The thoughtful critic who would be rid of the cheap formulas of
fiction-reviewing, and reach some clearer and deeper expression of
the sense and limitations of the art, is sure to resent the glib
definition of the novel of situation and the novel of character (or
manners) as necessarily antithetical and mutually exclusive. The
thoughtful critic will be right; and the thoughtful novelist will
share his view. What sense is there in such arbitrary divisions, such
opposings of one manner to another, when almost all the greatest novels
are there, in their versatility and their abundance, to show the
glorious possibility of welding both types of fiction into a single
masterpiece?
In what category, for instance, should “Anna Karenina” be placed?
Undoubtedly in that of novels of character and manners. Yet if one sums
up the tale in its rapidity and its vehemence, what situation did Dumas
Fils ever devise for his theatre “of situation” half so poignant or so
dramatic as that which Tolstoy manages to keep conspicuously afloat on
the wide tossing expanse of the Russian social scene? In “Vanity Fair,”
again, so preeminently a novel of manners, a novel of character, with
what dramatic intensity the situation between Becky, Rawdon and Lord
Steyne stands out from the rich populous pages, and gathers up into
itself all their diffused significance!
The answer is evident: above a certain height of creative capacity the
different methods, the seemingly conflicting points of view, are merged
in the artist’s comprehensive vision, and the situations inherent
in his subject detach themselves in strong relief from the fullest
background without disturbing the general composition.
But though this is true, it is true only of the greatest
novelists--those who, as Matthew Arnold said of Shakespeare, do not
abide our question but are free. In them, vast vision is united to
equivalent powers of co-ordination; but more often the novelist who
has the creative vision lacks the capacity for co-ordinating and
rendering his subject, or at least is unable, in the same creation, to
give an equal part to the development of character and to the clash
of situation. Owing to the lack of that supreme equipment which
always rises above classification most of the novelists have tended
to let their work fall into one of the two categories of situation or
character, thus fortifying the theory of the superficial critics that
life in fiction must be presented either as conflict or as character.
The so-called novel of character, even in less than the most powerful
hands, does not, of course, preclude situation in the sense of
a dramatic clash. But the novelist develops his tale through a
succession of episodes, all in some way illustrative of the manners
or the characters out of which the situation is eventually to spring;
he lingers on the way, is not afraid of by-paths, and enriches his
scene with subordinate pictures, as the mediæval miniaturist encloses
his chief subjects in a border of beautiful ornament and delicate
vignettes; whereas the novel of situation is, by definition, one in
which the problem to be worked out in a particular human conscience,
or the clash between conflicting wills, is the novelist’s chief if not
his only theme, and everything not directly illuminative of it must be
left out as irrelevant. This does not mean that in the latter type of
tale--as, for instance, in “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”--the episode,
the touch of colour or character, is forbidden. The modern novelist of
situation does not seem likely to return to the monochrome starkness
of “Adolphe” or “La Princesse de Clèves.” He uses every scrap of
colour, every picturesque by-product of his subject which that subject
yields; but he avoids adding to it a single touch, however decoratively
tempting, which is not part of the design.
If the two methods are thus contrasted, the novel of character and
manners may seem superior in richness, variety and play of light and
shade. This does not prove that it is necessarily capable of a greater
total effect than the other; yet so far the greatest novels have
undoubtedly dealt with character and manners rather than with mere
situation. The inference is indeed almost irresistible that the farther
the novel is removed in treatment from theatrical modes of expression,
the more nearly it attains its purpose as a freer art, appealing to
those more subtle imaginative requirements which the stage can never
completely satisfy.
When the novelist has been possessed by a situation, and sees his
characters hurrying to its culmination, he must have unusual keenness
of vision and sureness of hand to fix their lineaments and detain them
on their way long enough for the reader to recognize them as real human
beings. In the novel of pure situation it is doubtful if this has
ever been done with more art than in “The Wrong Box,” where Stevenson
launched on his roaring torrent of farce a group of _real people_,
alive and individual, who keep their reality and individuality till the
end. The tears of laughter that the book provokes generally blind the
reader to its subtle character-drawing; but, save for the people in
“Gil Blas,” and the memorable figures of Chicot and Gorenflot in the
Dumas cycle headed by “La Dame de Monsoreau,” it would be hard, in any
tale of action, to find characters as vivid and individual as those
which rollick through this glorious farce.
The tendency of the situation to take hold of the novelist’s
imagination, and to impose its own _tempo_ on his tale, can be resisted
only by richness and solidity of temperament. The writer must have a
range wide enough to include, within the march of unalterable law,
all the inconsequences of human desire, ambition, cruelty, weakness
and sublimity. He must, above all, bear in mind at each step that his
business is not to ask what the situation would be likely to make of
his characters, but what his characters, being what they are, would
make of the situation. This question, which is the tuning-fork of
truth, never needs to be more insistently applied than in writing the
dialogue which usually marks the culminating scenes in fiction. The
moment the novelist finds that his characters are talking not as they
naturally would, but as the situation requires, are visibly lending him
a helping hand in the more rapid elucidation of his drama, the moment
he hears them saying anything which the stress of their predicament
would not naturally bring to their lips, his effect has been produced
at the expense of reality, and he will find them turning to sawdust on
his hands.
Some novelists, conscious of the danger, and not sufficiently skilled
to meet it, have tried to turn it by interlarding these crucial
dialogues with irrelevant small-talk, in the hope of thus producing a
greater air of reality. But this is to fall again into the trap of what
Balzac called “a reality in nature which is not one in art.” The object
of dialogue is to gather up the loose strands of passion and emotion
running through the tale; and the attempt to entangle these threads
in desultory chatter about the weather or the village pump proves
only that the narrator has not known how to do the necessary work of
selection. All the novelist’s art is brought into play by such tests.
His characters must talk as they would in reality, and yet everything
not relevant to his tale must be eliminated. The secret of success
lies in his instinct of selection.
These difficulties are not a reason for condemning the novel of
situation as an inferior or at least as a not-worth-while form of the
art. Inferior to the larger form, the novel of character and manners,
it probably is, if only in the matter of scale; but certainly also
worth while, since it is the natural vehicle of certain creative minds.
As long as there are novelists whose inventive faculty presents them
first with the form, and only afterward with the substance, of the
tales they want to tell, the novel of situation will fill a purpose.
But it is precisely this type of mind which needs to be warned against
the dangers of the form. When the problem comes to the novelist
before he sees the characters engaged in it, he must be all the more
deliberate in dealing with it, must let it lie in his mind till it
brings forth of itself the kind of people who would naturally be
involved in that particular plight. The novelist’s permanent problem is
that of making his people at once typical and individual, universal
and particular, and in adopting the form of the novel of situation he
perpetually runs the risk of upsetting that nice balance of attributes
unless he persists in thinking of his human beings first, and of their
predicament only as the outcome of what they are.