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their characters often take shape. To revert for illustration to the Parable of the Prodigal Son, one may argue that the experiences of the "far country," separation from kindred and friends, together with the chastening effects of adverse fortune, combined to produce the spirit that distinguished the humble penitent from the pleasure-loving prodigal. The implied setting of this story is really more than mere background; it is a factor in the two other elements, character and action. Setting of this sort, which not only furnishes background but enters into and moulds character and action, is known by the scientific term "environment." The modern writer exemplifies the theory that environment modifies life, and he presents setting as an integral part of his work. In contemporary fiction, the novels of Zola are notable illustrations of the "deterministic" theory that char

acter is the product of two factors, heredity and environment. Thomas Hardy is the great exponent among English writers. In Tess, for example, almost every instance of elaborated descriptive detail serves the deeper purpose of determining the characters and the events that develop against the given background. The warm, sensuous atmosphere of Talbothays and the bleak chill and leaden drab of Flintcombe-Ash are not mere accidental circumstances attending certain details in Tess's career; rather they are actual agents entering into and moulding her life's tragedy.

Hawthorne, with his romantic imagination and poetic temperament, was prone to use this device in intensifying his narrative. In The Great Stone Face he gives a brilliant example of this type of dramatic setting:—

The Great Stone Face was a work of Nature in her mood of majestic playfulness, formed on the perpendicular side of a

mountain by some immense rocks, which had been thrown together in such a position as, when viewed at a proper distance, precisely to resemble the features of the human countenance. It seemed as if an enormous giant, or a Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice. There was the broad arch of the forehead, a hundred feet in height; the nose, with its long bridge; and the vast lips, which, if they could have spoken, would have rolled their thunder accents from one end of the valley to the other. True it is, that if the spectator approached too near, he lost the outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another. Retracing his steps, however, the wondrous features would again be seen; and the farther he withdrew from them, the more like a human face, with all its original divinity intact, did they appear; until, as it grew dim in the distance, with the clouds and glorified vapor of the mountains clustering about it, the Great Stone Face seemed positively to be alive.

Yet, mere mass of rock as it was, the contemplation of this wondrous natural phenomenon possessed an inspirational power over all those who lived within the range of its benignant aspect. Among these was Ernest, who with loving heart and helpful hand grew up under the shadow of the Great Stone Face.

From a happy yet often pensive child, he grew up to be a mild, quiet, unobtrusive boy, and sun-browned with labor in the fields, but with more intelligence brightening his aspect than is seen in many lads who have been taught at famous schools. Yet Ernest had had no teacher, save only that the Great Stone Face became one to him. When the toil of the day was over, he would gaze at it for hours, until he began to imagine that those vast features recognized him, and gave him a smile of kindness and encouragement, responsive to his own look of veneration.

And thus, ever growing in devotion to his ideal, the boy became a man and continued in the valley to serve his fellows. One day, Ernest, now a preacher of the Word, was addressing the people and among his hearers was a poet, gifted with the power of vision.

The poet, as he listened, felt that the being and character of Ernest were a nobler strain of poetry than he had ever written. His eyes glistening with tears, he gazed reverentially at the venerable man; and said within himself that never was there an aspect so worthy of a prophet and a sage as that mild, sweet, thoughtful countenance, with the glory of white hair diffused about it. At a distance, but distinctly to be seen, high up in the golden light of the setting sun, appeared the Great Stone Face, with hoary mists around it, like the white hairs around the brow of Ernest. Its look of grand beneficence seemed to embrace the world.

And in the venerable speaker, who since boyhood had been inspired by the constant contemplation of the Great Stone Face, the poet recognized the incarnation of all that those mighty features had prefigured.

In the preceding paragraphs we have the principal devices whereby background is made effective: (1) setting that is in harmony with the accompanying action; (2) setting that presents change correspondent to accompanying change in the action; (3) setting that is in contrast to the action; (4) setting that modifies action or character. We now pass to the consideration of certain well recognized phases of setting, known respectively as (1) local color, (2) atmosphere, and (3) symbolic setting.

Local Color

Every well-defined period of time, every distinct place, has its own character, which we may term its

"color," its "tone." The writer who can catch the peculiar spirit of a generation, the distinctive atmosphere of a locality, gains much in the convincingness of his work. The position that Westward Ho! has gained in English historic fiction is to be attributed in large degree to Kingsley's success in catching the very spirit of Elizabethan days when, her ports crowded with ships returning from unknown countries and laden with strange freight of every description, her streets filled with swaggering daredevils fresh from every conceivable adventure, England was aglow with life and a new world was opening at her doors. On the other hand, George Eliot's inability to reproduce the Florence of the fifteenth century underlies much of the adverse criticism that has been passed upon Romola as an example of unsuccessful historic fiction.

In so far as veritable history is narrative rather than expository, that is, in so far as history is a chronicle of events rather than an attempt to extract from events a philosophy of historical evolution or to establish scientific generalizations, to that extent history, like fiction, may make use of local color. It will strive to render as graphic as possible the time and the place of past events. This function of the narrator Macaulay has set forth in his essay on Hallam's Constitutional History of England. It is,

to make the past present, to bring the distant near, to place us in the society of a great man or on the eminence which overlooks the field of a mighty battle, to invest with the reality of human flesh and blood beings whom we are too much inclined to consider as personified qualities in an allegory, to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their old-fashioned wardrobes, to explain the uses of their ponderous furniture.

Although, as Macaulay goes on to say, the dramatic presentation thus indicated has, in large degree, been appropriated by the historic novelist, yet the historian has not neglected to profit by the advantages that come from effective portrayal of the time-spirit and of local color. Gibbon, Green, Froude, Parkman, all have shown what are the artistic possibilities of background. Yet from the fact already noted, that historic literature partakes so largely of the expository and intellectual nature, the best examples of local color are to be found elsewhere, particularly in the novel or the short story, where dramatic effect, rather than truth, is sought.

Excellent illustration of effectiveness in local color is to be found in the stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett, who have caught the peculiar spirit that differentiates New England from all other parts of this country. Similarly James Lane Allen has interpreted the spirit of Kentucky, George W. Cable that of the extreme South, George Eliot that of the English Midlands, and Thomas Hardy that of Dorsetshire. In the work of these writers setting is essential. It would amount to annihilation were background to be eliminated from such narratives as A New England Nun, The Choir Invisible, Adam Bede, or The Return of the Native.

Local color is more than the mere enumeration of characteristics. The dusty roadsides, the tapering spruces, the fifing of hermit thrushes, and the pungent odor of pine needles are not enough to constitute a picture of the Maine woods. All these are nothing more than externals. In such a study of locality, for example, as Miss Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs there is the keen appreciation of everything, animate and inanimate, that gives personality to the region.

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