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.

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 coil of 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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.