In writing of the short story I may have seemed to dwell too much on
the need of considering every detail in its plan and development;
yet the short story is an improvisation, the temporary shelter of a
flitting fancy, compared to the four-square and deeply-founded monument
which the novel ought to be.
It is not only that the scale is different; it is because of
the reasons for its being so. If the typical short story be the
foreshortening of a dramatic climax connecting two or more lives, the
typical novel usually deals with the gradual unfolding of a succession
of events divided by intervals of time, and in which many people, in
addition to the principal characters, play more or less subordinate
parts. No need now to take in sail and clear the decks; the novelist
must carry as much canvas and as many passengers as his subject
requires and his seamanship permits.
Still, the novel-theme is distinguished from that suited to the short
story not so much by the number of characters presented as by the
space required to mark the lapse of time or to permit the minute
analysis of successive states of feeling. The latter distinction, it
should be added, holds good even when the states of feeling are all
contained in one bosom, and crowded into a short period, as they are
in “The Kreutzer Sonata.” No one would think of classing “The Kreutzer
Sonata,” or “Ivan Ilyitch,” or “Adolphe,” among short stories; and
such instances prove the difficulty of laying down a hard-and-fast
distinction between the forms. The final difference lies deeper. A
novel may be all about one person, and about no more than a few hours
in that person’s life, and yet not be reducible to the limits of a
short story without losing all significance and interest. It depends on
the character of the subject chosen.
Since the novel-about-one-person has been touched on, it may be
well, before going farther, to devote a short parenthesis to
its autobiographical or “subjective” variety. In the study of
novel-technique one might almost set aside the few masterpieces in this
class, such as the “Princesse de Clèves,” “Adolphe” and “Dominique,” as
not novels at all, any more than Musset’s “Confession d’un Enfant du
Siècle” is a novel. They are, in fact, all fragments of autobiography
by writers of genius; and the autobiographical gift does not seem
very closely related to that of fiction. In the case of the authors
mentioned, none but Madame de La Fayette ever published another
novel, and her other attempts were without interest. In all the arts
abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation. It exists on
the lowest scale, and, in the art of fiction, belongs as much to the
producer of “railway novels” as to Balzac, Thackeray or Tolstoy; yet it
almost always marks the great creative artist. Whatever a man has it in
him to do really well he usually keeps on doing with an indestructible
persistency.
There is another sign which sets apart the born novelist from the
authors of self-confessions in novel-form; that is, the absence of
the objective faculty in the latter. The subjective writer lacks the
power of getting far enough away from his story to view it as a whole
and relate it to its setting; his minor characters remain the mere
satellites of the principal personage (himself), and disappear when not
lit up by their central luminary.
Such books are sometimes masterpieces; but if by the term “art of
fiction” be understood the creation of imaginary characters and the
invention of their imaginary experiences--and there seems no more
convenient definition--then the autobiographical tale is not strictly a
novel, since no objectively creative effort has gone to its making.
It does not follow that born novelists never write autobiographical
novels. Instances to the contrary will occur to every one and none more
obvious than that of “The Kreutzer Sonata.” There is a gulf between
such a book and “Adolphe.” Tolstoy’s tale, though almost avowedly the
study of his own tortured soul, is as objective as Othello. The magic
transposition has taken place; in reading the story we do not feel
ourselves to be in a resuscitated _real world_ (a sort of Tussaud
Museum of wax figures with actual clothes on), but in that other world
which is the image of life transposed in the brain of the artist, a
world wherein the creative breath has made all things new. If one
happened to begin one’s acquaintance with Tolstoy by reading “The
Kreutzer Sonata” one would not need to be told that it was the creation
of a brain working objectively, a brain which had produced, or was
likely to produce, other novels of a wholly different kind; whereas of
such books as “Dominique” or “Adolphe,” were one to light on them as
unpreparedly, one would say: “This is not the invention of a novelist
but the self-analysis of a man of genius.”
There is one famous book which might be described as the link
between the real novel and the autobiography in novel-disguise. This
is Goethe’s “Werther.” Here a youth of genius, as yet unpractised in
the art of fiction, has related, under the thinnest of concealments,
the story of his own unhappy love. The tale is intensely subjective.
The hero is never once _seen from the outside_, the minor figures are
hardly drawn out of the limbo of the unrealized; yet how instantly the
difference between “Werther” and “Adolphe” declares itself! The latter
tale is completely self-contained; it never suggests in the writer
the power or the desire to project a race of imaginary characters.
“Werther” does. Every page thrills with the dawning gift of creation.
The lover has not been too much absorbed in his own anguish to turn
its light on things external to him. The young Goethe who has noted
Charlotte’s way of cutting the bread-and-butter for her little brothers
and sisters, and set down the bourgeois humours and the sylvan charm of
the ball in the forest, is already a novelist.