with daily life, only to parallel it. When we say that a character in
Jane Austen, Miss Bates for instance, is "so like life" we mean that
each bit of her coincides with a bit of life, but that she as a whole
only parallels the chatty spinster we met at tea. Miss Bates is bound by
a hundred threads to Highbury. We cannot tear her away without bringing
her mother too, and Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, and the whole of
Box Hill; whereas we could tear Moll Flanders away, at least for the
purposes of experiment. A Jane Austen novel is more complicated than a
Defoe, because the characters are inter-dependent, and there is the
additional complication of a plot. The plot in _Emma_ is not prominent
and Miss Bates contributes little. Still it is there, she is connected
with the principals, and the result is a closely woven fabric from which
nothing can be removed. Miss Bates and Emma herself are like bushes in a
shrubbery--not isolated trees like Moll--and any one who has tried to
thin out a shrubbery knows how wretched the bushes look if they are
transplanted elsewhere, and how wretched is the look of the bushes that
remain. In most books the characters cannot spread themselves. They must
exercise a mutual restraint.
The novelist, we are beginning to see, has a very mixed lot of
ingredients to handle. There is the story, with its time-sequence of
"and then ... and then ..."; there are ninepins about whom he might
tell the story, and tell a rattling good one, but no, he prefers to tell
his story about human beings; he takes over the life by values as well
as the life in time. The characters arrive when evoked, but full of the
spirit of mutiny. For they have these numerous parallels with people
like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently
often engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book. They "run
away," they "get out of hand": they are creations inside a creation, and
often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they
kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they
revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay.
These trials beset the dramatist also, and he has yet another set of
ingredients to cope with--the actors and actresses--and they appear to
side sometimes with the characters they represent, sometimes with the
play as a whole, and more often to be the mortal enemies of both. The
weight they throw is incalculable, and how any work of art survives
their arrival I do not understand. Concerned with a lower form of art,
we need not worry--but, in passing, is it not extraordinary that plays
on the stage are often better than they are in the study, and that the
introduction of a bunch of rather ambitious and nervous men and women
should add anything to our understanding of Shakespeare and Tchekov?
No, the novelist has difficulties enough, and today we shall examine two
of his devices for solving them--instinctive devices, for his methods
when working are seldom the same as the methods we use when examining
his work. The first device is the use of different kinds of characters.
The second is connected with the point of view.
i. We may divide characters into flat and round.
Flat characters were called "humours" in the seventeenth century, and
are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures. In their purest
form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality: when there is
more than one factor in them, we get the beginning of the curve towards
the round. The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence
such as "I never will desert Mr. Micawber." There is Mrs. Micawber--she
says she won't desert Mr. Micawber, she doesn't, and there she is. Or:
"I must conceal, even by subterfuges, the poverty of my master's house."
There is Caleb Balderstone in _The Bride of Lammermoor_. He does not use
the actual phrase, but it completely describes him; he has no existence
outside it, no pleasures, none of the private lusts and aches that must
complicate the most consistent of servitors. Whatever he does, wherever
he goes, whatever lies he tells or plates he breaks, it is to conceal
the poverty of his master's house. It is not his idée fixe, because
there is nothing in him into which the idea can be fixed. He is the
idea, and such life as he possesses radiates from its edges and from the
scintillations it strikes when other elements in the novel impinge. Or
take Proust. There are numerous flat characters in Proust, such as the
Princess of Parma, or Legrandin. Each can be expressed in a single
sentence, the Princess's sentence being, "I must be particularly careful
to be kind." She does nothing except to be particularly careful, and
those of the other characters who are more complex than herself easily
see through the kindness, since it is only a by-product of the
carefulness.
One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily
recognized whenever they come in--recognized by the reader's emotional
eye, not by the visual eye, which merely notes the recurrence of a
proper name. In Russian novels, where they so seldom occur, they would
be a decided help. It is a convenience for an author when he can strike
with his full force at once, and flat characters are very useful to him,
since they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be
watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere--little
luminous disks of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like
counters across the void or between the stars; most satisfactory.
