[Sidenote: The climax of art]
This is the climax, the finest flowering of the fictive art. It is
the crux, whereby may be determined the vital reality of the beings
presented to the reader by the novelist. Growth is the first condition
of life; only the character that develops with the course of the
story is really alive; if it be stationary, then it is dead. Many
an interesting and amusing writer is without this power of creating
and developing character, the rarest and the highest given to mortal
man. It is the lack of this singular gift that fills the every-day
story-teller’s pages with puppets and labelled bundles of qualities
in place of human beings. It is possible to tell a very good story
without creating or developing character, but it is scarcely possible
to create and develop character without telling a good story. For it is
story—that is, linked incident, changing circumstance—that moulds the
plastic yet unchangeable character of man.
“Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Ein Karacter sich in dem Sturm der Welt.”
There is nothing so constant, and in one sense so unchanging, as
human character: every baby born into the world receives certain
characteristics, due in part to heredity, in part to climate
and physical conditions, in part, possibly, to pre-natal mental
surroundings, which characteristics remain with him to the day of his
death. A rose-tree may be trained and developed in different ways,
it may become a bush, a tree or a creeper, but it can never become a
peach—St. Peter is always Peter, and St. Paul, Saul, though the fisher
has become a saint and martyr, and the strict and fierce Pharisee the
Apostle of the Gentiles.
[Sidenote: Incident affects character]
Though in fiction, as in life, character creates incident, still it
is incident, which is dramatic circumstance, or circumstance, which
may be called stationary incident, that chiefly carves and shapes
character, calls out latent and often unsuspected vice, and evokes
equally unlooked-for virtue. Incident, or dramatic situation, may be
called the touchstone of character. Many an excellently written and
clever novel fails to enchain because the people in it do exactly what
they could not possibly do in real life. They develop wrongly because
they are not alive, not living organisms, and some secret instinct in
the reader is revolted by a feeling of unreality, he has a secret anger
at being cheated into temporary belief in a made-up figure, in whose
nostrils the breath of life is not.
[Sidenote: Maggie Tulliver]
Many critics, but I fancy chiefly males, and therefore incapable of
weighing female character, think this the weak point in _The Mill on
the Floss_. Maggie Tulliver, they say, high-minded Maggie, would never
have wasted her treasure of noble passion on such a barber’s block
as Stephen Guest. Yet that to my mind is one of the finest points
in that very fine novel. It is artistically as well as naturally
inevitable that the impulsive, imaginative, warm-hearted Maggie, who
ran away to live with the gipsies, so greatly admired little Lucy’s
doll-face and trim curls, who idealised everything she saw and lived in
a constant transition from heaven to hell, never abiding in one stay
on the firm level earth in her stormy childhood, should see an Apollo
in the first comely and well-conducted youth she met, and that her
imagination should invest him with a blinding glamour, which in turn
kindled so strong a passion as swept her off her feet. Her passionate
and exaggerated repentance, too, though as exasperating to the reader
as it would be in real life, is equally true, the natural sequence of
all that went before. Still, Maggie ought not to have been drowned,
she was but beginning to develop; Stephen Guest should have been but
an incident in the Sturm-und-Drang-Periode inevitable to a nature so
turbulent and so complex as hers. Maggie’s death, which is an accident
and a climax to nothing, must be regarded as an artistic murder, for
the wanton slaying of a personage whose death is not artistically
necessary in a fiction, is more than a blunder, it is a capital crime.
But the charm and interest of _The Mill on the Floss_ are not in the
development of Maggie so much as in that of her father and mother and
those matchless aunts and uncles of hers.
[Sidenote: Power to create character]
If the power to create and develop character is great, it is also
rare, and discoverable only in fiction of the highest order. It is
this that makes Hawthorne so incomparably grand; this that gives his
chief, though not his whole, magic to that master of English fiction,
Thackeray, and his peer, George Eliot; that impresses in Manzoni’s
splendid romance, _I Promessi Sposi_; that enchains in Jane Austen,
though she does but brush the surface of character, leaving the depths
unplumbed; that fascinates in Charlotte Brontë and in Mrs. Gaskell,
that powerful, wholesome, and but half-appreciated writer; and the
lack of which sends so marvellous a genius as Dickens, in spite of all
his witchery of fancy and fun and youthful mastery of language, lost
later in affectation, to the second rank. It was Dickens’ inability to
recognise his own limitation in this respect which chiefly contributed,
with his outrageous vanity, to wreck his later works; for he always
aimed at developing character, probably because it was the only thing
he could not do. Because the gods, as a sort of make-weight, with their
gifts of genius and talent, always throw in a perverse blindness to the
nature and limits of those endowments.
[Sidenote: Characters should develop]
Michael Angelo, at first sight of it, said to Donatello’s statue of St.
