For the relatedness and interrelatedness of all things flows and changes and trembles like a stream, and like a fish in the stream the characters in the novel swim and drift and float and turn belly-up when they’re dead.
So, if a character in a novel wants two wives—or three—or thirty: well, that is true of that man, at that time, in that circumstance. It may be true of other men, elsewhere and elsewhen. But to infer that all men at all times want two, three, or thirty wives; or that the novelist himself is advocating furious polygamy; is just imbecility.
It has been just as imbecile to infer that, because Dante worshipped a remote Beatrice, every man, all men, should go worshipping remote Beatrices.
And that wouldn’t have been so bad, if Dante had put the thing in its true light. Why do we slur over the actual fact that Dante had a cosy bifurcated wife in his bed, and a family of lusty little Dantinos? Petrarch, with his Laura in the distance, had twelve little legitimate Petrarchs of his own, between his knees. Yet all we hear is Laura! Laura! Beatrice! Beatrice! Distance! Distance!
What bunk! Why didn’t Dante and Petrarch chant in chorus:
Oh be my spiritual concubine
Beatrice! }
Laura! }
My old girl’s got several babies that are mine,
But thou be my spiritual concubine,
Beatrice! }
Laura! }
Then there would have been an honest relation between all the bunch. Nobody grudges the gents their spiritual concubines. But keeping a wife and family—twelve children—up one’s sleeve, has always been recognised as a dirty trick.
Which reveals how immoral the absolute is! Invariably keeping some vital fact dark! Dishonorable!
Here we come upon the third essential quality of the novel. Unlike the essay, the poem, the drama, the book of philosophy, or the scientific treatise: all of which may beg the question, when they don’t downright filch it; the novel inherently is and must be:
1. Quick.