James, true to his method, might avoid the scene of passion. I trust no reader will suppose me guilty of undervaluing this little masterpiece. I mean merely that it belongs to one marked class of novel, and that it would have been very differently conceived and treated had it belonged to that other marked class, of which I now proceed to speak.

The

dramatic
novel

I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel by that name, because it enables me to point out by the way a strange and peculiarly English misconception. It is sometimes supposed that the drama consists of incident. It consists of passion, which gives the actor his opportunity; and that passion must progressively increase, or the actor, as the piece proceeded, would be unable to carry the audience from a lower to a higher pitch of interest and emotion. A good serious play must therefore be founded on one of the passionate cruces of life, where duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple; and the same is true of what I call, for that reason, the dramatic novel. I will instance a few worthy specimens, all of our own day and language; Meredith's Rhoda Fleming, that wonderful and painful book, long out of print,' and hunted for at bookstalls like an Aldine; Hardy's Pair of Blue Eyes; and two of Charles Reade's, Griffith Gaunt and The Double Marriage, originally called White Lies, and founded (by an accident quaintly favourable to my nomenclature) on a play by Maquet, the partner of the great Dumas. In this kind of novel the closed door of The Author of Beltraffio must be broken open; passion must appear upon the scene and utter its last word; passion is the be-all and the end-all, the plot and the solution, the protagonist and the deus ex machina in one. The characters may come anyhow upon the stage: we do not care; the point is, that, before they leave it, they shall become transfigured and raised out of themselves by passion. It may be part of the design to draw them with detail; to depict a fulllength character, and then behold it melt and change in the furnace of emotion. But there is no obligation of the sort; 'Now no longer so, thank Heaven!

nice portraiture is not required; and we are content to accept mere abstract types, so they be strongly and sincerely moved. A novel of this class may be even great, and yet contain no individual figure; it may be great, because it displays the workings of the perturbed heart and the impersonal utterance of passion; and with an artist of the second class it is, indeed, even more likely to be great, when the issue has thus been narrowed and the whole force of the writer's mind directed to passion alone. Cleverness again, which has its fair field in the novel of character, is debarred all entry upon this more solemn theatre. A far-fetched motive, an ingenious evasion of the issue, a witty instead of a passionate turn, offend us like an insincerity. All should be plain, all straightforward to the end. Hence it is that, in Rhoda Fleming, Mrs. Lovel raises such resentment in the reader; her motives are too flimsy, her ways are too equivocal, for the weight and strength of her surroundings. Hence the hot indignation of the reader when Balzac, after having begun the Duchesse de Langeais in terms of strong if somewhat swollen passion, cuts the knot by the derangement of the hero's clock. Such personages and incidents belong to the novel of character; they are out of place in the high society of the passions; when the passions are introduced in art at their full height, we look to see them, not baffled and impotently striving, as in life, but towering above circumstance and acting substitutes for fate.

Advice

to the

And here I can imagine Mr. James, with his lucid sense, to intervene. To much of what I have said he would apparently demur; in much he would, somewhat impatiently, acquiesce. It may be true; but it is not what he desired to say or to hear said. He spoke of the finished picture and its worth when done; I, of the brushes, the palette, and the north light. uttered his views in the tone and for the ear of good society; I, with the emphasis and technicalities of the obtrusive student. But the point, I may reply, is not merely to amuse the public, but to offer helpful advice to the young writer. And the young writer will not so much be

He

young
writer

helped by genial pictures of what an art may aspire to at its highest, as by a true idea of what it must be on the lowest terms. The best that we can say to him is this: Let him choose a motive, whether of character or passion; carefully construct his plot so that every incident is an illustration of the motive, and every property employed shall bear to it a near relation of congruity or contrast; avoid a sub-plot, unless, as sometimes in Shakespeare, the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of the main intrigue; suffer not his style to flag below the level of the argument; pitch the key of conversation, not with any thought of how men talk in parlors, but with a single eye to the degree of passion he may be called on to express; and allow neither himself in the narrative nor any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter one sentence that is not part and parcel of the business of the story or the discussion of the problem involved. Let him not regret if this shortens his book; it will be better so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to lengthen but to bury. Let him not mind if he miss a thousand qualities, so that he keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen. Let him not care particularly if he miss the tone of conversation, the pungent material detail of the day's manners, the reproduction of the atmosphere and the environment. These elements are not essential: a novel may be excellent, and yet have none of them; a passion or a character is so much the better depicted as it rises clearer from material circumstance. In this age of the particular, let him remember the ages of the abstract, the great books of the past, the brave men that lived before Shakespeare and before Balzac. And as the root of the whole matter, let him bear in mind that his novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by its exactitude; but a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant simplicity. For although, in great men, working upon great motives, what we observe and admire is often their complexity, yet underneath appearances the truth remains unchanged: that simplification was their method, and that simplicity is their excellence.

