CHARACTER AND SITUATION IN THE NOVEL.

I.

Since definitions, however difficult and inadequate, are necessary, one may, to begin with, 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 should be added here that 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

2.

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 is a compacter and above all a
more inevitable affair, which, at least on English soil, did not
develop till "plot", in the old-fashioned sense of a coil of out-
ward 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 arbi-
trarily imposed do they appear to be 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 real 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 ju-jitsus them into representative attitudes
with a relentlessness against which only genius can prevail. In
every form of novel it is noticeable that the central characters

3.

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 his other characters, whom he views coolly
and objectively, in all their human weakness and inconsequence. But
there remains another reason, less often recognized, for the un-
reality of novel "heroes" and "heroines", a reason especially appli-
cable 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 minor 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 both writer and readers.

This fact, exemplified in all novels, becomes most vivid
in the novel of situation, where the characters tend to turn into
Laocoons, and die in the merciless coils of their adventure. This
is the extreme point of difference between the novel of situation
and of character, and the cause of the common habit of regarding
them as alternative methods of fiction.

4.

II.

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 this 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 master-piece?

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 device 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 Russian society? "Vanity Fair", again, is preeminently a novel of manners, a novel of character, with dramatic intensity the situation between Becky, Rawdon and Lord Steyne stands out from these rich populous pages, and gathers up into itself all their diffused significance!

5.

The answer is evident: above a certain height of creative
capacity the different "manners", the seemingly conflicting points
of view, are merged in the artist's comprehensive vision, and what-
ever situations are inherent in his survey detach themselves in
strong relief from the fullest background without disturbing the
general lines of the 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
endowed with the creative vision lacks an equal capacity for co-
ordinating and rendering, 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 escapes classification most of the novelists below the great-
ert have tended to let their work fall into one of the two catego-
ries of situation or character, and have thus fortified the super-
ficial critics in their belief that life in fiction must be presented
either as conflict or as character.

The so-called novel of character does not, of course, even
in less than the greatest hands, preclude situation in the sense
of a dramatic clash. But the composition usually proceeds by a
succession of episodes, all in some way illustrative of the manners
or the characters out of which the given situation is eventually to
spring; it lingers on the way, is not afraid of by-paths, and en-
riches its narrative with subordinate pictures, as the mediaeval
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

6.

particular human conscience, or the clash between conflicting wills,
is the novelist's chief if not his only theme, and every ornamental
episode not directly illuminative of it must be excluded as ir-
relevant. This does not mean that in the latter type of tale — as,
for instance, "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" — the episode, the touch
of colour or character, is ruled out. The modern novelist of situa-
tion does not seem likely to return to the monochrome starkness of
"Adolphe" or "La Princesse de Clèves". On the contrary, he uses
every scrap of colour, every picturesque by-product of his subject
which that subject yields; but he will purposely refrain from adding
to it a single touch, however decoratively tempting, which is of
extraneous origin.

If one thus contrasts the two methods, it is evident that
a superiority in richness, variety and play of light and shade,
belongs to the novel of character and manners. One is not therefore
justified in concluding that this type of novel is necessarily
capable of a greater total effect than the other; but the fact remains
that so far the greatest novels have dealt with character and manners
rather than with mere situation. The inference is indeed almost
unreasonable, but it is permissible that the more the novel is removed in treatment from
theatrical modes of expression, the more nearly it attains its pur-
pose as a larger freer art, destined to satisfy those subtler imagi-
native requirements to which the stage can never minister.

When the novelist has been possessed by a situation, and
sees his characters hurrying to the climax of their conflict, it
requires great 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 sure situa-
tion, it is doubtful if this has ever been done with more unfaltering

7.

art than in "The Wrong Box", where Stevenson, setting free a roaring
 torrent of farce, launched on its flying waters a group of real
 people, alive and individual, who keep their reality and individual-
 ity till the end. The tears of laughter provoked by this delightful
 book generally blind the reader to its subtle character-drawing;
 but, save for the people in Gil Blas, and the memorable figures of
 Chicot and Garenflot in the Dumas cycle headed by "La Dame de Mont-
soreau", it would be hard to find, in any tale of action, characters
 as vivid and individual as those which rollick through Stevenson's
 glorious farce.

