  CHARACTER AND PURPOSE The secret of character-drawing of course lies largely in the ability to understand and to appreciate character, but in its application to practical work it largely resolves itself into the power of realizing the personages of the tale. A striking example of how a vitalizing imagination can and may make the actors in a fiction real in spite of all drawbacks is furnished by George Meredith. George Meredith’s style is a teasing madness; his characters talk as no human beings ever dreamed of talking; and yet these personages are so actual, so individual, so human, that it is impossible not to feel that if one of them were pricked, real, red, warm human blood would flow. They existed so vividly for the author that they exist vividly for the reader and convince in spite of all the author’s mannerisms. The relation of an author to his puppets has been well put by Trollope when he says:— The novelist has other aims than the elucidation of his plot. He desires to make his readers so intimately acquainted with his characters that the creatures of his brain should be to them speaking, moving, living, human creatures. This he can never do unless he know those fictitious personages himself, and he can Deliberate description of persons is seldom of much effect. Says Stevenson:— Readers cannot fail to have remarked that what an author tells us of the beauty or the charm of his creatures goes for naught; that we know instantly better; that the heroine cannot open her mouth but what, all in a moment, the fine phrases of preparation fall from her like the robes from Cinderella, and she stands before us, self-betrayed, as a poor, ugly, sickly wench, or perhaps a strapping market-woman.—A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s. The same principle holds with mental traits. It is of little use to announce, and especially to announce early in a tale, what the character of an actor is. If the author declare that the fictitious person is this or that, he gives the reader a measure by which to criticise his performance. He puts into the hands of his public a rod wherewith to scourge him for whatever falls short of intention,—and if tried for falling short of intention, who shall escape? If the reader is left to judge of character by deeds, he becomes himself responsible for any opinions which he may choose to hold. The rule which every student should adopt for himself is that character is to be indicated first by the acts of the personages in a tale, and secondly by their talk. Of course I do not mean that there may not be a good deal of direct comment on character. I do mean, however, that while it will probably entertain the author to write this and may help him in understanding the people about whom he writes, the effect upon the reader will in most cases be exceedingly small. If you are in the habit of analyzing your mental experiences, I am confident that you will bear me out in saying that we are seldom much affected by any declaration on the part of the writer that a character is good, bad, or indifferent. If we have drawn the same conclusion from the story, that is from the events and the conversations, we may agree with the author; if we have not, we do not in the least accept his estimate. This may seem a covert attack upon the whole school of analytical fiction, but it is meant merely to be a warning to practical workers. There is nothing in all literary art more enticing to a novelist than the vivisection of character, and especially in this introspective age is it difficult to write objectively and without what might be called mental rummaging. It is impossible not to feel that all this minute analysis of character, however interesting as psychological tract or treatise, distinctly injures the effect of a work as a whole. It changes the characters from living beings to subjects on the dissecting-table, and destroys the vitality of the tale. It is in our time the prevailing fashion, but it is of our time no less the literary disease. In Often a single significant detail will throw more light on a character than pages of comment. An example in perfection is the phrase in which Thackeray tells how Becky Crawley, amid all her guilt and terror, when her husband had Lord Steyne by the throat, felt a sudden thrill of admiration for Rawdon’s splendid strength. It is like a flash of lightning which shows the deeps of the selfish, sensual woman’s nature. It is no wonder that Thackeray threw down his pen, as he confessed that he did, and cried, “That is a stroke of genius!” Of drawing characters from life much the same may be said as in regard to taking incidents from life. Real characters are excellent points of departure, and in the study of mental traits it is possible to hold much more closely to nature than in the reproduction of incidents. It is easy to pass the line of probability in incident, but one may go far before he cross the line of probability in character. It follows that there is in character much more material which may be taken directly from life into fiction, without especial modification. The chief difficulty here is—or at least so it seems to me—that it is less easy to make an actual person real in the mind as part of a fiction than it is to realize a person practically imaginary. If the writer in his thought and imagination get as perfect a Character-drawing belongs rather to novels than to short stories. The short story practically deals with character as it shows itself in a crisis or in a brief and rapid series of events. There is here no great opportunity for showing the development of character, but only for exhibiting how character is manifested under crucial and significant circumstances. The method must be varied according to the conditions, and almost perforce the writer of the short tale is forced to deal chiefly in suggestion, both of outward and inner conditions and traits, rather than in extended exposition. In any case, however, the same fundamental principle holds, that the clearness of the impression produced upon the reader depends upon the command of technical methods