renaissance which was stirring England. Keeping this man of a not uncommon type perfectly concrete and rounded, he has narrowed down the emphasis to the single aspect of hyper-sensitive and unstable moodiness. He is so great an artist just because he could bring so elusive and subtle a character or motive into this unmistakable and lasting relief.

To turn back now to practical matters, and to sum up the results of all this theorizing, I shall assume that the process by which you tell a story is a simplification of the real rush of experience; and that you accomplish this simplification by suppressing all but the most poignant and significant of the facts and sensations which throng so thickly in the stream of consciousness. To throw your incident and the people who take part in it, whether they be real or simulated, into high and memorable relief you will choose only the stirring and suggestive detail; for one reason we read story books is to find the humdrum of ordinary life scattered, and the interest and dramatic force of the commonplace picked out and emphasized for us. And not only must you leave out the swamping mass of irrelevant detail that for most of us hides the dramatic meaning of life, but you must select the relevant detail with an eye to its bearing on the motive, whether of character or incident or passion, which you have chosen for the soul of your story.

34. As I come now to the immediate and technical discussion of story-writing I shall follow the example of various other treatises and treat sepa

rately the three elements of a story, action or plot, the people or characters, and the background. To some extent every story must have each of these three elements: if it be a story at all it must have some action; action cannot be carried on without people or characters; and every action must be carried on somewhere, even though that somewhere may be practically ignored in the story. Stress on any one of these elements over the others alters the nature of the story. If you dwell chiefly on the action you get what is called a romance, or story of adventure or mystery, such as "Kidnapped," or the detective stories of Wilkie Collins or of M. Gaboriau. If you dwell on the characters you get a character study like some of George Eliot's works, or of the sort in which Mr. Henry James shows his consummate subtlety and cleverness. If you dwell on the background you get what may be hardly a story at all, but merely a description strung on a thread of story such as M. Pierre Loti's "Roman d'un Enfant." The art is at its best when all three elements are so fused that one cannot say whether the plot is written for the characters or the characters invented and studied for the story; and when the background strengthens both. This perfection is actually to be found in the great novels of the language: in Fielding, for example, in "Clarissa Harlowe," in the best of Scott's stories, in George Eliot, and in Dickens and Thackeray, the hold that the stories have on your mind depends both on the strong and moving plot and on the reality of the people: and in the

modern writers the background heightens the color of all.

Of each of these three elements I will now make a separate analysis.

35. In the plot of any story, whether it be a mere thread of incident, as in the stories of the Bible, or the slow complicated movement of some modern novels, the one necessity which underlies everything is that a throng of things which happened all together must be straightened out into single file in order to be put into words. Your first act as a story-writer is to get your material into a natural and orderly sequence. From the nature of the case, therefore, some sort of method is necessary to the telling of any story. In the simplest cases this method is nothing more than the natural simplification which is wrought by your memory: in the story of a canoe trip or of a fire the method takes care of itself. When more people take part in the action, and the action gets complicated, and you introduce motives of deeper significance, as in a short story and still more in a novel, you are more and more burdened with the responsibility of straightening out the tortuous and doubling course of your incidents into a single, straightforward flow. Since the object of this careful arranging is to give your story unbroken, undeviating progress you must get in all your facts and details so that they shall seem to come in the order in which they really fell.

To take the most complicated case first, in a full

sized novel of the conventional kind the natural order is out of the question, because there will be separate groups of actors, as is the case in " Middlemarch" with the Brooke family and the Casaubons on the one hand, and the Vincys and Lydgate on the other, or in Thackeray's story with the two branches of the Newcome family. To keep the thread of such a story from tangling itself you must plan carefully, and find incidents which do not overlap too much. You must take pains, too, to keep the chronology clear in your reader's mind, and the relations between the different groups of your readers: it is Thackeray's carelessness of such matters in the first chapter or two of "Henry Esmond" that makes it hard to get a start in that great romance. So too, as the various threads get more and more twisted into each other you must leave out more and more of the lesser things of the story, so that the interest may centre more and more closely on the final unentangling. In "The Newcomes," for example, the interest runs at the end almost entirely on the fortunes of the old Colonel and of Clive and Ethel. In this way a story which deals with many threads must clear itself at the end by bringing together the strongest and most notable; and as convergent lines at the point of meeting seem to the eye to thicken and grow blacker, so at the climax of a story the various threads of the plot coming together should bring it to the highest note of feeling.

In a short story the problem of the plot is in some ways a good deal simpler: in other ways it is more

difficult, in that it is like the problem before a playwright. In both the short story and the play the space is narrow, and the action or episode must be complete in itself. In each case, therefore, you must find or invent scenes which put the greatest amount of the story into the least space in more technical words, scenes which shall have the greatest possible significance. And the fewer there are of these scenes, the more striking the story will be. Mr. Kipling's little story of " Muhammad Din," in the "Plain Tales from the Hills," you will find to consist of just the suggestions of four or five little scenes which stretch over several months, each one adding its touch to the picture of the child. The very first scene of half a page fixes the local color and the contrast between East and West, and brings in all the people. In his longer story, "Without Benefit of Clergy," the scenes are so compact and so full of speech and action, that the story, with its almost appalling power and significance, could almost be acted as it stands. Again, Bret Harte's "Outcasts of Poker Flat" is made up of five or six scenes, with a little connecting narrative; each one, as in that in which Tom Simson and Piney arrive, is vivid with detail that will heighten the motive the redeeming capacity of mankind for self-sacrifice. And, in Miss Jewett's story "Fame's Little Day" (page 435), the division into three sections emphasizes the essentially dramatic construction. When you plan a short story, therefore, work it over in your mind until you find scenes which with the least possible amount of explanation and connection