CHAPTER III.

_WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD NOVEL?_

From the beginning of literature the most interesting thing which a writer can write has been the life history of a MAN. We are like boats borne on the swift current of the rushing river of Time. Whether our boat sink or swim, or turn to the right or to the left, is the matter of intensest interest--indeed, our interest is usually so intense in this subject that we can think of nothing else with any zest. And as we study our own problem of navigation on the waters of life, we watch all our neighbours to see how they succeed or fail, and why. Their problem is our problem and ours is theirs. Hence it is that stories of human life have formed the substance of the world’s greatest literature since the days of Homer.

Before outlining the history of the literary form which the universal human story has taken, let us explain the meaning of “the dramatic.” Drama deals with the crises in individual lives. While our boats on the current of Time sail smoothly and straight on their way, there is no drama, nothing that can be called dramatic, and so no material for an interesting story; but the moment that any obstacle or force of any kind, exterior or interior, causes the steady onward course of the life to cease or turn aside, however little, that moment we have the dramatic. So for the elements of a drama we must have a _collision_ of life forces, one of which forces is the onward movement of some individual human life. The other force may be circumstances, or “Fate,” as we call it; or it may be another human life. When but two forces meet, we have the simplest form of the drama, such as we may see in any short story or a one-act play. In a novel or a drama in acts we shall find a collision of several and various forces, usually different human lives meeting and influencing each other.

While the human story has been the same, and the principles of dramatic construction have been but little changed in several thousand years, the artistic form has changed with changing conditions, and the history of its development is intensely interesting.

The first form in which the story of life was told was the epic poem, as for example Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The Iliad was the tale of the “wrath of Achilles, Peleus’s son.” That force, coming straight athwart the current of the warlike lives of all the Greek and Trojan heroes, could not but be dramatic, for there was not one of them whose onward movement was not changed in some way, and of course the changes were interesting in proportion to the importance of the lives of the subjects--the greater the subject the greater the drama (if adequately executed) in the world’s literary history.

The next form which the human story took was that of the stage drama. Mechanical necessity required that the collision and life changes should be represented in the speeches of the characters, as in the epic poem they had been narrated in the song of the minstrel. We have our finest examples of the stage drama in Shakespeare, and we find that the poetic language uttered by the various characters on the stage is not very different from the language uttered by the single minstrel when he was the only performer. Moreover, we find a new element which the minstrel could not very easily represent, and that is humour. In the humorous portions the poetic drama begins to be prose.

The discovery of the printing press, which makes books that every man may read in his closet, has given birth to the third form of the great human story--the novel.

While there can be no doubt that the novel is the form above all others in which the world to-day chooses to receive the human story, the epic poem no longer being written and the poetic drama but rarely, still we should make a mistake if we suppose that the novel is the direct child and heir of the poetic stage drama even to the same extent that the drama was the direct child and heir of epic poetry.

Both the epic poem and the poetic drama have a dignity and loftiness that much more adequately represent the nobler and loftier characteristics of the human personality than the often trivial and even base and ignoble fictitious tale in the novel. The truth is, the modern novel is directly descended from the tavern tale, the amusing and entertaining narrative of the chance traveller coming unpretentiously and unexpectedly into the quiet country village. Such tavern tales we find in their purest form in the Arabian Nights and in Boccaccio’s Decameron. The stories of Sindbad the Sailor and the lovers of Boccaccio had unquestionably been told again and again by the wayfarer eager for the applause of his little audience, and had again and again been listened to by common folk whose only glimpse of the life of the outer world came through these same tavern yarns. Boccaccio collected his stories from the taverns of Italy, and wrote them out in the choicest Italian for the entertainment of his king and queen (A. D. 1348). The stories of the Arabian Nights were collected in Egypt at about the same time by some person or persons unknown, and reached the European world through the French version of Galland at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the Arabian Nights we may find the origin of the modern romance, and in the Decameron the beginning of the modern love-story or novel.

