Materials and Methods of Fiction / With an Introduction by Brander Matthews

by Clayton Meeker Hamilton

CHAPTER VI

SETTING

In the history of figure painting it is interesting to study the evolution of the element of background. This element is non-existent in the earliest examples of pictorial art. The figures in Pompeiian frescoes are limned upon a blank bright wall, most frequently deep red in color. The father of Italian painting, Cimabue, following the custom of the Byzantine mosaicists, whose work he had doubtless studied at Ravenna, drew his figures against a background devoid of distance and perspective and detail; and even in the work of his greater and more natural pupil, Giotto, the element of background remains comparatively insignificant. What interests us in Giotto's work at Padua and Assisi is first of all the story that he has to tell, and secondly the human quality of the characters that he exhibits. His sense of setting is extremely slight; and the homely details that he presents for the purpose of suggesting the time and place and circumstances of his action are very crudely depicted. His frescoes are all foreground. It is the figures in the forefront of his pictures that arrest our eye. His buildings and his landscapes are conventionalized out of any real reference to his people. These are examples of the first stage of evolution,—the stage in which the element of background bears no significant relation to the main business of the picture.

In the second stage, the background is brought into an artistic, or decorative, relation with the figures in the foreground. This phase is exhibited by Italian painting at its period of maturity. The great Florentines drew their figures against a background of decorative line, the great Venetians against a background of decorative color. But even in the work of the greatest of them the background exists usually to fulfil a purpose merely decorative,—a purpose with immediate reference to art but without immediate reference to life. There is no real reason, with reference to life itself, why the Mona Lisa of Leonardo should smile inscrutably upon us before a background of jagged rocks and cloudy sky; and the curtains in Raphael's Sistine Madonna are introduced merely as a detail of composition, and are not intended as a literal statement that curtains hung upon a rod exist in heaven.

In the third stage, which is exhibited by later painting, the background is brought into living relation with the figures of the foreground,—a relation suggested not merely by the exigencies of art but rather by the conditions of life itself. Thus the great Dutch genre painters, like the younger Teniers, show their characters in immediate human relation to a carefully detailed interior; or if, like Adrian van Ostade, they take them out of doors, it is to show them entirely at home in an accustomed landscape.

This stage, in its most modern development, exhibits an absolutely essential relation between the foreground and the background—the figures and the setting—so that neither could be imagined exactly as it is without the presence of the other. Such an essential harmony is shown in the "Angelus" of Jean-François Millet. The people exist for the sake of giving meaning to the landscape; and the landscape exists for the sake of giving meaning to the people. The "Angelus" is neither figure painting nor landscape painting merely; it is both.

In the history of fiction we may note a similar evolution in the element of setting. The earliest folk-tales of every nation happen "once upon a time," and without any definite localization. In the "Gesta Romanorum," that medieval repository of accumulated narratives, the element of setting is nearly as non-existent as the element of background in the frescoes of Pompeii. Even in the "Decameron" of Boccaccio the stories are seldom localized: they happen almost anywhere at almost any time. The interest in Boccaccio's narrative, like the interest in Giotto's painting, is centered first of all in the element of action, and secondly in the element of character. But his stories are all foreground. When the scene is out of doors, it is set vaguely in a conventional landscape: when it is indoors, it is set vaguely in a conventional palace. Because of this, his narrative is lacking in visual appeal. Most of his novelle read like summaries of novels,—setting forth an abstract synopsis of the action rather than a concrete representation of it. He tells you what happens, instead of making it happen before the eye of your imagination. His characters are drawn in outline merely, instead of being livingly projected in relation to a definite environment. The defect of his narrative, like the defect of Giotto's painting, is mainly lack of background.

Somewhat later in the history of fiction, as in the history of figure painting, we find instances in which the element of setting is used for a decorative purpose, and is brought into an artistic relation with the elements of action and character. Such a use is made of landscape, for example, in the "Orlando Furioso" of Ariosto and the "Faerie Queene" of Spenser. The settings depicted by these narrative poets are essentially pictorial, and are used as a decorative background to the action rather than as part and parcel of it. If we seek an example in prose rather than in poetry, we need only turn to the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney. In this again the setting is beautifully fashioned, but is employed merely for a decorative purpose. The background of pastoral landscape bears no necessary relation to the figures in the foreground. It exists for the sake of art rather than for the sake of life. This employment of the element of setting for a purpose essentially pictorial subsists in many later works of fiction, like the "Paul and Virginia" of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. In this the setting is composed and painted for the sake of its own sentimental beauty, and is obtruded even at the expense of the more vital elements of character and action. The story is, as it were, merely a motive for decorative composition.

It is only in fiction of a more modern spirit that the element of setting has been brought into living relation with the action and the characters; and it is only in the last century that the most intimate possibilities of such a relation have been appreciated and applied. Of course the most elementary means of making the setting "part and parcel of the business of the story" is to employ it as a utilitarian adjunct to the action. Granted certain incidents that are to happen, certain scenery and properties are useful, in the novel just as in the theater; and if these are supplied advisedly, the setting will, as it were, become a part of what is happening instead of remaining merely a decorative background to the incidents. The first English author to establish firmly this utilitarian relation between the setting and the action was Daniel Defoe. Defoe was by profession a journalist; and the most characteristic quality of his mind was an habitual matter-of-factness. Plausibility was what he most desired in his fictions; and he discerned instinctively that the readiest means of making a story plausible was by representing with entire concreteness and great wealth of specific detail the physical adjuncts to the action. The multitudinous particulars of Crusoe's island are therefore exhibited concretely to the reader one by one, as Crusoe makes use of them successively in what he does.

But though in Defoe the element of setting is merged with the element of action, it is not brought into intimate relation with the element of character. The island is a part of what Crusoe does, rather than a part of what he is. But the dwelling-room of the Boffins, which was described in the paragraph from "Our Mutual Friend" quoted toward the end of the preceding chapter, is a part of what the Boffins are, rather than of what they do. The setting in the latter case is used as an adjunct to the element of character instead of to the element of action. Fielding and his contemporaries were the first English novelists to make the setting in this way representative of personality as well as useful to the plot; but the finer possibilities of the relation between setting and character were not fully realized until the nineteenth century. The eighteenth-century authors, in so far as they elaborated the element of setting, seem to have done so mainly for the sake of greater vividness. The appeal of setting being visual, the element was employed to illustrate the action and to make the characters clearly evident to the eye. By rendering a story more concrete, a definite setting rendered it more credible. This the eighteenth-century novelists discerned; but only with the rise of the romantic movement was the element applied to subtler uses.