The terrible tale that follows could happen only as a result of the fearful loneliness and, more especially, the maddening heat of such a place as is described in these opening paragraphs. The setting in this story causes and determines the action.
2. Setting as an Influence on Character.––But in many other tales by recent writers the setting is used not so much to determine the action as to influence and mold 111 the characters; and when employed for this purpose, it becomes expressive of one of the most momentous truths of human life. For what a man is at any period of his existence is largely the result of the interaction of two forces,––namely, the innate tendencies of his nature and the shaping power of his environment. George Meredith, and more especially Mr. Thomas Hardy, therefore devote a great deal of attention to setting as an influence on character. Consider, for example, the following brief passage 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 112 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 originally came. Gradually the old house and the English landscape take hold of them; ancestral feelings rise to dominate them; and they remain forever after in enforced habitation on the ancient soil.
Uses of the Weather.––All that has been said thus far of setting in general applies of course to one of the most interesting of its elements,––the weather. In simple stories like the usual nursery tale, the weather may be non-existent. Or it may exist mainly for a decorative purpose, like the frequent golden oriental dawns of Spenser’s poem or the superb and colorful symphonies of sky and sea in Pierre Loti’s “Iceland Fisherman.” It may be used as a utilitarian adjunct to the action: at the end of “The Mill on the Floss,” as we have already noted, the 113 rains descend and the flood comes merely for the purpose of drowning Tom and Maggie. Or it may be employed to illustrate a character: we are told of Clara Middleton, in “The Egoist,” that she possesses the “art of dressing to suit the season and the sky”; and therefore the look of the atmosphere at any hour helps to convey to us a sense of her appearance. Somewhat more artistically, the weather may be planned in pre-established harmony with the mood of the characters: this expedient is wonderfully used in the wild and wind-swept tales of Fiona MacLeod. On the other hand, the weather may stand in emotional contrast with the characters: the Master of Ballantrae and Mr. Henry fight their duel on a night of absolute stillness and stifling cold. Again, the weather may be used to determine the action: in Mr. Kipling’s early story called “False Dawn,” the blinding sandstorm causes Saumarez to propose to the wrong girl. Or it may be employed as a controlling influence over character: the tremendous storm toward the end of “Richard Feverel,” in the chapter entitled “Nature Speaks,” determines the return of the hero to his wife. In some cases, even, the weather itself may be the real hero of the narrative: the great eruption of Vesuvius in “The Last Days of Pompeii” dominates the termination of the story.
Although the weather is a subject upon everybody’s tongue, there are very few people who are capable of talking about it with intelligence and art. Very few writers of fiction––and nearly all of them are recent––have exhibited a mastery of the weather,––a mastery based at once upon a detailed and accurate observation of natural phenomena and a philosophic sense of the relation between these phenomena and the concerns of human beings. Perhaps in no other detail of craftsmanship does Robert Louis Stevenson so clearly prove his mastery as in his marshalling of the weather, always 114 vividly and truthfully described, to serve a purpose always fitting to his fictions.
Romantic and Realistic Settings.––Let us next consider the main difference between the merits of a good romantic and a good realistic setting. Since the realist leads us to a comprehension of his truth through a careful imitation of the actual, the thing most to be desired in a realistic setting is fidelity to fact; and this can be attained only by accurate observation. But since the romantic is not bound to imitate the actual, and fabricates his investiture merely for the sake of embodying his truth clearly and consistently, the thing most to be desired in a romantic setting is imaginative fitness to the action and the characters; and this can sometimes be attained by artistic inventiveness alone, without display of observation of the actual. Verisimilitude is of course the highest merit of either sort of setting; but whereas verisimilitude with the realist lies in resemblance to actuality, verisimilitude with the romantic lies rather in artistic fitness. The distinction may perhaps be best observed in the historical novels produced by the one and by the other school. In the setting of realistic historical novels, like George Eliot’s “Romola” and Flaubert’s “Salammbô,” what the authors have mainly striven for has been accuracy of detail; but in romantic historical novels, like those of Scott and Dumas père, the authors have sought rather for imaginative fitness of setting. The realists have followed the letter, and the romantics the spirit, of other times and lands.
A Romantic Setting by Edgar Allan Poe.––As an example of a pure romantic setting, far removed from actuality and yet thoroughly truthful in artistic fitness to the action and the characters, we can do no better than examine the often-quoted opening of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”:––