THE STUDY OF A NOVEL

CHAPTER I

EXTERNAL STRUCTURE

1. Meaning of External Structure. Like all other artists, the novelist communicates with us solely through a sensuous medium - an external material. For the novelist this medium is language, considered as already prepared for him by nature and society, and significant in the study of an individual work only as an individual novelist has given it a particular structure. This medium itself, differing in no very important respects for all the forms of literature, is considered in the chapter on General Esthetic Interest.

The form given to language in a novel, as observed by eye and ear, whether referring to small details or to the whole composition, may be called, for the sake of clearness, the "external structure." Primarily, and especially from the æsthetic point of view, the appeal of this structure is to the ear. The complete evaluation of the structural interest of a novel can be given only when it is read aloud. Practically, in most cases, the values of the structure as an arrangement of sounds, reach us through the medium of the eye, and this visible structure comes to have a certain, though relatively slight, æsthetic value in itself. A sonnet is more readily appreciated when it is printed compactly on a single page.

2. Significance of External Structure. The larger units of external structure in a novel have comparatively little æsthetic significance in themselves, as compared with those of the spatial arts. There is no very obvious artistic difference between a novel divided into "parts" and one divided into chapters only; but these divisions are important when we interpret them in their relation to the "internal structure." The smaller structural forms, those which the ear distinctly grasps as units - the phrase, sentence, paragraph-may have a definite æsthetic value in themselves. Elaborate attention to the sound-values of every detail of structure is more characteristic of verse than of prose, and some critics would probably consider it antagonistic to the nature of the novel as a prose form. On the whole, the tendency to develop these values persistently is more characteristic of the short story than of longer fictions, and more characteristic of the romance than of the novel.

3. Characteristics of Novelistic Structure.

All the

structural forms of the novel are found in other kinds of literature. The novel differs from its literary fellows only by a characteristic combination of structural units, and in some cases, by a special adaptation of them. No form of prose literature, in English at least, has a perfectly definite structure determining the type of the whole composition. In comparison with the sonnet, rondeau, ballade, etc., the novel, the essay, the oration, are all "amorphous." The history of the novel shows no very important development in this respect, though somewhat more careful attention to the treatment of structural units is naturally found in the more modern novelists.

The novel, in a generic sense including the romance,

as written to-day, is fairly determinate in the following respects:

I. It is written almost entirely in prose.

2. It contains from fifty thousand to five hundred thousand words.

3. It is divided into paragraphs, and the paragraphs grouped into one, or usually more than one, kind of higher division.

4. It has a distinct, separate title or titles, sufficient to distinguish it from all other individual works. (Compare some lyrics, called simply "Lines," "A Song," etc.; histories identified by the author's name, etc.)

5. It is composed of a significant combination, in alternation, of dramatic form (quoted speech) and of non-dramatic (unquoted speech). If the entire novel is supposed to be quoted speech, as in the epistolary and other documentary types, there is a secondary dramatic form within this. Specially characteristic of the novel, as distinct from the drama, is the "described dialogue," as contrasted with the "set" or pure dramatic dialogue.

4. The Whole Composition. - The mere determination of the composition is not quite so simple a matter as it might seem. Ordinarily a single novel is taken as a unit for careful study.

This frequently includes more than the "story" proper-the continuous illusion of the plot. It may be introduced by a "dramatic" preface, with an illusion of its own, as in Scott's Old Mortality, Bride of Lammermoor, etc. In the latter work, Chapter I is supposed to be written by Peter Pattieson, is quite separate from the story proper, and contains an interesting and fairly complete little story in itself. A novel