He made no change in the location because even he could not improve
upon the scene for such a story. He changed the month from August to
September (¶ 1) to make plausible, perhaps, the rain necessary for such
a slide, and to make seasonable the bitter wind which he introduces. He
omitted all names to add to the air of unsolved mystery that haunts the
story. He introduced the guest (¶ 4) and the grandmother (¶ 1), increased
the age of the daughter (¶ 1), retained the parents and younger children
(¶ 1) and omitted the hired men to suit the requirements of his story. He
omitted the warning but retained the establishment of a place of refuge
(¶ 9) to heighten the climax. He used the flight from the house (¶ 42)
because it just suited his purpose. He retained the strange preservation
of the house (¶ 42) to increase the air of mystery, and to intensify the
tragedy by making it appear in a manner unnecessary. He suppressed the
finding of any of the bodies (¶ 42) to aid the plausibility of his
narrative, and to increase the pathos of the guest's death.
Compare carefully the account given by Spaulding and the story of
Hawthorne, for you have here an excellent illustration of the difference
between the commonplace recital of facts and their transformation into a
work of art. Spaulding's relation is a true story, but Hawthorne's is
literature.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 20: "Bad Story-Telling," by Frederick M. Bird. _Lippincott's._
Oct., '97.]
[Footnote 21: "Rudimentary Suggestions for Beginners in Story Writing,"
by E. F. Andrews. _Cosmopolitan._ Feb., '97.]
[Footnote 22: "The Art of Fiction." A lecture by Gilbert Parker. _The
Critic._ Dec., '98.]
[Footnote 23: "Magazine Fiction and How Not to Write It," by Frederick
M. Bird. _Lippincott's._ Nov., '94.]
[Footnote 24: "Bad Story-Telling," by Frederick M. Bird. _Lippincott's_,
Oct., '97.]
[Footnote 25: "Fact in Fiction," by Frederick M. Bird. _Lippincott's_,
July, '95.]
[Footnote 26: "The Art of Fiction." A lecture by Gilbert Parker. _The
Critic._ Dec., '98.]
[Footnote 27: "Historical Relics of the White Mountains," by John H.
Spaulding. (Boston, 1855.) "Destruction of the Willey Family," page 58.]
VI
THE CHARACTERS
It is the tritest sort of a truism to say that the characters in a story
are important, for stories are stories only in so far as they reflect
life, and life is impossible without human actors. It is the hopes and
fears, the joys and sorrows, the sins and moral victories of men that
interest us. We men are a conceited lot, and find nothing of interest
except as it relates to us. Thus in the most ingenious stories, where
some marvelous invention or discovery is introduced, the interest
centers, not in the wondrous things themselves, but in their influence
on the people of the story; and in the few stories where a beast or a
thing plays the hero, it is always given human attributes.
Fictitious characters, like the plots that they develop, are based
primarily on fact, and they further resemble the plots in being
different phases of a primal idea, rather than intrinsically diverse.
We find many characters in fiction--Miss Wilkins' stories are full
of them--which are evidently meant to be realistic, and which impress
us as word photographs of existing persons; yet it is improbable that
they are exact reproductions. A real person ordinarily has too much
of the commonplace and conventional about him to serve in fiction,
where--despite the apparent paradox--a character must be exaggerated
to appear natural. A person in fiction is at the best but a blur of
hieroglyphics on a sheet of paper, and can be comprehended only
through the mentality of the author; therefore his description, his
actions, his words, his very thoughts must be made so unnaturally
striking that through the sense of sight alone they will stimulate
the imagination and produce the effect which actual contact with the
real person would induce. The character which seems most real is
usually a composite of the most striking characteristics of several
real persons. To this source of fictitious characters is due the fact
that a literary puppet is often thought to be the reproduction of
several very different real persons; for the reader, recognizing a
particular trait which is characteristic of some one of his
acquaintance, thinks that he recognizes the character.
