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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.
We have had many distinguished fiction-writers, but none with the physical gusto of a Fielding, a Smollett, or even a Dickens, who, idealist and romanticist as he was, and Victorian as were his artistic preferences, has this animal life which tingles upon every page.
Everybody had the chance of seeing Tom Brown at Oxford, and watching their old favorite's course through undergraduate days to that haven and final goal of fiction-writers, marriage.
If, however, the Tractarian fiction-writers had confined themselves to allegory there would be no necessity to do more than glance at them, for allegory, on the obvious Biblical suggestion, has been a constant instrument of combined religious instruction and pastime. But they went much further afield. William Gresley and others wrote stories mostly for the young.
Even the most fanciful flights of the fiction-writers had not quite hit upon him. He was not a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, nor was he like the unfortunate young man in Kipling's "Greatest Story in the World." His two personalities were so mixed that they were practically aware of themselves and of each other all the time.
=Transition from Material to Method.= We have now considered the subject-matter of fiction and also the contrasted attitudes of mind of the two great schools of fiction-writers toward setting forth that subject-matter.
I forget whether they married sisters, but they live on in the memory as ornamental symbols of a vanished past a day when fiction-writers impressed it, on their readers with every means at their command, that a hero was well-dressed, well-washed, and well-groomed. Such details have become unnecessary, and grumpy stand-patters no longer contemptuously mutter, 'Soap!
Undoubtedly, very few people are always at home for every real experience that knocks upon their doors: very few people, to say the thing more simply, have an experiencing nature. But great fiction may be written only by men of an experiencing nature; and here is a basis for confession that, after all, fiction-writers are born, not made.
"The conditions" to use a phrase of Emerson's "are hard but equal": and at their best, the realist, working inductively, and the romantic, working deductively, are equally able to present the truth of fiction. We have now considered the subject-matter of fiction and also the contrasted attitudes of mind of the two great schools of fiction-writers toward setting forth that subject-matter.
'Yes, and so he is a little of the petit-maître, perhaps. He's much of that school which fiction-writers describe as having "finely-pencilled eyebrows, and chins of almost womanlike roundness"; but people in Rome always called him handsome, that is if he be my Cecil Walpole.
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