most desired
in his fictions; and he discerned instinctively that the readiest
means of making a story plausible was by representing with entire
concreteness and great wealth of specific detail the physical
adjuncts to the action. The multitudinous particulars of Crusoe's
island are therefore exhibited concretely to the reader one by one,
as Crusoe makes use of them successively in what he does.

=2. Setting as an Aid to Characterization.=--But though in Defoe the
element of setting is merged with the element of action, it is not
brought into intimate relation with the element of character. The
island is a part of what Crusoe does, rather than a part of what he
is. But the dwelling-room of the Boffins, which was described in the
paragraph from "Our Mutual Friend" quoted toward the end of the
preceding chapter, is a part of what the Boffins are, rather than of
what they do. The setting in the latter case is used as an adjunct to
the element of character instead of to the element of action. Fielding
and his contemporaries were the first English novelists to make the
setting in this way representative of personality as well as useful to
the plot; but the finer possibilities of the relation between setting
and character were not fully realized until the nineteenth century.
The eighteenth-century authors, in so far as they elaborated the
element of setting, seem to have done so mainly for the sake of
greater vividness. The appeal of setting being visual, the element was
employed to illustrate the action and to make the characters clearly
evident to the eye. By rendering a story more concrete, a definite
setting rendered it more credible. This the eighteenth-century
novelists discerned; but only with the rise of the romantic movement
was the element applied to subtler uses.

=Emotional Harmony in Setting.=--A new and very interesting
attitude toward landscape setting was disclosed by Rousseau in the
"Nouvelle Heloise" and developed by his numerous followers in early
nineteenth-century romance. The writers who advocated a "return to
nature" spelled nature with a capital N and considered it usually
as an anthropomorphic presence. As a result of this, when they
developed a natural background for their stories, they established a
sympathetic interchange of mood between the characters and the
landscape, and imagined (to use the famous phrase of Leibnitz) a
"pre-established harmony" between the shifting moods of nature and
of m