A second advantage is that they are easily remembered by the reader
afterwards. They remain in his mind as unalterable for the reason that
they were not changed by circumstances; they moved through
circumstances, which gives them in retrospect a comforting quality, and
preserves them when the book that produced them may decay. The Countess
in _Evan Harrington_ furnishes a good little example here. Let us
compare our memories of her with our memories of Becky Sharp. We do not
remember what the Countess did or what she passed through. What is clear
is her figure and the formula that surrounds it, namely, "Proud as we
are of dear papa, we must conceal his memory." All her rich humour
proceeds from this. She is a flat character. Becky is round. She, too,
is on the make, but she cannot be summed up in a single phrase, and we
remember her in connection with the great scenes through which she
passed and as modified by those scenes--that is to say, we do not
remember her so easily because she waxes and wanes and has facets like a
human being. All of us, even the sophisticated, yearn for permanence,
and to the unsophisticated permanence is the chief excuse for a work of
art. We all want books to endure, to be refuges, and their inhabitants
to be always the same, and flat characters tend to justify themselves on
this account.
All the same, critics who have their eyes fixed severely upon daily
life--as were our eyes last week--have very little patience with such
renderings of human nature. Queen Victoria, they argue, cannot be summed
up in a single sentence, so what excuse remains for Mrs. Micawber? One
of our foremost writers, Mr. Norman Douglas, is a critic of this type,
and the passage from him which I will quote puts the case against flat
characters in a forcible fashion. The passage occurs in an open letter
to D. H. Lawrence, with whom he is quarrelling: a doughty pair of
combatants, the hardness of whose hitting makes the rest of us feel like
a lot of ladies up in a pavilion. He complains that Lawrence, in a
biography, has falsified the picture by employing "the novelist's
touch," and he goes on to define what this is:
It consists, I should say, in a failure to realize the complexities of
the ordinary human mind; it selects for literary purposes two or three
facets of a man or woman, generally the most spectacular, and therefore
useful ingredients of their character and disregards all the others.
Whatever fails to fit in with these specially chosen traits is
eliminated--must be eliminated, for otherwise the description would not
hold water. Such and such are the data: everything incompatible with
those data has to go by the board. It follows that the novelist's touch
argues, often logically, from a wrong premise: it takes what it likes
and leaves the rest. The facts may be correct as far as they go but
there are too few of them: what the author says may be true and yet by
no means the truth. That is the novelist's touch. It falsifies life.
Well, the novelist's touch as thus defined is, of course, bad in
biography, for no human being is simple. But in a novel it has its
place: a novel that is at all complex often requires flat people as well
as round, and the outcome of their collisions parallels life more
accurately than Mr. Douglas implies. The case of Dickens is significant.
Dickens' people are nearly all flat (Pip and David Copperfield attempt
roundness, but so diffidently that they seem more like bubbles than
solids). Nearly every one can be summed up in a sentence, and yet there
is this wonderful feeling of human depth. Probably the immense vitality
of Dickens causes his characters to vibrate a little, so that they
borrow his life and appear to lead one of their own. It is a conjuring
trick; at any moment we may look at Mr. Pickwick edgeways and find him
no thicker than a gramophone record. But we never get the sideway view.
Mr. Pickwick is far too adroit and well trained. He always has the air
of weighing something, and when he is put into the cupboard of the young
ladies' school he seems as heavy as Falstaff in the buck-basket at
Windsor. Part of the genius of Dickens is that he does use types and
caricatures, people whom we recognize the instant they re-enter, and yet
achieves effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that
is not shallow. Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He
ought to be bad. He is actually one of our big writers, and his immense
success with types suggests that there may be more in flatness than the
severer critics admit.
Or take H. G. Wells. With the possible exceptions of Kipps and the
aunt in _Tono Bungay_, all Wells' characters are as flat as a photograph.