"While the popular idea that every creature of the novelist's
imagination has a definite original somewhere among his acquaintances
is, of course, egregiously false, it has yet this much of truth,
that they are, to a large extent, suggestions from life. Not one
person, but half a dozen, often sit as models for the same picture,
while the details are filled out by the writer's imagination. There
are few people in real life sufficiently interesting or uncommonplace
to suit the novelist's purpose, but he must idealize or intensify
them before they are fit subjects for art. Dickens intensified to the
verge of the impossible, yet we never feel that Dick Swiveller and
Sam Weller and Mr. Micawber, and the rest of them, are unnatural;
they are only, if I may coin the word, 'hypernatural.' It is the
business of art to idealize. Even at its best art is so inferior to
nature, that in order to produce the same impression it has to
intensify its effects; to deepen the colors, heighten the contrasts,
omit an object here, exaggerate an outline there, and so on, until it
has produced the proper picturesque effect."[28]
A careful description of the appearance of the characters may be
necessary to the understanding of the story, as in Irving's perfect
picture of Ichabod Crane in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"; but in our
model the people are rather typical than individual, and Hawthorne
devotes but little space to their external characteristics. A word or
a phrase suffices to tell us all that is necessary to enable our
minds to body them forth. Even the hero is outwardly distinguished
only by a melancholy expression--a slight of which no school-girl
"authoress" would have been guilty. It is more often necessary to
give the mental characteristics of the puppets, and in "The Ambitious
Guest" we have a deal of such detail concerning the young stranger;
but here, too, you must exercise forbearance, as Hawthorne did in his
partial analysis of the other characters.
It is by no means essential that the personages of a short story be
attractive in person or in character. The taste of readers used to be so
artificial that no romancer would have dared to present a heroine who
was not perfect in face and figure, or a hero who was not an Apollo for
manly beauty; but in these more practical days we have substituted good
deeds for good looks and have made our characters more human--our men
more manly and our women more womanly; and we exalt them now for heroic
acts, rather than heroic mould.
A mistake which it seems hard for the novice to avoid is that of telling
everything possible about a character and leaving nothing to the
imagination of the reader. This exhaustive method leads to a
multiplicity of detail which verges on baldness, and which is very apt
to contain considerable irrelevant matter; the details are usually
arranged with little regard for their true value; and the intended
description becomes a mere catalogue of personal charms. For example, in
these three descriptions, detailed though they are, there is nothing to
distinguish the particular person described from the scores of other
people possessing the same general traits:
He was a tall, deep-chested, broad-shouldered man, having a
light complexion, dark moustache, hair and eyes.
We will take a look at our heroine, as she sits lazily rocking,
the sunshine touching her hair. She is of medium height, with
black hair and eyes and a winning smile that makes friends for
her everywhere.
Lura was yet but a slight school girl; she was now fifteen and
equally as large as Grace. She looked very beautiful as she came
out to meet Grace and Mrs. Morton, on their return from the
village. Her dark brown hair had been carefully combed back,
but the short locks had fallen and formed in ringlets about the
snowy neck and face. Her large gray eyes were bright. Her full
curved lips were red, and in laughing and talking revealed two
rows of small, even, pearly white teeth. Her cheeks were round
and well formed; although at the present time they bore no marks
of roses, they were generally rosy. The gray eyes, by the
changing of the expression, often became almost black and
greatly completed her beauty.
Clever character depiction consists in selecting and presenting only
those salient details which will serve to body forth rather a vague
image, which shall yet possess a definite personality, to which the
reader may give such distinctness as his imagination may impart to the
hints offered. It is in a manner building a complete character upon a
single characteristic, after the familiar method of Dickens. It is this
impressionistic method which is most used by masters to picture those
characters which seem to us real persons.
In "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Irving thus describes the hero (?),
Ichabod Crane, and the heroine, Katrina Van Tassel:
The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was
tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms
and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet
that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most
loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at the top,
with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose,
so that it looked like a weather-cock, perched upon his spindle
neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along
the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging
and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the
genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow
eloped from a cornfield.
