By A. C. Allenson

From the March & April 1923 issues of "Writer's Monthly." now in the public domain.

PART I

Few words in the list of literary technical terms impress one more thoroughly with their inadequacy than "Setting." It belongs to a class of words that have an unaccommodating rigidity, and is in the awkward position, in its fictional application, that a fixed thing must ever occupy when it seeks to deal with a changing, evolutionary thing.

We are told by the books that the short-story is a constantly changing, evolving creation, developing as life, the fashions of the time, literary tastes and appreciations develop. We know how far it has come, and with this to guide us, we may speculate upon its future with the certain knowledge that its form, precisely, is no more fixed today than it was half a century ago.

While it is true that words do extend their application and meaning as new uses arise for them, it is also true that they come to the task with a certain groaning, creaking reluctance, like that of a heavily-burdened man upon whose shoulders an added load has been placed, or as a stout old Conservative, convinced at heart that things as he has known them are the best possible, who is bidden to open his mind and accommodate himself to progressive ideas; if he does yield before the pressure of circumstances he brings with him some favoring thought regarding the past.

Thus, Setting has in it the suggestion of the stage, and brings to the mind the background against which the actors move—the drawing room with its furnishings in keeping with the time of the play, the situation of its characters, the requirements of its incidents. The castle hall must be furnished accurately in the matter of historical detail; the landscape, the deck of a ship, the court of justice, all true to life, for the purpose of the Setting is to create in the mind of the spectator the illusion of reality, and the more correct this is the greater the play's chances of success.

While in the well-staged play the setting is of greatest importance, it is, nevertheless, in some degree a thing apart from the play, when compared with the Setting of a story. In the one case the Setting is visible to the physical eye, in the other it is perceived by the inner eye—the imagination. Thus, one may have a play without stage accessories, and if one compares the picture of a London stage during the Stuart period, as described by the delightful Pepys, with that of the old Lyceum in the great days of the Irving regime, it may be seen how far stagecraft has marched— from a mere platform, unadorned, with favored spectators seated about it on stools, to the representation of the actual scene, with every detail as exact as if the place and its appointments had been lifted bodily across the gulf of centuries and set down in the world today. The Setting of the play suggests something closely related but apart, while in the story it is interwoven, actually part of the plotted design and inseparable from it.

Again Setting brings to the mind the frame of the picture within which the painting is "set," and this likewise has the suggestion of apartness. It also suggests the setting of the precious stone—the gold or silver or platinum "frame" within which the gem is placed, and which, by reason of some relation of harmony or contrast, enhances the beauty of the jewel; again, here, is the suggestion of apartness. Just as one may have a play of great value without accessories, so one may have a picture without a frame, a diamond without a setting, but there may scarcely be a short-story without some setting. In the story it is not something added to the work that might be done without, but something that belongs to it by the very terms and conditions of its existence, as do character, incident, emotion.

Henry James in "The Art of Fiction" says: "I cannot… conceive in any novel worth discussing at all of a passage of description that is not in its intention narrative." This applies to the short-story even more emphatically; in it setting must contribute, not as a mere adjunct or accessory, but as the colored silk thread contributes to the design of the weaver, being indispensable to the perfection of the designer's color-scheme. Unity is one of the outstanding requirements of the short-story, and setting must fall into line with other features that go to make up the unified work. Going back to the figure of our old Conservative gentleman, one may note the evolutionary process that setting has gone through, both on stage and in fiction. In the first stage of both there was no setting—the characters appeared, debated or declaimed their parts, without any thought of suitable background; one place was as good as another, and no place at all best, since there was nothing to take the attention from the characters and their topic or theme. In the second stage there was a formal decorative setting, not necessarily relevant to the purposes or spirit of play or story, but deemed to be pleasing to eye and esthetic sense on general principles. It was furnished much after the fashion in which the primitive photographer provided "artistic" background for his portrait—a daubed landscape with trees, a few Corinthian pillars, a castle, some browsing deer and a greyhound or two couching in the foreground; the setting had as much to do with the portrait as has a storm at sea with a chocolate sundae. Then came the third stage in which the possibilities of setting as aid to the purpose of the play or the story were realized, and so writers and playwrights proceeded to harness setting to their chariot, each striving to effect this illusion of reality after the differing fashion already explained.