But the photographs are agitated with such vigour that we forget their
complexities lie on the surface and would disappear if it was scratched
or curled up. A Wells character cannot indeed be summed up in a single
phrase; he is tethered much more to observation, he does not create
types. Nevertheless his people seldom pulsate by their own strength. It
is the deft and powerful hands of their maker that shake them and trick
the reader into a sense of depth. Good but imperfect novelists, like
Wells and Dickens, are very clever at transmitting force. The part of
their novel that is alive galvanizes the part that is not, and causes
the characters to jump about and speak in a convincing way. They are
quite different from the perfect novelist who touches all his material
directly, who seems to pass the creative finger down every sentence and
into every word. Richardson, Defoe, Jane Austen, are perfect in this
particular way; their work may not be great but their hands are always
upon it; there is not the tiny interval between the touching of the
button and the sound of the bell which occurs in novels where the
characters are not under direct control.
For we must admit that flat people are not in themselves as big
achievements as round ones, and also that they are best when they are
comic. A serious or tragic flat character is apt to be a bore. Each time
he enters crying "Revenge!" or "My heart bleeds for humanity!" or
whatever his formula is, our hearts sink. One of the romances of a
popular contemporary writer is constructed round a Sussex farmer who
says, "I'll plough up that bit of gorse." There is the farmer, there is
the gorse; he says he'll plough it up, he does plough it up, but it is
not like saying "I'll never desert Mr. Micawber," because we are so
bored by his consistency that we do not care whether he succeeds with
the gorse or fails. If his formula was analysed and connected up with
the rest of the human outfit, we should not be bored any longer, the
formula would cease to be the man and become an obsession in the man;
that is to say he would have turned from a flat farmer into a round one.
It is only round people who are fit to perform tragically for any length
of time and can move us to any feelings except humour and
appropriateness.
So now let us desert these two-dimensional people, and by way of
transition to the round, let us go to _Mansfield Park_, and look at
Lady Bertram, sitting on her sofa with pug. Pug is flat, like most
animals in fiction. He is once represented as straying into a rose-bed
in a cardboard kind of way, but that is all, and during most of the
book his mistress seems to be cut out of the same simple material as
her dog. Lady Bertram's formula is, "I am kindly, but must not be
fatigued," and she functions out of it. But at the end there is a
catastrophe. Her two daughters come to grief--to the worst grief known
to Miss Austen's universe, far worse than the Napoleonic wars. Julia
elopes; Maria, who is unhappily married, runs off with a lover. What
is Lady Bertram's reaction? The sentence describing it is significant:
"Lady Bertram did not think deeply, but, guided by Sir Thomas, she
thought justly on all important points, and she saw therefore in all
its enormity, what had happened, and neither endeavoured herself, nor
required Fanny to advise her, to think little of guilt and infamy."
These are strong words, and they used to worry me because I thought
Jane Austen's moral sense was getting out of hand. She may, and of
course does, deprecate guilt and infamy herself, and she duly causes
all possible distress in the minds of Edmund and Fanny, but has she any
right to agitate calm, consistent Lady Bertram? Is not it like giving
pug three faces and setting him to guard the gates of Hell? Ought not
her ladyship to remain on the sofa saying, "This is a dreadful and
sadly exhausting business about Julia and Maria, but where is Fanny
gone? I have dropped another stitch"?
I used to think this, through misunderstanding Jane Austen's
method--exactly as Scott misunderstood it when he congratulated her for
painting on a square of ivory. She is a miniaturist, but never
two-dimensional. All her characters are round, or capable of rotundity.