The bond of union between the tavern tale and the story of modern fiction is not difficult to detect. The tavern tale is the confidential narrative of the unpretentious traveller to his handful of uncritical common people whose instincts are primitive and whose primary desire is for amusement: the story of modern fiction is the confidential narrative of the author to a single ordinary or average reader, who sits down in the privacy of his closet to be amused and instructed--chiefly amused. The style required in both cases is personal, familiar, and conversational. Formality is thrown aside, and unrestrained by any critical audience or the presence of a judge of mature mind and high appreciation, both tale-teller and story-writer speak freely of the privacy of life, and of its most sacred secrets as well as its most hidden vices. Such a medium is very far from the lofty dignity of poetry; yet it is perhaps the only truly democratic form of literary art.

As we have seen, the modern novel was at first nothing more than an almost verbatim report of the tavern tale-teller’s narrative. Then, in Richardson and Fielding, we find the same kind of gossip invented by the author and set forth with a trifle more fancy and imagination, as it is done in letters. The powers of the prose essay invented by Addison and his fellows were soon added to the style of the novel, an early illustration of which we may find in Goldsmith’s _Vicar of Wakefield_. Scott gave the novel the dignity and romantic interest of history--history made human and therefore turned into true literature. Dickens added the sentimental, poetic style of the ballad, and Thackeray the teaching of the familiar homily.[1] In the stories of Hawthorne we see what the ancient fable and allegory contributed to the modern fictitious phantasy.

In Balzac for the first time we discover any attempt to make fiction the vehicle for the broad national drama which Homer gave us in his epic poems. In Poe we find the beginnings of an application of dramatic principles to the construction of the short story, and in this very small field Maupassant brought the art of dramatic construction well nigh to perfection. We may imagine that a novel ought to be as complete and perfectly constructed a drama as one of Shakspere’s plays; but the fact that we find no such novels suggests that fiction as an art is yet incomplete and not fully matured.

The origin of fiction was very low; but it was an origin very near to the common people, and so to the simple and natural instincts of all of us. With this broad foundation the possibilities of development are enormous, and we may reasonably hope that some day the novel will take a place in literary art that is much above that of the epic poem or even the poetic drama. It is not hampered by the mechanical limitations of either of these, and the variety and literary opportunity which characterize it are the possession of fiction alone.

And now let us ask, What are the characteristics of a good novel? And, How may we judge a novel?

We may think of the novel in two ways--as the tavern tale and as poetry--as prose, with its characteristic humour and conversational style, and the imaginative and lofty dream of the human soul, otherwise expressible only in verse.

As a tavern tale we may test a novel by fancying that the author is sitting down in person with us in our dressing-gown before the fire. He talks to us and tells us a tale. If he were there in person, what characteristics should he have to make him attractive to us? Why, of course, he should be polite and engaging. Too great familiarity even in the privacy of home spoils friendship, and so does vulgarity. And yet with a certain reserve of manner he may enter upon almost any topic of human thought, and even discuss with us our own secret sins. The good conversationalist will make us think and talk ourselves, and so will a good novel-writer. Of course we cannot talk to the author; but we can find in our friends a good substitute for him.

Another quality we shall demand is sincerity. While we may like to listen for a time to the brilliant conversation of a witty talker whom we cannot trust, the sincere friend will hold our affections long after the brilliant talker is forgotten. The brilliant and insincere friend and the brilliant and insincere novelist or writer are alike left deserted in their old age, with not a friend in the world. (What better example of this could we have than Oscar Wilde? When the insincerity of his character was found out, how quickly the world dropped him!)

The novelist above all other writers stands to the reader in the attitude of a personal friend. At first we turn to such a friend merely because he is agreeable as a companion; but the time comes when we wish to consult him as to the solution of our personal difficulties, and ask him to share in our personal joys. In somewhat the same way a novel writer may become the friend and adviser of his reader. In the stories he tells he deals frankly and sincerely with just such problems of life and emotion as those which confront the reader; and through his characters he declares what he thinks the best thing to do. If you would test the greatness of any novelist, ask the question, Would you be willing to follow the advice which he gives his characters?

We have spoken of the author as the friend of the reader. This figure of speech has been chosen for the purpose of making apparent the intimate relations between the substance of the story and the personality of the reader. As a matter of fact, however, it is only the personality of the _reader_ which is in any way alive and consciously perceived: the writer is so entirely impersonal (or should be) that he becomes completely merged in his characters. His spirit is felt in every line of description and every touch of character; but, as we might say, his own form should never be seen. With no suggestion of sacrilege we might even say that he is to the creations in the novel what God is to nature: the eye sees nature in all its beauty, but only the heart can perceive by a hidden vision of its own the presence of the divine. Such is the ideal part which an artist should play in his story.

