dashed by the mysterious parallel condemnation, that the story that you like ‘isn’t a novel.’ The novel has been treated as if its form were as well defined as the sonnet. A year or so ago, for example, there was a quite serious discussion, which began I believe in a weekly paper devoted to the interests of various nonconformist religious organizations, about the proper length for a novel. The critic was to begin his painful duties with a yard-measure. The matter was taken up with profound gravity by the Westminster Gazette, and a considerable number of literary men and women were circularized and asked to state, in the face of Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Shabby Genteel Story, and Bleak House, just exactly how long the novel ought to be. Our replies, according to the civility of our natures, were for the most part either uncivil or evasive; but the mere attempt to raise the question shows, I think, how widespread among the editorial, paragraph-writing, opinion-making sort of people is this notion of prescribing a definite length and a definite form for the novel. In the newspaper correspondence that followed, our friend the Weary Giant made a transitory appearance again. We were told the novel ought to be long enough for him to take up after dinner and finish before his whiskey at eleven.
That was obviously a half-forgotten echo of Edgar Allan Poe’s discussion of the short story. Edgar Allan Poe was very definite upon the point that the short story should be finished at a sitting. But the novel and the short story are two entirely different things, and the train of reasoning that made the American master limit the short story to about an hour of reading as a maximum, does not apply to the longer work. A short story is, or should be, a simple thing; it aims at producing one single, vivid effect; it has to seize the attention at the outset, and never relaxing, gather it together more and more until the climax is reached. The limits of the human capacity to attend closely therefore set a limit to it: it must explode and finish before interruption occurs or fatigue sets in. But the novel I hold to be a discursive thing; it is not a single interest, but a woven tapestry of interests; one is drawn, first by this affection and curiosity and then by that; it is something to return to, and I do not see that we can possibly set any limit to its extent.
The distinctive value of the novel among written works of art is in characterization, and the charm of a well-conceived character lies not in knowing its destiny but in watching its proceedings. For my own part I will confess that I find all the novels of Dickens, long as they are, too short for me. I am sorry they do not flow into one another more than they do. I wish that Micawber and Dick Swiveller and Sairey Gamp turned up again in other novels than their own, just as Shakespeare ran the glorious glow of Falstaff through a group of plays. But Dickens tried this once when he carried on the Pickwick Club into Master Humphrey’s Clock. That experiment was unsatisfactory, and he did not attempt anything of the sort again.
Following on the days of Dickens, the novel began to contract, to subordinate characterization to story and description to drama; considerations of a sordid nature, I am told, had to do with that something about a guinea-and-a-half and six shillings, with which we will not concern ourselves here and now; but I rejoice to see many signs to-day that that phase of narrowing and restriction is over, and that there is every encouragement for a return toward a laxer, more spacious form of novel-writing.