The tendency of the situation to possess itself of the
novelist's imagination, and to impose its own tempo on his tale, can
be resisted only by the richness and solidity of his temperament.
He must have a range of perception wide enough to see, within the
march of unalterable law, all the inconsequent welter of human
desires, ambitions, cruelties, weaknesses and sublimities. He must,
above all, at each step in the novel of situation, remind himself
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 is the tuning-fork
of truth, and should, above all, be unfailingly applied 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 that saying anything which the stress of
their predicament would not naturally bring to their lips, he will
find that his effect has been produced at expense of their reality,
and that they are turning to sawdust on his hands.

8.

Some novelists, conscious of this danger, and not sufficiently skilled to meet it, have tried to turn it by interlarding these crucial dialogues with pages of irrelevant small-talk, in the hope of producing a greater semblance 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 purpose of the dialogue is to gather up the loose strands of passion and emotion on which the novelist has put his reader's hand; and any attempt to retard the movement of the tale by desultory chatter about the weather or the village pump proves only that the narrator has not know how to do the necessary work of selection. All the novelist's most practised 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 whole secret of success lies in the artist's 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, for reasons to be hereafter shown; but certainly also worth-while, as long as it remains the natural vehicle of certain creative minds. While there are novelists whose inventive faculty presents them first with the form, and only afterward with the substance, of the tales they are moved to tell, the novel of situation will continue to fill a purpose. But it is precisely to this type of mind that a warning against the dangers of the form should be addressed. Where the problem comes to the novelist before the characters engaged in it, he must be all the more slow in seizing on it, must let it lie in his mind till it creates of itself the kind of people who would naturally be involved in that kind of

IO.

engaged not only individuals but social groups, and the individual
plight was usually the product — one of the many products — of
the social conflict. There is indeed a sense in which situation is
the core of every tale, and as truly present in the quiet pages
of Eugénie Grandet or Le Lys dans la Vallée as in the epic clash of
"War and Peace" or the dense social turmoil of "Vanity Fair".

But the great, the unquestioned advantage of the novelist
to whom his subject first presents itself in terms of character,
either individual or social, is that he can quietly watch his people
or his group going about their daily business, and let the circums-
tances of his tale grow out of what they are, out of their idio-
syncracies, their humours and their prejudices, instead of fitting
a situation onto them before he really knows them, either personally
or collectively.

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 short-comings — to the level of those great novels which escape classification. For if one remembers Tess's tragedy, still more vividly does one remember Tess herself.

In continental literature several famous novels at once present themselves in the situation group. The first, 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 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 profane 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 slave 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, Le Curé de Tours" — such relentless and subtle character studies that their protagonists and the difficulties which beset them leap together

I2.

thinking of his human beings first, and of their predicament only
as the outcome of what they are.

IV.

The predicament — the situation — must still be borne
in mind if the novelist approaches his task in another way, and
sees his tale as situation illustrating character instead of the
reverse.

Even the novel of character and manners can never be with-
out situation, that is, without some sort of climax caused by the
contending forces engaged. The conflict, the shock of forces, is
latent in every attempt to detach a fragment of human experience
and transpose it in terms of art, that is, of completion.

The seeming alternative is to fall back on the slice-of-
life method, but that, as has already been suggested, contains its
own condemnation, since every attempt to employ it of necessity
involves selection, and selection in the long run must eventually
lead to the transposition, the "stylization", of the subject.

Let it be assumed, then, that a predicament there must be,
whether worked out in one soul, or created by the shock of opposing
purposes. The larger the canvas of the novel — supposing the
novelist's powers to be in scale with his theme — the larger will
be the scale of the predicament. In the great novel of manners in
which Balzac, Thackeray and Tolstoy were preeminent, the conflict
engages not only individuals but social groups, and the individual
plight is usually the product — one of the many products — of
the social conflict. There is a sense in which situation is the
core of every tale, and as truly present in the quiet pages of

I3.