Somewhere about this time the stage and the story began to part company. Hitherto, setting had been pictorial and illustrative, dealing more or less with concrete things. Now, in the story it was made to operate after the fashion in which Setting and Atmosphere operate in the real, everyday lives of men and women—as an irresistible compulsion exerted upon character by the visible and invisible conditions of those lives, the compulsion exerted by reason of the kinship of man with Nature that not only environs but is part of him.

Lovers of Dickens will pleasurably recall Mr. Vincent Crummles, the theatrical impresario in Nicholas Nickleby. When times were hard for young Nicholas and his protege Smike, the kindly Crummles found places for them in his troupe. Nicholas. being "literary," was to write or adapt plays to he added to the Crummles repertoire. Thus Mr. Crummles addressed him: "We'll have a new show-piece out directly. Let me see… peculiar resources of the establishment—new and splendid scenery—you must manage to introduce a real pump and two washing tubs. That's the London plan. They look up some dresses and properties, and have a piece written to fit 'em. Most of the theatres keep an author on purpose."

The "London plan"—one suspects—has had adherents outside London, both in Thespian and fictional art, playwrights and authors who, finding themselves in happy possession of a real pump and a couple of washing tubs, have made them render yeoman service.

George du Maurier thus made Sir Gorgeous Midas speak when showing a gentleman round his Art Gallery: "The pictures ain't much—only hand-painted—but them frames cost me a matter of five hundred quid apiece. Like 'em, eh?" And Chauncey Depew tells the story of a critical opinion passed by a rural admirer upon one of his ornate speeches: "Guess there was more frill than shirt to that speech of your's Chauncey."

In a day, not yet remote, there was a school of writers who, with a general story-notion in mind, obtained a ream or two of paper, a large bottle of ink, a sheaf of pens, took off coat and collar, lighted a portentous pipe, and proceeded to wallow in preliminary setting—purling brooks, rippling streams, waving forests, silvery moons, golden sunsets; true, the story did not call for any of them with notable insistence, but it was "good stuff" and would take care of fifty pages anyway, get the "old bean" working, in the Wodehousian term, and maybe, after this cranking had been done the engine might take it into its head to start running. It was picture stuff, and the dear public likes pictures.

A change, however, has taken place, and while the pictorial has perhaps a stronger hold than ever upon the general public—so much so that there is danger lest the eyes take upon themselves the entire functioning of the brain, seeing taking the place of thinking—there is evidenced in the fiction of the day a much more satisfactory idea of the function of setting.

It must not be mere frame, but part of the picture, not that which sets off the gem but is something inseparable from its beauty; it must not be present merely on general principles of estheticism, but must be relevant to the story itself and must help it on as do the other features—plot, character, verisimilitude, emotion, and style. No longer may it find place in the fictional "show" as does the front-row chorus girl on the stage by reason of shapely limbs and elegance of figure, but having as little essential relation to the musical comedy as has a Pekingese pup with the Einstein theory. Unless it has contributory force it should be struck out of the story as a mere cumberer of valuable fig-growing ground.

The writer must ask himself, "Will this pictorial feature —this Setting—help me to tell my story better, impress its purpose on my reader's mind?" Obviously, if it will not, it must do positive damage by diverting the attention of the reader from the purpose of the story. Pictures, or Setting, for their own sake, then, are positively detrimental, and, charming as they may seem to be in the parental sight of the author, he must, in the graphically ruthless words of Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch, "murder his darlings." To sum this part of the matter up: Setting as mere ornamentation is as discordant in the short-story as would be the nailing of a chromo on the panelled and carved walls of a Venetian palace. The true mission of Setting is to effect the purpose in fiction that the conditions of real life—its Setting—effect in the making and molding of character.

