THE SOURCES OF PLOT

THE SOURCES OF PLOT

1. The Characters'

Here arises the old question as to whether circumstances govern men or men control circumstances. As to fiction, Mr. Howells holds to the latter view. " The true plot, " he says, " comes out of the character ; that is, the man does not result from the things he does, but the things he does result from the man, and so plot comes out of character; plot aforethought does not characterize. " A more moderate view, it seems to me, is that events ordinarily modify characters, and that in certain instances men actually make events. When circumstances are too much for the struggling will, and events pile up, irresistibly driving man on to his destiny, we have tragedy. 2But not all life is tragic. Now and again the hero's hand disposes of affairs and he arises victorious.

" To many men, doubtless, there is far more fascination in conceiving a group of characters — and then setting to work to discover a narrative which will give them the freest action — than in toiling over the bare idea, and the subsequent plot, followed by a series of actors and actresses who work out the denouement. "3

When Thackeray planned Vanity Fair the characters gave form to the plot. In writing to his mother he says " What I want is to make a set of people living without God in the world (only that is a cant phrase), greedy,

pompous men, perfectly self-satisfied for the most part,

and at ease about their superior virtue. "'

To conceive of a character as subject to the limitations of heredity, or of environment, at once opens up the book of life, whose lightest word is weighty with meaning. What a field is here disclosed, replete with the most absorbing problem plots I 5A dissolute but good-natured man comes into a fortune, but it is to be his contingent upon his entire reformation: how does he act? A man born without timidity, at middle age suddenly finds fear obsessing his every thought : how would he attempt to maintain his place among his associates? A light woman suddenly awakens to the fact that she has forfeited the respect of her grown daughter : what means will she take to regain it?

The combinations are endless.

In the great majority of instances the characters in the short-story will disclose themselves by means of

2. Dramatic Incidents

Marion Crawford has called the novel a pocket stage' 1 The same may be said even more truly of the short-story. It is patent to the observer that these two are now influencing each other profoundly. The dramatist and the short-story writer labor with the same materials, under nearly like conditions, and often seek similar effects.

The drama exhibits " characters in action " 7— so does the short-story ; the drama is plotted with a view to the same requirements as govern the short-story — brief and comprehensive introduction of characters and setting, rapid rise of the complicating incident to the climax, period of suspense, denouement, and swift close; both are contrived to produce a preconceived and unified effect ; both are compressed, scenic, and usually contain a touch of fantasy. Thus the points of likeness might be multiplied and expanded.

One word, however, may be offered about the bearing of the old dramatic unities —action, time and place. s The unity of the short-story upon which Poe insists is none of these ; it is, as has already appeared, a unity of effect, or impression. At the same time it is well to remember that unity of action, which Corneille called the unity of intrigue, is essential to good plot. It is also usually desirable to limit the time to a short period, and the place to one general locality — of which more later.

From the foregoing it will be plain that the characters and dramatic incidents, as well as the general sources noted in previous chapters, must generally be used conjointly. This idea is amplified in the following:

" In his recently written preface to the revised Portrait of a Lady, Mr. Henry James quotes a remark of

Ivan Turgenev `in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. ' It began for him, Mr. James reports, ` almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him. . . . He saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favorable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel. ' " °

3. Impressionism

One never tires of quoting Stevenson. The following words from Graham Balfour's Life and Letters of the great romancer admirably point out the three special sources of fictional plots —characters, dramatic incidents, and impressionism. Balfour is speaking:

" I remember very distinctly his saying to me: ' There are, so far as I know, three ways, and three ways only, of writing a story. You may take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a character and choose incidents and situations to develop it, or lastly — you must bear with me while I try to make this clear '— (here he made a gesture with his hand as if he were trying to shape something and give it outline and form) —` 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 one of those islands on the west coast of Scotland, and I gradually developed the story to express the sentiment with which the coast affected me. ' "

Stevenson's experience is what Mr. H. S. Canby 11calls (as he himself laments, for want of a better term) " impressionism, " but in Stevenson's case the impression gained totality only when the story grew out of his somewhat vague " feeling. " of atmosphere. He first received an impression, and then sought to convey that impression by means of the story —'and he did. 12

Of course the general impression of atmosphere is not the only one the author may wish to convey through the medium of the short-story. The more specific feeling aroused by a picture, an incident, a situation, a problem, a character — what not — may be just as effectively conveyed to the reader. Mr. Canby thus dwells upon this theme in his brochure, The Short Story:

" So the nucleus of ' The Luck of Roaring Camp' may have been the glimpse of a lank, rough figure, with a tiny baby in its arms, and, in spite of the excellent plot, a feeling akin to the pleasurable emotion which would follow upon such a scene in real life remains longest

with the reader. According to this theory [impressionism] the process, if one should attempt to write a Short Story, might be something like this : I leave my room and meet a drunken beggar reeling from the gutter. As I turn to avoid him, he pulls himself together and quotes huskily a dozen lines of Virgil with a bow and a flourish, and stumbles off into the darkness. I make him into a story, and, be the plot what it may, the effect upon the reader that I shall strive for will be a vivid impression of incongruity, not far different from that which I felt when the drunkard turned scholar and relapsed. Not all short stories can be analyzed back to their basic element as easily as this one may be built up, but with many the process is easy and obvious. Nearly everyone of Maupassant is a perfect example; his titles ' Fear, " Happiness, " The Coward, ' would lead you to suspect as much. In the motifs and suggestions for stories, some utilized later, some not, which may be found in quantity scattered through Hawthorne's American Note-Books, there is often enough such an impression noted at the moment of its inception. Here in the American Note-Books, II. 176, is ' The print in blood of a naked foot to be traced through the streets of a town, ' which seems to inspire ' Dr. Grimshaw's Secret, ' and again, N. B. I. 13, ' In an old house a mysterious knocking might be heard on the wall, where had formerly been a doorway now bricked up, ' which is applied in `Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure ; ' also, ' A stranger, dying, is buried; and after many years two strangers come in search of his grave and open it. . . . In Henry

James's story, Flickerbridge, ' which appeared in Scribner's for February, 1902, the action of the story can only be explained by the deep impression which the quaint, delightful lady of Flickerbridge makes upon the hero, which impression it is the intent of the author to convey to the reader; and so with many another. "