridge, my attention was attracted to a two-story white building across the stream, about twenty-five or thirty paces to the left of the road.

The main building was oblong. A little lower than the ridge-pole and midway across the front a gable projected, supported by four large white pillars, and serving as a covering to a small porch. On the left of the house a veranda extended to a low shed attached at right angles to the main structure and extending out about twenty feet. The roof of the veranda sloped upward until it met the main building just below the windows of the second story, and, like the roof of the main portion, it was covered with weather-beaten shingles. The ridge-pole of the shed was lower than that of the house itself, so low, in fact, that the only use to which the shed could be put was that of woodhouse or storeroom. It was partly obscured by a large willow tree, growing on the bank of the stream at some distance from the dwelling.

The house was built of wood, and stood on a foundation of white marble, one layer of which could be seen above the ground. The main part of the house was painted white, and with its green shutters and four white pillars supporting the gable in front, it looked like an old colonial mansion on a somewhat small scale.

In front of the dwelling were four great maples, their leaves a blaze of color. A little to the right of the house, stood a single elm. The approach to the front porch was by a cinder path, directly in front and nearly straight, turning slightly to the east and terminating in three steps. Another path of the same material led from the front porch to the side veranda, which was about four steps from the ground. Between the two paths and the point where I stood, a road entered the yard, and wound to the left, around an oval plot of grass in front of the shed. The lawn in front of the house and within

the turn of the road was thickly strewn with leaves, and on every hand the signs of approaching winter were visible.

As I stood making a mental note of these details, suddenly

- etc.

(b) As one passes up the main street of the village past the lodge of the Alpha Omega fraternity, he soon reaches the bridge leading over Willow Brook. At some distance from this point and to the right of the road stands a large white frame house. A low porch, standing at the center of the front part of the building, is almost half occupied with four large columns. They extend upward about a story and a half and support a projecting part of the third story.

These tall columns and the white color of the house give it a distinctly colonial air. The porch is painted brown and the shutters are green. Were it not for the weather-beaten and somewhat dismantled appearance of the shingled roof, the house might impress one as being new.

In each of these pictures, preliminary to details of action, the same purpose is evident: the writer is presenting his setting for the purpose of identification, in order to objectify the scene that the reader may follow it intelligently.

Illustration of how pure exposition or description shades off into what we have called expository setting appears in the two selections following, chosen respectively from Windle's The Wessex of Thomas Hardy and from Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. Both have to do with the same subject, the little church at Puddletown, or "Weatherbury" as the novelist has rechristened the place in his Wessex stories.

A little further on again, and we enter Puddletown, the Weatherbury of "Far from the Madding Crowd,” and, as we

enter the village, we shall see, opposite to the principal inn, a grey house behind a high wall, which occupies the position of the farm over which Bathsheba Everdene presided. It corresponds to it, however, in position only, for the building from which its structural characteristics were drawn is at some little distance off, and has yet to be seen. The church is the first object of interest, and is well worthy of careful study for its own intrinsic merits, apart altogether from its connection with the story, since it is about the only edifice of its kind in Dorsetshire which has been so fortunate as to escape the hands of the "restorer." It contains a fine Jacobean gallery, in which the voice of Gabriel Oak used to be heard as he sang bass in the choir, a very beautiful and almost unique Norman font, and some fine tombs, amongst them many belonging to the family of Martin, which formerly occupied the stately house of Athelhampton not far from the village. The porch, in which Troy slept on the night after Fanny Robin's funeral, is that on the north side, and cannot be said to have been improved by the dado of encaustic tiles with which it has been bedecked. The fine tower is battlemented, as Mr. Hardy describes, but the gurgoyles are not specially remarkable. Perhaps he added to it some of those at Sydling St. Nicholas, no very great distance off, which are as grotesque as the medieval mind could desire.1

Turning now to chapter XLVI of Far from the Madding Crowd, we come to these two paragraphs at the very beginning:

The tower of Weatherbury Church was a square erection of fourteenth-century date, having two stone gurgoyles on each of the four faces of its parapet. Of these eight carved protuberances only two at this time continued to serve the purpose of their erection that of spouting the water from the lead roof within. One mouth in each front had been closed by bygone church-wardens as superfluous, and two others were

1 The Wessex of Thomas Hardy, by B. C. A. Windle. By permission of John Lane Company, N. Y.