Read Like A Writer

There are two ways to learn how to write fiction: by reading it and by writing it. Yes, you can learn lots about writing stories in workshops, in writing classes and writing groups, at writers' conferences. You can learn technique and process by reading the dozens of books like this one on fiction writing and by reading articles in writers' magazines. But the best teachers of fiction are the great works of fiction themselves. You can learn more about the structure of a short story by reading Anton Chekhov's 'Heartache' than you can in a semester of Creative Writing 101. If you read like a writer, that is, which means you have to read everything twice, at least. When you read a story or novel the first time, just let it happen. Enjoy the journey. When you've finished, you know where the story took you, and now you can go back and reread, and this time notice how the writer reached that destination. Notice the choices he made at each chapter, each sentence, each word. (Every word is a choice.) You see now how the transitions work, how a character gets across a room. All this time you're learning. You loved the central character in the story, and now you can see how the writer presented the character and rendered her worthy of your love and attention. The first reading is creative—you collaborate with the writer in making the story. The second reading is critical.


John Dufresne, from his book, The Lie That Tells A Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction

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Saturday, August 3, 2019

How To Write Short Stories

THE WRITING OF THE
SHORT STORY




BY

LEWIS WORTHINGTON SMITH, A.M.

DRAKE UNIVERSITY, DES MOINES, IOWA




D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO

Copyright, 1902,
By D. C. Heath & Co.

It is a pleasure
to be permitted to associate
with this little book
the name of my friend
Professor L. A. Sherman
of the University of Nebraska.


SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS

In the author's classes the three stories in the volume entitled "Three Hundred Dollars" are first studied because of their simplicity, and these are followed by parts of "The Bonnie Brier Bush," and then by the stories from Bret Harte. Mrs. Phelps Ward's "Loveliness" is especially valuable for illustrating methods and devices for making a simple theme dramatically interesting. Students are required to mark stories with the symbols and discuss them with reference to the principles of which this little book is an exposition, but no recitation on the book itself is required. Perhaps one-third of the time in the class-room is spent in discussion of the short themes written by the class, and when convenient these are placed on the board before the class for that purpose. In the theme work following the suggested subjects the effort is made to confine instruction and practice to one thing at a time, but at the conclusion of the work of the term each member of the class is required to hand in a complete original story.


[1] WRITING OF THE SHORT STORY


Narrative Forms

1. Elements of the Story.—This little volume is meant to be a discussion of but one of the various forms that literature takes, and it will be first in order to see what are the elements that go to the making of a narrative having literary quality. A story may be true or false, but we shall here be concerned primarily with fiction, and with fiction of no great length. In writing of this sort the first essential is that something shall happen; a story without a succession of incidents of some kind is inconceivable. We may then settle upon incident as a first element. As a mere matter of possibility a story may be written without any interest other than that of incident, but a story dealing with men will not have much interest for thoughtful readers unless it also includes some showing of character. Further, as the lives of all men and women are more or less conditioned by their surroundings and circumstance, any story will require more or less description. Incidents are of but little moment, character showing may have but slight interest, description is purposeless, unless the happenings of the story develop in the characters feelings toward which we assume some attitude of sympathy or opposition. Including this fourth element of the story, we shall then have[2] incident, description, character, mood, as the first elements of the narrative form.

2. A Succession of Incidents Required.—A series of unconnected happenings may be interesting merely from the unexpectedness—or the hurry and movement of the events, but ordinarily a story gains greatly in its appeal to the reader through having its separate incidents developed in some sort of organic unity. The handling of incidents for a definite effect gives what we call plot. A plot should work steadily forward to the end or dénouement, and should yet conceal that end in order that interest may be maintained to the close. Evidently a writer who from the first has in mind the outcome of his story will subordinate the separate incidents to that main purpose and so in that controlling motive give unity to the whole plot. Further, the interest in the plot will be put on a higher plane, if in the transition from incident to incident there is seen, not chance simply, but some relation of cause and effect. When the unfolding of the plot is thus orderly in its development, the reader feels his kindling interest going forward to the outcome with a keener relish because of the quickening of thought, as well as of emotion, in piecing together the details that arouse a glow of satisfaction.

3. The Character Interest.—We can hardly have any vital interest in a story apart from an interest in the characters. It is because things happen to them, because we are glad of their good fortune or apprehensive of evil for them, that the incidents in their succession gain importance in our emotions. We are concerned with things that affect our lives, and secondarily with things that affect the lives of others, since what touches the fortunes of others is but a part of that complex web of destiny and environment[3] in which our own lives are enmeshed. In the story it is not so true as in the drama that, for the going out of our sympathies toward the hero or the heroine, there should be other contrasting characters; but a story gains color and movement from having a variety of individualities. Especially if the story is one of action, definite sympathies are heightened when they are accompanied by emotional antagonisms. In "The Master of Ballantrae," we come to take sides with Henry Durrie almost wholly through having found his rival, the Master, so black a monster. Such establishment of a common bond of interest between us and the character with whom our sympathies are to be engaged is a most effective means of holding us to a personal involvement in the development of the plot. There must not be too many characters shown, the relations between them must not be too various or too complexly conflicting, but where the interplay of feeling and clashing motives is not too hard to grasp, a variety of characters gives life and warmth of human interest to a story.

4. Uses of Description.—Inasmuch as there are other interests in our lives than those which are established by our relations with our fellows, interests connected with the material world about us, any narrative will probably have occasion to include some description. It may be necessary merely as an aid to our understanding of some of the details upon which the plot turns, it may help us to realize the personalities of the characters, and it is often useful in creating background and atmosphere, giving us some of the feelings of those with whom the story deals as they look upon the beauty, or the gray dullness, of the changing panorama of their lives. Stevenson's description of the[4] "old sea-dog" in "Treasure Island" is an excellent illustration of the effectiveness of a few lines of description in making us know something very definite in the man.

"I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a handbarrow, a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the saber cut across one cheek, a lurid white."

5. Rossetti in "The Bride's Prelude," a story in verse, after merely glancing at the opening of the tale, devotes eight stanzas to description introduced for the purpose of background and atmosphere. Two of them are given here.

"Within the window's heaped recess
The light was counterchanged
In blent reflexes manifold
From perfume caskets of wrought gold
And gems the bride's hair could not hold
"All thrust together: and with these
A slim-curved lute, which now,
At Amelotte's sudden passing there,
Was swept in some wise unaware,
And shook to music the close air."

This helps us to enter into the life and spirit of the time and place, to conceive imaginatively the likings, the desires, the passions, the purposes, and the powers that shall be potent in the story.

6. Kinds of Description.—Description is primarily of two kinds, that which is to give accurate information, and that which is to produce a definite impression not necessarily involving exactness of imagery. The first of these forms is useful simply in the way of explanation, serving the first purpose indicated in paragraph four. The[5] second is useful for other purposes than that of exposition, often appealing incidentally to our sense of the beautiful, and requiring always nice literary skill in its management. It should be borne in mind always that literary description must not usurp the office of representations of the material in the plastic arts. It should not be employed as an end in itself, but only as subsidiary to other ends.

7. Various Moods as Incidents.—The moods in the characters of a story and their changes are connected with the incidents of the story, since they are in part happenings, and with the characters, since they reveal character. Apart from direct statement of them, we understand the moods of the actors in the little drama which we are made to imagine is being played before us from the things they say, from the things they do, and from gestures, attitudes, movements, which the author visualizes for us. If these moods are not made clear to us or we cannot see that they are natural, definite reactions from previous happenings in accord with character, we do not have a sense of organic unity in the narrative. We become confused in trying to establish the dependence of incident and feeling upon something preceding, and our interest flags. Everything that happens in a well-told story gives us feelings which we look to find in those whom the happenings affect in the tale, feelings which should call forth some sort of responsive action for our satisfaction. Clearly, if the characters are cold, if we cannot find in them moods of the kind and intensity that to us seem warranted, the story will be a disappointment.[6]


Literary Divisions and General Principles

8. The Conceptual and Emotional.—Theoretically all writing is divided easily into two classes, conceptual and emotional, the literature of thought and the literature of feeling. In the actual attempt to classify written composition on this basis, however, no sharp distinction can be maintained. Even matters of fact, certainly such matters of fact as we care to write about, are of more or less moment to us; we cannot deal with them in a wholly unemotional way. In our daily lives we are continually reaching conclusions that differ from the conclusions reached by others about the same matters of fact, and are trying to make these matters of fact have the same value for others that they have for us. This is true of our business life as well as of our social and home life. It always will be so. It is doubtless true that if our knowledge of matters of fact embraced a knowledge of the universe, and if the experience of each of us were just like that of his fellow and included all possible experience, we might reach identical conclusions. This is not true and never can be true. It is in effect true of a small portion of the things about which we think,—the addition of one to two makes three for every one,—but outside of these things, writing need not be and seldom is purely conceptual.

9. Subject-matter.—Various as are the things about which we write and manifold as are our interests in them, they may be classified for our purposes under four heads: Matters of Fact, Experience, Beauty, Truth. Again, we shall find difficulty in separating each of these from each of the others. Some of our experiences have certainly[7] been revelations of matters of fact; without our experiences, we should hardly have acquired any real sense of the beautiful; save for them we could not have known anything of truth. No accurate definition of these things carefully distinguishing between them can be attempted here. It may be assumed that what is meant by matters of fact will be understood without definition. As we read the story in great measure for the purpose of enlarging our experience, this part of our possible literary material is worth considering further. In the child we are able to detect very early a growing curiosity. That curiosity does not disappear when the child has grown from boy to man; he is still asking questions of the universe, still trying to piece the fragments of his knowledge into a law-ordered and will-ordered whole. What he knows has been the product of experience, what he may yet know further must be the product of experience. This experience may not all be personal, but even that which he gets at second hand is so far useful in helping him toward that understanding of the universe for which he hopes. He never will reach that understanding, all his experience will make but a fraction of things to be known matters of fact to him; and yet a deathless interest in the scarcely recognized belief that the facts and forces of which he has known have some unifying principle makes his emotions quicken at every new experience that may have possible significance.

10. Appeal of Experience, Beauty, and Truth.—It will be evident, then, that experience which somehow makes the impression of superior importance may be presented inorganically and yet gain an interested hearing. The method of creating this impression, whether through the appearance of conviction in the writer or by various literary[8] devices, need not detain us here. We shall be concerned merely with noting that the possible relation of the particular to the general, of this experience to the whole of experience, makes it a thing of moment. In just what way experience develops in us the sense of the beautiful, just what it is in anything that makes us distinguish beauty in it, cannot now be determined. It will be enough for us to know that literature makes a large appeal to a sense of the beautiful in us, a sense not fortuitous and irrational, though varying, but normal and almost universal, dependent upon natural laws of development. Truth is also difficult of definition, but we may understand that when out of experience, as through a process of reasoning, we have reached a conclusion that is something more than a matter of fact, a conclusion touching our emotions and having vital spiritual interest to us, the experience, whether our own directly or at second hand, has brought us to a truth. Truth is, perhaps, that matter of fact of universal intelligence that transcends the matter of fact of the finite mind.