Even Miss Bates has a mind, even Elizabeth Eliot a heart, and Lady
Bertram's moral fervour ceases to vex us when we realize this: the disk
has suddenly extended and become a little globe. When the novel is
closed, Lady Bertram goes back to the flat, it is true; the dominant
impression she leaves can be summed up in a formula. But that is not how
Jane Austen conceived her, and the freshness of her reappearances are
due to this. Why do the characters in Jane Austen give us a slightly new
pleasure each time they come in, as opposed to the merely repetitive
pleasure that is caused by a character in Dickens? Why do they combine
so well in a conversation, and draw one another out without seeming to
do so, and never perform? The answer to this question can be put in
several ways: that, unlike Dickens, she was a real artist, that she
never stooped to caricature, etc. But the best reply is that her
characters though smaller than his are more highly organized. They
function all round, and even if her plot made greater demands on them
than it does, they would still be adequate. Suppose that Louisa Musgrove
had broken her neck on the Cobb. The description of her death would have
been feeble and ladylike--physical violence is quite beyond Miss
Austen's powers--but the survivors would have reacted properly as soon
as the corpse was carried away, they would have brought into view new
sides of their character, and though _Persuasion_ would have been
spoiled as a book, we should know more than we do about Captain
Wentworth and Anne. All the Jane Austen characters are ready for an
extended life, for a life which the scheme of her books seldom requires
them to lead, and that is why they lead their actual lives so
satisfactorily. Let us return to Lady Bertram and the crucial sentence.
See how subtly it modulates from her formula into an area where the
formula does not work. "Lady Bertram did not think deeply." Exactly: as
per formula. "But guided by Sir Thomas she thought justly on all
important points." Sir Thomas' guidance, which is part of the formula,
remains, but it pushes her ladyship towards an independent and undesired
morality. "She saw therefore in all its enormity what had happened."
This is the moral fortissimo--very strong but carefully introduced. And
then follows a most artful decrescendo, by means of negatives. "She
neither endeavoured herself, nor required Fanny to advise her, to think
little of guilt or infamy." The formula is reappearing, because as a
rule she does try to minimize trouble, and does require Fanny to advise
her how to do this; indeed Fanny has done nothing else for the last ten
years. The words, though they are negatived, remind us of this, her
normal state is again in view, and she has in a single sentence been
inflated into a round character and collapsed back into a flat one. How
Jane Austen can write! In a few words she has extended Lady Bertram, and
by so doing she has increased the probability of the elopements of Maria
and Julia. I say probability because the elopements belong to the domain
of violent physical action, and here, as already indicated, Jane Austen
is feeble and ladylike. Except in her school-girl novels, she cannot
stage a crash. Everything violent has to take place "off"--Louisa's
accident and Marianne Dashwood's putrid throat are the nearest
exceptions--and consequently all the comments on the elopement must be
sincere and convincing, otherwise we should doubt whether it occurred.
Lady Bertram helps us to believe that her daughters have run away, and
they have to run away, or there would be no apotheosis for Fanny. It is
a little point, and a little sentence, yet it shows us how delicately a
great novelist can modulate into the round.
All through her works we find these characters, apparently so simple and
flat, never needing reintroduction and yet never out of their
depth--Henry Tilney, Mr. Woodhouse, Charlotte Lucas. She may label her
characters "Sense," "Pride," "Sensibility," "Prejudice," but they are
not tethered to those qualities.
As for the round characters proper, they have already been defined by
implication and no more need be said. All I need do is to give some
examples of people in books who seem to me round so that the definition
can be tested afterwards:
All the principal characters in _War and Peace_, all the Dostoevsky
characters, and some of the Proust--for example, the old family servant,
the Duchess of Guermantes, M. de Charlus, and Saint Loup; Madame
Bovary--who, like Moll Flanders, has her book to herself, and can expand
and secrete unchecked; some people in Thackeray--for instance, Becky and
Beatrix; some in Fielding--Parson Adams, Tom Jones; and some in
Charlotte Brontë, most particularly Lucy Snowe. (And many more--this is
not a catalogue.) The test of a round character is whether it is capable
of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If
it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. It has the
incalculability of life about it--life within the pages of a book. And
by using it sometimes alone, more often in combination with the other
kind, the novelist achieves his task of acclimatization and harmonizes
the human race with the other aspects of his work.
ii. Now for the second device: the point of view from which the story
may be told.
To some critics this is the fundamental device of novel-writing. "The
whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction," says Mr.