"Eugénie Grandet" or "Le Lys dans la Vallée" as in the tense tragedy of "The Return of the Native", the epic clash of "War and Peace" or the dense social turmoil of "Vanity Fair".

But the main advantage of the novelist to whom his subject first presents itself in terms of character, either individual or social, is that he can quietly watch his people or his group going about their business, and let the circumstances of his tale grow out of what they are, out of their idiosyncracies, their humours and their prejudices, instead of fitting a situation onto them before he really knows them, either personally or collectively.

It is manifest that every method of fiction has its dangers, and that the study of character pursued to excess may tend to submerge the action necessary to illustrate that character. In the inevitable reaction against the arbitrary "plot" many novelists have gone too far in the other direction, either swamping themselves in the tedious "stream of consciousness", or else — another frequent error — growing to exaggerated importance to trivial incidents because they are describing trivial lives. There is a sense in which nothing which receives the touch of art is trivial; but then the incident, insignificant in itself, must illustrate some general law, or turn on some deep movement of the soul. If the novelist wants to hang his drama on a button, let it at least be one of Lear's.

All things hold together in the practise of any art, and in the novel character and manners, and the climaxes springing out of them, cannot be dealt with separately without loss to the subject. It is a matter for the novelist's genius to adjust them in their due proportion; and then we shall have "Emma" or "The Egoist" if character is to be given the first place, "Le Père Goriot" or

I4.

"Madame Bovary" if drama is to be blent with it, and "War and Peace", "Vanity Fair", "L'Education Sentimentale", if all the points of view and all the methods are to be harmonized in the achievement of a great picture wherein the individual, the group and their social background have each a perfectly apportioned share in the composition.

"Four great walls in the New Jerusalem Meled in each side by the ampels reed -" But to cover such a space adequately happens only once or twice in the career of even the greatest artists.

THE END.

I.

Definitions, however difficult and inadequate, are necessary; and one may, to begin with, distinguish the novel of situation from that of character and manners by saying that, in the former, the persons imagined by the author, almost always spring out of a first vision of the situation, and whatever his genius, are inevitably conditioned by it; 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 destruction shall serve in the following pages to mark the difference between the two ways in which the author may face and present his subject — since most subjects are susceptible of being treated in either way.

Any thoughtful critic who wants to be rid of the cheap formulas of fiction-reviewing, and to arrive at 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) may for convenience be so.

# CHARACTER AND SITUATION IN THE NOVEL.

## I.

Since definitions, however difficult and inadequate, are necessary, one may, to begin with, distinguish the novel of situation from that of character and manners by saying that, in the *first* person, the persons imagined by the author almost always spring out of a *flat* 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 in which the *novelist* may face and present his subject — since most subjects lend themselves to being treated from any of these respective points of view.

## I.

Definitions, however difficult and inadequate, are necessary. To begin, therefore, we may first 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 should be added that 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

I.

Definitions, however difficult and inadequate, are necessary, and one may, to begin with, distinguish the novel of situation from that of character and manners by saying that, in the former, the persons imagined by the author spring out of a first vision of the situation, and whatever his genius, are inevitably conditioned by it; 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 in which the novelist may face and present his subject — since most subjects lend themselves to being treated in any of these respective ways.

Any thoughtful critic who wants to be rid of the cheap formulas of fiction-reviewing, and to arrive at 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).

2.

included 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 master-piece?

In what category, for instance, should Anna Karenina be placed? In that of novels of character and manners, undoubtedly. Yet, if one sums up the tale in its rapidity and its vehemence, what "situation" did Dumas Fils ever devise for his theatre half so poignant or so dramatic as that which Tolstoy manages to keep conspicuously afloat on the wide tossing surface of his picture of Russian society?

