Novelette

“ The novelette might be called an essay in reincarnation, for it chronicles in the first person the thoughts and emotions of a man, a member of the Russian nobility, from the moment of his death until, on the day of his funeral, his individuality enters life again in the new-born infant of his wife’s maid. ”

“ The introduction safely engineered, I took another novelette from the pile, and holding it firmly in the left hand, I grasped the scissors with the thumb and forefinger of the right, cut three or four extracts at random, of rather more than half a column in length, and pasted these in the album, leaving about space enough for a couple of pages of three-volume novel, between each section.
Thus I dealt with my twelve novelettes, and then went through them again, and even again. Then the hard work began. ”

“ Letty wrote on, her evenings stabbed through and through by this secret excitement,—till, reading over the completed story, it struck her, with happy surprise, as not a whit less [329] convincing or enthralling than all those other tales which had fed her imagination since flapper days: the “White Heather” Novelette Series; the “Silver Chimes” Complete Novel, published every Tuesday; the Myrtle Library; the Pink-and-Blue Boudoir Supplement; fiction in coloured paper covers, stacked, crumpled and torn, behind her bed-valance. ”

“ The Short-Story a Distinct Type.––But the conte, or short-story, differs from the novel and the novelette not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively, not only in length, but also in kind. In such contes as “The Necklace” of de Maupassant and “The Last Class” of Daudet, in such short-stories as “Ligeia,” “The Ambitious Guest,” “Markheim,” and “Without Benefit of Clergy,” the aim of the author is quite distinct from that of the writer of novels and of novelettes. In material and in method, as well as in extent, these stories represent a type that is noticeably different. ”

“ It is true that the old romances abound with hints and germs only needing development, but development was slow in coming, and even when about the beginning of the eighteenth century romance and novelette had grown into the novel, it was still long before the novel became a vehicle of ideas and a potent factor in civilisation. ”

“ He threw it under the table instead and took up a penny novelette with a coloured frontispiece depicting a very dark gentleman about to stab a very fair lady without giving her time to put up her hair. ”

“ They averted their attention from reality and gave themselves up to reverie. They went about the world distraught in a day-dream, a day-dream that they were not really themselves, but beings far nobler and more romantic, or that presently things would change about them into a dramatic scene centring about themselves. These novelette magazines and popular novels that supplied the chief part of the income of Crane & Newberry, were really helps to reverie—mental drugs. Sunray, have you ever read any twentieth-century novelettes? ”

“ But if eyeglasses are tabooed by novelists, what shall we say of spectacles? What gallery would accept a Juliet with spectacles? For a woman in literature to wear spectacles is to put her out of the pale of romance at once. Even in real life spectacles are a problem, but to the heroine of a novel they are impossible. No novelist with any regard for his publisher or his sales would venture to give his heroine gold spectacles. ”

“ It is here that the novella, so much more perfect in form, shows its irremediable inferiority to the novel, and somehow to the play, to the very farce, which it may quantitatively excel. We can all recall by name many characters out of comedies and farces; but how many characters out of short stories can we recall? Most persons of the drama give themselves away by name for types, mere figments of allegory, and perhaps oblivion is the penalty that the novella pays for the fineness of its characterizations ”

“ I seldom look into novels; it is really very well for a novel.’ Such is the common cant. ‘And what are you reading, Miss ——?’ ‘Oh, it’s only a novel!’ replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference or momentary shame. ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda,’ or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. ”

“ After very judiciously observing, that there is the same relation between romances and novels as between tragedy and comedy, he proceeds thus: ‘Since all traditions must indisputably give glace to the drama, and since there is no possibility of giving that life to the writing, or repetition of a story, which it has in the action; I resolved in another beauty to imitate dramatic writing, namely, in the design, contexture, and result in the plot. I have not observed it before in a novel. ”

“ Is this a strong statement, a libel upon the female sex? But you read novel after novel in which the larger number of women—all, perhaps, except the heroine—are represented as artful, sly, deceitful, managing; and generally the main object of their artifice is to secure a husband for themselves or for their daughters: yet you do not at once cry out in indignant protest against such misrepresentation. On the contrary, you follow the plot with lively interest, think the author has a very clear insight into human nature, and especially excels in the delineation of female character! ”

“ How strange—how nice—for all the world like a story-book—really in love—a romance in three volumes carrying on in the cottage, and she, Madge, a character in it—a sharer in the plot—an important person in the novel—the sister of the heroine—it was almost as good as being the heroine herself. ”

“ In longer prose the story with a plot is the romance, the modern romance. In it, too, the author is concerned mainly with the course of events. Take "Ivanhoe" or "The Prisoner of Zenda," for instance, and what have you?—actors about whom there is no question of character growth. What they were at the beginning, that they are at the end—except, perhaps, Rebecca. In romance the happenings are largely adventure. As they become preposterous the narrative borders on the mere wonder type. ”

“ We shall then be able to make the usual reply, which we find in all manuals of literature, and which should always be given in an examination paper, the æsthetic reply, to the effect that a novel is a work of art, with its own laws, which are not those of daily life, and that a character in a novel is real when it [Pg 96] lives in accordance with such laws. Amelia or Emma, we shall then say, cannot be at this lecture because they exist only in the books called after them, only in worlds of Fielding or Jane Austen. The barrier of art divides them from us. ”

