Suspense and excitement must go hand in hand
with a feeling for a developing inner necessity. There is no story
without both. Yet no formula for the amount of each can be devised.
The dependence of man upon nature makes inevitable the occurrence of
what we call accidents, violent breaks in the tissue of personal and
social life, unaccountable from the point of view of our human purposes.
By admitting the part played by the non-human background in determining
fate, the naturalistic school of writers have enlarged the vision of
the novelist beyond the range of the tender-minded sentimentalist. It
is to be expected, moreover, that coincidences should occur,--the
meeting of independent lines of causation with consequences fateful
to each. A careful investigation would disclose that most interesting
careers have been largely determined by coincidences. The only demand
that we can make of the artist in this regard is that he do not give
us so many of these that his work will seem unreal. We must not feel
that he is making the story in order to surprise us and thrill us--the
purpose of melodrama; the story should make itself. Hardy's _The
Return of the Native_ is an illustration of failure here; the
coincidences are so many that it seems magical, the work of a capricious
genius, not of nature.
By fate in a story we do not mean, of course, the mere causal
concatenation of events, for some relation to a purposeful life is
always implied. But since this relation is a general condition applying
to all art, we shall consider it here only as it affects the unity of
a story.
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