One need not pause here to dwell upon the more obvious uses of Setting, such as exactness in technical or historical detail—to point out that a soldier of Norman times should not be equipped with a Springfield rifle or an automatic pistol—, but may pass on to deal with the less obvious, but much more important aspects of Setting, those that reach inward, from the seen to the unseen, from the physical eye to that of the mind and soul, from the action to motive, the source and springs of action.

PART II

Under the general head of Setting, writers on technique have grouped three related though in some respect distinct features—Setting, Atmosphere, Feeling. Without pinning one's-self down to strict exactness, or venturing more than suggestion, may it not fairly be said that these three features respond in some degree to the physical, the mental, and the spiritual in humankind?—the last of the three terms being employed, of course, in the wider sense. The physical facts in Setting suggest the mental—the refining agency or Atmosphere through which physical impressions pass for rectification, while the mental passes on the result of its operations to the spiritual, or feeling, as the fictionist understands it— spiritual intuition and conclusion. This feeling is not mere sentiment, but has in it all the convincing reasonableness of spiritual fact.

This last feature has been emphasized by Stevenson in the familiar passage in which he indicates the three ways of beginning a story; the third of these (the other two not being relevant to this article) he thus states: "You may take a certain atmosphere and get action and persons to express and realize it. I'll give you an example—The Merry Men. There I began with the feeling of those islands on the West of Scotland, and I gradually developed the story to express the sentiment with which the coast affected me."

Again, in writing of this feeling that may be the story's incentive, Stevenson says: "Some places speak distinctly— certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder, certain old houses demand to be haunted, certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck." One ventures to reproduce these oft-quoted excerpts because they exemplify the theory suggested here: Setting, Atmosphere, Feeling—the physical appeal, the mental rectification, the feeling that inspires action and arrives at conclusions.

Setting, then, should transport us to the world of the story, furnish the illusion that we are in that world for the time being, and enable us to feel the sensations and pass through the mental experiences we should have had were we really in that world, living under the pictured conditions, subject to the same laws, engaged upon the same problems. The story should show the characters subject to the same kind of environing influences and compulsions as are exercised upon it, in real life, under similar conditions.

The Setting may be either in harmony with the incident or in impressive contrast to it, for both harmony and contrast are real and in accordance with the varying fashions of life as we live it. The design of every life is shot with vivid dramatic contrasts, though its major part may be monotonous enough. These conditions or fashions of life may be reproduced in differing degree, from the extreme form of local coloring to one less vivid but quite as real; the Setting may be so constant and unobtrusive as to be largely atmospheric, and again it may be supplied by deft and pregnant touches that —almost insignificant outwardly—when pressed upon a spring in consciousness open wide a marvelous world that is both imaginative and intensely real.

The writer recalls a sunny summer afternoon, many years ago, spent in the court house of an old English southern cathedral city. The indescribable tranquility—almost a holy calm—resting upon the city seemed to have invaded the precincts of the Court. Through the Gothic windows, now open, came the scents of English flowers, and one could catch glimpses of tall, full-foliaged trees, and velvet lawns that had been rolled and cared for during the better part of a thousand years. Now and again came the chimes of the cathedral bells, swinging in the tower that stood, sentinel-like, over the tombs of Norman kings. A man was being tried for murder—it was now the luncheon hour—; bewigged and begowned barristers chatted until such time as the judge, presiding over the Assizes, should return to the bench. Presently a door at the back of the bench opened and forth came the judge in wig and gown, accompanied by the High Sheriff, who wore the gorgeous livery of his great office. The assemblage rose as the judge moved to his chair, holding what seemed to be a little sheaf of papers in his hand.