which enables a writer to impart what he feels and upon the sharpness with which he realizes the character he depicts. When there is talk of moral purpose in fiction most persons are either a little indignant or a good deal inclined to get out of the way. If they think how much useless talk has been wasted over the phrase they are impatient; if they recall how dull much of this talk has been, they are bored by the very idea. Indeed, one is sometimes tempted to What is generally meant by the question whether a story shall have a moral purpose is whether it shall convey an avowed lesson, whether, in short, it shall be undisguisedly or at least deliberately didactic. To this there seems to me but one answer possible, whether from a literary or an ethical point of view,—and that is an unqualified negative. From the point of view of political and social economics it might appear that this statement is too sweeping, but closer examination, I believe, shows it to be sound. Take, for instance, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a book which has been at least as widely read as any ever produced in this country. Whatever may have been the opinion in the quarter of the century in which the book saw the light, it would probably be impossible to find to-day a critic of reputation who would place it above mediocrity considered simply as literature. As a means of aiding a great social reform it is one of the most noteworthy intellectual productions of the time. Its reputation was of course due largely to the accidental association with a great political movement, but its influence makes it a historical document of the highest possible interest. From When the critics took Mrs. Humphry Ward to task for so heavily freighting “Robert Elsmere” with metaphysical discussion and disquisition, that lady published a defense of her methods. She declared that she could not “try to reflect the time without taking account of forces which are at least as real and living as other forces, and have as much to do with the drama of human existence.” She misses the real point. She assumes that the objection is to the choice of subject which she has made in writing her book. The trouble is not simply that she has concerned herself with theological scruples. It is that she has made her moral obvious as a moral; and, what is of perhaps even more importance, that she has not the art to make her theme show through it the fundamentally human emotions with which, and with which only, art is properly concerned. It is not the province of art to deal with the question of limited interests except as they depend upon and illustrate human life in its wide meaning. Art cannot stop at so confined an inquiry as whether a man shall be a Mohammedan, a Catholic, or a Protestant or an Agnostic. The novelist who would succeed permanently must go deeper than that. The essential principle of conviction which is common to all humanity This brings me to what I should say is the first principle involved in this matter. Literature as an art should deal with those ethical questions only which are of universal human interest. We have noticed already that whatever a reader is led to do for himself is more real and more vital than anything which can be done for him. This principle, carried farther and higher, underlies the fact that mankind will give little heed to any “record of intellectual conceptions” of life, while they will be moved and led by a “reflection of life”—in other words by those tales which are the embodiment of human emotions and human passions. To be told what some man thinks that life should mean The very essence of all art is that the motive of a work shall be inherent in it and not an outside purpose; but even aside from this, the moral purpose which shows itself as such defeats its own object. The lesson which is elaborated for us belongs in the sermon, and sermons are apt to be of effect so transient that it is necessary to have a fresh one at least once a week. The teaching of a genuine work of art is permanent. It is hardly conceivable that the race should outlive the teaching of Dante or Shakespeare. The hypothesis upon which the “moral purpose,” so called, is introduced into fiction is that men shall be moved to accept its teaching. The objection which it seems fair to urge against this is that the ethical lesson conveyed indirectly is so much more effectual; and that it is not wise to waste the opportunity and to dull men’s minds to the legitimate effects of fiction. What the sincere novelist does is practically to say to his reader: “Here is a portion of life as it seems to me it is or might be. I tell you the whole of its reality or its possibility as far as I can perceive it. What it means, what is the lesson to be drawn from it, you must discover for yourself. In the first place the emotions which I have felt in writing the tale cannot be directly expressed. I have endeavored to suggest them, and that is all that can be done by means of language. In the second place, the moral of life will be vital only to him who draws it for himself.” Of course it is impossible to determine how far one novelist or another would definitely say to himself anything of this sort; but I believe that this is the position consciously or unconsciously taken by every serious writer of fiction. No conviction, no opinion, no faith is vital which is not the original growth of the mind which holds it. We may induce it. We may advance ideas, we may even formulate views, and suppose that we have converted another to our own position, be it intellectual, moral, Æsthetic, or religious. We may have secured a sort of conformity; the other may even himself suppose that he thinks as we do; but until he feels that we think as he does there is little hope that genuine opinions have taken root in his mind. It is only when the life within him has consciously put into tangible form its own belief that he is in any permanent way, in any real sense, convinced. Conviction which is forced upon one by deliberately didactic books is like a costume, assumed willingly or unwillingly as the |
|
