512
RICHARD POIRIER
to the novel or to any kind of prose. Indeed it is significant that most
adverse criticism of, say, Melville or James displays a marked failure
to give requisite attention to the demanding styles by which these
writers create an imaginary environment that excludes the standards
of that "real" one to which most critics subscribe.
I am making a distinction between works that create through lan–
guage an essentially imaginative environment for the hero and works
that mirror an environment already accredited by history and society.
This
distinction is usually explained, more often than not explained
away, by saying that the first kind of environment belongs to the
romance and that the second belongs to the novel. Hawthorne pro–
vides, in his Preface to
The House of the Seven Gables,
the
locus
classicus:
When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed
that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and
material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume
had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of com–
position is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely
to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's
experience. The former-while, as a work of art, it must rigidly
subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it
may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart-has fairly a
right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent,
of the writer's own choosing or creation.
If
he thinks fit, also, he
may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow
the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture. He
will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges
here stated, and, especially, to mingle the Marvellous rather as a
slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than as any portion of the
actual substance of the dish offered to the public. He can hardly
be said, however, to commit a literary crime even if he disregard
this caution.
Sorted out for us here are the two kinds of fictional environment
I have been trying to describe: one might be called the provided
environment, the other an invented environment. But it
is
regrettable
that Hawthorne chose to elevate distinctions about environment,
which is after all only one aspect of fiction, into distinctions between
genres. Use of the terms "romance" and "novel" have in fact pre-
