position.=--Exposition, for its own sake, is also out of place
in fiction. The aim of exposition is to explain,--an aim necessarily
abstract; but the purpose of fiction is to represent life,--a purpose
necessarily concrete. To discourse of life in abstract terms is to
subvert the natural mood of art; and the novelist may make his meaning
just as clear by representing life concretely, without a running
commentary of analysis and explanation. Life truly represented will
explain itself. There are, to be sure, a number of great novelists, of
whom George Eliot may be taken as the type, who frequently halt their
story to write an essay about it. These essays are often instructive
in themselves, but they are not fiction, because they do not embody
their truths in imagined facts of human life. George Eliot is at one
moment properly a novelist, and at the next moment a discursive
expositor. She would be still greater as a novelist, and a novelist
merely, if she could make her meaning clear without digressing to
another art.

=3. Description.=--Description also, in the most artistic fiction, is
used only as subsidiary and contributive to narration. The aim of
description--which is to suggest the look of things at a certain
characteristic moment--is an aim necessarily static. But life--which
the novelist purposes to represent--is not static but dynamic. The
aim of description is pictorial: but life does not hold its pictures;
it melts and merges them one into another with headlong hurrying
progression. A novelist who devotes two successive pages to the
description of a landscape or a person, necessarily makes his story
stand still while he is doing it, and thereby belies an obvious law of
life. Therefore, as writers of fiction have progressed in art, they
have more and more eliminated description for its own sake.

=4. Narration, the Natural Mood of Fiction.=--Since, then, the natural
mood, or method, of fiction is narration, it is necessary that we
should devote especial study to the nature of narrative. And in a
study frankly technical we may be aided at the outset by a definition,
which may subsequently be explained in all its bearings.

_A narrative is a representation of a series of events._ This is a
very simple definition; and only two words of it can possibly demand
elucidation. These words are _series_ and _event_. The word _event_
will be explained fully in a later section of this chapter: meanwhile
it may be understo