rrative. The details of a novel are so many
and so various that the author needs at all times a nice understanding
and a careful application of the principle of emphasis. It is
therefore advisable that the present chapter should be devoted to the
enumeration and illustration of the different technical devices which
are employed by artists in narrative to cast the needed emphasis on
the essential features of their stories.

First of all, it is obviously easy to emphasize by position. In any
narrative, or section of a narrative, that is designed to be read in
a single sitting, the last moments are of necessity emphatic because
they are the last. When the reader lays the narrative aside, he
remembers most vividly the last thing that has been presented to his
attention; and if he thinks back to the earlier portions of the story,
he must do so by thinking through the concluding passage. Therefore,
it is necessary in the short-story, and advisable in the chapters of a
novel, to reserve for the ultimate position one of the most inherently
important features of the narrative; for surely it is bad art to
waste the natural emphasis of position by casting it upon a subsidiary
feature.

The importance of this simple expedient will readily be recognized if
the student will gather together a hundred short-stories written by
acknowledged masters and examine the last paragraph of each. Consider
for a moment the final sentences of "Markheim," which we have already
quoted in another connection:--

"He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a
smile.

"'You had better go for the police,' said he: 'I have killed your
master.'"

The entire story is summed up in the concluding phrase; and the final
sentence rings ever after in the reader's memory.

Here, to cite a new example, is the conclusion of Poe's "The Masque of
the Red Death":--

"And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come
like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the
blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing
posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with
that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired.
And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion
over all."

The sense of absolute ruin which we derive from this impressive
paragraph is, to a considerable extent, due to the emphasis it gains
from its finality. The effect