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 since most 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 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 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 “Cesar Birotteau” or “Le Cure 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 as her 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 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, 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.