George, “March!” and the young figure always seems, in its breathing
vitality, to be on the point of obeying the order. So it is with the
finest creations in fiction: they march, they develop, they achieve an
immortal existence, like the lovers in Keats’ _Grecian Urn_—
“For ever shalt thou love, and she be fair.”
We expect them to go on living; we look out for Colonel Newcome’s
noble and pathetic face among the pensioners in the chapel, and expect
to see that delightful old sinner, Major Pendennis, ogle us from his
club-window as we pass. How sadly do the characters of Amelia Sedley’s
kind and easy-going parents develop under the stress of ill-fortune,
and yet how truly! The indulgent and affectionate merchant, and his
comfortable, commonplace spouse, who caress and fondle Amelia’s
girlhood, pass with saddest ease into the selfish and querulous tyrants
of her widowed maturity; the harshness of their soured and unlovely old
age is but the other side of natures to which ease and material comfort
are the first conditions of existence. And poor dear Amelia, how
naturally she glides through the bitter trials and keen sorrows of her
womanhood, losing the self-complacency and regardlessness of others,
fostered by her caressed and guarded girlhood, and emerging mellowed
and sweetened from the flame! People run Amelia down. I love her; I
should like to have known her. Don’t we all know and love, and feel the
better for knowing and loving, some Amelia? My heart aches now as if
from a fresh stab whenever I read the immortal sentence which describes
the falling of night on battle-field and city, on the town without, and
Emmy’s desolate chamber within, where she “was praying for George, who
was lying on his face dead, with a bullet through his heart.” Of course
we all adore that good-for-nothing Becky Sharpe, whose complex and
subtle nature is so terribly warped and contorted by the wrongs of her
youth. How delightful is the unexpected tenderness developed in that
great, clumsy, big-hearted blackguard, Rawdon Crawley, by his dainty,
clever little witch of a wife and his neglected child. This Rawdon is
essentially virile all the way through. It was not only a fine brain,
but a great and generous and very tender heart that conceived and
developed all these intensely human creatures in Thackeray’s great
romance.
[Sidenote: Living examples in fiction]
What fine development there is in Lucia and Renzo, those very
commonplace and unromantic young country-folk in the first chapters of
_I Promessi Sposi_. Yet Lucia does not surprise us when, under stress
of the terrible events which tear their tranquil lives apart, she
comports herself with such signal heroism, and overawes and disarms
the lawless brigands who have carried her off, by the dignity of her
gentle yet strong rectitude. Nor are we astonished when the honest
and simple-minded Renzo, by his single-hearted loyalty and devotion
to plain duty, becomes a hero in his turn. It is a matchless stroke
of Manzoni’s genius thus from such every-day and unromantic material
to evolve stuff so heroic and full of romantic interest as in the
characters of these _Promessi Sposi_, who were not even romantically in
love, but were merely going to marry because they were at marrying age
and thought each other suitable.
This subtle and inevitable development which follows from the creation
of a living character in fiction, as from the birth of a living
organism in nature, gives a distinct charm to Malory’s version of
Arthurian legend, the one centre of interest around which the whole
body of the romance _Morte d’Arthur_ plays, being the development of
Sir Lancelot, that very live and captivating man, whom once to know is
always to love. Chaucer, fettered and cramped though he was, yet in the
narrow limits his art imposed gives subtle suggestions of spiritual
growth, while the immortal people painted in the Prologue, though of
necessity debarred from movement, are like Donatello’s St. George, we
involuntarily tell them to march, they are so alert and so much alive.
And even in the _Nibelungen Lied_, which would at first seem but a
poetic welding together of myth, tradition and romance, the main point
of the story and the hinge upon which the whole tragedy plays, is the
terrible direction taken by Chriemhild’s naturally sweet and noble
nature under the warping influence of deadly wrong.
[Sidenote: A bad tendency]
Macbeth, aweary of the sun, is another man than the gallant Scottish
chief who consults the witches; and what a change passes over the
warm-hearted and devoted wife, who is so eager for her husband’s
advancement. Hamlet and Faust (especially Hamlet), being not so much
a Danish prince and a German philosopher as representatives of the
human race, are the first and finest instances of character-development
in fiction. Yet the same Goethe, who, by the spontaneous play of his
great genius, created the living Faust, also composed that nauseous
study of morbid anatomy, _Wahlverwandtschaften_, in which there is
no true development upwards or downwards, but a sort of stagnant and
hopeless decay, and by the composition of which he became the father
of a great and gruesome school of fiction, the noxious influence of
which is spreading everywhere like a leprous growth over the fair face
of fictive art, especially in France, where the novel has been reduced
to a study of the gutter and the city sewer, and poetry to the open
worship of decay, and where a great artist like Zola devotes marvellous
powers of observation and description and analysis of character through
the whole of the celebrated _Assommoir_ to impressing upon the reader
that dirty linen is dirty, which Falstaff knew by sad experience,
but did not dwell upon, long ago. There is much morbid anatomy of
stagnant character in _L’Assommoir_ but no development; the characters
do not even degenerate, they simply rot as if from some mysterious,
irresistible corruption.
