I
Definitions, however difficult and inadequate, are the necessary “tools
of criticism.” To begin, therefore, one may distinguish the novel of
situation from that of character and manners by saying that, in the
first, the persons imagined by the author almost always spring out
of a vision of the situation, and are inevitably conditioned by it,
whatever the genius of their creator; whereas in the larger freer form,
that of character and manners (or either of the two), the author’s
characters are first born, and then mysteriously proceed to work out
their own destinies. Let it, at any rate, be understood that this rough
distinction shall serve in the following pages to mark the difference
between the two ways of presenting the subject since most subjects
lend themselves to being treated from either point of view.
It is not easy to find, among great novels written in English, examples
of novels of pure situation, that is, in which the situation is what
the book is remembered by. Perhaps “The Scarlet Letter” might be cited
as one of the few obvious examples. In “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,”
which one is tempted to name also, the study of character is so
interwoven with the drama as to raise the story--for all its obvious
shortcomings--to the level of those supreme novels which escape
classification. For if one remembers Tess’s tragedy, still more vividly
does one remember Tess herself.
In continental literature several famous books at once present
themselves in the situation group. One of the earliest, as it is the
most famous, is Goethe’s “Elective Affinities,” where a great and
terrible drama involves characters of which the creator has not managed
quite to sever the marionette wires. Who indeed remembers those vague
initialled creatures, whom the author himself forgot to pull out of
their limbo in his eagerness to mature and polish their ingenious
misfortunes?
Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata” is another book which lives only by
force of situation, sustained, of course, by the profound analysis of
a universal passion. No one remembers who the people in “The Kreutzer
Sonata” were, or what they looked like, or what sort of a house they
lived in--but the very roots of human jealousy are laid bare in the
picture of the vague undifferentiated husband, a puppet who comes to
life only in function of his one ferocious passion. Balzac alone,
perhaps, managed to make of his novels of situation--such as “César
Birotteau” or “Le Curé de Tours”--such relentless and penetrating
character studies that their protagonists and the difficulties which
beset them leap together to the memory whenever the tales are named.
But this fusion of categories is the prerogative of the few, of those
who know how to write all kinds of novels, and who choose, each time,
the way best suited to the subject in hand.
Novels preeminently of character, and in which situation, dramatically
viewed, is reduced to the minimum, are far easier to find. Jane
Austen has given the norm, the ideal, of this type. Of her tales it
might almost be said that the reader sometimes forgets what happens
to her characters in his haunting remembrance of their foibles and
oddities, their little daily round of preoccupations and pleasures.
They are “speaking” portraits, following one with their eyes in that
uncannily lifelike way that good portraits have, rather than passionate
disordered people dragging one impetuously into the tangle of their
tragedy, as one is dragged by the characters of Stendhal, Thackeray
and Balzac. Not that Jane Austen’s characters do not follow their
predestined orbit. They evolve as real people do, but so softly,
noiselessly, that to follow the development of their history is as
quiet a business as watching the passage of the seasons. A sense of
her limitations as certain as her sense of her power must have kept
her--unconsciously or not--from trying to thrust these little people
into great actions, and made her choose the quiet setting which enabled
her to round out her portraits as imperceptibly as the sun models a
fruit. “Emma” is perhaps the most perfect example in English fiction of
a novel in which character shapes events quietly but irresistibly, as a
stream nibbles away its banks.
Next to “Emma” one might place, in this category, the masterpiece of
a very different hand: “The Egoist” of Meredith. In this book, though
by means so alien to Miss Austen’s delicate procedure that one balks
at the comparison, the fantastic novelist, whose antics too often make
one forget his insight, discarding most of his fatiguing follies, gives
a rich and deliberate study of a real human being. But he does not
quite achieve Jane Austen’s success. His Willoughby Patterne is typical
before he is individual, while every character in “Emma” is both, and
in degrees always perfectly proportioned. Still, the two books are
preeminent achievements in the field of pure character-drawing, and one
must turn to the greatest continental novelists--to Balzac again (as
always), to Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, Marcel Proust,
and perhaps to the very occasional best of Trollope--to match such
searching and elaborate studies.
But among the continental novelists--with few exceptions--the
delineation of character is inextricably combined with the study of
manners, as for instance in the novels of Tolstoy, of Balzac and of
Flaubert. Turgenev, in “Dmitri Rudin,” gave the somewhat rare example
of a novel made almost entirely out of the portrayal of a single
character; as, at the opposite extreme, Samuel Butler’s “Way of all
Flesh,” for all its brilliant character-drawing, is essentially the
portrait of a family and a social group--one of the most distinctive
novels of “manners” it is possible to find.
Such preliminary suggestions, cursory as they are, may help, better
than mere definitions, to keep in mind the differing types of novel in
which either character or situation weighs down the scales.