Then something occurred that suddenly stilled the room to silence that could be felt; one sensed a wave of awe and dread sweep over the assembly, and every eye turned to the judge's hand in which he carried his papers. But he carried something else beside papers—a small square, of but a few inches, of black cloth. The trial was nearing its end, the case would go to the jury and the verdict would almost certainly be rendered during the course of that sunny afternoon; then the judge would deliver sentence of death—for there was no doubt in the case—and before he pronounced the fateful words "That you be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and may God have mercy on your soul," he would place that bit of black cloth upon his wig—the black cap, as it is called.

It is all part of the Setting of Justice as administered in England these thousand years. Those of us who looked on, that scented summer afternoon, saw as vividly as if it were actuality, a prison yard, the tolling of a prison bell, a small procession in which were a doomed man and his spiritual adviser walking to a grim gallows, the clergyman reading in broken voice the service for the burial of the dead who was yet alive; then a man standing alone on a plank, a rope about his neck—a quick jerk at a lever—the lone man vanishing from sight—the quivering of a taut rope for a few moments —the black flag climbing the prison flagstaff and fluttering word to the world that the price of murder had been paid. Just a glimpse of a bit of black cloth—a touch of Setting—and the picture and the story were complete in their every detail.

Zola contended that "Setting should show the environment which determines and completes the man;" and so in the Rougon-Macquart series of novels he developed his philosophic study of environment—character being made, shaped, developed, degenerated by the sordid influences brought to bear upon it by the conditions of life. It is abundantly evident that most of us are what we are as the result of external influences such as those that made us Catholic or Protestant, Mohammedan or Buddhist.

We fight to the death for principles that would have been negatived by us just as stoutly had we been placed from birth in an opposite environment. Most of us are what we are, not because of superior virtue or higher moral excellence, but because we never had the foes to fight that our less successful, or less moral, sister or brother have had leagued against them. It is easy to be good—as Becky Sharp asserted—on ten thousand a year; that is the doctrine of the world.

"Character," the old Greek word that we have turned exactly into English, means "likeness'"—the likeness as that of the impress of the stamp of the seal upon the wax; and that was how the Greek understood the word. Character in each of us is largely the impress of the stamp of life upon the wax of our nature; ceaselessly from cradle to grave the pressure is being exerted upon us, and it is the fictionist's duty to show the lives of his characters under the compelling influence of this constant pressure that, perhaps, is never being more effectively exerted than when we least realize it—pressure exerted by our complicated environment in which is so much that is hindering as well as so much that is helpful. The Hebrew prophet saw life as lived in a fire of righteousness that destroyed all that was combustible—the Greek philosopher saw it as pressure, and each is true. Hardy, essential Pantheist, showed in "Tess" the intimate relation between external Nature—Setting—and humankind:

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 being impregnated by their surroundings.

And, after the same fashion, throughout the whole story he interweaves incident and setting and character—the three great strands that go to make up life, in reality and in fiction. Describing Tess—"Maiden No More'—he thus interweaves the mood of Nature with the mood of the girl:

She knew how to hit to a hair's breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of the day and the suspense of the night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions. … On those long hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with the element she moved in. The flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral part of the scene. … The midnight airs and gusts, moaning among the tightly wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. … walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. … She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself an anomaly.

Again when Tess had struck her deadly blow in ultimate revolt against unjust and torturing Fate, and the pursuers come up with her and Angel Clare as the dawn lifts on Salisbury Plain:

In a minute or two her breathing became more regular, her clasp of his hand relaxed, and she fell asleep. The band of silver paleness along the east horizon made even the distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark and near, and the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity, and hesitation, which is usual just before day. The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-Stone beyond them, and the Stone of Sacrifice midway. Presently the night-wind died out, and the quivering little pools in the cuplike hollow of the stones lay still. At the same time something seemed to move on the verge of the dip eastward—a mere dot—it was the head of a man approaching them from the hollow beyond the Sun-Stone…

"Let her finish her sleep," he implored in a whisper, of the men as they gathered round.

