Most novels, for convenient survey, may be grouped under one or the
other of three types: manners, character (or psychology) and adventure.
These designations may be thought to describe the different methods
sufficiently; but as a typical example of each, “Vanity Fair” for the
first, “Madame Bovary” for the second, and, for the third, “Rob Roy” or
“The Master of Ballantrae,” might be named.
This grouping must be further stretched to include as subdivisions what
might be called the farcical novel of manners, the romance and the
philosophical romance; and immediately “Pickwick” for the first, “Harry
Richmond,” “La Chartreuse de Parme” or “Lorna Doone” for the second,
and “Wilhelm Meister” or “Marius the Epicurean” for the third category,
suggest themselves to the reader.
Lastly, in the zone of the unclassifiable float such enchanting hybrids
as “John Inglesant,” “Lavengro,” and that great Swiss novel, “Der Grüne
Heinrich,” in which fantasy, romance and the homeliest realities are so
inimitably mingled. It will be noticed that in the last two groups--of
romance pure or hybrid--but one French novel has been cited. The French
genius, which made “Romanticism” its own (after borrowing it from
England), has seldom touched even the hem of Romance: Tristan and
Iseult and their long line of descendants come from Broceliande, not
from the Ile de France.
Before going farther it should be added that, in a study of the modern
novel, the last-named of the three principal groups, the novel of
adventure, is the least important because the least modern. That this
implies any depreciation of the type in itself will not for a moment
be admitted by a writer whose memory rings with the joyous clatter of
Dumas the elder, Herman Melville, Captain Marryat and Stevenson; but
their gallant yarns might have been sung to the minstrel’s harp before
Roland and his peers, and told in Babylonian bazaars to Joseph and
his Brethren: the tale of adventure is essentially the parent-stock
of all subsequent varieties of the novel, and its modern tellers have
introduced few innovations in what was already a perfect formula,
created in the dawn of time by the world-old appeal: “Tell us another
story.”
All attempts at classification may seem to belong to school-examinations
and text-books, and to reduce the matter to the level of the famous
examination-paper which, in reference to Wordsworth’s “O cuckoo, shall
I call thee bird, or but a wandering voice?” instructed the student
to “state alternative preferred, with reasons for your choice.” In a
sense, classification is always arbitrary and belittling; yet to the
novelist’s mind such distinctions represent organic realities. It does
not much matter under what heading a school-girl is taught to class
“Vanity Fair”; but from the creator’s point of view classification
means the choice of a manner and of an angle of vision, and it mattered
greatly that Thackeray knew just how he meant to envisage his subject,
which might have been dealt with merely as the tale of an adventuress,
or merely as the romance of an honest couple, or merely as an
historical novel, and is all of these, and how much more besides--is,
indeed, all that its title promises.
The very fact that so many subjects contain the elements of two or
three different types of novel makes it one of the novelist’s first
cares to decide which method he means to use. Balzac, for instance,
gives us in “Le Père Goriot” and in “Eugénie Grandet” two different
ways of dealing with subjects that contain, after all, much the same
elements; in the one, englobing his tragic father in a vast social
panorama, in the other projecting his miser (who should have given
the tale its name) in huge Molièresque relief against the narrow
background of a sleepy provincial town peopled by three or four
carefully-subordinated characters.
There is another kind of hybrid novel, but in which the manner rather
than the matter may be so characterized; the novel written almost
entirely in dialogue, after the style, say, of “Gyp’s” successful
tales. It is open to discussion whether any particular class of
subjects calls for this treatment. Henry James thought so, and the
oddly-contrived “Awkward Age” was a convinced attempt on his part to
write “a little thing in the manner of Gyp”--a resemblance which few
readers would have perceived had he not pointed it out. Strangely
enough, he was persuaded that certain subjects not falling into the
stage-categories require nevertheless to be chattered rather than
narrated; and, more strangely still, that “The Awkward Age,” that
delicate and subtle case, all half-lights and shades, all innuendoes,
gradations and transitions, was typically made for such treatment.
His hyper-sensitiveness to any comment on his own work made it
difficult to discuss the question with him; but his greatest admirers
will probably feel that “The Awkward Age” lost more than it gained
by being powdered into dialogue, and that, had it been treated as a
novel instead of a kind of hybrid play, the obligation of “straight”
narrative might have compelled him to face and elucidate the central
problem instead of suffering it to lose itself in a tangle of talk. At
any rate, such an instance will probably not do much to convince either
novelists or their readers of the advantage of the “talked” novel. As
a matter of fact, the mode of presentation to the reader, that central
difficulty of the whole affair, must always be determined by the nature
of the subject; and the subject which instantly calls for dialogue
seems as instantly to range itself among those demanding for their full
setting-forth the special artifices of the theatre.
The immense superiority of the novel for any subject in which
“situation” is not paramount is just that freedom, that ease in passing
from one form of presentation to another, and that possibility of
explaining and elucidating by the way, which the narrative permits.
Convention is the first necessity of all art; but there seems no reason
for adding the shackles of another form to those imposed by one’s own.
Narrative, with all its suppleness and variety, its range from great
orchestral effects to the frail vibration of a single string, should
furnish the substance of the novel; dialogue, that precious adjunct,
should never be more than an adjunct, and one to be used as skilfully
and sparingly as the drop of condiment which flavours a whole dish.
The use of dialogue in fiction seems to be one of the few things about
which a fairly definite rule may be laid down. It should be reserved
for the culminating moments, and regarded as the spray into which the
great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the
shore. This lifting and scattering of the wave, the coruscation of the
spray, even the mere material sight of the page broken into short,
uneven paragraphs, all help to reinforce the contrast between such
climaxes and the smooth effaced gliding of the narrative intervals;
and the contrast enhances that sense of the passage of time for
the producing of which the writer has to depend on his intervening
narration. Thus the sparing use of dialogue not only serves to
emphasize the crises of the tale but to give it as a whole a greater
effect of continuous development.
Another argument against the substitution of dialogue for narrative is
the wastefulness and round-aboutness of the method. The greater effect
of animation, of presentness, produced by its excessive use will not
help the reader through more than half the book, whatever its subject;
after that he will perceive that he is to be made to pay before the end
for his too facile passage through the earlier chapters. The reason
is inherent in the method. When, in real life, two or more people are
talking together, all that is understood between them is left out of
their talk; but when the novelist uses conversation as a means not only
of accentuating but of carrying on his tale, his characters have to
tell each other many things that each already knows the other knows.
To avoid the resulting shock of improbability, their dialogue must be
so diluted with irrelevant touches of realistic commonplace, with what
might be described as by-talk, that, as in the least good of Trollope’s
tales, it rambles on for page after page before the reader, resignedly
marking time, arrives, bewildered and weary, at a point to which one
paragraph of narrative could have carried him.