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But any one intimately acquainted with Latin literature as a whole, and not merely with the more savoury passages commonly selected, will necessarily incline to the belief that novelistic historians have too often been taking what was exceptional, eccentric, and strongly disapproved by contemporaries, for the usual and the normal.
Certain novels, like "Jane Eyre," which exhibit an emphatic struggle between individual human wills, are inherently capable of theatric representment. =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.
It is a matter of expression merely, and must be decided in each case by the temperamental attitude of the author toward his subject-matter. Certain materials of fiction are inherently epic, or dramatic, or novelistic, as the case may be.
From this we see that the novelistic attitude toward character is much more intimate than the epic attitude. The wrath of Achilles is significant to Homer, not so much because it is an exhibition of individual personality as because it is a factor in jeopardizing the victory of the Greeks. Considered as types of individual character, most of Homer's heroes are mere boys.
Fiction hasn't yet outgrown the influence of the stage on which it originated. Whatever a man writes FOR EFFECT is wrong and bad. 'Only in your view. There may surely exist such a thing as the ART of fiction. 'It is worked out. We must have a rest from it. You, now the best things you have done are altogether in conflict with novelistic conventionalities.
Also, an author, according to his mental attitude toward life and toward the subject-matter of his fictions, may cast his stories either in the epic, the dramatic, or the novelistic mood. In order to understand this distinction, we must examine the nature of the epic and the drama, and then study the novel in comparison with these two elder types of fiction.
In Loti's works, however, pessimism is softened to a musical melancholy; the style is direct; the vocabulary exquisite; the moral situations familiar; the characters not complex. In short, his place is unique, apart from the normal lines of novelistic development. The vein of Loti is not absolutely new, but is certainly novel.
The French, who are more precise than we in their use of denotative terms, are accustomed to divide their novelistic fiction into what they call the roman, the nouvelle, and the conte.
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.
On the other hand, novelistic authors, since they have been interested mainly in the revelation of intimate phases of individual personality, have seized upon the element of love as the leading motive of their stories. And this is one of the main differences, on the side of content, between epic and novelistic fiction.
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