Take again "Vanity Fair"; a novel of manners, a novel of character, if ever there was one; yet with what dramatic intensity the "situation" between Becky, Rawdon and Lord Steyne stands out from those 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 "manners", the seemingly conflicting points of view, are merged in the artist's comprehensive vision, and the "situations" inherent in his survey detach themselves in strong relief from the fullest background without disturbing the general lines of his composition.

But this is true, but true only of the greatest novelists, those who, as Matthew Arnold said of Shakespeare, do not abide one question but are free. In them, vast vision is united to equivalent powers of co-ordination; but more often the novelist endowed with

3.

the creative vision lacks an equal gift of co-ordinating and
rendering, or at least is unable, in the same creation, to give an
equal part to the development of character and the clash of
situation. Owing to this lack of the supreme equipment, which
always escapes classification, most of the novels below the great-
est have tended to fall into one of the two categories, and have
thus fortified the superficial critics in their belief that life in
fiction must be presented either as conflict or as character.

The so-called

## II.

The so-called novel of character does not, of course, even
in less than the greatest hands, preclude "situation", in the sense
of a dramatic clash. But it proceeds by a succession of episodes,
all in some way illustrative of the manners or the characters
out of which the given situation is eventually to spring; it lingers
on the way, is not afraid of by-paths, and enriches its narrative
with subordinate pictures, as the mediaeval miniaturist encloses his
of
chief subjects in a border beautiful ornament and delicate vignette.
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
sole subject, and every ornamental episode not directly illuminative
of this situation is therefore excluded as irrelevant. This does
not mean that, in such novels — as, for instance, in "Tess of the
in the latter type of tale —

4.

d'Urbervilles" — the episode, the touch of colour or character, is ruled out. The modern novelist of situation does not seem likely to return to the colourless starkness of Adolphe or La Princesse de Clèves. On the contrary, he uses every scrap of colour, every picturesque by-product of his subject, which that subject yields; but he will purposely refrain from adding to it a single touch, however decoratively tempting, which is of extraneous origin.

If one thus contrasts the two methods, it is evident that a superiority in richness, variety and play of light and shade, is the attribute of the novel of character and manners. One is not therefore justified in concluding that this type of novel is necessarily capable of a greater total effect than the other. But the fact remains that so far in the practice of the art, the greatest novels have been novels of character and manners rather than of mere situation. The inference is indeed almost permissible that, the farther the novel is removed from a mode of expression adapted to the theatre, the more it fulfils its purpose as a larger freer art, destined to fulfill those subtler imaginative requirements which the stage can never satisfy.

2.

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 preoccupation
and pleasures. They are "speaking" portraits, following one with
their eyes in that uncannily lifelike way that great 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 little
~~character~~ figures 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 the little people into great actions,
and made her choose for the display of her will 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 master-
piece of a very different hand: "The Egoist" of Meredith.
~~It is thought here that one ~~by means so alien to Miss Austen's delicate procedure that one~~

3.

 Balts at the comparison, the fantastic novelist whose antics too often make one forget his insight, was once discarded most of his fatiguing follies, and gave a rich deliberate study of a real human being. But he did 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, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, Marcel Proust, and perhaps the 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 it almost always was in the novels of Tolstoy and of Balzac. Turgenev, in "Dmitri Roudine", gave one of the somewhat rare examples of a novel existing almost entirely in 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 different types of novel in which either character and situation weights down the scales.

4.

the field of pure character-drawing, and one must turn to the greatest continental novelists — to Balzac again (as always), to Stendhal, 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, and of Balzac; Turgenev, in "Dmitri Roudin," gave the somewhat rare example of a novel existing almost entirely in 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 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 different types of novel in which either character and situation tends to weigh down the scales.

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.

2.

The real novel of situation, to a compacter and above all
a more inevitable affair, which, at least on English soil, did not
develop till "plot", in the old-fashioned sense of a coil of out-
ward 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 arbi-
trarily 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 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 ju-jitsus them into the required attitude
with a relentlessness against which only genius can prevail. In

3.

