mosphere the artist allows no dissonance in his details. Everything must harmonize action and setting. His task is largely one of elimination. On the other hand, in seeking for local color the writer excludes nothing; rather, he courts multiplicity of detail and seeks the ultimate combination that is the incarnation of them all.

Symbolic Setting

The third variety of setting, the symbolic, is, as suggested by the name, confined in great degree to allegorical narrative. While, like all setting, it brings out with increased power the details of the action, at the same time it possesses a value of its own. In The Great Stone Face, for example, the titanic features sculptured on the precipice are more than a mere effective natural setting for the development of Ernest's simple personality. The reader feels that the face symbolizes something of the ideal, of the spiritual, the constant contemplation of which inspires the true man to the highest attainment.

In A Tale of Two Cities Dickens makes effective use of this phase of setting in the following passage:

The night was so very sultry, that although they sat with doors and windows open, they were overpowered by heat. When the tea-table was done with, they all moved to one of the windows, and looked out into the heavy twilight. Lucie sat by her father; Darnay sat beside her; Carton leaned against a window. The curtains were long and white, and some of the thunder gusts that whirled into the corner caught them up to the ceiling, and waved them like spectral wings.

"The raindrops are still falling, large, heavy, and few," said Doctor Manette. "It comes slowly."

"It comes surely," said Carton.

They spoke low, as people watching and waiting mostly do;

as people in a dark room, watching and waiting for the Lightning, always do.

There was a great hurry in the streets of people speeding away to get shelter before the storm broke; the wonderful corner for echoes resounded with the echoes of footsteps coming and going, yet not a footstep was there.

"A multitude of people, and yet a solitude!” said Darnay, when they had listened for a while.

"Is it not impressive, Mr. Darnay?" asked Lucie. "Sometimes I have sat here of an evening, until I have fancied - but even the shade of a foolish fancy makes me shudder to-night, when all is so black and solemn

"Let us shudder too. We may know what it is?"

"It will seem nothing to you. Such whims are only impressive as we originate them, I think; they are not to be communicated. I have sometimes sat alone here of an evening listening, until I have made the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming by and by into our lives."

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There is a great crowd coming one day into our lives, if that be so," Sydney Carton struck in, in his moody way.

The footsteps were incessant, and the hurry of them became more and more rapid. The corner echoed and re-echoed with the tread of feet; some, as it seemed, under the windows; some, as it seemed, in the room; some coming, some going, some breaking off, some stopping altogether; all in the distant streets, and not one within sight.

"Are all these footsteps destined to come to all of us, Miss Manette, or are we to divide them among us?”

"I don't know, Mr. Darnay; I told you it was a foolish fancy, but you asked for it. When I have yielded myself to it, I have been alone, and then I have imagined them the footsteps of the people who are to come into my life, and my father's."

"I take them into mine!" said Carton. "I ask no questions and make no stipulations. There is a great crowd bearing down upon us, Miss Manette, and I see them! by the Lightning." He added the last words, after there had been a vivid flash which had shown him lounging in the window.

"And I hear them!" he added again, after a peal of thunder. "Here they come, fast, fierce, and furious!"

It was the rush and roar of rain that he typified, and it stopped him, for no voice could be heard in it. A memorable storm of thunder and lightning broke with that sweep of water, and there was not a moment's interval in crash, and fire, and rain, until after the moon rose at midnight.

The setting that runs through this episode of the thunder storm is not primarily for the more effective projection of the action, but, as in Hawthorne's story of Ernest, it is written with view to the implication. The scene is allegorical, and foreshadows the tragic events destined to appear in the drama of Lucie and her father. The hurrying footsteps, Carton's thoughtless words, the onward rush and roar of the approaching storm unmistakably represent the many people that are to enter their lives, the sacrifice that Carton is to make for Lucie without stipulating conditions, the darkness that is to settle over them all as the Revolution closes in. The spectral waving of the curtains, the crashing of the thunder, the mysterious footsteps ever coming and ever going but never passing, all these details contribute to the fatefulness of the scene and foretell something in store.

Symbolic setting is essentially unlike local color, indeed unlike almost all other dramatic setting, in that while in one sense it is background, it is, in fact, part of the action. It is akin to atmosphere rather than to local color, but it is more even than atmosphere. In Hawthorne's story of Ernest the setting, it is true, is peculiarly in harmony with Ernest's spiritual development, but one who should see in the setting nothing more than this would lose much of what the legend is intended to convey. Similarly, the passage from Dickens would lose much, if not all, of its significance were the reader to

view it as nothing more than a rather picturesque piece of descriptive writing.

It is evident, then, that setting is auxiliary to action, to the ordering of details that constitute the backbone of the narrative. The only exception would seem to be in those cases where the environment demands a certain harmonious and concurrent action. Yet even here the story is ultimately the thing.

Undue Elaboration of Setting

Description, apart and unsubordinated, is recognized as an entirely legitimate form of prose discourse, but it cannot be termed background unless upon it something is enacted. Descriptive writing cast into the body of a narrative may be defended in proportion as it is an inherent part of the whole composition. When it begins to take form as an independent entity, the composition as a narrative whole at once begins to suffer from lack of unity, coherence, and emphasis. Narrative unity is violated because there is no longer essential consonance between the action-without which there can be no narration-and the background of the action; the two do not coalesce. Narrative coherence suffers because the general current of events is disturbed by the interpolation of what seems foreign matter. And narrative emphasis is lost because, through want of true proportion, the subordinate is advanced into equal prominence with that which is not its rhetorical equal.

Undue elaboration of setting is likely to manifest itself in one of two ways: (a) the writer overcrowds his setting with unnecessary details; or (b) he indulges in descriptive dissipation without regard to the main function of the composition.

and indeed of older

A tendency of young writers writers not possessed of well-developed power of selection is to overcrowd the scene with details that are trivial or that leave too little to the reader's imagination. Arlo Bates in his Talks on Writing English illustrates the first of these tendencies in the following passage:

To force the accidental on the reader is to destroy the sense of reality, which is the prime object of the literary artist. As an illustration we may take this passage from Thack

eray:

"If your Majesty will please to enter the next apartment," says Esmond, preserving his grave tone, "I have some papers there which I would gladly submit to you, and by your permission, I will lead the way;" and taking the taper up, and backing before the Prince with very great ceremony, Mr. Esmond passed in to the little Chaplain's room, through which we had just entered into the house. "Please to set a chair for his Majesty, Frank," says the Colonel to his companion, who wondered much at this scene, and was as much puzzled by it as the other actor in it. Then going to the crypt over the mantelpiece, the Colonel opened it, and drew thence the papers which had so long lain there. - The History of Henry Esmond.

This might have been written, with more literal exact

ness:

"If your Majesty will please to enter the next apartment," says Esmond, preserving his grave tone, resting his hand on the back of a chair, and bowing as he spoke, "I have some papers there which I would gladly submit to you; and by your permission I will lead the way." He stepped forward a couple of paces. He took up the taper, bowing again, and backed before the Prince with great ceremony toward the door of the little Chaplain's room, through which we had just entered the house. He glanced under his arm as he bowed to see the threshold, lest he should stumble and destroy the dignity of his