“ Although the exact definition of a domestic novel nowhere appears, the term may be understood—by expanding the French roman à la tasse de thé—as meaning a realistic piece of fiction in which the heroine serves as chief protagonist, and which can be read with a teacup in one hand without danger of spilling the tea. ”

“ In the poem ‘Two Women,’ the first half of which appeared in the January number of Appletons’ Journal, and the last half of which has just now come to us in the February number of that magazine, there is something, we think, which takes the piece out of the category of ordinary magazine-work, and entitles it to special attention. The poem is long enough, for one thing, to fill a little volume, if it were printed as it is the custom to print books of poetry, and while it is rugged, faulty, and in many respects defective, it is nevertheless strong, dramatic, and full of the flavor of the soil. ”

“ My only attempt at anything in the form of a novel, was “Amelia, or a Young Lady s Vicissitudes,” first printed in the Lady’s Book, and then in a small volume by itself. Could I begin anew my literary career, I would always write novels instead of short stories. ”

“ What a mercy for the novelist in this age of perpetual repetition, of twice told tales, if he might give his heroine a new attribute! One feels sure that if eyeglasses and their variations were permitted they would produce quite a new kind of heroine, to the immense advantage and relief of literature. Of course the novelist has to keep up with the times; it is as imperative for him as for the fashion-books, for it is from him alone that future generations will learn how we lived, dressed and looked, and what were our favourite sufferings. ”

“ As to romance, I might have known, if I had considered the subject, that wherever youth and maiden are, there is the certainty of romance and the chance of tragedy. I might have known that the important thing in a drama is, what the characters are, and what they do, not the scenes where they stand while they are acting. In the theatre, people are looking at the lover and the lady, not at the balustrade and the tower. ”

“ Lyly and Greenespecies of comedy. Of his eight plays, written at intervals from 1580 to 1593, all but one were in prose, and all except the Plautian Mother Bombie adhere loosely to a common formula. Classical myth or story, with pastoral elements, and occasionally an allegory of contemporary politics, furnish the basis of plots with similar love complications. Gods, goddesses, nymphs, fairies, and many others add to the spectacle and mingle in the love intrigue, and all rise to a graceful dialogue, which quickens to brisk repartee when the pages or servants appear. ”

“ As these poems echo the far-off ring of the ancient ballad, so we may venture to surmise that the short prose story of adventure, which appeals to modern taste by its vivid reality, its terseness of style, and its picturesque outline, represents the latest form reached by Romance in its long evolution. ”

“ We do here as we do with novels written in the epistolary form. How many improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with in Clarissa and other books, for the sake of the delight which that form upon the whole gives us! But the practice of stage-representation reduces everything to a controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must play the orator. The love dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night! ”

“ This convenient division of prose fiction into romances and novels is open to challenge. Some critics use the name "novel" for any work of prose fiction. They divide novels into two classes, stories (or short stories) and romances. The story relates simple or detached incidents; the romance deals with life in complex relations, dominated by strong emotions, especially by the emotion of love. ”

“ For the time has gone when novels were written for young ladies, and told the placid love of Edwin and Angeline; nowadays the novel, growing ambitious, lays hands upon science, commerce, philosophy: we write less of moated granges, more of tea-shops and advertising agencies, for the Press is teaching the people to look to the novel for a cosmic picture of the day, for a cosmic commentary. ”

“ But the vitality and elastic vigour of the whole carry us over every difficulty... and we pause at the close of the novel to reflect on the amazing freshness of the talent which could thus make a set of West country scenes, in that despised thing, a novel, blaze with light like a comedy of Shakespeare. ”

“ It had cultivated the sense of a well-knit plot, of effective situation, and of the interplay of character and action—all elements transferable to prose narrative. And when, in the middle of the eighteenth century, we find the novel beginning to take the place of the stage as the dominant kind of imaginative entertainment, it is easy to see how much the younger form owed to the elder. ”

“ So the heroic romances, we are told, 'availed themselves skilfully of the opportunity to foster a new taste in the reading public—a delight, namely, born of the fashionable leisure of a self-conscious society, in minute introspection, and the analysis and portraiture of emotional states.' We are inclined to suspect that these words, which would serve well enough to describe the taste for the analytic novel of our own day, must be taken with considerable reserve in their application to the writings and the readers of two centuries ago. ”

“ These are not interruptions and dissonances in the play, but motions and upliftings of the play itself; they are not the superposition of one life upon another, but the outpouring of that life, which is continued in the central motive. These witticisms, conceits and misunderstandings in Romeo and Juliet, [Pg 289] which have so often been blamed, are to be explained, at least in great measure, in a natural way, as the character of the play, as the comedy, which precedes and imparts its colour to the tragedy, and is brilliant with the fashionable and gallant speech of the day. ”

“ Symbolism, long familiar in the interpretation of ancient poetry and of holy writ, had made its way into creative art, and had produced the "Romance of the Rose," that wonder of the thirteenth century. Satire, which in this poem is combined with the allegorical theme of the quest of love, had found separate expression in the versified episodes called "fabliaux," and in the tales of Reynard the Fox. ”