y the result of the interaction
of two forces,--namely, the innate tendencies of his nature and the
shaping power of his environment. Mr. Meredith, and more especially
Mr. Thomas Hardy, therefore devote a great deal of attention to
setting as an influence on character. Consider, for example, the
following brief passage from Mr. Hardy's "Tess of the D'Ubervilles":--

"Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of Froom Vale, at a season
when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of
fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should
not grow passionate. The ready hearts existing there were impregnated
by their surroundings."

Zola, in his essay on "The Experimental Novel," states that the proper
function of setting is to exhibit "the environment which determines
and completes the man"; and the philosophic study of environment
reacting upon character is one of the main features of his own
monumental series of novels devoted to the Rougon-Macquart family.
His example has been followed by a host of recent writers; and a
new school of fiction has grown up, the main purpose of which is to
exhibit the influence of certain carefully studied social, natural,
business, or professional conditions on the sort of people who live
and work among them.

If the setting be used both to determine the action and to mold the
characters, it may stand forth as the most important of the three
elements of narrative. In Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris," the
cathedral is the leading factor of the story. Claude Frollo would be
a very different person if it were not for the church; and many of the
main events, such as the ultimate tragic scene when Quasimodo hurls
Frollo from the tower-top, could not happen in any other place. In Mr.
Kipling's very subtle story entitled "An Habitation Enforced," which
appeared in the _Century Magazine_ for August, 1905, the setting is
really the hero of the narrative. An American millionaire and his
wife, whose ancestors were English, settle for a brief vacation in
the county of England from which the wife's family originally came.
Gradually the old house and the English landscape take hold of them:
ancestral feelings rise to dominate them; and they remain forever
after in enforced habitation on the ancient soil.

All that has been said thus far of setting in general applies of
course to one of the most interesting of its elements,--the weather.
In simple stories like the us