11. Literary Principles and Qualities.—There are some fundamental principles of literary presentation which we may briefly review here. All our study of science, and in a less obvious fashion, of all the physical, social, and artistic world about us, is more or less an attempt to classify, simplify, and unify facts whose relations we do not see at a glance. We must observe and learn the facts first, but they will be of no great utility to us as unrelated items of knowledge. The need of establishing some sort of law and order in our understanding of the mass of phenomena of which we must take cognizance is so insistent that we early acquire the habit of attempting to hold in mind any new fact through its relation to some[9] other fact or facts. In other words, we can retain the knowledge we acquire only by making one fact do duty for a great many other facts included in it. Our writing must not violate what is at once a necessity and a pleasure of the mind. Unity, simplicity, coherence, harmony, or congruity, must all be sought as essential qualities of any writing. We must also indicate our sense of the relative values of the things with which we deal by a proper selection of details for presentation, a careful subordination of the less important to the more important through the proportion of space and attention given to each, and through other devices for securing emphasis. Let us keep in mind value, selection, subordination, proportion, emphasis, as a second group of terms for principles involved in writing. We may also wish to give our subject further elements of appeal through what may be suggested beyond the telling, through the melody and rhythm of the words, or through a quickening of the sense of the beautiful. Suggestion, melody, rhythm, beauty, are to be included, then, in a third group of qualities that may contribute to the effectiveness of what we write.

12. Conceptual Writing.—Of the literary qualities that have just been discussed, only the first group is perhaps essential to what has been designated as conceptual writing. Here we may place expository writing on subjects wholly matter of fact, mathematical discussions, scientific treatises largely, though not necessarily, and other writing of like character. As unity is the quality of importance here, we may well consider the units of discourse. Our first unit is that of the whole composition, the second that of the paragraph, and the third that of the sentence. Which of these is the prime unit, as the dollar is the prime unit of our[10] medium of exchange, may not be evident at once; but if we examine the writing of clear thinkers carefully, without attempting to settle the matter in any doctrinaire fashion, we shall find that the paragraph, and not the sentence, is the more unified whole. I turn to Cardinal Newman, and in the middle of a paragraph find the sentence, "This should be carefully observed," a sentence meaningless when taken from the context. As a part of the paragraph it has a function, but it is certainly as a unit of detail and not as a prime unit. A writer like Carlyle makes these lesser units more important, but they are still subordinate to their use in the paragraph. In all our writing we shall do much for the unity, simplicity, and coherence of our work by seeing to it that our paragraphs are properly arranged and that each fulfills this function of a prime unit in the composition.

13. The Sense of Value.—When, in addition to statement of mere matters of fact, an author wishes to impress his readers with his own sense of the importance and the value of what he has to say, or of some special phase of his subject, he will employ the principles of the second group spoken of in a preceding paragraph. They cannot be ignored, indeed, in explanation of the simplest matters of fact, but a writer who means to convince and persuade will make more use of them. His personality will express itself in the selection of details and in the emphasis he places upon one detail or another. Among the literary forms which, besides being conceptual, are also concerned with persuasion, we find the oration, the essay, a great deal of business correspondence, and much of what we read in magazines and newspapers.

14. Writing having Artistic Quality.—When in addition[11] to expressing matters of fact or truth, appealing perhaps to experience, we wish to arouse some sense of the beautiful and the artistic, we shall give our writing some or all of the qualities of the third group. Evidently, writing of this sort is in many respects the most difficult, since the writer must have regard for unity and the related principles, as well as for the qualities which peculiarly distinguish it. Experience, beauty, and truth are all available as subject-matter, and all the principles governing literary composition are concerned. Here we shall find the poem, the drama, the oration in some of its forms, most essays of the better sort, the greater part of good critical writing, literary description, and all narrative forms except the matter-of-fact historical writing of unliterary scholars.

15. Two Things Requisite in Writing.—It is to be borne in mind that the foregoing classifications are by no means absolute. Gardiner in his "Forms of Prose Literature" says very truly that the "essential elements, not only of literature, but of all the fine arts, are: first, an organic unity of conception; and second, the pervasive personality of the artist." It is true that much of our writing does not aspire to literary character, but in very little of our writing of any sort can we afford to neglect the first of these elements, and in very little of it do we care to leave the second out of account. Even in exposition of the simpler sort we may give to our writing the distinction of a more luminous style and the stronger appeal of a warmer personal interest, if we shape it into organic unity and make evident in it "the pervasive personality of the artist."[12]


The Story in Particular

16. The Art of the Story.—However abstract the thinking of civilized man may become, "all our intelligence," to quote Ladd's "Outlines of Physiological Psychology," "is intelligence about something or other, ... resting on a basis of sensations and volitions." Difficult as it is and difficult as are the problems involved in its construction, the story is from some points of view the most elementary of literary forms. It is concerned directly with matters of sensation and volition. If it is to play upon our emotions, it must revive sensations and volitions, make us in some degree part of the action. Experience is at once its warp and woof, but while it gives us new experiences, it must, in connection with them, revive old ones and so become tangible and real for us.

Of the memories that have come to us through the senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, those that are visual are probably the most clearly defined and persistent for most people. The sensation of hearing doubtless comes next, and then those of touch, smell, and taste. A name will suffice to make us see the face of an absent friend; a few words, or the sight of a music roll, is enough to make us hear a favorite melody; a line or two on a printed page brings back to us the scent of the hayfield or the heavy odor of hyacinths in a conservatory. We must remember, too, that this may be in each case, not simply a bringing back of the idea of the things, but a reviving of the sensations themselves. The seat of sensation is after all the brain. Originally we experience sensation through some excitation of the end organs of sense, the ear, the nerves of[13] touch, the retina; but these sensations become associated with verbal images in the mind, and finally the excitation of the verbal images results also in the revival of the original sensation. There is perhaps no one of us who has not seen wholly imaginary moving shadows or flashing lights in the dark. Such cases are not good illustrations of the point, possibly, but most of us can at will hear a connected succession of notes with which we have familiarized ourselves. In my own recent experience there occurred a very clear and wholly unexpected subjective sense of smell when reading of an experiment with frogs which recalled the distinctive odor of slimy water. Mr. James Sully, in "Illusions," says, "Stories are told of portrait painters who could summon visual images of their sitters with a vividness equal to that of reality, and serving all the purposes of their art." The same writer says again, and this is peculiarly significant, that "the physiologist Gruithuisen had a dream in which the principal feature was a violet flame, and which left behind it, after waking for an appreciable duration, a complementary image of a yellow spot." Here a purely subjective impression had been reproduced in the nerves of sense.

17. The Place of Sensation in Writing.—The thing that it seems important to dwell upon here is that subjective sensations do go out from the brain and stimulate in a very real fashion the sensations that are naturally excited by external stimuli localizing themselves in the end organs of sense. As these sensations, while not the all of emotion, are largely involved in emotion as its more poignant element, and as emotion is a first requisite in the appeal of a story, it is evident that the writer of stories will do well to acquire the art of reviving sensations. Further, as in[14] the quickening of sensations our ideas become more tangible and real, writers who employ other literary forms will find that their style gains clarity and distinction by a like appeal to sensation when possible. Just how successful story-writers make appeal to sensation, revive experience, give new experience, and touch the sense of the beautiful is to be taken up more definitely in the following pages. We can understand, of course, that subjective sensations are not as strong as those which we experience directly, but on the other hand they may be more varied, they may crowd in upon us more rapidly, they may be more congruously chosen for a definite effect than in our actual life. The total effect may then be no less pronounced. In discovering how this is brought about we shall find the art of the short story.


Special Study of the Story

18. Symbols for Visualization.—On analyzing a story for the purpose of discovering the elements of which it is composed, and the kind and degree of appeal which they have for us, we shall find it convenient to employ a few symbols for the purpose of labeling our findings for discussion in the class room. Some of the directions which we make will be based upon differences in the way in which the things presented are effective in our minds, others upon differences in the things presented, themselves. First we shall work with symbols of description and visualization, of which for convenience we may distinguish four sorts shading one into the other, not clearly defined, and yet worth discussing, that we may cultivate a sharper sense of qualities of effectiveness in visualization. For these four sorts of visualization we may employ the symbols, V1, V2,[15] V3, VB3. For the first of these the symbol V1 is not very satisfactory, since we will employ it for simple description which presents rather the idea of the thing than a mental picture, but it will perhaps be simpler to use it than to use a symbol for the word description. Having in mind the idea of a thing, we may by mental effort, if the idea is defined with sufficient clearness, call up the image of the object. V2 is the symbol for a visualization through a suggestion which the mind, by reason of the interest kindled, fills out to something more than the mere idea, more or less definite imagery resulting. In the V3 form, we are, as it were, compelled to see the image without mental effort, so swiftly and surely do the verbal memory images reëstablish old sensations or combine with old sensations to the formation of new. In the fourth form, we will add the B (Beauty) when the image which we see is such as to appeal pleasurably to the æsthetic sense. That there should be perfect agreement in the use of any one of these symbols in any particular case is, of course, not to be expected. Our individual experiences have been so different and the associations of sensation are so varied that the character and intensity of any visualization must differ in each individual. This, of course, is one of the things that complicate the problem of literary composition and make study of these things of particular importance.

19. Audition and Other Sensations.—As the problem of audition is of less moment than that of visualization, we will make but the one distinction between such presentation of sound as calls up the idea of the sound only, a1 and such as produces in us the sense of the sound itself, a2, premising that any one who chooses may make the three divisions preceding.[16]

Appeals to the other senses as occurring less often, we may group together under the symbol S, using 1 with this, as with a, when it comes to us in the conceptual way, and 2 when it comes as an excitant of sensation.

20. Instances of Visualization.—Before we go farther, it will be well to examine briefly an example or two of literary description.

V2"The rim of the sun was burning the hilltops, and already the vanguard of his strength stemming the morning mists, when I and V2my companion first trod the dust of a small town which stood in our path. It still lay very hard and white, however, and sharply V1edged to its girdle of olive and mulberry trees drenched in dew, a compactly folded town well fortified by strong walls and many V2towers, with the mist upon it and softly over it like a veil. For it V1lay well under the shade of the hills awaiting the sun's coming. In the streets, though they were by no means asleep, but, contrariwise, S2busy with the traffic of men and pack mules, there was a V2shrewd bite as of night air; looking up we could perceive how faint the blue of the sky was, and the cloud-flaw how rosy yet with the flush of Aurora's beauty-sleep. Therefore we were glad to get into the market place, filled with people and set around with goodly S2brick buildings, and to feel the light and warmth steal about our limbs."

Maurice Hewlett, "Earthwork out of Tuscany."

Here we shall first use the symbol V2, because the image presented is one that appeals at once to experience, experience too that has not been dimmed by frequence. The instant when the rim of the sun comes up bright and red is the instant when our expectation is most kindled toward the glory of the dawn and of the day which it foretokens. "The vanguard of his strength" in the next clause suggests the purely fanciful. This mixture of the concrete and the abstract does not go back to sensation, a thing worth noting and so the visualization is destroyed. The dependent clause[17] brings up a new visualization, a V2, in the "dust of a small town." The second sentence is V1, until the close when it becomes V2 through the quickening of memories that have been emotional. The vagueness of a village hidden in the mist has appealed to our imagination in the assurance of a something unknown. The next sentence is V1, and so also is the next until in "the shrewd bite as of night air" we get an S2. The V2 of the faint blue of the sky is destroyed, as in the first sentence, by the merely intellectual playing of fancy in "Aurora's beauty-sleep." The next sentence gives us an S2 in the closing clause, for which the two preceding have been a preparation.

