ssage from
Mr. Hardy's "Tess of the D'Ubervilles":--

"Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of Froom Vale, at a season
when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of
fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should
not grow passionate. The ready hearts existing there were impregnated
by their surroundings."

Zola, in his essay on "The Experimental Novel," states that the proper
function of setting is to exhibit "the environment which determines
and completes the man"; and the philosophic study of environment
reacting upon character is one of the main features of his own
monumental series of novels devoted to the Rougon-Macquart family. His
example has been followed by a host of recent writers; and a new
school of fiction has grown up, the main purpose of which is to
exhibit the influence of certain carefully studied social, natural,
business, or professional conditions on the sort of people who live
and work among them.

This incentive has been developed to manifest advantage in America by
such novelists as Mrs. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mr. George W. Cable,
Mr. Hamlin Garland, Mrs. Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, Jack London, Mr.
Booth Tarkington, and Mr. Stewart Edward White. Each of these
authors--and many others might be mentioned--has attained a special
sort of eminence by studying minutely the effect upon impressionable
characters of a particular environment. The manifold diversity of life
in the many different districts of the United States affords our
fiction-writers a predestined opportunity to endeavor to make the
nation acquainted with itself.

=Setting as the Hero of the Narrative.=--If the setting be used both
to determine the action and to mold the characters, it may stand forth
as the most important of the three elements of narrative. In Victor
Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris," the cathedral is the leading factor of
the story. Claude Frollo would be a very different person if it were
not for the church; and many of the main events, such as the ultimate
tragic scene when Quasimodo hurls Frollo from the tower-top, could not
happen in any other place. In Mr. Kipling's very subtle story entitled
"An Habitation Enforced," which is included in his "Actions and
Reactions," the setting is really the hero of the narrative. An
American millionaire and his wife, whose ancestors were English,
settle for a brief vacation in the county of England from which the
wife's family origi