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 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 intensity the 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 coordination; 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 which always 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 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 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 Cleves.” 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 treatment from 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 of real 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 Bias,” and the memorable figures of Chicot and Gorenflot in the Dumas cycle headed by “La Dame de Monsoreau,” it would be hard, in any tale 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 own tempo on 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 elucidation of 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- worthwhile 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 worthwhile, 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 at once 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.