"Solemn and vast at all times, in spite of pettiness in the near details, the impression becomes more solemn and vast towards evening. The sun goes down, a swollen orange, as it were, into the sea. A blue-clad peasant rides home, with a harrow smoking behind him among the dry clods."

In this from Robert Louis Stevenson the last sentence brings the description to a V3; the smoking harrow is suggestive of so much more than the cloud of dust that has not yet settled to the earth in the stillness of the approaching twilight when the work of the day is done.

21. Motor Effects of Visualization.—There is another way in which things seen touch sensation. Look at a picture of the Laocoön for a moment. Fix your eyes upon the contortions of the limbs, see the agony of the face, note the fangs of the serpent ready to embed themselves in the flesh. While fastening these fearful details in your mind have you not felt some of the horror of it, and has not that feeling shown a tendency to innervate some of the muscles, has not your face shown some of the suffering which you have been studying, and have you not felt a tendency[18] toward the muscular movements of one writhing in agony? Certainly, such motor impulses do result from certain kinds of visualization, and it need hardly be said that they are peculiarly effective in making us really alive with the emotion which inheres in the movement or the attitude which we see. If the gestures of a speaker are to be effective, they must seem natural to us; that is, they must be such as we would make if we were in that fashion attempting to express a similar emotion. Otherwise the motor suggestions of the words and the motor suggestion of the gestures may inhibit or neutralize each other, or at least produce a feeling of confusion. Halleck, in his "Education of the Central Nervous System," says, "All states of consciousness contain a motor element." When a visualization or an audition, as that of a sharp command, seems to have motor effects, we may add to the symbols of kind and degree of sensation the symbol x.

22. Inference in Literature.—It was apparent in the visualization quoted from Stevenson that some of the impressions which we get from literature we get as inferences. Dust does not arise from a harrow so as to have the appearance of smoke on a windy day, and therefore we know that it is quiet. In the opening of a story some things must be explained directly, and for such explanatory matter, matter from which we infer nothing beyond the statement, we will employ the symbol Exp.; but for other presentation of matters of fact we will employ the symbol F1. From facts as presented—and we will use the term in a comprehensive sense—we may or may not draw inferences, and we will distinguish facts from which no inference is drawn by the symbol F1, and those from which inference is drawn by the symbol F2. An inference may be preponderatingly[19] intellectual or emotional; we may, when desirable, add the symbol a for one and b for the other. An inference we may call an "effect," and a fact as effect, whether the effect be emotional or conceptual, is clearly more potent in a literary way than a mere fact.

23. Effects of Incident and Mood.—Allied to the fact as effect is the incident which makes us know something more than the happening itself. All incidents we may distinguish under the symbols In1, In2a, In2b, the secondary symbols having the significance as with F above. Mood effects are, in general, more important, and it will be worth while to distinguish three sorts, m1, an inference which we draw regarding the mood of the writer, m2, a like inference which becomes infectious, creating in us in some degree a like feeling, and m3, an "effect" enabling us to draw an inference regarding the mood of a character in the story. In addition to this we shall find direct statement of mood, but that we shall mark with some of the preceding symbols, generally F1, perhaps. We may understand further that the mood effects are of both kind and degree. When the showing of mood is such as to make us realize in it the intensity of strong emotion or passion, we may indicate the heightening of the feeling by the addition of the symbol d, using k alone, or with d to indicate that the character of the mood is shown.

24. Methods of Characterization.—In our everyday life we are continually drawing inferences in regard to the characters of those about us, and we do the same thing in a story. Some writers tell us as clearly as they can the natures of the men and women they are revealing to us, while others leave that almost wholly for us to conjecture. We shall employ, then, two sets of symbols for character,[20] one for direct statement of character, and one for character effects. The realization of character through direct statement may include presentation of motives, ideas, passions, will, special phases of development. It may come through report of the talk of others, or through statement of opinion generally entertained. c1 we will use for direct statement of character,—"John was a hard old miser,"—and we will add to this symbol the symbol a to indicate that this is only so far potent with us as to make us know the writer's understanding of the character merely, b to indicate that we recognize the writer's feeling for the character but do not share it, and c to indicate that the writer's feeling for his character affects us sympathetically to a like feeling. Another group of symbols, c2, c3, and c4, we will use for character "effects," for such knowledge of character as we gain by inference. c2 is a symbol for a general inference regarding a group of people or a community; c3 and c4 are symbols for inferences regarding the individual, c3 indicating the recognition of type or class qualities, c4, the recognition of more individual traits of character. The distinction here is merely one of matter of fact, a distinction not always to be made with sureness, since it is one of degree rather than altogether one of kind. When the way in which a man is good or cheerful or avaricious is differentiated for us from the way in which another man is good or cheerful or avaricious, he is so far individualized. Class characterization, c3, may be found along with individualization. The extreme accentuation of one or a few characteristics to the disregard of others gives the effect of individualization, but we shall understand this as in fact type characterization, since our natures are so complex that in almost no case can the conduct of any one be understood[21] through knowledge of a few dominant traits of character. Individualization gives us intimacy of acquaintance; type or class characterization makes us see merely the striking, peculiar, or controlling expressions of personality. Guy Mannering in Scott's "Guy Mannering" is but a type of the conventional soldier. Tito Milema in George Eliot's "Romola" presents so many sides of a complex nature that we easily distinguish him from all other characters in fiction whatever.

25. The Subjective and Objective.—Writers, in their methods of presentation, may be broadly divided into two classes, those who write subjectively and those who write objectively. A subjective writer is one whose own personality, point of view, feeling, is insistent in what he writes. An objective writer, on the other hand, is one who leaves the things of which he makes record to produce their own impression, the writer himself remaining an almost impassive spectator, telling the story with little or no comment. Chaucer, in the prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," betrays his personal feeling for his characters continually, and so is subjective. Shakespeare in his plays is objective, presenting all sorts of men and women without show of his own attitude toward them.

26. Interest of the Plot and its Purpose.—We have seen that interest in incident is a first interest in the story. This interest, we must understand further, is not to be maintained by having things happen in a matter regulated only by chance or the exigencies of the author's invention at the moment. The unification of a story that results from the subordination of minor incidents to a final outcome is an essential necessity of the plot. The plot, indeed, is the arrangement of incidents with reference to the dénouement.[22] The development of the plot should be such as to indicate an end toward which the succession of incidents is tending, and yet such as to keep the reader in suspense with regard to the nature of that end. There must be novelty in the happenings, and yet the novelty must not be so great as to keep the reader confused or strain belief. The permanent hold upon us of a piece of fiction is enhanced if it embodies some central truth, illustrating the working out of some law of life, or involved in the personal attitude of the writer toward some problem of existence. Only dilettanteism and superficiality forget that an artist, giving the form of beauty to his conceptions, is trying to make them as significant to others as they are to him, and that æsthetic and ethical, or spiritual, significance are inextricably interwoven. It will, of course, be the care of the artist to see that any didactic purpose is not obtrusive.

F2b 1. A tray of glasses was placed on the table with great solemnity by the "wricht," who made no sign and invited none.      2. You might have supposed that the circumstance had F2b escaped the notice of the company, so abstracted and unconscious was their manner, had it not been that two graven images a minute later are standing by the table.

m3k 3. "Ye 'ill taste, Tammas," with settled melancholy.

m3k 4. "Na, na; I've nae incleenation the day; it's an awful dispensation, this, Jeems. 5. She wuld be barely saxty."F2a

m3k 6. "Ay, ay, but we maun keep up the body sae lang as we're here, Tammas."

c2/c4 7. "Weel, puttin' it that way, a'm not sayin' but yir richt," yielding unwillingly to the force of circumstance.m2

c4/m3 8. "We're here the day and there the morn, Tammas. 9. She was a fine wumman—Mistress Stirton—a weel-livin'm3 wumman: this will be a blend, a'm thinkin'."

c4/m3 10. "She slippit aff sudden in the end; a'm judgin' it's frae the Muirtown grocer; m3but a body canna discreeminate [23]on a day like this."

11. It was George Howe's funeral that broke the custom and closed the "service." F2b 12. When I came into the garden where the neighbors were gathered, the "wricht" was removing his tray and not a glass had been touched. Exp.+m2 13. Then I guessed that Drumtochty had a sense of the fitness of things and was stirred to its depths.

14. "Ye saw the wricht carry in his tray," said Drumsheigh as he went home from the kirkyard.

m3d 15. "Weel, yon's the last sicht o't ye' ill get or a'm no Drumsheigh. 16. I've nae objection masel' to a neighborm3k tastin' at a funeral, a' the more if he's come from the upper end o' the pairish, and ye ken I dinna hold wi' thae teetotal m3d fouk. 17. A'm ower auld in the horn to change noo. m3/F2b 18. But there's times and seasons, as the Gude Buik says, and it wud hae been an awfu' like business tae luik at a gless in Marget's Garden, and puir Domsie standing in ahent the brier bush as if he cud never lift his heid again."

27. Interpretative Application of the Symbols.—A little discussion of the foregoing from a "A Scholar's Funeral" in the "Bonnie Brier Bush" may serve to make some of these things clearer. The fact that the "wricht" is silent here in the first sentence makes us know that this is the usual custom and that these people have an underlying sense of decorum. Sentence two has the same effect in their abstraction, and this is emphasized again in the "two graven images." The third sentence is a mood "effect" of kind, since we recognize the conventionally sobered feeling without the "settled melancholy." This is true again in sentence four, and in five we have a "fact as effect," drawing the inference that they are a long-lived race in Drumtochty. From the yielding to an invitation so framed as to put aside the semblance of yielding to inclination, we get a knowledge of character which seems to us individual, but which is used by the author to indicate[24] a local community characteristic. The author's mood of amused observation is evident here, too, in his unbelieving acquiescence in Tammas's point of view. In sentences eight and nine we come to know Jeems in a more individual way, through the mingling in him of moods of conventional solemnity and everyday discussion. This is repeated in sentence ten. In sentence twelve we draw an emotional inference concerning the degree of their feeling from the fact that "not a glass had been touched." This is told in the explanatory way in thirteen with the addition of a suggestion of the author's sympathetic understanding and appreciation. Knowing Drumsheigh's reserve, from things that have gone before this in the story, we feel that only strong emotion could have called out sentence fifteen; and the apologetic tone of sixteen and seventeen indicates rather mood than such heightened feeling. Sentence eighteen returns to the mood of fifteen and sixteen, and through the fact of Domsie's standing "ahent the brier bush" reveals both Domsie's mood and Drumsheigh's own in our knowledge of its emotional appeal to him.

28. Different Forms of the Story.—It is to be understood that certain types of the short story are not included in this study as not being available for detailed work. Stories in which the interest is almost wholly dependent upon the succession of incidents can profitably be studied only with relation to the plot. Generally in such cases the things that make the story effective will be readily apparent, and they can be brought out by a few questions. To give variety and interest to the work the teacher will occasionally find it desirable to call attention to stories in current periodicals, requiring the class to bring in analyses of them showing structure of the plot, methods of managing the[25] reader's sympathies, fundamental motive of the story, the treatment of character and methods of presenting it, and such other things as seem most of moment in the story in question. When library facilities permit, it will be found worth while to make some comparison of the short story as it is now written in America with the short stories of fifty years ago and of the present day in England and France. No classification of stories is attempted here, since such classification is of no particular moment to the writer of stories.