But, though the artist as a personality is or should be entirely unseen, he is only the more truly present; and the greater his soul and the nobler his life and the broader his imagination and the more poetic his fancy, the more truly does his book become a treasure to the reader.

All dramatic writers, whether epic poets, poetic dramatists, or novelists, are known by the characters they create. It is not important that those characters should ever have really existed in the world: what is demanded is that they be natural and possible and true to the principles of life. The creative writer will of course create characters never seen before. He will never be a mere copyist; or if he is he becomes a biographer, and ceases to be a dramatic artist. Of course, also, these characters must have their collisions with other characters or with the forces of fate. That is necessary to give dramatic interest, the interest of plot. And characters are known by what they do; so unless they really meet adequate dramatic situations they cannot be said to exist at all, even though the author has described them minutely and told us that they have an endless variety of noble and beautiful qualities: for us only those qualities exist which we see in action. So in brief we may say that a great novelist (or other dramatic writer) is known by the great deeds of his great characters.

From this point of view Shakspere is our greatest author. His Lear, Othello, Desdemona, Portia, Macbeth, Hamlet, Caesar, Brutus, Cleopatra, and the rest form a noble company of great men and women. Instinctively we compare these fictitious characters with the characters of history. Many of them are taken from history; but by art and imagination they are created anew in shapes that live before our eyes as the characters of history (often quite different personages) really lived before the eyes of their contemporaries, but could not live before our eyes.

No novelist gives us such a company of _great_ men and women--very few give us even one great man. In some ways we may compare with Shakspere’s characters those of Balzac. The great French novelist set out to represent typical characters of all classes of the society he knew. He has as varied a company as Shakspere, and it is typical of society as Shakspere’s is not; but none of Balzac’s characters can for a moment be considered as great as Shakspere’s. Even the Country Doctor, perhaps Balzac’s noblest creation, has no such depth of interest as Hamlet, for example, though we might possibly compare him with Prospero; and what a creature is the Duchesse de Langeais beside Portia!

But a novelist who gives us no characters which we can take an interest in even if we do not love them or admire them is not much of a novelist. The name of Thackeray suggests Becky Sharpe and Henry Esmond and Colonel Newcome. The fine substance of Thackeray’s men and women, both good and bad, their refinement and delicacy and intelligence and sensibility, mark them as personalities far above the ordinary in fiction; and so they give Thackeray a rank that the variety of his characters and the range of his sympathies would not otherwise entitle him to. Dickens is to us but a name for the little dream world in which we make the acquaintance of David Copperfield and Micawber and Peggotty and Agnes and Dora, of the father of the Marshalsea and Little Dorrit and their friends of the prison, of Little Nell and her friends, of Oliver Twist and his thievish but interesting companions. Dickens’s characters are not examples for admiration; but they are intensely interesting because so intensely human, coming so near to us ourselves as they often do even when we are least ready to admit it. And unquestionably their number is great. The number and variety of an author’s characters are always to be taken into account in estimating his greatness, or even his value to us individually.

Scott’s characters are very different from any of these. They seem made especially to wear picturesque historic costumes, and in their almost limitless multitude they form a pageantry which is splendid and entrancing in the extreme. The thing of value is that the pageantry is alive; and if Scott’s characters were created to wear costumes, they were created living all of them; and (as the reader of _Sartor Resartus_ well knows) the wearing of costumes is, in its figurative sense, one of the most important duties of life, with many people becoming nearly a religion. In Scott we may find out to what extent this universal passion is legitimate and what great-souled love there may be in the heart beating beneath the costume.

Such are some of the principles by which we should test and judge all works of dramatic art, whether plays on the stage or novels. We need not, however, in all cases wholly condemn a book professing to be a novel which falls short by this criterion: it may be good as an essay or a history or a treatise, and its author may have mistaken its character in calling it a novel.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: We should not overlook the important part the pulpit has had in the development of English literature.]