ructive 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.

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.

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 understood loosely as synonymous with _happening_. Let us
first examine the exact meaning of the word _series_.

The word _series_ implies much more than the word _succession_: it
implies a relation not merely chronological but also logical; and
the logical relation it implies is that of cause and effect. In any
section of actual life which we examine, the events are likely to
appear merely in succession and not in series. One event follows
another immediately in time, but does not seem linked to it
immediately by the law of causation. What you do this morning does not
often necessitate as a logical consequence what you do this afternoon;
and what you do this evening is not often a logical result of what you
have done during the day. Any