A Few Cautions

29. The suggestions that follow are phrased to cover the matter of visualization, but they touch upon general principles which are of wider application. It has seemed more convenient at this point to give them this specific treatment.

30. Author's Purpose should be Concealed.—An attempt to bring about a visualization or any other artistic effect in the mind of the reader is foredoomed to failure when in any way the writer's purpose too evidently betrays itself as such. Too much in the way of direct statement or predication is one indication of such purpose, and is therefore more or less ineffectual. For effective visualization some sort of preparation of the mood or sympathies of the reader is generally required. This, however, should be concealed, being accomplished through suggestion, as is the visualization itself.

31. Unity in Visualization.—A visualization should be so managed as to bring the whole picture, or nearly all of it, into the mind at once. It is partly because it does not do this that the method by details is not generally effective.[26] A string of incomplete images passing through the mind, each one taking the place of the preceding and effacing it, is not artistically satisfying. It is possible to retain such separate images and at the end bring them together in a complete picture, but this will require effort on the part of the reader; and it is fundamentally important in all writing to reduce the conscious attention and effort of the reader to the lowest point. Only extreme literary art can so nullify this effort in effect as to make description by detail pleasurable, if of any length. Description by detail is, perhaps, more admissible in writing having a meditative tone than in any other, except, of course, technical description.

32. Fine Writing.—Fine writing is especially to be avoided in visualization, since the tone of artificiality is immediately destructive of the reader's confidence in the sincerity of the writer. It betrays the author's purpose of producing an effect. The appearance of truth free from any semblance of over-statement is a first requisite.

33. In any visualization harmony of detail is of prime importance. Even in describing something actually seen it will sometimes be necessary to leave out items really present, but not of a kind to contribute to the general effect. The saying that "Truth is stranger than fiction" should read that fiction may not be as strange as truth. Harmony of mood is important, as well as harmony of detail, in the thing described. If the picture is a quiet one, exclamatory excitement on the part of the writer, however affecting the scene may be supposed to be, will prevent its becoming real to the reader. These things are, then, to be borne in mind with regard to the elements of a visualization: the details presented must be so far true to common[27] knowledge and experience as to gain ready belief, they must have unity in fact and in effect, and they must also be sufficiently individual to appeal to the mind with something of the sense of novelty.


Reference Table of Symbols

Exp. = Explanatory matter.
F1 = Statement of fact from which no inference is drawn.
F2 = Statement of fact from which an inference is drawn.
F2a = Statement of fact with inference mainly logical.
F2b = Statement of fact with inference mainly emotional.
In. = Statement of incident, secondary symbols as with F.
As1 = Anticipatory suggestion, a foretelling of something to happen, leaving the reader in doubt as to how it is to be brought about.
As2 = Anticipatory suggestion, a foreshowing of something definite to happen, exciting the reader's curiosity to know what it is and how it is to be brought about.
As3 = Anticipatory suggestion, a foreshadowing of something to be expected in the way of character development and consequent happening.
V1 = Description in which the mere idea of the thing described is presented.
V2 = A kindling hint by which the mind is enabled to piece together a visualization of the object.
V3 = Visualization of so vivid a kind as to possess the mind completely. This becomes
Vb3   when it pleasurably affects the sensibilities.
A1 = Audition in the way of simple idea of the thing to be heard.
A2 = Audition as a reviving of the sense of sound.
S1 = Sensation, the mere presentation of the idea of an appeal to one of the other senses.
S2 = Sensation, a subjective reviving of the sensation itself.
x   used to indicate that a subjective excitation of some one of the senses has motor effects, as in the shiver at the thought of a file upon the teeth.
m1 = Mood "effect," from which we learn the feeling of the writer [28]without experiencing it ourselves.
m2 = Mood "effect" from which we sympathetically experience the feeling of the writer.
m3 = Mood "effect," a revelation of the feeling of a character in the story.
c1 = Direct statement of character.
c1a = Direct statement of character that does not reveal the author's attitude toward the character.
c1b = Direct statement in which we are made aware of the author's attitude toward the character, but are not affected by it.
c1c = Direct statement of character sympathetically influencing us to the author's attitude toward the character.
c2 = Character "effect," characterization of a group or community of people.
c3 = Character "effect," class or type characterization of the individual.
c4 = Character "effect" in the way of individualization.
d = Degree, added to symbol for mood effect to indicate intensity of the feeling.
k = Kind, used to indicate that the inference concerns itself with character and not intensity.
/ = A symbol employed (see section 26) to indicate that one inference is drawn as an ultimate conclusion from another more immediate inference.

Subjects for Daily Themes

Subjects for visualization and the reviving of other sensations.

1. A sunset sky. 2. A group in the park. 3. A spring freshet. 4. The man at the threshing machine. 5. The city across the river: night. 6. Moonlight among the hills. 7. A city street. 8. The college campus. 9. Eleanor's rose garden. 10. The witch of Endor (1 Sam. xxviii: 6-25). 11. Mt. Pelée in eruption. 12. The woods at night. 13. David playing before Saul. 14. A ferny water course among the trees. 15. A bluebird in the orchard. 16. The violinist. 17. In time of apple blossoms. 18. The scent of new-mown hay. 19. Barbara at the piano. 20. The first watermelon. 21. Sailing with the wind. 22. Dawn in the mountains. 23. The wind among the pines. 24. The blacksmith and the forge.[29]

Subjects for presentation of mood.

1. Uncle Dick hears the news. 2. Balboa catches sight of the Pacific. 3. Silas explains himself. 4. Napoleon looking back at Moscow. 5. Congressman Norris is refused the floor of the convention. 6. Johnnie is told that he may go to the circus. 7. Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga. 8. Bamba, king of an island in the south seas, sees the first ship of the white man. 9. Alfred meets a Hallowe'en obstacle.

Subjects for visualization and presentation of facts as "effects."

1. A deserted house. 2. In the second-hand store. 3. The railroad wreck. 4. The beggar at the door. 5. Representative Dongan reads a letter from "The Corners." 6. A woman at the station. 7. Mrs. Humphrey's kitchen. 8. The trail of war.

Subjects for character studies.

1. The village oracle. 2. The landlord of the Lion Inn. 3. The old stage-driver. 4. The conductor. 5. An old-fashioned music-master. 6. A pirate captain. 7. A country beau. 8. Deacon Bradley. 9. The school bully. 10. The female suffragist. 11. One of the four hundred. 12. A disciple of Mrs. Eddy. 13. "The man with the hoe." 14. The scissors grinder. 15. Captain Doty of the police. 16. A candidate for office.


The Complete Story

The invention of situations and plots can hardly be a matter of class-room instruction. If stories come to one, it is well. Study of the detailed means of making them living for the reader will then be worth while. The student should be encouraged to invent plots of his own, but as a simplification of this difficulty, to the end that some exercise in the writing of a complete story may be had, plots of some successful published stories are here given with suggestions regarding methods of treatment.

I

Scene, a saloon where both men and women are drinking. One of them, a girl, thinks she sees at the window the face of Christ with[30] his tender eyes. She leaves and will not permit the others to go with her.

At a little distance she comes upon the stranger waiting for her. He tells her that when she wakes it will be to a new life and she will be his, bidding her go to a house he points out and remain for the night. She obeys, and the man passes into the shadow.

Introductory sentence in the original, giving the atmosphere of the story: "This was the story the mystic told." Concluding sentence in the original, connecting it with our sense of unfathomable mysteries: "And this the listener gravely asked, 'One was chosen, the others left. Were the others less in need of grace?'"

Divisions of the story. 1. Visualizing description of the saloon and of the street outside through which the stranger passes.

2. Appearance of the face at the pane and its effect on the young girl (m3 "effect"). This is the difficult part of the story, and the reader can be made to believe in it only through sympathy with the girl's feeling.

3. The talk of her companions and her answers (m3).

4. Her search for the stranger in the night (m3).

5. His talk to her when she finds him.

This story in the original contains a little less than two thousand words. It will be seen at once that unless handled in such fashion as to appeal vividly to the imagination, a story with this for its theme will seem weak and unreal. It must be made as suggestive as possible or it will fail. It preaches, but it must avoid the air of preaching. Consider carefully how you would present the stranger—whether first at the window or before—so as to affect the reader with a sense of something more than human in him.

II

Scene of the story is the prairie desert of the West in time of drouth. A party of men, including two who are not yet through their work in an eastern college, are riding in search of water, having had none for two days. Water is found, but shortly afterwards one of the two young men is missing. The talk of the others reveals the absent one's unselfishness[31] and friendly devotion to his chum. Soon he is seen riding up excitedly and beckoning. The others follow him to a rough eminence, where he stops and listens, imploring them to tell him whether they can hear a voice calling. When they hear it too, he is assured that he has not lost his reason from the thirst, and together they begin a search which results in their discerning a cavern in the side of an embankment where a man lies on a couch moaning for water. As they try to enter, he warns them away with the cry of "smallpox."

The story is told to a group of friends gathered together of an evening, and the narrator draws from among his books a copy of Shakespeare found in the cavern by one of the men, bearing on its fly leaf, in addition to the owner's name, the word Brasenose, the name of one of the colleges at Oxford. The pathos of the story is in this last touch, an Oxford student dying so loathsome a death in a strange and desert land, and dying so heroically.

Divisions of the story. 1. Visualization of the desert and the men. The scent of water. Drinking from the muddied stream.

2. One of the young men starts off alone in a delirium of pain (m3). He returns suffering from the fear that he has lost his reason (m3).

3. The discovery of the cave (V3 and F2b). The delirious talk of the sick man. His sudden joy in the unexpected presence of human beings (V3 and m3). His final "G'way! G'way! Smallpox!"

4. The narrator of the story shows the copy of Shakespeare and the inscription on the fly leaf.

The story in the original contains about three thousand words. It is important that the suffering of the men be developed at some length in a convincing fashion. It serves as a preparation for the more terrible suffering of the one man who moans for water as he tears the foul smallpox sores. This should be presented in as visualizing a way as possible and with as full showing of mood as may be. The conclusion in division 4 must be altogether different in tone from the preceding. Narrator and listeners are in a world of ease and comfort, and their interest in the story is an interest in something pathetically remote.[32]


Situations to be Developed into Plots

(Adapted from published stories not original)

1. Rome in the early centuries after Christ. Three persons are involved, one man and two women, one of whom has just pledged troth to the man. The man and the other woman are devotees of a mystic faith, whose priest residing in a dark cavern in the hills calls now one, now another devotee to pass through the "void" to eternal fellowship with God.

2. Oklahoma at the time of the opening of the strip for settlement. A man and his wife and two children come from Kansas to find land in the strip on the day of the run. They have failed in Kansas and are almost out of money. The husband, who is to make the run for the strip on horseback when the signal guns are fired, falls sick.

3. A lumber camp. In addition to the men, a man and his wife who cook and take care of the camp, and a half-witted chore boy. The chore boy tries to take care of the men and keep them from drinking. A number of the men go off to a neighboring town for a spree, and the chore boy goes with them.

