Note (return) — Chapter XII · THE FACTOR OF STYLE

Scott has no style, and Thackeray has no structure; but these technical defects go down before their magnitude of message. Scott teaches us the glory and the greatness of being healthy, young, adventurous, and happy; and Thackeray, with tears in his eyes that humanize the sneer upon his lips, teaches us that the thing we call Society, with a capital S, is but a vanity of vanities. If we turn from the novel to the short-story, we shall notice that certain themes are in themselves so interesting that the resultant story could not fail to be effective even were it badly told. It is perhaps unfair to take as an example Mr. F. J. Stimson's tale called "Mrs. Knollys," because his story is both correctly constructed and beautifully written; but merely in theme this tale is so effective that it could have endured a less accomplished handling. The story runs as follows:2—A girl and her husband, both of whom are very young, go to the Alps for their honeymoon. The husband, in crossing a glacier, falls into a crevasse. His body cannot immediately be recovered; but Mrs. Knollys learns from a scientist who is making a study of the movement of the ice that in forty-five years the body will be carried to the end of the glacier. Thereafter she regards her husband as absent but not lost, and lives her life in continuous imagined communion with him. At the end of the allotted time, she returns and finds his body. She is then a woman in her sixties; but her husband is, in aspect, still a boy of twenty-one. She has dreamt of him as growing old beside her: she finds him sundered from her by half a century of change.—Even in a bald and ineffective summary the interest of this narrative effect must be apparent. The story scarcely needed to be told as well as Mr. Stimson told it.