though it does the book an injustice. "Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out." ILLUSTRATIVE READING In his Modern Study of Literature Professor R. G. Moulton gives plot-schemes of Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and Scott's Monastery. Note the setting in Meredith's Love in the Valley. In the course of it, as Mr. G. M. Trevelyan points out in The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith, we are taken through all the seasons of the farmer's year, and the appreciation of this provides the key to the complete understanding of the poem. In Our Mutual Friend there are the river and the dust-heap, both full of significance, while in The Old Curiosity Shop we soon find ourselves on the Thames-side wharf that consorts so well with the sinister influence exercised throughout the book by Quilp, its owner. In Hardy's The Return of the Native Egdon Heath is so overpowering that it becomes, in a sense, the chief personage in the drama. But one of the finest examples of appropriate setting in all literature is to be found in the Book of Job. We first meet Job at the feast-typical of the prosperity and joy that had hitherto been his lot. Then comes the news of a long succession of losses, each more overwhelming than that which preceded it, followed by a loathsome infliction, and Job "sat among the ashes." And on that ashmound where, we are told, the outcast and beggar still sit outside Eastern villages the drama is played out to its conclusion. Note the end of Paradise Lost. Cecil Headlam has an attractive paper on "The Endings of Books" in Friends That Fail Not. EXERCISES 1. Ruskin lays down these principles for the painter of historical subjects: "Every figure which is unnecessary is an encumbrance. Every figure which does not sympathize with the action, interrupts it." Discuss the applicability of these rules to prose-fiction. 2. Make plot-schemes for a play of Shakespeare, a Waverley novel, and any modern novel that you have read. 3. Contrast the following from the point of view of character-development: Prince Henry (in Henry IV), Sydney Carton, Sir Percy Blakeney, Becky Sharp, and Portia (in The Merchant of Venice). 4. Comment upon the conclusions of the following: Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Newcomes, Maud. 5. "All works of art tell a story." Show briefly how this is true, taking as examples a poem, a piece of sculpture, a building, and a musical composition. CHAPTER XI PERSONALITY AND STYLE We might as well say that one man's shadow is another's as that the style of a really gifted mind can belong to any but himself. It follows him about as a shadow. His thought and feeling are personal, and so his language is personal. J. H. NEWMAN THAT quality which we term personality-the revelation of the man behind the book-marks all great literature. In the literature of modern times its significance is indisputable. It is possible for a practised reader to tell without much difficulty whether a given passage was written by Macaulay or Addison, Burke or Bunyan, Henry James or H. G. Wells. Or when he takes up Shakespeare's Henry VIII and compares Queen Katharine's trial scene with the passages in which she reproaches the two cardinals he is at once conscious of a striking difference. Both occur in a play which bears the name of Shakespeare; but, as Sir Sidney Lee observes, "no reader with an ear for meter can fail to detect in the piece two rhythms, an inferior and a superior rhythm. Two pens were clearly at work." From one the ideas flow with such a rush that no conventional forms can contain them. Again and again the accepted canons suffer. The movement is rapid and the expression broken. The writer's white-hot imagination twists and changes the ordered arrangement of the sentences as molten lava will disturb and alter the rock-masses through which it forces its way to the surface. What the other pen gives us is, on the contrary, calm and methodical. Emotion is kept well in hand, and is never allowed to overflow the bounds of the chosen metrical form. There are no wild flights of imagery, no bewildering turns of thought. The reader fails to catch the tones of Shakespeare in such a passage as this, with its unfailing regularity and conventional imagery: Alas! poor wenches, where are now your fortunes? Shipwreck'd upon a kingdom where no pity, No friends, no hope, no kindred weep for me; Almost no grave allow'd me. Like the lily, I'll hang my head and perish. Shakespeare may be the name upon the titlepage, but the hand is the hand of John Fletcher. This, on the other hand, with its abruptness, its concentration, and the unconventionality of its imagery is the true voice of Shakespeare: O! many Have broke their backs with laying manors on 'em For this great journey. What did this vanity But minister communication of A most poor issue. Here, then, are two different styles reflecting two different personalities. It is not a question of superficial tricks and mannerisms, but a matter of essential individuality. So when Shelley, apostrophizing the West Wind, says, Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless and swift and proud, he is giving us the key to the tragedy of his life and also revealing the true significance of his work. The passage explains that eerie power of myth-making which makes Shelley stand out among our English poets. He not only saw the West Wind as a great being inhabiting vast spaces; he was himself, for the nonce, a being on the same gigantic scale, and possessed congruous attributes. And when the thorns of life lacerated him and roused him to a sense of the realities of prosaic existence, it was a sad and bitter disillusionment. Shelley wrote as he did because he was Shelley. His style was not a manner that he consciously assumed for a definite purpose, but a mode of expression that followed naturally and inevitably upon his own temperament. It is this inevitable quality of all true style that we are sometimes apt to forget, and Newman's metaphor of the shadow is particularly valuable |