4. Some place in the region of the mountain whites of the Carolinas and Tennessee. A beautiful girl with a tinge of negro blood that does not show in nature, intellectual endowment, or appearance. A mountain white to whom she is betrothed. A young man from the North visiting the family with whom she is staying is attracted by her. The contrast of the life of the mountain whites to which her betrothal if fulfilled dooms her, and that of the world of taste and culture which her nature demands.


Questions on "A Doctor of the Old School," from the "Bonnie Brier Bush"

I

1. a. What has been accomplished in your sympathies by this? 2. b. Has this been through direct statement of things calling for your sympathies, or through "effects"? c. Is the method cumulative and gradual, or direct and insistent? d. Would you say that the method here is objective or subjective? e. What symbols do you find that you have employed largely, and for what purpose have the devices for which[33] two of these stand been employed? f. Would you say that the author puts much or little meaning into his words? Is the style diffuse and thin, or does it accomplish much with few words? Indicate a paragraph or page that justifies your conclusion and say how. g. Are the inferences which you are made to draw logical or emotional, and do they seem to you delicate and subtle or simple and direct? Indicate some of them in confirmation of your conclusion.

II

1. a. Do you see any change in the method of presenting MacLure here? b. How is it an advance in the development of the story or not? c. Was Part I. preparation for this or not, and if so, how? d. Does this have a definite climax and dénouement, and if so, where?

III

1. a. How does this make an advance upon the preceding in the revelation of MacLure? b. Does it in any way get nearer to elemental human feeling? c. Does it anywhere appeal directly to sensation? d. Do you find in this any feeling for the mystery of existence? Does it seem to be an integral part of the story, coming from its essential emotion and free from obtrusive moralizing, or not? e. Is there any increase in intensity of feeling in this or not, and if so, how is it indicated in the symbols you have employed? f. Has MacLure now been presented to us with full showing of his distinguishing characteristics or not? and do we find in him a vital human nature?

IV

1. a. Do you think a death-bed scene a good subject for literary presentation or not? Why? b. Would you call it a difficult thing to present or not? c. Do you find anything objectionable here? d. Has the interest of the whole story depended upon incident or upon showing of character? e. Does this Part IV. serve in any particular way to round out our knowledge of MacLure, and if so, in what way? f. What is the especially appealing thing in the portrait of MacLure? And what in the fortune and circumstance of his life? g. Does this appeal touch in any fashion upon our sense of a something inscrutable governing our lives? h. Which of the different sorts of subject-matter (see section 9)[34] seem to you to be the more largely employed here? So far as it is concerned with experience, is it a reviving of what we have experienced or an addition to our knowledge of life? Is there in it a truth that you could formulate into a law of life, or is the truth so much a matter of emotion as merely to touch the sensibilities and so give us a wider vision?


Questions on "Loveliness," by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps-Ward

(Atlantic Monthly, August, 1899)

1. a. Do you detect in this story any purpose beyond that of recounting a series of happenings? If so, what? b. If you were to write the story, would you think it prospectively a difficult thing to arouse interest in a dog? c. Has that been done here or not? d. If so, what are some of the author's devices and how successfully employed?

2. a. What is the artistic purpose of the first two paragraphs? Why does the author delay so long in telling us that she is writing of a dog? b. Does she let her own feeling for the girl and dog appear or not? If so, is it obtrusive or not? Effective or not, as your markings indicate? c. Are there any incidents in the story that a reader might for any reason be unwilling to accept? d. If so, how is the handling such as to disguise the difficulty or not, as the case may be?

3. a. What devices are employed to make us interested in Adah? b. Are we made to feel that her dependence upon the dog is natural and deserving of sympathy or not, and if so, how? c. Are the incidents so managed as to maintain interest in the expectation of the dénouement or not? d. Does the story seem to have sufficient unity of purpose and plan or not?

4. a. What symbols do you notice that you have employed most largely? b. Is the story written in the way of direct statement or of suggestion? c. For what frequent purpose would you say that the writer employs F2? M3? M2? d. Can you say in what the art of the story especially consists? e. What would you probably have thought of the story were its art less delicate and sure?


General Outline Questions for Study of Stories in Current Magazines, etc.

1. a. Upon what is the interest of the story especially dependent? b. Are the incidents presented rapidly and coherently, or slowly and[35] disconnectedly? c. Is there a clearly defined plot or not? d. Does the plot have a climax of entanglement, or does it fail in developing this feature of the story interest?

2. a. How is character presented? b. Are the characters well chosen for their reactions among themselves? c. Are the things they do and say continually consistent or not? d. Are they sufficiently individualized to escape the appearance of the conventional and to hold interest?

3. a. Does the story state facts and happenings merely, or does it get hold of vital sensations and revive them? b. If so, in what ways does it seem to do that? c. In general does it seem to you subjective or objective in method?

4. a. How much of the interest of the story is in the development of the plot and how much in the stirring of vital sensations, including sympathetic moods? b. Does the development of the story center about any idea or attitude toward life? c. What excellences and what faults do you find in the story?


Some Stories Available for Study

"Five Hundred Dollars," "The Village Convict," and "Eli," all in a volume under the title of the first, Heman White Chaplin, Little, Brown & Co., $1.00.

"Loveliness," Elizabeth Stuart Phelps-Ward, Atlantic Monthly, August, 1899.

"The Flail of Time," Helen Choate Prince, Atlantic Monthly, August, 1899.

"A Christmas Carol," Dickens, Cassel's National Library, 10 cents.

"Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush," Ian MacLaren, David C. Cook, Elgin and Chicago, paper, 5 cents.

"The Luck of Roaring Camp," "Tennessee's Partner," Bret Harte, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., $1.00, Overland Monthly, September, 1902.

"Bonaventure" (Chapters XVI-XVIII), George W. Cable, copyrighted, but obtainable in a cheap reprint.

"The Game and the Nation," Owen Wister, Harper's Monthly, May, 1900.

Nettleton's "Specimens of the Short Story," Henry Holt & Co., 50 cents.[36]


Books that may Profitably be Consulted

"Education of the Central Nervous System," R. P. Halleck, The Macmillan Co.

"The Philosophy of the Short Story," Brander Matthews, Longmans, Green & Co.

"The Short Story," Yale Studies in English, Henry Holt & Co.

"Forms of Prose Literature," J. H. Gardiner, Chas. Scribner's Sons.

"Working Principles of Rhetoric," J. F. Genung, Ginn & Co.

"Outline of Psychology," E. B. Titchener, The Macmillan Co.

"Short Story Writing," C. R. Barrett, Baker & Taylor Co., $ 1.00.

Chapter XII, "A Study of Prose Fiction," Bliss Perry, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.


ENGLISH LITERATURE.

The Arden Shakespeare.

The Greater Plays in their literary aspect. One play in each volume, with Introduction, Notes, Essay on Metre, and Glossary. Based on the Globe text. From 144 to 224 pages. Cloth. Price, 25 cents a volume.

This edition presents the greater plays in their literary aspect, and not merely as material for the study of philology or grammar. Verbal and textual criticism has been included only so far as may serve to help the student in his appreciation of the poetry.

Questions of date and literary history have been fully dealt with in the Introductions, but the larger space has been devoted to the interpretative rather than to the matter-of-fact order of scholarship. Æsthetic judgments are never final, but the editors have attempted to suggest points of view from which the analysis of dramatic motive and dramatic character may be profitably undertaken.

In the Notes likewise, though it is hoped that unfamiliar expressions and allusions have been adequately explained, it has been thought more important to consider the dramatic value of each scene, and the part that it plays in relation to the whole.

Each volume has a Glossary, an Essay upon Metre, and an Index. Appendices are added upon points of interest that could not be treated in the Introduction or the Notes. The text is based on that of the Globe edition. The following plays are ready:—

Hamlet.—Edited by Edmund K. Chambers, B.A.

Macbeth.—Edited by Edmund K. Chambers, B.A., Oxford.

Julius Cæsar.—Edited by Arthur D. Innes, M.A., Oxford.

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Henry VIII.—Edited by D. Nichol Smith, M.A., Edinburgh.

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Monday, June 17, 2019

An Affair of State by Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)

