Furthermore, the novelist need not, like the dramatist, subserve the immediate necessity for popular appeal. The dramatic author, since he plans his story for a heterogeneous multitude of people, must incorporate in the same single work of art elements that will interest all classes of mankind. But the novelistic author, since he is at liberty to pick his auditors at will, may, if he choose, write only for the best-developed minds. It is an element of Shakespeare’s greatness that his most momentous plays, like “Hamlet” and “Othello,” are of interest to people who can neither read nor write, as well as to people of educated sensibilities. But it is an evidence of Meredith’s greatness that his novels are caviare to the general. Mr. Kipling’s “They” is the greater story because it defends itself from being understood by those it is not really for. In exhibiting the subtler and more delicate phases of human experience, the novel far transcends the drama. The drama, at its deepest, is more poignant; but the novel, at its highest, is more exquisite.
Dramatized Novels.––The proper material for the drama is, as we have seen, a struggle between individual human wills, motivated by emotion rather than by intellect, 170 and expressed in terms of objective action. In representing such material, the drama is supreme. But the novel is wider in range; for besides exhibiting (though less emphatically) this special aspect of human life, it may embody many other and scarcely less important phases of individual experience. Of late, an effort has been made to break down the barrier between the novel and the drama: many stories, which have been told first in the novelistic mood, have afterward been reconstructed and retold for presentation in the theatre. This attempt has succeeded sometimes, but has more often failed. Yet it ought to be very easy to distinguish a novel that may be dramatized from a novel that may not. Certain scenes in novelistic literature, like the duel in “The Master of Ballantrae,” are essentially dramatic both in content and in mood. Such scenes may be adapted with very little labor to the uses of the theatre. Certain novels, like “Jane Eyre,” which exhibit an emphatic struggle between individual human wills, are inherently capable of theatric representment. But any novel in which the main source of interest is not the clash of character on character, in which the element of action is subordinate, or in which the chief appeal is made to the individual (instead of the collective) mind, is not capable of being dramatized successfully.
III. The Novelistic Mood.––It is impossible to determine whether, at the present day, the novel or the drama is the more effective medium for embodying the truths of human life in a series of imagined facts. Dramatic fiction has the greater depth, and novelistic fiction has the greater breadth. The latter is more extensive, the former more intensive, in its artistry. This much, however, may be decided definitely. The novel, at its greatest, may require a vaster sweep of wisdom on the part of the author; but the drama is technically more difficult, 171 since the dramatist, besides mastering all of the general methods of fiction which he necessarily employs in common with the novelist, must labor in conformity with a special set of conditions to which the novelist is not submitted. George Meredith may be a greater author than Sir Arthur Wing Pinero; but Pinero is of necessity more rigid in his mastery of structure.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Define the three moods of fiction,––epic, dramatic, and novelistic.
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the epic mood?
3. Explain the three influences under which the dramatist must always do his work,––that of the actor, that of the theatre, and that of the audience.
4. What sort of novel can be dramatized successfully?
SUGGESTED READING
Study, comparatively, the character of Æneas in Virgil’s epic, the character of Macbeth in Shakespeare’s drama, and the character of Sentimental Tommy in Sir James Barrie’s novels.