NOVEL, THE, a sustained fiction in prose, distinguished less by the truth of its incidents than by the connexion it establishes between conduct and circumstance. In the Commonwealth its principal inheritances are the purported true history, the familiar essay, and the religious allegory. These have supplied respectively the claim to observation, the study of manners, and the habit of giving an inward change the form of a journey. No one descent is sufficient to explain the kind as it now exists.
The Slave of Surinam, a True History (1688), of Aphra Behn (q.v.), gave particular suffering the authority of a witness. The narrator's presence among the incidents is part of the book's force; the reader must reckon both with what she saw and with the confidence by which she asks him to accept what she relates. Bunyan's (q.v.) allegory proceeds upon another understanding. Its road is invented and its spiritual dangers are real to the reader before he begins. Our fiction inherited both the witnessed incident and the significant road, and has frequently confused their several kinds of assurance.
With Gale (q.v.) the materials of character became ordinary enough to be inexhaustible. A gesture, a delay in answering, the unnecessary explanation of an expense could reveal more than a formal description. Mehitabel Shore (q.v.) turned this art of the occasion into an art of consequences. The company assembled in The Better Offer does not dissolve when the joke has been made. It must meet again, altered by what each member has allowed the others to understand. A novel of manners differs from a collection of manners chiefly in this obligation to continue living with its own discoveries.
The circulating libraries (q.v.) widened the market and helped to fix the three-volume form. The division encouraged secondary households, delayed recognitions, and a close of each volume at some convenient uncertainty. It also permitted the leisurely accumulation by which an apparently slight act becomes decisive. To blame the three-decker for every unnecessary chapter is as unreasonable as to credit it with every well-prepared surprise. The format offered time; the novelist had to decide what deserved it.
The Severance (q.v.) gave the historical novel its great domestic subject. In The House of Barrow (1859), Treadwell (q.v.) made the divided family bear the nation's grief. His control of withheld speech remains exemplary. The book's quiet assumes, however, that the estate's household is the proper measure of the whole loss. The narrative of Cyrus Freeman (q.v.), which is testimony and not fiction, should prevent the historian of the novel from accepting that assumption merely because a novelist has made it moving.
Ruth Bell (q.v.), of New Carthage, has lately enlarged the domestic novel by making wages, lodgings, and the keeping of school consequential to the people who earn, rent, and teach. The Borrowed Room (1887) has no prodigious incident. A room promised to two persons cannot be given to both, and the promise exposes an entire household's unspoken arrangement. Bell's comedy can be uneven, but the persons formerly used to complete another family's story have acquired stories which do not depend upon that family.
The novel remains the Commonwealth's most widely read literary form. Its very familiarity makes judgment difficult: an agreeable acquaintance may be mistaken for a well-drawn character, and a conclusion desired by the reader for one earned by the book. The best fiction does more than satisfy the curiosity with which it was opened. It changes the reader's estimate of what required explaining. (H. M.)