AN art may become impersonal because it has too much circumstance or too
little, because the world is too little or too much with it, because it
is too near the ground or too far up among the branches. I met an old
man out fishing a year ago, who said to me, 'Don Quixote and Odysseus
are always near to me'; that is true for me also, for even Hamlet and
Lear and Oedipus are more cloudy.[1] No playwright ever has made or
ever will make a character that will follow us out of the theatre as Don
Quixote follows us out of the book, for no playwright can be wholly
episodical, and when one constructs, bringing one's characters into
complicated relations with one another, something impersonal comes into
the story. Society, fate, 'tendency,' something not quite human, begins
to arrange the characters and to excite into action only so much of
their humanity as they find it necessary to show to one another. The
common heart will always love better the tales that have something of an
old wives' tale and that look upon their hero from every side as if he
alone were wonderful, as a child does with a new penny. In plays of a
comedy too extravagant to photograph life, or written in verse, the
construction is of a necessity woven out of naked motives and passions,
but when an atmosphere of modern reality has to be built up as well, and
the tendency, or fate, or society has to be shown as it is about
ourselves, the characters grow fainter, and we have to read the book
many times or see the play many times before we can remember them. Even
then they are only possible in a certain drawing-room and among such and
such people, and we must carry all that lumber in our heads. I thought
Tolstoi's 'War and Peace' the greatest story I had ever read, and yet it
has gone from me; even Lancelot, ever a shadow, is more visible in my
memory than all its substance.