An Affair of State by Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)
An Affair of State
by Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)
Approximate Word Count: 3642
Paris had just heard of the disaster of Sedan. The Republic was proclaimed. All France was panting from a madness that lasted until the time of the commonwealth. Everybody was playing at soldier from one end of the country to the other.
Capmakers became colonels, assuming the duties of generals; revolvers and daggers were displayed on large rotund bodies enveloped in red sashes; common citizens turned warriors, commanding battalions of noisy volunteers and swearing like troopers to emphasize their importance.
The very fact of bearing arms and handling guns with a system excited a people who hitherto had only handled scales and measures and made them formidable to the first comer, without reason. They even executed a few innocent people to prove that they knew how to kill, and in roaming through virgin fields still belonging to the Prussians they shot stray dogs, cows chewing the cud in peace or sick horses put out to pasture. Each believed himself called upon to play a great role in military affairs. The cafés of the smallest villages, full of tradesmen in uniform, resembled barracks or field hospitals.
Now the town of Canneville did not yet know the exciting news of the army and the capital. It had, however, been greatly agitated for a month over an encounter between the rival political parties. The mayor, Viscount de Varnetot, a small thin man, already old, remained true to the Empire, especially since he saw rising up against him a powerful adversary in the great, sanguine form of Dr. Massarel, head of the Republican party in the district, venerable chief of the Masonic lodge, president of the Society of Agriculture and the Fire Department and organizer of the rural militia designed to save the country.
In two weeks he had induced sixty-three men to volunteer in defense of their country--married men, fathers of families, prudent farmers and merchants of the town. These he drilled every morning in front of the mayor's window.
Whenever the mayor happened to appear Commander Massarel, covered with pistols, passing proudly up and down in front of his troops, would make them shout, "Long live our country!" And this, they noticed, disturbed the little viscount, who no doubt heard in it menace and defiance and perhaps some odious recollection of the great Revolution.
On the morning of the fifth of September, in uniform, his revolver on the table, the doctor gave consultation to an old peasant couple. The husband had suffered with a varicose vein for seven years but had waited until his wife had one too, so that they might go and hunt up a physician together, guided by the postman when he should come with the newspaper.
Dr. Massarel opened the door, grew pale, straightened himself abruptly and, raising his arms to heaven in a gesture of exaltation, cried out with all his might, in the face of the amazed rustics:
"Long live the Republic! Long live the Republic! Long live the Republic!"
Then he dropped into his armchair weak with emotion.
When the peasant explained that this sickness commenced with a feeling as if ants were running up and down his legs the doctor exclaimed: "Hold your peace. I have spent too much time with you stupid people. The Republic is proclaimed! The Emperor is a prisoner! France is saved! Long live the Republic!" And, running to the door, he bellowed: "Celeste! Quick! Celeste!"
The frightened maid hastened in. He stuttered, so rapidly did he try to speak" "My boots, my saber--my cartridge box--and--the Spanish dagger which is on my night table. Hurry now!"
The obstinate peasant, taking advantage of the moment's silence, began again: "This seemed like some cysts that hurt me when I walked."
The exasperated physician shouted: "Hold your peace! For heaven's sake! If you had washed your feet oftener, it would not have happened." Then, seizing him by the neck, he hissed in his face: "Can you not comprehend that we are living in a republic, stupid!"
But the professional sentiment calmed him suddenly, and he let the astonished old couple out of the house, repeating all the time:
"Return tomorrow, return tomorrow, my friends; I have no more time today."
While equipping himself from head to foot he gave another series of urgent orders to the maid:
"Run to Lieutenant Picard's and to Sublieutenant Pommel's and say to them that I want them here immediately. Send Torcheboeuf to me too, with his drum. Quick now! Quick!" And when Celeste was gone he collected his thoughts and prepared to surmount the difficulties of the situation.
The three men arrived together. They were in their working clothes. The commander, who had expected to see them in uniform, had a fit of surprise.
"You know nothing, then? The Emperor has been taken prisoner. A republic is proclaimed. My position is delicate, not to say perilous."
He reflected for some minutes before the astonished faces of his subordinates and then continued:
"It is necessary to act, not to hesitate. Minutes now are worth hours at other times. Everything depends upon promptness of decision. You, Picard, go and find the curate and get him to ring the bell to bring the people together, while I get ahead of them. You, Torcheboeuf, beat the call to assemble the militia in arms, in the square, from even as far as the hamlets of Gerisaie and Salmare. You, Pommel, put on your uniform at once, that is, the jacket and cap. We, together, are going to take possession of the mairie and summon Monsieur de Varnetot to transfer his authority to me. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Act, then, and promptly. I will accompany you to your house, Pommel, since we are to work together."
Five minutes later the commander and his subaltern, armed to the teeth, appeared in the square just at the moment when the little Viscount de Varnetot, with hunting gaiters on and his rifle on his shoulder, appeared by another street, walking rapidly and followed by three guards in green jackets, each carrying a knife at his side and a gun over his shoulder.
While the doctor slapped, half stupefied, the four men entered the mayor's house and the door closed behind them.
"We are forestalled," murmured the doctor; "it will be necessary now to wait for reinforcements; nothing can be done for a quarter of an hour."
Here Lieutenant Picard appeared. "The curate refuses to obey," said he; "he has even shut himself up in the church with the beadle and the porter."
On the other side of the square, opposite the white closed front of the mairie, the church, mute and black, showed its great oak door with the wrought-iron trimmings.
Then, as the puzzled inhabitants put their noses out of the windows or came out upon the steps of their houses, the rolling of a drum was heard, and Torcheboeuf suddenly appeared, beating with fury the three quick strokes of the call to arms. He crossed the square with disciplined step and then disappeared on a road leading to the country.
The commander drew his sword, advanced alone to the middle distance between the two buildings where the enemy was barricaded and, waving his weapon above his head, roared at the top of his lungs: "Long live the Republic! Death to traitors!" Then he fell back where his officers were. The butcher, the baker and the apothecary, feeling a little uncertain, put up their shutters and closed their shops. The grocery alone remained open.
Meanwhile the men of the militia were arriving little by little, variously clothed but all wearing caps, the cap constituting the whole uniform of the corps. They were armed with their old rusty guns, guns that had hung on chimney pieces in kitchens for thirty years, and looked quite like a detachment of country soldiers.
When there were about thirty around him the commander explained in a few words the state of affairs. Then, turning toward his major, he said: "Now we must act."
While the inhabitants collected, talked over and discussed the matter the doctor quickly formed his plan of campaign.
"Lieutenant Picard, you advance to the windows of the mayor's house and order Monsieur de Varnetot to turn over the town hall to me in the name of the Republic."
But the lieutenant was a master mason and refused.
"You are a scamp, you are. Trying to make a target of me! Those fellows in there are good shots, you know that. No, thanks! Execute your commissions yourself!"
The commander turned red. "I order you to go in the name of discipline," said he.
"I am not spoiling my features without knowing why," the lieutenant returned.
Men of influence, in a group near by, were heard laughing. One of them called out: "You are right, Picard, it is not the proper time." The doctor, under his breath, muttered: "Cowards! " And placing his sword and his revolver in the hands of a soldier, he advanced with measured step, his eye fixed on the windows as if he expected to see a gun or a cannon pointed at him.
When he was within a few steps of the building the doors at the two extremities, affording an entrance to two schools, opened, and a flood of little creatures, boys on one side, girls on the other, poured out and began playing in the open space, chattering around the doctor like a flock of birds. He scarcely knew what to make of it.
As soon as the last were out the doors closed. The greater part of the little monkeys finally scattered, and then the commander called out in a loud voice:
"Monsieur de Varnetot?" A window in the first story opened and M. de Varnetot appeared.
The commander began: "Monsieur, you are aware of the great events which have changed the system of government. The party you represent no longer exists. The side I represent now comes into power. Under these sad but decisive circumstances I come to demand you, in the name of the Republic, to put in my hand the authority vested in you by the outgoing power."
M. de Varnetot replied: "Doctor Massarel, I am mayor of Canneville, so placed by the proper authorities, and mayor of Canneville I shall remain until the title is revoked and replaced by an order from my superiors. As mayor, I am at home in the mairie, and there I shall stay. Furthermore, just try to put me out." And he closed the window.
The commander returned to his troops. But before explaining anything, measuring Lieutenant Picard from head to foot, he said:
"You are a numskull, you are--a goose, the disgrace of the army. I shall degrade you."
The lieutenant replied: "I'll attend to that myself." And he went over to a group of muttering civilians.
Then the doctor hesitated. What should he do? Make an assault? Would his men obey him? And then was he surely in the right? An idea burst upon him. He ran to the telegraph office on the other side of the square and hurriedly sent three dispatches: "To the Members of the Republican Government at Paris"; "To the New Republican Prefect of the Lower Seine at Rouen"; "To the New Republican Subprefect of Dieppe."
He exposed the situation fully; told of the danger run by the commonwealth from remaining in the hands of the monarchistic mayor, offered his devout services, asked for orders and signed his name, following it up with all his titles. Then he returned to his army corps and, drawing ten francs out of his pocket, said:
"Now, my friends, go and eat and drink a little something. Only leave here a detachment of ten men, so that no one leaves the mayor's house."
Ex-Lieutenant Picard, chatting with the watchmaker, overheard this. With a sneer he remarked: "Pardon me, but if they go out, there will be an opportunity for you to go in. Otherwise I can't see how you are to get in there!"
The doctor made no reply but went away to luncheon. In the afternoon he disposed of offices all about town, having the air of knowing of an impending surprise. Many times he passed before the doors of the mairie and of the church without noticing anything suspicious; one could have believed the two buildings empty.
The butcher, the baker and the apothecary reopened their shops and stood gossiping on the steps. If the Emperor had been taken prisoner, there must be a traitor somewhere. They did not feel sure of the revenue of a new republic.
Night came on. Toward nine o'clock the doctor returned quietly and alone to the mayor's residence, persuaded that his adversary had retired. And as he was trying to force an entrance with a few blows of a pickax the loud voice of a guard demanded suddenly: "Who goes there?" M. Massarel beat a retreat at the top of his speed.
Another day dawned without any change in the situation. The militia in arms occupied the square. The inhabitants stood around awaiting the solution. People from neighboring villages came to look on. Finally the doctor, realizing that his reputation was at stake, resolved to settle the thing in one way or another. He had just decided that it must be something energetic when the door of the telegraph office opened and the little servant of the directress appeared, holding in her hand two papers.
She went directly to the commander and gave him one of the dispatches; then, crossing the square, intimidated by so many eyes fixed upon her, with lowered head and mincing steps, she rapped gently at the door of the barricaded house as if ignorant that a part of the army was concealed there.
The door opened slightly; the hand of a man received the message, and the girl returned, blushing and ready to weep from being stared at.
The doctor demanded with stirring voice: "A little silence, if you please." And after the populace became quiet he continued proudly:
Here is a communication which I have received from the government." And, raising the dispatch, he read:
"Old mayor deposed. Advise us what is most necessary. Instructions later.
"For the Subprefect,
"SAPIN, Counselor."
He had triumphed. His heart was beating with joy. His hand trembled, when Picard, his old subaltern, cried out to him from the neighboring group:
"That's all right; but if the others in there won't go out, your paper hasn't a leg to stand on." The doctor grew a little pale. If they would not go out--in fact, he must go ahead now. It was not only his right but his duty. And he looked anxiously at the house of the mayoralty, hoping that he might see the door open and his adversary show himself. But the door remained closed. What was to be done? The crowd was increasing, surrounding the militia. Some laughed.
One thought, especially, tortured the doctor. If he should make an assault, he must march at the head of his men; and as with him dead all contest would cease, it would be at him and at him alone that M. de Varnetot and the three guards would aim. And their aim was good, very good! Picard had reminded him of that.
But an idea shone in upon him, and turning to Pommel, he said: "Go, quickly, and ask the apothecary to send me a napkin and a pole."
The lieutenant hurried off. The doctor was going to make a political banner, a white one, that would, perhaps, rejoice the heart of that old legitimist, the mayor.
Pommel returned with the required linen and a broom handle. With some pieces of string they improvised a standard, which Massarel seized in both hands. Again he advanced toward the house of mayoralty, bearing the standard before him. When in front of the door, he called out: "Monsieur de Varnetot!"
The door opened suddenly, and M. de Varnetot and the three guards appeared on the threshold. The doctor recoiled instinctively. Then he saluted his enemy courteously and announced, almost strangled by emotion: "I have come, sir, to communicate to you the instructions I have just received."
That gentleman, without any salutation whatever, replied: "I am going to withdraw, sir, but you must understand that it is not because of fear or in obedience to an odious government that has usurped the power." And, biting off each word, he declared: "I do not wish to have the appearance of serving the Republic for a single day. That is all."
Massarel, amazed, made no reply; and M. de Varnetot, walking off at a rapid pace, disappeared around the corner, followed closely by his escort. Then the doctor, slightly dismayed, returned to the crowd. When he was near enough to be heard he cried: "Hurrah! Hurrah! The Republic triumphs all along the line!"
But no emotion was manifested. The doctor tried again. "The people are free! You are free and independent! Do you understand? Be proud of it!"
The listless villagers looked at him with eyes unlit by glory. In his turn he looked at them, indignant at their indifference, seeking for some wore that could make a grand impression, electrify this placid country and make good his mission. The inspiration came, and turning to Pommel, he said "Lieutenant, go and get the bust of the ex-emperor, which is in the Council Hall, and bring it to me with a chair."
And soon the man reappears, carrying on his right shoulder Napoleon II in plaster and holding in his left hand a straw-bottomed chair.
Massarel met him, took the chair, placed it on the ground, put the white image upon it, fell back a few steps and called out in sonorous voice:
"Tyrant! Tyrant! Here do you fall! Fall in the dust and in the mire. An expiring country groans under your feet. Destiny has called you the Avenger. Defeat and shame cling to you. You fall conquered, a prisoner to the Prussians, and upon the ruins of the crumbling Empire the young and radiant Republic arises, picking up your broken sword."
He awaited applause. But there was no voice, no sound. The bewildered peasants remained silent. And the bust, with its pointed mustaches extending beyond the cheeks on each side, the bust, so motionless and well groomed as to be fit for a hairdresser's sign, seemed to be looking at M. Massarel with a plaster smile, a smile ineffaceable and mocking.
They remained thus face to face, Napoleon on the chair, the doctor I front of him about three steps away. Suddenly the commander grew angry.
What was to be done? What was there that would move this people and bring about a definite victory in opinion? His hand happened to rest on his hip and to come in contact there with the butt end of his revolver under his red sash. No inspiration, no further word would come. But he drew his pistol, advanced two steps and, taking aim, fired at the late monarch. The ball entered the forehead, leaving a little black hole like a spot, nothing more. There was no effect. Then he fired a second shot, which made a second hole, then a third; and then, without stopping, he emptied his revolver. The brow of Napoleon disappeared in white powder, but the eyes, the nose and the fine points of the mustaches remained intact. Then, exasperated, the doctor overturned the chair with a blow of his fist and, resting a foot on the remainder of the bust in a position of triumph, he shouted: "So let all tyrants perish!"
Still no enthusiasm was manifest, and as the spectators seemed to be in a kind of stupor from astonishment the commander called to the militiamen:
You may now go to your homes." And he went toward his own house with great strides, as if he were pursued.
His maid, when he appeared, told him that some patients had been waiting in his office for three hours. He hastened in. There were the two varicose-vein patients, who had returned at daybreak, obstinate but patient.
The old man immediately began his explanation: "This began by a feeling like ants running up and down the legs."

