V Catastrophic. -The Sunday evening is well individualized. In temporal, spatial, and circumstantial settings there are definite reminiscences of the climax. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Initial. The action begins at once, with a fairly rapid movement. The omission of detailed settings is characteristic of the entire novel. The reader does not know directly the year or season or part of England in which the story opens. Climactic. The time is a late hour of an April evening. The state of the weather is only implied. The day has no significance apart from the specific incident. The place setting is the parlor at Hunsford, which has no particular meaning for the reader or the characters. Catastrophic.— Darcy's successful proposal occurs on a September morning, in the neighborhood of the Bennet home. That is about all one knows of time and place. The circumstantial setting must be gathered largely from preceding and following chapters. 74. Further Economy. In general, settings with special artistic quality are either in definite contrast or agreement with their incidents. Sharp contrast is a favorite method with both the romancer and the humorist. Hawthorne uses the cheerful morning as a background for tragic death, with striking effect, in The House of the Seven Gables and in Ethan Brand. Humorous contrast between the real setting and its interpretation by a character is well exemplified in Don Quixote, Sir Launcelot Greaves, and in the Roman camp of the Antiquary's imagination. Effects are often gained by a conscious inversion of conventional settings. "The morning of Friday was as serene and beautiful as if no pleasure party had been intended, and that is a rare event, whether in novelwriting or real life." (The Antiquary, Chapter XVII.) The action and reaction between settings and characters is a complex matter, and has already been noticed more than once. The character may not only interpret his environment; he may to no small extent make it, as notably in Robinson Crusoe. Pessimistic realism, however, prefers to portray human nature as the 'slave of circumstances.' In novels of any school, the same details often serve as setting and as motivation. The storm in the Antiquary, Chapter VII, is not only a fine background for the tragic incident, but is the direct cause of it. Repetition of specific place settings, with contrasted or similar incidents, is often used with more definite single effects than in the examples given above from Silas Marner. The effect is one of tragic pathos in the "let him remember it in that room, years to come!" of Dombey and Son. (Chapters XVIII and LIX.) Trollope, in Barchester Towers, and Hardy, in A Pair of Blue Eyes, describe, with ironical effect, a heroine wooed by two lovers, at different times, but in exactly the same spot. CHAPTER V THE DRAMATIS PERSONÆ If in 75. Composition. A list of the dramatis personæ, for a drama, epic, or novel, will vary according to the interpretation of the term and the degree of analysis desired. the drama, appearance on the stage is the basis of inclusion, some persons of considerable importance in the plot will generally be omitted. Claribel and Sycorax, for example, are both of definite value in the plot-development of The Tempest. In the novel, the frequent use of secondary narrative, as distinct from presented action, introduces many characters who would not appear on the stage in a dramatization. In addition to truly individualized characters, a novel always includes many persons with little more than numerical identity- whether speaking, present without speech, or given a mere reference. In the remote background are persons merely implied, though some of them may have been clearly conceived by the novelist. In an intensive imaginative study, one could scarcely fail to raise some question concerning the mother of Wickham, in Pride and Prejudice; or the father of the hero and the parents of Molly Cass, in Silas Marner. The author himself is a dramatis persona if he has an organic part in the action as a whole, either in propria persona, or in a fictitious disguise which preserves his real identity. In fictions of the type of Smollett's Adventures of an Atom, a personified object is technically the central figure of the action. In Notre Dame de Paris, the cathedral itself has been called, imaginatively, the real hero. In many medieval and some modern stories, an animal plays a similar rôle. Supernatural beings and personified abstractions become true dramatis personæ, in romance, whenever they have a genuine function as individuals in the unity of the illusion. "Anxiety," in Silas Marner, serves merely in a figure of speech; but "Despair" is one of the real characters in Pilgrim's Progress. 76. Number. The absolute number of dramatis personæ is of great importance in determining the social area of the novel, and the degree of complexity in its action. The number relative to length of composition affects particularly the rapidity of action, the degree of individualization, and the reader's sense of sustained intimacy with the characters. In a way, there is decided contrast between the sociological ideal of the novel, demanding an extensive "exhibition" of varied types, and the psychological ideal, intent on profound study of the individual. The epic breadth resulting from a large dramatis persona with little individualization is exemplified in The Plague Year and I Promessi Sposi. The former fiction contains about 165 persons with numerical identity, of whom only 16 are given individual names. In the latter work the corresponding numbers are 150 and 33. For the Waverley Novels,1 some 1700 characters are enumerated. 1 Library edition; Edinburgh, 1853. The above data, with some others, give roughly a proportion of 30 to 40 individuals present in the action, whether speaking or not, to 100,000 words. 77. Chapter Distribution. A table showing the distribution of the principal characters according to chapters, if made early in the examination of the novel, is often helpful as a basis for further study of individuals and groups. Such a scheme gives a condensed list of dramatis personæ; the structural history of individuals, in outline; indicates the consecutive grouping, and serves to recall the general significance of each chapter. In the following example only the most important characters are noted. "S" indicates speech; "P," presence; "R,” reference. 78. Grouping in General. The method of grouping and the emphasis on the different groups will depend on the individual novel and the particular purpose with which it is studied. Certain groups, of special importance in technical analysis, are determined by the structure itself; others are defined or suggested by the author's comment; still others may be perceived or fashioned by the critic. A group may be a real ensemble, composed of persons assembled in some definite, limited space and time, as in |