THE NOVEL

By GUY DE MAUPASSANT

I have no intention of pleading here in behalf of the little novel which follows. On the contrary, the ideas which I shall try to make clear would involve rather a criticism of the kind of psychological study which I undertook in Pierre et Jean. I wish to concern myself with the Novel in general.

What is

a novel?

"The greatest

I am not the only one to whom the same reproach is addressed by the same critics every time a new book appears. In the midst of eulogistic remarks I find regularly this, by the same pens: fault of this work is that it is not a novel, strictly speaking." One might reply with the same contention: "The greatest defect of the writer who does me the honor of judging me is that he is not a critic."

What are, in fact, the essential characteristics of a critic?

It is necessary that without partisanship, without preconceived opinions, without the ideas of any school, without connections with any particular group of artists, he should comprehend, distinguish, and explain all the most opposite tendencies and most contrary temperaments, and entertain artistic endeavors of the most diverse nature.

Now the critic who, after Manon Lescaut, Paul and Virginia, Don Quixote, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Werther, Elective Affinities, Clarissa Harlowe, Emile, Candide, Cinq-Mars, René, The Three Musketeers, Mauprat, Le Père Goriot, La

Maupassant (1850-1893) wrote this essay as a preface to his novel Pierre et Jean, in 1887. In translating, I have occasionally drawn isolated sentences into paragraphs. Of the six novels of Maupassant, Une Vie was the first (1883) and Fort comme le mort (1889) the last. His great reputation, however, rests upon his nearly two hundred short stories, which began to appear in 1880.

In this connection we may aptly quote from Short Story Writing by Walter B. Pitkin (Macmillan 1913), which finds the distinguishing mark of the short story to be its double ideal. "The short story ideal is a fusion of two artistic ideals, the one American, the other French. Poe best expressed the former, and Maupassant the latter. The American ideal is the 'Single Effect.' The French ideal is the Dramatic Effect. The Short Story is therefore a narrative drama with a single effect."

Cousine Bette, Colomba, Le Rouge et le Noir, Mademoiselle de Maupin, Notre Dame de Paris, Salammbo, Madame Bovary, Adolphe, M. de Camors, L'Assommoir, Sapho, etc., still dares to write: "This is a novel, and that is not," seems to me to be endowed with a perspicacity quite like incompetence.

In general, the critic means by "novel" an adventure more or less probable, arranged like a drama in three acts, of which the first contains the exposition, the second the action, and the third the dénouement. This manner of composing is entirely admissible if only one accepts likewise all the others.

Do there exist rules for writing a novel, without observance of which a written narrative should bear a different name?

If Don Quixote is a novel, is Le Rouge et le Noir another? If Monte Cristo is a novel, is L'Assommoir one also? Is it possible to establish a comparison between the Elective Affinities by Goethe, the Three Musketeers by Dumas, Madame Bovary by Flaubert, M. de Camors by Octave Feuillet, and Germinal by Zola? Which of these works is a novel? What are the famous rules? Whence do they come? Who established them? And by virtue of what principle, what authority, what reasoning?

the novelist

It appears, however, that the critics know in some peculiar The critic and and indubitable fashion what constitutes a novel and what distinguishes it from another work which is not one. This means simply that, without being producers, they are enrolled in a school, and reject, in the manner of novelists themselves, all works conceived and executed outside their aesthetic scheme. An intelligent critic ought, on the contrary, to seek for all that is most unlike the novels already written, and as much as possible impel young authors to attempt new paths.

All writers, Victor Hugo as well as Zola, have persistently claimed the absolute and indisputable right to compose, that is to imagine or to observe, according to their own personal conception of art. Talent arises from originality, which is a peculiar manner of thinking, of seeing, of understanding, and of judging. Now the critic who presumes to define the novel according to the idea he has formed in accordance with the