[Sidenote: _Tess_]
A great, perhaps the greatest, living English novelist is, like his
lesser brothers, touched by this mysterious blight. Hence _Tess_ has an
artistically impossible climax. Mr. Hardy’s fine genius created a noble
character in Tess, but his Paganism (for the blight has its origin in
Paganism) blinded him to the full grandeur of his own creation. He sees
clearly how the tragedy of Tess’s girlhood, the horrible cruelty of
which she is the innocent victim, moulds her nature, first stunning her
to a degradation from which she quickly revolts, and ultimately leading
her through suffering and knowledge of good and evil to a higher purity
than that of ignorant innocence, but he cannot see, perhaps because he
does not believe in, the impossibility of the final actions he imputes
to her, in a nature that had grown to such a height. Vainly is the
ivory parasol flourished in the face of the reader, who rejects it as
an unreality. But I speak under correction.
[Sidenote: Paganism]
Whatever Paganism may be to art—and the late Mr. J. A. Symonds thinks
it is very good for it—there is no doubt that it is absolutely fatal
to creative literature. The pure Pagan, the denying spirit, can have
no ideal; it is not that he asserts there is no God, but that he says
there is no good; he knows no inward vivifying spirit to produce
moral progress; therefore for him character cannot grow, it can only
decay, like geraniums touched by frost. This denying spirit, this
Paganism, which acknowledges matter because itself is material, and
which denies soul and the supernatural, sees in man a mere organism,
bound in an eternal ring of sense, a being whose deepest emotions are
but animal instincts, variously developed, and whose subtlest thoughts
are but emanations from an organ resembling curds; therefore it has
only the human animal for its subject in art and literature, and can
depict nothing in moral life but its decay. It has no clue to the
growth of the living organism, acknowledging not life but only death.
Human character is to this Paganism as the rapidly decomposing corpse
under the knife and microscope. It is this which in politics produces
Nihilism, Socialism, Anarchy, in literature what is known as Zolaism,
though Zola is but one of its products, and in France the poetry of
the decadence, the acknowledged idolatry of corruption; and it is this
which fills European fiction with unsavoury studies in morbid anatomy
in place of wholesome, vivifying pictures of living and growing
character. One can trace this sterilising influence in Goethe’s life
as well as in his works; one sees it beginning in George Eliot, and
continuing in the most ambitious English writers of the day; but not
in Mr. Hall Caine, whose work, with all its shortcomings, is a protest
against it, and who resolutely proclaims the soul of man and his power
to rise above his passions and make a stepping-stone of his dead self
to something nobler.
[Sidenote: The art of developing character]
But how acquire the art of developing character in fiction? We may as
well try to acquire blue eyes and straight noses, nature having endowed
us with aquiline features and black orbs. It is, like the gifts of
poetry and cookery, born with us or unattainable, though, like those
sources of so much solace to mankind, it may and must be cultivated
when present. The means whereto are study and observation of life, and
of great literary masterpieces.
That pleasant and light-hearted writer, Mr. James Payn, probably
beguiled by the whisper of some tricksy demon, once, to his subsequent
acknowledged sorrow, sat down and airily indited an essay in a
leading periodical on fiction as a profession, in which he asserted
in that gentle and joyous fashion of his that, like any other craft,
that of novel-writing can be acquired by study and practice. With a
thoughtlessness that Christian charity would fain assume to be devoid
of guile, he even expressed an innocent wonder that a profession so
easy and inexpensive to acquire, and so delightful as well as lucrative
to exercise, was not more sought after by the parents of British
youth, who, worthy folk, to do them strict justice, have never been
backward in repressing the vice of scribbling in their offspring. It
would be unkind to dwell upon the error of Mr. Payn’s ways. Nemesis,
in the shape of letters during the next few days from half the
parents in the three kingdoms, demanding instant instruction for sons
(especially those who had failed in most other things) in the elements
of novel-writing, overtook that poor man, and he did fit penance in
a subsequent number of the periodical, appearing there in all the
humiliation of white sheet, ashes, and taper, and duly confessing, if
not his sins, at least his sorrow for their results.
[Sidenote: Those who should write]
The art of novel-writing is not to be picked up along the primrose
path, even when the gift is present; nor is literature, especially in
its higher walks, a lucrative profession; it is, as of old, a crutch,
but not a staff. It is doubtless comparatively easy, a certain knack
being inborn and skill having been acquired, to reel off story after
story at the same dead level of mediocrity, but no writer has produced
many good novels, or ever will. The world is flooded with fiction,
chiefly worthless, but able by sheer volume to swamp the few good
novels that appear from time to time. People should never write a novel
or indite a poem of malice prepense. The only justification for doing
either is being unable to help it. Those novel-writers who can create
characters will develop them and thank heaven; those who cannot will
not, and let us hope they will thank heaven too.