The novel was the first form to be used by men with a clear knowledge of what it allowed them to do, and what it expected of them in return. Smollett's is its simplest definition. 'A novel,' he says, 'is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purpose of a uniform plan and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient.' It is, as near as may be, a piece of life, and one of its similarities to ordinary existence is perhaps the characteristic that best marks its difference from the _nouvelle_. The novel contains at least one counterplot, the _nouvelle_ none. Life has as many counterplots as it has actors, as many heroes and heroines as play any part in it at all. No man is a hero to his valet, because in that particular plot the valet happens to be a hero to himself. The novelist does not attempt so equable a characterisation, but by telling the adventures of more than one group of people, and by threading their tales in and out through each other, he contrives to give a conventional semblance of the intricate story-telling of life.[10] [The _nouvelle_.] The _nouvelle_ is a novel without a counterplot, and on a smaller scale.[11] The latter quality is dependent on the former, since it combats the difficulty of sustained attention, that the novel avoids by continual change from one to another of its parallel stories. The _nouvelle_ was with Boccaccio little more than a plot made actual by the more important sentences of dialogue, and by concise sketching of its principal scenes. It has now grown to be a most delicate and delightful form, without breathlessness and without compression, its aim of pure story being implicit in the manner of its telling. It is differentiated from the short story, the advantage of whose brevity it shares in a lesser degree, by the separate importance of its scenes, which are not bound to be subjected so absolutely to its conclusion. For example, the splendid cathedral scene in _La Morte Amoureuse_, where, at the moment of ordination, a young priest is stricken with passion for a courtesan, would be unjustifiable in a short story unless it ended in the climax of the tale. The priest would have to die on the steps of the altar, or the woman to kill herself at his feet as he passed, a vowed celebate, down the cathedral aisle. The short story must be a single melody ending with itself; the _nouvelle_ a piece of music, the motive of whose opening bars, recurring again and again throughout, is finally repeated with the increase in meaning that is given it by the whole performance. [The short story.]