She was a blooming lass of fresh eighteen, plump as a partridge,
ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked as one of her father's
peaches, and universally famed, not merely for her beauty, but
her vast expectations. She was withal a little of a coquette, as
might be perceived even in her dress, which was a mixture of
ancient and foreign fashions, as most suited to set off her
charms. She wore the ornaments of pure yellow gold which her
great-great-grandmother had brought over from Saardam, the
tempting stomacher of the olden time, and withal a provokingly
short petticoat to display the prettiest foot and ankle in the
country round.
Here are Hawthorne's pictures of Beatrice and her father in
"Rappaccini's Daughter":
On again beholding Beatrice the young man was even startled to
perceive how much her beauty exceeded his recollection of it--so
brilliant, so vivid in its character, that she glowed amid the
sunlight, and, as Giovanni whispered to himself, positively
illuminated the more shadowy intervals of the garden path. Her
face being now more revealed than on the former occasion, he was
struck by its expression of simplicity and sweetness--qualities
that had not entered into his idea of her character, and which
made him ask anew what manner of mortal she might be. Nor did he
fail again to observe or imagine an analogy between the
beautiful girl and the gorgeous shrub that hung its gem-like
flowers over the fountain--a resemblance which Beatrice seemed
to have indulged a fantastic humor in heightening both by the
arrangement of her dress and the selection of its hues.
His figure soon emerged into view, and showed itself to be that
of no common laborer, but a tall, emaciated, sallow and
sickly-looking man dressed in a scholar's garb of black. He was
beyond the middle term of life, with gray hair, and a thin gray
beard and a face singularly marked with intellect and
cultivation, but which could never, even in his more youthful
days, have expressed much warmth of heart.
And this is the way Dickens sets forth Scrooge, the old miser, in "A
Christmas Carol":
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a
squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous,
old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had
ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and
solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old
features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek,
stiffened his gait, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and
spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on
his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his
own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in
the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
There is very little of the catalogue style of description here; indeed,
the characters can hardly be said to be described: the author gives
rather the sensations which they produced on observers and so excites
similar sensations in the mind of the reader.
When once introduced the characters should be allowed to work out
their identities with the least possible interference from the
author. Their characteristics must not be listed like invoices of
goods: they must themselves display the psychological powers with
which they were endowed by their creator. Their speeches and actions
must seem the results of mental processes, and must appear natural,
if not logical; indeed, it is an open question if they can be both at
once, for there are few people who are always logical. One good
method of presenting the characteristics of a fictitious personage is
to indulge in a bit of mind reading, and give his thoughts as he
thinks them; another and better way is to show the man actuated by
his dominant mental qualities. In "The Cask of Amontillado" Poe
builds a whole story on an elaboration of the latter method, and
presents the picture of a man temporarily mastered by the spirit of
revenge. It is only by thus allowing the characters to work out their
own destinies that you can make them real; otherwise they will appear
as mere painted puppets, without life or volition.
On account of the technical limitations of the short story the number
of characters which may have principal or "speaking" parts is very
small--in general only two, and frequently but one. There are usually
other characters present to help out the action, but they are merely
supernumeraries, without form, life or influence. There are many
violations of this rule, I admit, among them such stories as
Hawthorne's "The Great Stone Face," "The Seven Vagabonds," and "The
Great Carbuncle;" but analysis shows them to be panoramic or episodic
in effect, and really violating the unity of action which the short
story demands. For similar reasons the characters presented must be
unnaturally isolated, with little past and less future, and most
strangely lacking in relatives; for the few thousand words of the
short story permit but a cursory treatment of the ancestry, birth,
breeding and family of the one or two important characters. If by any
trick they can be made the last of a long line, and be snatched from
obscurity into the momentary glare of the lime light, so much the
better for author, reader and character; but if some portion of their
history bears upon the story, let it be presented by subtle touches,
preferably by references in the dialogue, so that the reader obtains
the necessary knowledge without being conscious of the means.
