s a utilitarian
adjunct to the action. Granted certain incidents that are to happen,
certain scenery and properties are useful, in the novel just as in the
theater; and if these are supplied advisedly, the setting will, as it
were, become a part of what is happening instead of remaining merely
a decorative background to the incidents. The first English author to
establish firmly this utilitarian relation between the setting and the
action was Daniel Defoe. Defoe was by profession a journalist; and
the most characteristic quality of his mind was an habitual
matter-of-factness. Plausibility was what he 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.

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.

A new and very interesting attitude toward landscape setting was
disclosed by Rousseau in the "Nou