The novel, in the hands of English-speaking writers, has always tended,
as it rose in value, to turn to pictures of character and manners,
however much blent with dramatic episodes, or entangled in what used to
be vaguely known as a plot. The plot, in the traditional sense of the
term, consisted in some clash of events, or, less often, of character.
But it was an arbitrarily imposed and rather spaciously built
framework, inside of which the people concerned had room to develop
their idiosyncrasies and be themselves, except in the crucial moments
when they became the puppets of the plot.
The real novel of situation, a compacter and above all a more
inevitable affair, did not, at least on English soil, take shape till
“plot,” in the old-fashioned sense of a coil of outward happenings,
was giving way to the discovery that real drama is soul-drama. The
novel of situation, indeed, has never really acclimatized itself
in English-speaking countries; whereas in France it seems to have
grown naturally from the psychological novel of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, wherein the conflict of characters tended from
the first to simplify the drawing of _character_ and to turn the
protagonists into embodiments of a particular passion rather than of a
particular person.
From this danger the English novelist has usually been guarded by
an inexhaustible interest in personality, and a fancy for loitering
by the way. The plots of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot
and their successors are almost detachable at will, so arbitrarily
are they imposed on the novel of character which was slowly but
steadily developing within their lax support, and which became, as the
nineteenth century advanced, the typical form of English fiction.
The novel of situation is a different matter. The situation, instead
of being imposed from the outside, is the kernel of the tale and its
only reason for being. It seizes the characters in its steely grip,
and jiu-jitsus them into the required attitude with a relentlessness
against which only genius can prevail. In every form of novel it is
noticeable that the central characters tend to be the least real.
This seems to be partly explained by the fact that these characters,
survivors of the old “hero” and “heroine,” whose business it was not
to be real but to be sublime, are still, though often without the
author’s being aware of it, the standard-bearers of his convictions
or the expression of his secret inclinations. They are _his_ in
the sense of tending to do and say what he would do, or imagines
he would do, in given circumstances, and being mere projections of
his own personality they lack the substance and relief of the minor
characters, whom he views coolly and objectively, in all their human
weakness and inconsequence. But there remains another reason, less
often recognized, for the unreality of novel “heroes” and “heroines,”
a reason especially applicable to the leading figures in the novel of
situation. It is that _the story is about them_, and forces them into
the shape which its events impose, while the subordinate characters,
moving at ease in the interstices of the tale, and free to go about
their business in the illogical human fashion, remain real to writer
and readers.
This fact, exemplified in all novels, becomes most vivid in the novel
of situation, where the characters tend to turn into Laocoöns, and die
in the merciless coils of their adventure. This is the extreme point of
the difference between the novel of situation and of character, and the
cause of the common habit of regarding them as alternative methods of
fiction.