IVCHARACTER AND SITUATION IN THE NOVEL
IVCHARACTER AND SITUATION IN THE NOVEL
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 sincemost 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 vagueinitialled 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 asher 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 twobooks 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.
Thenovel, 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 coilof 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 ofcharacterand 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 arehisin 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 thatthe 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.
Thethoughtful 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 toresent 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 intensitythe 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 whichalways 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 onlytheme, 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 treatmentfrom 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 ofreal 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 anytale 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 owntempoon 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 elucidationof 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 atonce 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.
Thepredicament—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 without 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 backon the “stream of consciousness”—which is simply the “slice-of-life” of the ’eighties renamed—but that method, as has already been pointed out, 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 “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 form of his tale grow out of what they are, out of their idiosyncrasies, 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—giving an exaggerated importance to trivialincidents when the tale is concerned with trivial lives. There is a sense in which nothing which receives the touch of art is trivial; but to rise to this height the incident, insignificant in itself, must illustrate some general law, and 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 practice of any art, and character and manners, and the climaxes springing out of them, cannot, in the art of fiction, be dealt with separately without diminution to the subject. It is a matter for the novelist’s genius to combine all these ingredients 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 “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 backgroundhave each a perfectly apportioned share in the composition.
“Four great walls in the New JerusalemMeted on each side by the angel’s reed—”
“Four great walls in the New JerusalemMeted on each side by the angel’s reed—”
“Four great walls in the New Jerusalem
Meted on each side by the angel’s reed—”
Yes; but to cover such spaces adequately happens even to the greatest artists only once or twice in their career.