Axolotl by Julio Cortázar

Axolotl



There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.

I got to them by chance one spring morning when Paris was spreading its peacock tail after a slow wintertime. I was heading down tbe boulevard Port-Royal, then I took Saint-Marcel and L'Hôpital and saw green among all that grey and remembered the lions. I was friend of the lions and panthers, but had never gone into the dark, humid building that was the aquarium. I left my bike against tbe gratings and went to look at the tulips. The lions were sad and ugly and my panther was asleep. I decided on the aquarium, looked obliquely at banal fish until, unexpectedly, I hit it off with the axolotls. I stayed watching them for an hour and left, unable to think of anything else.

In the library at Sainte-Geneviève, I consulted a dictionary and learned that axolotls are the larval stage (provided with gills) of a species of salamander of the genus Ambystoma. That they were Mexican I knew already by looking at them and their little pink Aztec faces and the placard at the top of the tank. I read that specimens of them had been found in Africa capable of living on dry land during the periods of drought, and continuing their life under water when the rainy season came. I found their Spanish name, ajolote, and the mention that they were edible, and that their oil was used (no longer used, it said) like cod-liver oil.

I didn't care to look up any of the specialized works, but the next day I went back to the Jardin des Plantes. I began to go every morning, morning and afternoon some days. The aquarium guard smiled perplexedly taking my ticket. I would lean up against the iron bar in front of the tanks and set to watching them. There's nothing strange in this, because after the first minute I knew that we were linked, that something infinitely lost and distant kept pulling us together. It had been enough to detain me that first morning in front of the sheet of glass where some bubbles rose through the water. The axolotls huddled on the wretched narrow (only I can know how narrow and wretched) floor of moss and stone in the tank. There were nine specimens, and the majority pressed their heads against the glass, looking with their eyes of gold at whoever came near them. Disconcerted, almost ashamed, I felt it a lewdness to be peering at these silent and immobile figures heaped at the bottom of the tank. Mentally I isolated one, situated on the right and somewhat apart from the others, to study it better. I saw a rosy little body, translucent (I thought of those Chinese figurines of milky glass), looking like a small lizard about six inches long, ending in a fish's tail of extraordinary delicacy, the most sensitive part of our body. Along the back ran a transparent fin which joined with the tail, but what obsessed me was the feet, of the slenderest nicety, ending in tiny fingers with minutely human nails. And then I discovered its eyes, its face. Inexpressive features, with no other trait save the eyes, two orifices, like brooches, wholly of transparent gold, lacking any life but looking, letting themselves be penetrated by my look, which seemed to travel past the golden level and lose itself in a diaphanous interior mystery. A very slender black halo ringed the eye and etched it onto the pink flesh, onto the rosy stone of the head, vaguely triangular, but with curved and triangular sides which gave it a total likeness to a statuette corroded by time. The mouth was masked by the triangular plane of the face, its considerable size would be guessed only in profile; in front a delicate crevice barely slit the lifeless stone. On both sides of the head where the ears should have been, there grew three tiny sprigs, red as coral, a vegetal outgrowth, the gills, I suppose. And they were the only thing quick about it; every ten or fifteen seconds the sprigs pricked up stiffly and again subsided. Once in a while a foot would barely move, I saw the diminutive toes poise mildly on the moss. It's that we don't enjoy moving a lot, and the tank is so cramped—we barely move in any direction and we're hitting one of the others with our tail or our head—difficulties arise, fights, tiredness. The time feels like it's less if we stay quietly.

It was their quietness that made me lean toward them fascinated the first time I saw the axolotls. Obscurely I seemed to understand their secret will, to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility. I knew better later; the gill contraction, the tentative reckoning of the delicate feet on the stones, the abrupt swimming (some of them swim with a simple undulation of the body) proved to me that they were capable of escaping that mineral lethargy in which they spent whole hours. Above all else, their eyes obsessed me. In the standing tanks on either side of them, different fishes showed me the simple stupidity of their handsome eyes so similar to our own. The eyes of the axolotls spoke to me of the presence of a different life, of another way of seeing. Gluing my face to the glass (the guard would cough fussily once in a while), I tried to see better those diminutive golden points, that entrance to the infinitely slow and remote world of these rosy creatures. It was useless to tap with one finger on the glass directly in front of their faces; they never gave the least reaction. The golden eyes continued burning with their soft, terrible light; they continued looking at me from an unfathomable depth which made me dizzy.

And nevertheless they were close. I knew it before this, before being an axolotl. I learned it the day I came near them for the first time. The anthropomorphic features of a monkey reveal the reverse of what most people believe, the distance that is traveled from them to us. The absolute lack of similarity between axolotls and human beings proved to me that my recognition was valid, that I was not propping myself up with easy analogies. Only the little hands . . . But an eft, the common newt, has such hands also, and we are not at all alike. I think it was the axolotls' heads, that triangular pink shape with the tiny eyes of gold. That looked and knew. That laid the claim. They were not animals.

It would seem easy, almost obvious, to fall into mythology. I began seeing in the axolotls a metamorphosis which did not succeed in revoking a mysterious humanity. I imagined them aware, slaves of their bodies, condemned infinitely to the silence of the abyss, to a hopeless meditation. Their blind gaze, the diminutive gold disc without expression and nonetheless terribly shining, went through me like a message: "Save us, save us." I caught myself mumbling words of advice, conveying childish hopes. They continued to look at me, immobile; from time to time the rosy branches of the gills stiffened. In that instant I felt a muted pain; perhaps they were seeing me, attracting my strength to penetrate into the impenetrable thing of their lives. They were not human beings, but I had found in no animal such a profound relation with myself. The axolotls were like witnesses of something, and at times like horrible judges. I felt ignoble in front of them; there was such a terrifying purity in those transparent eyes. They were larvas, but larva means disguise and also phantom. Behind those Aztec faces, without expression but of an implacable cruelty, what semblance was awaiting its hour?

I was afraid of them. I think that had it not been for feeling the proximity of other visitors and the guard, I would not have been bold enough to remain alone with them. "You eat them alive with your eyes, hey," the guard said, laughing; he likely thought I was a little cracked. What he didn't notice was that it was they devouring me slowly with their eyes, in a cannibalism of gold. At any distance from the aquarium, I had only to think of them, it was as though I were being affected from a distance. It got to the point that I was going every day, and at night I thought of them immobile in the darkness, slowly putting a hand out which immediately encountered another. Perhaps their eyes could see in the dead of night, and for them the day continued indefinitely. The eyes of axolotls have no lids.

I know now that there was nothing strange, that that had to occur. Leaning over in front of the tank each morning, the recognition was greater. They were suffering, every fiber of my body reached toward that stifled pain, that stiff torment at the bottom of the tank. They were lying in wait for something, a remote dominion destroyed, an age of liberty when the world had been that of the axolotls. Not possible that such a terrible expression which was attaining the overthrow of that forced blankness on their stone faces should carry any message other than one of pain, proof of that eternal sentence, of that liquid hell they were undergoing. Hopelessly, I wanted to prove to myself that my own sensibility was projecting a nonexistent consciousness upon the axolotls. They and I knew. So there was nothing strange in what happened. My face was pressed against the glass of the aquarium, my eyes were attempting once more to penetrate the mystery of those eyes of gold without iris, without pupil. I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood.

Only one thing was strange: to go on thinking as usual, to know. To realize that was, for the first moment, like the horror of a man buried alive awaking to his fate. Outside, my face came close to the glass again, I saw my mouth, the lips compressed with the effort of understanding the axolotls. I was an axolotl and now I knew instantly that no understanding was possible. He was outside the aquarium, his thinking was a thinking outside the tank. Recognizing him, being him himself, I was an axolotl and in my world. The horror began—I learned in the same moment —of believing myself prisoner in the body of an axolotl, metamorphosed into him with my human mind intact, buried alive in an axolotl, condemned to move lucidly among unconscious creatures. But that stopped when a foot just grazed my face, when I moved just a little to one side and saw an axolotl next to me who was looking at me, and understood that he knew also, no communication possible, but very clearly. Or I was also in him, or all of us were thinking humanlike, incapable of expression, limited to the golden splendor of our eyes looking at the face of the man pressed against the aquarium.

He returned many times, but he comes less often now. Weeks pass without his showing up. I saw him yesterday, he looked at me for a long time and left briskly. It seemed to me that he was not so much interested in us any more, that he was coming out of habit. Since the only thing I do is think, I could think about him a lot. It occurs to me that at the beginning we continued to communicate, that he felt more than ever one with the mystery which was claiming him. But the bridges were broken between him and me, because what was his obsession is now an axolotl, alien to his human life. I think that at the beginning I was capable of returning to him in a certain way—ah, only in a certain way—and of keeping awake his desire to know us better. I am an axolotl for good now, and if I think like a man it's only because every axolotl thinks like a man inside his rosy stone semblance. I believe that all this succeeded in communicating something to him in those first days, when I was still he. And in this final solitude to which he no longer comes, I console myself by thinking that perhaps he is going to write a story about us, that, believing he's making up a story, he's going to write all this about axolotls.

The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf

The Mark on the Wall

by Virginia Woolf



PERHAPS IT WAS the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.... If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature­the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way­an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were­very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.

But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was made by a nail after all; it's too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to say for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have­what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization­let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses­what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble­three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ­all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour­landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard....

But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won't be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour­dim pinks and blues­which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become­I don't know what....

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper­look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe.

The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane.... I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes.... Shakespeare.... Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so­A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the open door,­for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer's evening­But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn't interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this:

"And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I'd seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?" I asked­(but I don't remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people­what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps­but these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers­a whole class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation. Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits­like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker's Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom­if freedom exists....

In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf.... There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name.... What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrow-heads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson drank out of­proving I really don't know what.

No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really­what shall we say?­the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain?­Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases.... Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs.... How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections­if it were not for Whitaker's Almanack­if it were not for the Table of Precedency!

I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is­a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?

Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker's Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can't be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall.

I understand Nature's game­her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action­men, we assume, who don't think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.

Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of.... Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don't know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers­all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes.... One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately­but something is getting in the way.... Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker's Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing.... There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying­

"I'm going out to buy a newspaper."

"Yes?"

"Though it's no good buying newspapers.... Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war!... All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall."

Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

From Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf

 

About the Author 

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf (/wʊlf/; née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Wikipedia

 Notable works: Mrs Dalloway (1925); To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando (1928); A R...
Died: 28 March 1941 (aged 59); Lewes, England

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Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf

Kew Gardens

by Virginia Woolf


FROM THE OVAL-SHAPED flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves. Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.

The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed. The man was about six inches in front of the woman, strolling carelessly, while she bore on with greater purpose, only turning her head now and then to see that the children were not too far behind. The man kept this distance in front of the woman purposely, though perhaps unconsciously, for he wished to go on with his thoughts.

"Fifteen years ago I came here with Lily," he thought. "We sat somewhere over there by a lake and I begged her to marry me all through the hot afternoon. How the dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragonfly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe. All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly; for some reason I thought that if it settled there, on that leaf, the broad one with the red flower in the middle of it, if the dragonfly settled on the leaf she would say 'Yes' at once. But the dragonfly went round and round: it never settled anywhere­of course not, happily not, or I shouldn't be walking here with Eleanor and the children­Tell me, Eleanor. D'you ever think of the past?"

"Why do you ask, Simon?"

"Because I've been thinking of the past. I've been thinking of Lily, the woman I might have married.... Well, why are you silent? Do you mind my thinking of the past?"

"Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees,... one's happiness, one's reality?"

"For me, a square silver shoe buckle and a dragonfly­"

"For me, a kiss. Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels twenty years ago, down by the side of a lake, painting the water-lilies, the first red water-lilies I'd ever seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on the back of my neck. And my hand shook all the afternoon so that I couldn't paint. I took out my watch and marked the hour when I would allow myself to think of the kiss for five minutes only­it was so precious­the kiss of an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses all my life. Come, Caroline, come, Hubert."

They walked on the past the flower-bed, now walking four abreast, and soon diminished in size among the trees and looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches.

In the oval flower bed the snail, whose shell had been stained red, blue, and yellow for the space of two minutes or so, now appeared to be moving very slightly in its shell, and next began to labour over the crumbs of loose earth which broke away and rolled down as it passed over them. It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antennæ trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture­all these objects lay across the snail's progress between one stalk and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings.

This time they were both men. The younger of the two wore an expression of perhaps unnatural calm; he raised his eyes and fixed them very steadily in front of him while his companion spoke, and directly his companion had done speaking he looked on the ground again and sometimes opened his lips only after a long pause and sometimes did not open them at all. The elder man had a curiously uneven and shaky method of walking, jerking his hand forward and throwing up his head abruptly, rather in the manner of an impatient carriage horse tired of waiting outside a house; but in the man these gestures were irresolute and pointless. He talked almost incessantly; he smiled to himself and again began to talk, as if the smile had been an answer. He was talking about spirits­the spirits of the dead, who, according to him, were even now telling him all sorts of odd things about their experiences in Heaven.

"Heaven was known to the ancients as Thessaly, William, and now, with this war, the spirit matter is rolling between the hills like thunder." He paused, seemed to listen, smiled, jerked his head and continued:­

"You have a small electric battery and a piece of rubber to insulate the wire­isolate?­insulate?­well, we'll skip the details, no good going into details that wouldn't be understood­and in short the little machine stands in any convenient position by the head of the bed, we will say, on a neat mahogany stand. All arrangements being properly fixed by workmen under my direction, the widow applies her ear and summons the spirit by sign as agreed. Women! Widows! Women in black­"

Here he seemed to have caught sight of a woman's dress in the distance, which in the shade looked a purple black. He took off his hat, placed his hand upon his heart, and hurried towards her muttering and gesticulating feverishly. But William caught him by the sleeve and touched a flower with the tip of his walking-stick in order to divert the old man's attention. After looking at it for a moment in some confusion the old man bent his ear to it and seemed to answer a voice speaking from it, for he began talking about the forests of Uruguay which he had visited hundreds of years ago in company with the most beautiful young woman in Europe. He could be heard murmuring about forests of Uruguay blanketed with the wax petals of tropical roses, nightingales, sea beaches, mermaids, and women drowned at sea, as he suffered himself to be moved on by William, upon whose face the look of stoical patience grew slowly deeper and deeper.

Following his steps so closely as to be slightly puzzled by his gestures came two elderly women of the lower middle class, one stout and ponderous, the other rosy cheeked and nimble. Like most people of their station they were frankly fascinated by any signs of eccentricity betokening a disordered brain, especially in the well-to-do; but they were too far off to be certain whether the gestures were merely eccentric or genuinely mad. After they had scrutinised the old man's back in silence for a moment and given each other a queer, sly look, they went on energetically piecing together their very complicated dialogue:

"Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says, I says­"

"My Bert, Sis, Bill, Grandad, the old man, sugar,

    Sugar, flour, kippers, greens,
    Sugar, sugar, sugar."

The ponderous woman looked through the pattern of falling words at the flowers standing cool, firm, and upright in the earth, with a curious expression. She saw them as a sleeper waking from a heavy sleep sees a brass candlestick reflecting the light in an unfamiliar way, and closes his eyes and opens them, and seeing the brass candlestick again, finally starts broad awake and stares at the candlestick with all his powers. So the heavy woman came to a standstill opposite the oval-shaped flower bed, and ceased even to pretend to listen to what the other woman was saying. She stood there letting the words fall over her, swaying the top part of her body slowly backwards and forwards, looking at the flowers. Then she suggested that they should find a seat and have their tea.

The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. Let alone the effort needed for climbing a leaf, he was doubtful whether the thin texture which vibrated with such an alarming crackle when touched even by the tip of his horns would bear his weight; and this determined him finally to creep beneath it, for there was a point where the leaf curved high enough from the ground to admit him. He had just inserted his head in the opening and was taking stock of the high brown roof and was getting used to the cool brown light when two other people came past outside on the turf. This time they were both young, a young man and a young woman. They were both in the prime of youth, or even in that season which precedes the prime of youth, the season before the smooth pink folds of the flower have burst their gummy case, when the wings of the butterfly, though fully grown, are motionless in the sun.

"Lucky it isn't Friday," he observed.

"Why? D'you believe in luck?"

"They make you pay sixpence on Friday."

"What's sixpence anyway? Isn't it worth sixpence?"

"What's 'it'­what do you mean by 'it'?"

"O, anything­I mean­you know what I mean."

Long pauses came between each of these remarks; they were uttered in toneless and monotonous voices. The couple stood still on the edge of the flower bed, and together pressed the end of her parasol deep down into the soft earth. The action and the fact that his hand rested on the top of hers expressed their feelings in a strange way, as these short insignificant words also expressed something, words with short wings for their heavy body of meaning, inadequate to carry them far and thus alighting awkwardly upon the very common objects that surrounded them, and were to their inexperienced touch so massive; but who knows (so they thought as they pressed the parasol into the earth) what precipices aren't concealed in them, or what slopes of ice don't shine in the sun on the other side? Who knows? Who has ever seen this before? Even when she wondered what sort of tea they gave you at Kew, he felt that something loomed up behind her words, and stood vast and solid behind them; and the mist very slowly rose and uncovered­O, Heavens, what were those shapes?­little white tables, and waitresses who looked first at her and then at him; and there was a bill that he would pay with a real two shilling piece, and it was real, all real, he assured himself, fingering the coin in his pocket, real to everyone except to him and to her; even to him it began to seem real; and then­but it was too exciting to stand and think any longer, and he pulled the parasol out of the earth with a jerk and was impatient to find the place where one had tea with other people, like other people.

"Come along, Trissie; it's time we had our tea."

"Wherever does one have one's tea?" she asked with the oddest thrill of excitement in her voice, looking vaguely round and letting herself be drawn on down the grass path, trailing her parasol, turning her head this way and that way, forgetting her tea, wishing to go down there and then down there, remembering orchids and cranes among wild flowers, a Chinese pagoda and a crimson crested bird; but he bore her on.

Thus one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless movement passed the flower-bed and were enveloped in layer after layer of green blue vapour, in which at first their bodies had substance and a dash of colour, but later both substance and colour dissolved in the green-blue atmosphere. How hot it was! So hot that even the thrush chose to hop, like a mechanical bird, in the shadow of the flowers, with long pauses between one movement and the next; instead of rambling vaguely the white butterflies danced one above another, making with their white shifting flakes the outline of a shattered marble column above the tallest flowers; the glass roofs of the palm house shone as if a whole market full of shiny green umbrellas had opened in the sun; and in the drone of the aeroplane the voice of the summer sky murmured its fierce soul. Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue. It seemed as if all gross and heavy bodies had sunk down in the heat motionless and lay huddled upon the ground, but their voices went wavering from them as if they were flames lolling from the thick waxen bodies of candles. Voices. Yes, voices. Wordless voices, breaking the silence suddenly with such depth of contentment, such passion of desire, or, in the voices of children, such freshness of surprise; breaking the silence? But there was no silence; all the time the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear; like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured; on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air.


From Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf


About the Author 

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf (/wʊlf/; née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Wikipedia

 Notable works: Mrs Dalloway (1925); To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando (1928); A R...
Died: 28 March 1941 (aged 59); Lewes, England

Buy Virginia Woolf Books at Amazon

A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf

A Haunted House

by Virginia Woolf


Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple.

“Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!” “It’s upstairs,” she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered “Quietly,” they said, “or we shall wake them.”

But it wasn’t that you woke us. Oh, no. “They’re looking for it; they’re drawing the curtain,” one might say, and so read on a page or two. “Now they’ve found it,” one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm. “What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?” My hands were empty. “Perhaps it’s upstairs then?” The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.

But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The window panes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My hands were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat softly. “The treasure buried; the room . . . ” the pulse stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure?

A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always burnt behind the glass. Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat gladly. “The Treasure yours.”

The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way and that. Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp falls straight from the window. The candle burns stiff and still. Wandering through the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy.

“Here we slept,” she says. And he adds, “Kisses without number.” “Waking in the morning—” “Silver between the trees—” “Upstairs—” “In the garden—” “When summer came—” “In winter snowtime—” The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.

Nearer they come; cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides silver down the glass. Our eyes darken; we hear no steps beside us; we see no lady spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. “Look,” he breathes. “Sound asleep. Love upon their lips.”

Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply. Long they pause. The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall, and, meeting, stain the faces bent; the faces pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy.

“Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years—” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure—” Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”

From Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf

 

About the Author 

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf (/wʊlf/; née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Wikipedia

 Notable works: Mrs Dalloway (1925); To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando (1928); A R...
Died: 28 March 1941 (aged 59); Lewes, England

Buy Virginia Woolf Books at Amazon

 

Saturday, June 15, 2019

Two Things Requisite in Writing by Lewis Worthington Smith

Two Things Requisite in Writing

by

Lewis Worthington Smith


 It is to be borne in mind that the foregoing classifications are by no means absolute. Gardiner in his "Forms of Prose Literature" says very truly that the "essential elements, not only of literature, but of all the fine arts, are: first, an organic unity of conception; and second, the pervasive personality of the artist." It is true that much of our writing does not aspire to literary character, but in very little of our writing of any sort can we afford to neglect the first of these elements, and in very little of it do we care to leave the second out of account. Even in exposition of the simpler sort we may give to our writing the distinction of a more luminous style and the stronger appeal of a warmer personal interest, if we shape it into organic unity and make evident in it "the pervasive personality of the artist."