All waited in the growing light, their faces and hands as if they were silvered, the remainder of their figures dark, the stones glistening to a green-gray, the Plain still a mass of shadows. Soon the light was strong, and a ray shone upon her unconscious form, peering under her eyelids and waking her.

"What is it, Angel?" she said, starting up. "Have they come for me?

Blended with the suggestion of Inevitableness, grim, rigid, implacable, and made more so by the darkness brooding over the Great Plain and the half-vision of the Stone of Sacrifice upon which hundreds of victims, guiltless as she, had been bereft of life in sacrificial offering, is something of relief, as the sun's rays were bringing relief from the darkness of the night. The dawning and the waking suggest that Fate has done its utmost and can do no more; nothing is left but for the tender vessel of her heart to break; she has known the bitter "plight" of living and death will be escape—a peace that the combined powers of earth and hell can no more molest.

I have quoted from this one book purposely in order to show the consistency with which Hardy blends the mood of Nature and that of his character.

To turn elsewhere for a single example of Setting matching the mood of the character and the nature of the incident, one finds it in Shorthouse's "John Inglesant." When the temptation comes to Inglesant to ruin himself and his companion he sees the movements of his own passion mirrored in Nature:

The sylvan arcades seemed like a painted scene-piece upon a Satanic stage, supernaturally alight to further deed of sin, and unpeopled lest the wrong should be interrupted or checked. … The poisonous mists crept over the tops of the cork-trees, and flitted across the long vistas in spectral forms, cowled and shrouded for the grave. Beneath the gloom indistinct figures seemed to glide—the personification of the miasma that made the place fatal to human life. … But even as he turned a sudden change came over the scene. The deadly glamor of the moonlight faded suddenly, a calm, pale and solemn light settled over the forest, the distant line of hills shone out distinct and clear, the evil mystery of the place departed whence it came, and fresh and cooling breezes sprang up and passed through the rustling wood, breathing pureness and life. e day-spring was at hand in the eastern sky. The rustling breeze was like a whisper from heaven that reminded him of his better self. He came back into the room—then he said—like a man speaking in a dream:

"The fatal miasma is rising from the plain, Lauretta; this place is safe for neither of us, we had better go on."

And not less powerful than harmony in emphasizing the features of a fictional situation is that of contrast—where the Setting and the incident are at opposite poles, one emphasizing the force of the other by reason of dramatic unlikeness. Contrast, whether in character study or in the presentation of incident, is of infinite value in fiction as in other forms of art— black against white—the drab dinginess of a stranded ship over against the colors of a Turner sunset, the heavens ablaze in crimsons and golds. One may linger only a moment or two in this article to present a single example of this method. I take it from Kipling's "Without Benefit of Clergy." Here the perfect happiness of Holden and Ameera is emphasized by contrast with the plague-infested city by night:

"My lord and my love, let there be no more foolish talk of going away. Where thou art, I am. It is enough." She put an arm around his neck, and a hand on his mouth.

There are not many happinesses so complete as those that are snatched under the shadow of the sword. They sat together and laughed, calling each other openly by every pet name that could move the wrath of the gods. The city below them was locked up in its own torments. Sulphur fires blazed in the streets; the conches in the Hindu temples screamed and bellowed, for the gods were inattentive in those days. There was a service in the great Mohammedan shrine, and the call to prayer from the minarets was almost unceasing. They heard the wailing in the houses of the dead, and once the shriek of a mother who had lost a child and was calling for its return. In the gray dawn they saw the dead borne out through the city gates, each litter with its own little knot of mourners.

Wherefore they kissed each other and shivered.

Thus Setting goes about its business, illustrating incident, whether by means of harmony or contrast, exercising its compulsions on character as they are exercised by the conditions of the life we live, compulsions however that do not, in the case of man, mean disaster or defeat necessarily, since out of them —even the sharpest and bitterest—man may rise sublime in defeat, unconquerable in disaster.

"It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the Master of my Fate, I am the Captain of my Soul."