“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was––but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me––upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees––with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium: the bitter lapse into every-day life, the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.... It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate, its capacity for sorrowful impression; and acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down––but with a shudder even more thrilling than before––upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.”
Certainly this setting bears very little resemblance to the actual; but just as certainly its artistic fitness to the 116 tale of terror which it preludes gives it an imaginative verisimilitude.
A Realistic Setting by George Eliot.––As an example of a realistic setting, closely copying the actual, let us examine the following passage from “Adam Bede” (Chapter XVIII):––
“You might have known it was Sunday if you had only waked up in the farmyard. The cocks and hens seemed to know it, and made only crooning subdued noises; the very bull-dog looked less savage, as if he would have been satisfied with a smaller bite than usual. The sunshine seemed to call all things to rest and not to labor; it was asleep itself on the moss-grown cow-shed; on the group of white ducks nestling together with their bills tucked under their wings; on the old black sow stretched languidly on the straw, while her largest young one found an excellent spring-bed on his mother’s fat ribs; on Alick, the shepherd, in his new smock-frock, taking an uneasy siesta, half-sitting, half-standing on the granary steps.”
There is no obvious imaginative fitness in this passage, since in the chapter where it occurs the chief characters are going to a funeral; but it has an extraordinary verisimilitude, owing to the author’s accurate observation of the details of life in rural England.
The Quality of Atmosphere, or Local Color.––These two passages differ very widely from each other. In one thing, and one only, are they alike. Each of them exhibits the subtle quality called “atmosphere.” This quality is very difficult to define, though its presence may be recognized instinctively in any work of graphic art, like a painting or a description. Without attempting to define it, we may discover the technical basis for its presence if we seek out the sole deliberate device in which these two passages, different as they are in every other 117 feature, are at one. It will be noticed that in each of them the details selected for presentation have been chosen solely for the sake of a common quality inherent in them––the quality of sombreness and gloom in the one case, and the quality of Sabbath quietude in the other––and that they have been marshalled to convey a complete sense of this central and pervading quality. It is commonly supposed that what is called “atmosphere” in a description is dependent upon the setting forth of a multiplicity of details; but this popular conception is a fallacy. “Atmosphere” is dependent rather upon a strict selection of details pervaded by a common quality, a rigorous rejection of all others that are dissonant in mood, and an arrangement of those selected with a view to exhibiting their common quality as the pervading spirit of the scene.
This is obviously the technical basis for the “atmosphere” of a purely imaginary setting like that of the melancholy House of Usher. The effect is undeniably produced by the suppression of all details that do not contribute to the central sense of gloom. But the same device underlies (less obviously, to be sure) all such descriptions of actual places as are rich in “atmosphere.” What is called “local color”––the very look and tone of a definite locality––is produced not by photographic multiplicity of details, but by a marshalling of materials carefully selected to suggest the central spirit of the place to be depicted. The camera frequently defeats itself by flinging into emphasis details 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 118 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 coördinate 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.”