ils that are dissonant with the informing spirit of
the scene it seeks to reproduce: so also does the author who
overcrowds his picture with multifarious details, however faithful
they may be to fact. The true triumphs of "local coloring" have been
made by men who have struck at the heart and spirit of a place--have
caught its tone and timbre as George Du Maurier did with the
_Quartier Latin_--and have set forth only such details as tingled with
this spiritual tone.

=Recapitulation.=--We have studied the many uses of the element of
setting, and have seen that in the best-developed fiction it has grown
to be entirely cooerdinate with the elements of character and action.
Novelists have come to consider that any given story can happen only
in a given set of circumstances, and that if the setting be changed
the action must be altered and the characters be differently drawn. It
is therefore impossible, in the best fiction of the present day, to
consider the setting as divorced from the other elements of the
narrative. There was a time, to be sure, when description for its own
sake existed in the novel, and the action was halted to permit the
introduction of pictorial passages bearing no necessary relation to
the business of the story,--"blocks" of setting, as it were, which
might be removed without detriment to the progression of the
narrative. But the practice of the best contemporary novelists is
summed up and expressed by Henry James in this emphatic sentence from
his essay on "The Art of Fiction":--"I cannot imagine composition
existing in a series of blocks, nor conceive, in any novel worth
discussing at all, of a passage of description that is not in its
intention narrative."

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Explain and illustrate the three historic stages in the evolution
of the element of setting.

2. What did Ruskin mean by "the pathetic fallacy"?

3. What are the modern uses of the element of setting?

4. Explain the process of attaining atmosphere, or local color.

5. Adduce original instances of emotional harmony, emotional contrast,
and irony in setting.

SUGGESTED READING

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: "A Gossip on Romance."

BLISS PERRY: "A Study of Prose Fiction"--Chapter VII, on "The
Setting."

Read at greater length those passages of famous fiction from which
have been selected the illustrative quotations cited in this chapter.

CHAPTER VII

THE POINT OF VIEW IN NARRATIVE

The Importanc