The few real characters in the story must be made unusually interesting
on account of their loneliness. They compose the story, they represent
the human race, and if they fail us we are in sad straits. They must
be individual; they must stand out sharply from the page, clear and
attractive, and leave no doubt of their personalities. More than any
other form of fiction, the short story depends upon its hero and
heroine, who have "star parts" and monopolize the stage of action. We
must see them so vividly that when they speak and act we shall perceive
them as actual personages. It is such accuracy of depiction that makes
Rip Van Winkle, Sherlock Holmes, Van Bibber, and a host of others enter
into our thoughts and speech as if they had really lived.
The names with which we label these dolls may be of importance. In these
days names have little significance, yet we still feel that a name from
its very sound may be appropriate or otherwise, and no careful writer
would give to his characters appellations selected at random. Names are
frequently used to good advantage as aids to character depiction or to
enhance humorous effects, as in the case of Hawthorne's Feathertop and
Monsieur du Miroir, and Irving's Ichabod Crane, and in many other
instances familiar to readers of Dickens.
"Dickens's names are marvelously apt, as we see from the passing into
common phrase of so many of them. Not a few have become synonyms for the
kind of character to which they were attached.... If a name is to hint
at character it should do so in the subtlest manner possible--in a
manner so subtle as to escape all but the quickwitted, who will forgive
the inartistic method in their pride at being so clever as to detect the
writer's intention.... In these days, when craftsmanship is cared for
and looked for more than ever, ... novelists must sacrifice nothing
that will lend a trick of reality to their imaginings. If they take any
pains to select names for their characters they should hit upon such as
will be seen to suit them when their books have been read (like Sir
Willoughby Patterne or Gabriel Oak); names that attempt with clumsy
impertinence to give a clew to character at the outset are best left to
the inept amateur of letters who has not wit enough to dispense with
such aid.
"To be avoided, also, are out-of-the-way names that may have living
owners in the real world. No John Smith or Tom Jones can complain if
writers christen their characters after them; but if a man owns a
peculiar name he dislikes having it borrowed and attached to some figure
in fiction whose proceedings very likely do it little credit.... Every
writer must know the satisfaction that comes when an 'exquisitely right'
name is hit upon. But it is just as well to take reasonable precautions
to avoid indignant protests such as that which Hawthorne drew upon
himself"[29] for his use of the name Judge Pyncheon in "The House of
the Seven Gables."
The dramatic trend of the short story is responsible for its tendency
to advance action by speech. Good short stories have been written and
will be written which contain little or no dialogue; they succeed
through vividness of plot, skill in character depiction, ingenuity of
construction, or some such quality; but they would be more interesting
and more natural if they held more conversation. A short story should
be full of talk of the proper kind; there are few people who preserve
silence at all times, and in the exciting moments which a short story
usually presents, most persons would find tongue to voice their teeming
thoughts. Speech adds naturalness and vividness to the actors, it lends
them a personal interest, it gives insight into character, and it aids
the development of the plot.
This is a modern tendency, for the stories of Kipling, Stevenson,
Wilkins, Davis and Doyle contain much more of the conversational element
than those of Poe, Hawthorne or Irving. Where the latter would present a
mental struggle or a crisis by some paragraphs of description, the
former express it in the short exciting words of the actors themselves;
even soliloquies and asides and other of the most mechanical devices of
the drama are forced into the service of the short story, to replace the
long explanatory passages such as were used by Irving. It has been
predicted that in the short story of the future the characters will be
briefly introduced and then will be allowed to speak for themselves; if
this prophecy comes true we shall have stories similar to Hope's "The
Dolly Dialogues," or Howells' little dramas, where there is almost no
comment by the author. It is more probable, though, that there is
something of a "fad" in the present liking for pure dialogue, and that
the short story will never attain the absolute purity of the drama.
