Anatomy of fiction vs ornamentation

Anatomy of fiction vs ornamentation

An architect who has a building to design studies the anatomy of other buildings ; that is, he examines, in their relation to each other, the necessary features of all architecture — the arch, wall, pier, buttress, roof, and apertures. One building differs from another only in the way in which these elements are combined. As a piece of literature is an organic product quite as much as is a building, the first step in learning how to write is to be able to analyze a piece of literature anatomically ; that is, to resolve it into elements or units found differently combined in other specimens of literature.

Let us now see how these constructive units, of which literature makes use, sometimes appear in our conversation. We may imagine ourselves listening to a group of persons conversing on ordinary subjects. One who has been traveling in a foreign country is describing a celebrated cathedral or the scene from his window in one of the places he has visited. This gives us place- description. A second person has just met an old friend whom he has not seen for years, and is telling how changed he is in looks—an example of the description of personal appearance. Still another of the Company is giving his opinion of the character of some man in public life. This is character-description. One who is interested in social settlements is describing the way in which the poor live. This is description of mode of life. A fifth is giving an account of a meeting he at¬tended in the afternoon—description of an occasion or assemblage. It will not be necessary to carry- these illustrations further. It may be readily seen that these motives are found in literature because they are units of experience unorganized in life but organized in litera¬ture into larger and unified wholes. When these elements of literary construction are once understood, the problem of composition is merely that of their effective combination ; and the problem of literary analysis on the side of form is the separation of a piece of literature into its component motives.

There is distinction between the structural and decorative problems in the art of writing. Let us once more make use of architecture for purposes of analogy. The structural elements in architecture, the arch, pier, etc., give strength, order, symmetry, and organization to a building and express the intelligence of the architect, while the ornamenta¬tion adds beauty to the work and displays the feeling of the builder. "The two virtues of architecture which we can justly weigh," says Ruskin, "are its strength or good construction and its beauty or good decoration." It is possible to weigh in the same manner the virtues of a piece of literature, to separate in it the structural from the decorative elements. What is meant by the structure or anatomy of a piece of literature has already been explained. The decorative or purely sthetic element is secured by means of various rhetorical de¬vices and turns of expression, such as figures of speech, the rhetorical question, the periodic, sentence, and par¬allel construction, all of which lend additional beauty to the whole. It is through the ornamental side of the subject that the book brings certain phases of the study of formal rhetoric into the student's work in actual con¬struction. While the problem of composition does not deal primafily with ornamentation, no textbook can altogether neglect this aspect of it, for all good writing is in a measure beautiful. As the builder first puts his stones into order and afterward learns "to touch them into beauty with the graceful and delicdte forms he finds in nature—foliage and birds, shells and clouds and waves"—so the writer must not neglect either the con, structive or the ornamental side of his art, or his writing will be deficient either in clearness or in grace.

It will be seen that this method of studying com¬position is intended to react on the study of literature. It makes possible a correlation between these two departments which will lead to power in construction and to skill in real literary analysis, which means an appreciation of literature on both its anatomical, and decorative sides. The method of composition and literary analysis thus outlined is the most novel feature of the book. Students, however, need direction, not only in the organ¬izing of material into themes, but in the selection of the material itself. The book, therefore, deals with the question of material. Literature, art, and common life are the sources from which the student is expected to draw his subject-matter. The plates which the book contains furnish some of the material in narration and description, and the method herein suggested for the description of these paintings seeks to avoid the mere cataloguing of the details found in them— a most per¬nicious exercise in composition, though it may stim¬ulate the student's general power of observation. The social side of composition has been kept well to the front by showing the origin of some of the models in collo¬quial speech, by carrying on oral and written composi¬tion side by side throughout the book, and by suggesting subjects from common life that will open to the student's eyes the possibilities of his every-day surroundings as subjects for themes, and so show him that the materials of poetry and art 'are very near, even on "the pathway of our lives." In the early part of the book the theme- material is drawn very largely from literature. While the student is struggling with the elements of form, it is thought wise to furnish him with subject-matter. One piece of literature is, therefore, used for a pattern, and another for material to be reproduced, or made over, as it were, according to a given pattern_ lkfore selecting the matter to be used in this way, the authors obtained lists of readings from twenty-five of the leadmg high schools in the country, and have taken from those lists the selections that seem to commend themselves most generally to teachers of secondary English. While due prominence has been given to the common divisions of composition into narration, description, exposition, argumentation, and persuasion, an effort has been made to keep before both student and teacher the fact that these do not, as a rule, occur in either life or literature in their pure form. No author sets out with the intention of making a description, for instance, to the exclusion of narration, exposition, or any other form of composition. Indeed, the forms of composition are mere abstractions, useful only for analytical pur¬poses. Although at least one theme-model has been given upon each of the five divisions of composition, in its pure form, more emphasis has been placed upon the mixed types. There are theme-models on narration and description combined, also on narration and exposi¬tion, and on narration, description, and exposition com¬bined. The various models provide forms for the short story, the character sketch, the traveler's sketch, the oration, the book review, the debate, and the biograph¬ical or historical essay. It will thus be seen that narration is the one form that is carried through the book and gives the work its unity. There are two reasons why narration has been given such prominence. One is that it is the most common type of literature and the one which interests the largest number of people. The epic, the drama, the novel, the short story, the narrative poem, history, and biography are all primarily narrative, and constitute the greater part of the average person's reading. It is, therefore, important that our natural taste for narrative literature should be properly educated, in order that we may not be satisfied with what is inferior in conception or execu¬tion. The other reason is the need of duly limiting the scope of the work attempted in an elementary course. It is impossible for the young student to gain a complete working knowledge of all the forms of composition in the time generally allotted to the subject in secondary schools. For these reasons the book aims to concentrate the attention upon the leading form, and to give thought to the other kinds of composition, for the most part, only as they enter into combination with this. While the structural, or fundamental, work in this study of the method of composition is carried as a unit throughout the book, the correlated features are ade¬quately treated. One entire chapter, for instance, is devoted to ornamentation used in description; and exer¬cises in punctuation, choice of words, sentence structure, and other materials employed in constructive work form a part of the text. In this way grammatical, mechanical, and rhetorical details are brought in inci¬dentally, as they should be, and only as they are required in the student's composition. The young writer should be taught to handle the word, the sen¬tence, and the paragraph as parts of a concrete and larger whole which he is creating, just as the mason learns to handle and fit his bricks by laying them in an actual wall. By interspersing a few spelling exercises and review lessons in grammar, the authors aim to make the student feel that the break between high- school English and grammar-school English is not very marked. In the themes drawn from life an effort has been made to keep the commonplace from deteriorat¬ing into the trivial or the insipid, by suggesting a treatment of these subjects which is vivid and dramatic. If both theme and treatment are allowed to be ordi¬nary, there is little chance for growth in vocabulary or general literary appreciation. Thus, the social side of composition, that which connects it with everyday life, has two problems: one to open the student's eyes to the heroic element in common life; and the other to I teach him how to make the unheroic and the ordinary interesting by the manner in which he deals with his subject. The authors urge that students be encour¬aged to select their c wn subjects.