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 circums-
tances, 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.

The thoughtful critic who wants to be rid of the cheap formulas of fiction-reviewing, and to arrive at 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 master-piece?

In what category, for instance, should Anna Karenina be placed? In that of novels of character and manners, undoubtedly. 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 surface of his picture of Russian society? "Vanity Fair", again, is preeminently a novel of manners, a novel of character; yet with what dramatic intensity the situation between Becky, Rawdon and Lord Steyne projects from those rich populous pages, and sums up in itself all their diffused significance!

The answer is evident: above a certain height of creative capacity the different "manners", the seemingly conflicting points of view, are merged in the artist's comprehensive vision, and whatever the situations are inherent in his survey detach themselves in strong relief from the fullest background without disturbing the general lines of the composition.

endowed with the creative vision lacks an equal capacity for co-
ordinating and rendering, 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 escapes classification most of the novels
below the greatest have tended to fall into one of the two catego-
ries of situation or character, and have thus fortified the super-
ficial critics in their belief that life in fiction must be present-
ed either as conflict or as character.

The so-called novel of character does not, of course, even
in less than the greatest hands, preclude "situation" in the sense
of a dramatic clash. But the composition usually proceeds by a
succession of episodes, all in some way illustrative of the manners
of the characters out of which the given situation is eventually to
spring; it lingers on the way, is not afraid of by-paths, and en-
riches its narrative with subordinate pictures, as the mediaeval
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 every ornamental

episode not directly illuminative of it must be excluded as irrelevant. This does not mean that in the latter type of tale — as, for instance, "Tess of the d'Ubervilles" — the episode, the touch of colour or character, is ruled out. The modern novelist of situation does not seem likely to return to the colourless starkness of Adolphe or La Princesse de Clèves. On the contrary, he uses every scrap of colour, and every picturesque by-product of his subject which that subject yields; but he will purposely refrain from adding to it a single touch, however decoratively tempting, which is of extraneous origin.

If one thus contrasts the two methods, it is evident that a superiority in richness, variety and play of light and shade, belongs to the novel of character and manners. One is not therefore justified in concluding that this type of novel is necessarily capable of a greater total effect than the other; but the fact remains that so far the greatest novels have dealt with character and manners rather than with mere situation. The inference is indeed almost permissible that the more the novel is removed in treatment from theatrical modes of expression, the more nearly it attains its purpose as a larger freer art, destined to satisfy those subtler imaginative requirements to which the stage can never minister.

12.

III.

The seeming alternative is to fall back on the slice-of-life
method, but that in its own condemnation, since every attempt to
employ it fatally involves selection, and selection in the long run
must eventually lead to the transposition, the " stylization", of
the subject.

13.

engages not only individuals but social groups, and the individual
plight is usually the product — one of the many products — of
the social conflict. There is a sense in which situation is the
core of every tale, and as truly present in the quiet pages of
"Eugénie Grandet" or "Le Lys dans la Vallée" as in the tense tragedy
of "The Return of the Native", epic clash of "War and Peace" or the
dense social turmoil of "Vanity Fair".

But the great, the unquestioned advantage of the novelist
to whom his subject first presents itself in terms of character,
either individual or social, is that he can quietly watch his people
or his group going about their business, and let the circumstances
of his tale grow out of what they are, out of their idiosyncracies,
their humours and their prejudices, instead of fitting a situation
onto them before he really knows them, either personally or
collectively.

I4.

the first place, "Le Père Goriot" or "Madame Bovary" if drama is to
be blent with it, and "War and Peace", "Vanity Fair", "L'Éducation
Sentimentale", if all the points of view and all the methods are to
be harmonized in the achievement of a great picture wherein the
individual, the group and their social background have each a perfect-
ly apportioned share in the composition.

Meted on each side by the angel's reed —"

Yes; but to cover such spaces adequately happens only once or twice
in the career, or even the greatest artists.

THE END.