Percy Lubbock, "I take to be governed by the question of the _point of
view_--the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the
story." And his book _The Craft of Fiction_ examines various points of
view with genius and insight. The novelist, he says, can either describe
the characters from outside, as an impartial or partial onlooker; or he
can assume omniscience and describe them from within; or he can place
himself in the position of one of them and affect to be in the dark as
to the motives of the rest; or there are certain intermediate attitudes.
Those who follow him will lay a sure foundation for the æsthetics of
fiction--a foundation which I cannot for a moment promise. This is a
ramshackly survey and for me the "whole intricate question of method"
resolves itself not into formulæ but into the power of the writer to
bounce the reader into accepting what he says--a power which Mr. Lubbock
admits and admires, but locates at the edge of the problem instead of at
the centre. I should put it plumb in the centre. Look how Dickens
bounces us in _Bleak House_. Chapter I of _Bleak House_ is omniscient.
Dickens takes us into the Court of Chancery and rapidly explains all the
people there. In Chapter II he is partially omniscient. We still use his
eyes, but for some unexplained reason they begin to grow weak: he can
explain Sir Leicester Dedlock to us, part of Lady Dedlock but not all,
and nothing of Mr. Tulkinghorn. In Chapter III he is even more
reprehensible: he goes straight across into the dramatic method and
inhabits a young lady, Esther Summerson. "I have a great deal of
difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I
am not clever," pipes up Esther, and continues in this strain with
consistency and competence, so long as she is allowed to hold the pen.
At any moment the author of her being may snatch it from her, and run
about taking notes himself, leaving her seated goodness knows where, and
employed we do not care how. Logically, _Bleak House_ is all to pieces,
but Dickens bounces us, so that we do not mind the shiftings of the view
point.
Critics are more apt to object than readers. Zealous for the novel's
eminence, they are a little too apt to look out for problems that shall
be peculiar to it, and differentiate it from the drama; they feel it
ought to have its own technical troubles before it can be accepted as an
independent art; and since the problem of a point of view certainly is
peculiar to the novel they have rather overstressed it. I do not myself
think it is so important as a proper mixture of characters--a problem
which the dramatist is up against also. And the novelist must bounce us;
that is imperative.
Let us glance at two other examples of a shifting view point.
The eminent French writer, André Gide, has published a novel called
_Les Faux Monnayeurs_[4]--for all its modernity, this novel of Gide's
has one aspect in common with _Bleak House_: it is all to pieces
logically. Sometimes the author is omniscient: he explains everything,
he stands back, "il juge ses personnages"; at other times his
omniscience is partial; yet again he is dramatic, and causes the story
to be told through the diary of one of the characters. There is the same
absence of view point, but whereas in Dickens it was instinctive, in
Gide it is sophisticated; he expatiates too much about the jolts. The
novelist who betrays too much interest in his own method can never be
more than interesting; he has given up the creation of character and
summoned us to help analyse his own mind, and a heavy drop in the
emotional thermometer results. _Les Faux Monnayeurs_ is among the more
interesting of recent works: not among the vital: and greatly as we
shall have to admire it as a fabric we cannot praise it unrestrictedly
now.
For our second example we must again glance at _War and Peace_. Here the
result is vital: we are bounced up and down Russia--omniscient,
semi-omniscient, dramatized here or there as the moment dictates--and at
the end we have accepted it all. Mr. Lubbock does not, it is true: great
as he finds the book, he would find it greater if it had a view point;
he feels Tolstoy has not pulled his full weight. I feel that the rules
of the game of writing are not like this. A novelist can shift his view
point if it comes off, and it came off with Dickens and Tolstoy. Indeed
this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting view
point is a symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge:--I find it
one of the great advantages of the novel-form, and it has a parallel in
our perception of life. We are stupider at some times than others; we
can enter into people's minds occasionally but not always, because our
own minds get tired; and this intermittence lends in the long run
variety and colour to the experiences we receive. A quantity of
novelists, English novelists especially, have behaved like this to the
people in their books: played fast and loose with them, and I cannot see
why they should be censured.