If these fictitious personages are to talk, however, they must talk
naturally and interestingly--and "there's the rub!" As in real life a
man often shows himself to be a fool when he begins to talk, so in
fiction a character frequently proves to be but a poor puppet of
straw when he opens his mouth. The only way to make your characters
talk naturally is to imitate the speech of the persons whom they in
some degree represent. People in general do not talk by book: they
use colloquial language, full of poor grammar, slang, and syncopated
words; and their sentences are neither always logical nor complete.
In reproducing this, however, you must "edit" it a little, using your
own judgment as to which are the characteristic idioms; for the
speech of the people in books is admittedly a little better than in
real life--except in dialect stories, where it is usually worse; and
you must avoid equally the heavy rhetorical style of the extreme
romantic school, and the inane commonplaces of the radical realists.
Conversation like the following is commonly termed "bookish"; it is
painfully correct and laboriously profound--but it is not natural. If it
were meant for a burlesque upon polite and "cultured" society it would
be exquisite, but it is the manner in which the writer believes people
really talk, though it is easy to guess that he himself is far from such
absurd affectations in his familiar speech.
"By way of preliminary, I have to say that my name is
Athlee--Felix Athlee, and yours is Miss India Lemare. I've seen
you before."
"In the flesh, I hope," she answered.
"Yes, I like you better that way, though you now wear the
expression of one older in years and experience. Wherefore, may
I ask?"
"Shadows fall on the young as well as the old. One is fortunate,
indeed, to keep always in the sunshine."
"And flit like the butterfly, without volition or effort? Human
appointments are different. Work is the inevitable, and with
the proper tools, it is pleasant enough."
"They must, long ago, have rusted, for the want of use."
"No, we have simply to consider our specialty and we find them
ready at hand. Have you done so?"
"I am dazed, and my brain works capriciously."
"Except in the interest of your desires. What are they?"
"Wealth for independence, leisure for indulgence, and fame, the
outcome of talent."
His luminous eyes looked out over the water, as he said: "The
universal hunt of mankind is for happiness, and he searches for
it in as many ways as there are peculiarities of disposition.
Does he ever really find it? Many weary hearts are covered with
the soft down of wealth. Mischief lurks in indulgence, and fame
dazzles but to elude. It is wiser to accept what the gods give,
and use the gifts for the betterment of others as well as
ourselves."
"Meaningless words, when one is at enmity with the gods for
withholding. What fine spun theories we mortals have!"
To the listener every conversation contains a deal of commonplace: it
may be that the speakers really have nothing interesting to say, and it
may be that their conversation is so personal as to interest themselves
only. The reader occupies the position of a listener, and it is the
duty of the author to suppress all commonplace dialogue, unless, as
sometimes happens, it assists in plot or character development.
Conversation like the following is--let us hope--interesting to the
parties concerned, but the reader would be delivered from it as from
a plague.
"I am so glad to get _one_ desire of my heart."
"And that is?" said Al.
"Snow!"
"So glad that is all. I thought you had spied my new tie and was
planning some 'crazy design' upon it."
"Oh, let me see! Now, really, that is becoming to your style,
but I think it would suit mine better. 'Brown eyes and black
hair should never wear blue--that is for grey eyes, the tried
and true.' See?"
"Neither the eyes nor the tie," said Al, as he turned his back
and looked up at the ceiling.
The real difficulty with this dialogue is that the writer attempted to
make his characters "smart" and so permitted them to indulge in
repartee; but as they were only commonplace people the privilege was too
much for them and they merely twaddled. They did succeed in being
humorous, but the humor is unconscious.
Yet unconscious humor is preferable to the forced and desperate attempt
at fun-making which we have in this extract:
"I don't believe he is proud," said Joe to Tom, his younger
brother. "But you know he has been to the Holy Land and cannot
now associate with such wicked sinners as we are. Or else he has
turned Jew and thinks we are Samaritans."
"You two are getting no better fast," said the doctor, after a
hearty laugh. "Wait until you get sick, I'll give you a pill
that will make you repent."