As my own personal character is by no means perfect, or even complete
though imperfect, it follows that I cannot teach you how to draw a
character. Certainly, I have, however sketchily, drawn a few characters
in different stories, but I find that they were all more or less an
aspect of myself. I have never yet committed a murder, but I have hated
some people so fiercely that I have imagined the killing of them. So,
the mood being on me, I once wrote a story called “Ebro” in which the
hero was a murderer. But, in a way, _Ebro_ was myself. Again, once
in the long ago, when I was young and beautiful, I started on a wild
trip in a small sail boat from the Straits of Magellan bound for the
Falkland Islands. We had been in search of hidden treasure, which we
did not find, and, having been in forbidden places, were forced to
flee. Now some two hundred miles from shore we ran into a storm and
there was much to do. During that storm I was terribly afraid. Like any
other coward, I died a hundred deaths. That experience I remembered and
it came to light when I wished to write the story, “My Friend Julio,”
wherein was portrayed a man much terrified by wind and water. So, in my
imagination, one way or another, I have broken each and every one of
the ten commandments. Some, of course, I have broken in reality. The
heroes, or characters I draw then, as I see it, are merely pictures
of myself seen from this angle or that, the same individual in his
varied moods. It is somewhat like the watching of a diamond and seeing
different colored rays as the light from this facet or that is caught.
In every man are many vices as well as many virtues. Each must know
himself, see himself naked and as he is, without idealistic fig leaves.
Still, though I cannot tell you what to do, I can chart a few shoals so
that you shall not run aground too early in your literary voyage.
First of all then, as I have said, there is the prime necessity of
Sincerity. Second, no man can possibly write anything at all worth
while except he see straight. By that I mean that most men do actually
see things in a distorted kind of a way. I do not mean by this the
habit of careless seeing, nor even of blurred seeing. What I do mean
is that habit of not seeing at all for oneself, but seeing through
the eyes of others. Take, for example, the people who have lived in a
small town for a great many years and have heard political orators,
Chautauquan lecturers, candidates for this office and that talk about
the “handsome men and beautiful women, the intelligent children and
public-spirited citizens” in the burg. You will find that many who have
listened to that kind of thing year in and year out, do actually come
to believe that their fellow townsmen and townswomen are thus and so.
They become firmly convinced that theirs is a favored spot in which
beauty abounds. Of course, a glance at any well-filled kodak album will
reveal the fact that in place of a wide-spread beauty, there is an
incredible amount of vulgar and quite healthy ugliness. Or, again, if
you ask a dozen men to describe the average American youth, eleven of
them will conjure up a vision of some long-legged, square-shouldered
fellow unlike anything on earth, or of some square-chinned, bright
salmon-colored lad. Their notions, you will find, are derived, not
from their own observation, but from seeing advertisements put out
by wholesale clothing warehouses and makers of men’s collars. Or
imagining the American girl, they will see not what you may see, girls
flabby, skinny, awkward, sloppy, tall, short, lopsided, sometimes
pimpled, and, very rarely, one now and then really beautiful, but
instead, some baby-faced creature with idiotic simper in the style of
a magazine cover. Or again they will be led into unquestioning belief
when the politician aforementioned who, ringing the changes upon all
the familiar phrases of political oratory, and intoxicated with his
own flamboyant boastings, perhaps whooping things up for war, declares
that military training has made a generation of square-shouldered,
deep-chested lads. People listening to him, who make the sign of the
cross every time The Star Spangled Banner is played, will be quite
oblivious to the fact that a moment’s glance into any street will
reveal the truth that, in spite of three years in the trenches, the
young men of today slouch and stoop, lean and shuffle, and lounge
against corners and posts just as much as ever they did before 1914.
It will never occur to them that the square-shouldered effect of the
khaki-clad lad was entirely due to the odd cut of the coat. So, I add
this then. SEE STRAIGHT.
Here is another law, or commandment, or guide, or whatever you choose
to call it. I give it to you in seven words. SET DOWN THE THING AS IT
IS. Do that and you get somewhere. Fail to do it and you inevitably
get nowhere. That rule, of course, loops back on the one preceding
it, for before the thing can be set down as it is, one must be sure
that it is seen as it is. The trouble is that so much is about us that
tends to distort. Pictorial artists, newspaper men, moving picture
producers are all in league to get a “feature” angle on things, so
it comes about that presently we are in such fix that we actually
mistrust the evidence of our own senses. Not so long ago I attended a
piano recital in which the performer played several compositions which
I know so well that I could tell you every note in every chord. But
the clumsy fellow came a cropper, turning his minor chords here and
there into majors, dropping his octaves and making a great muddle of
things. From force of habit, or convention, the audience applauded and
the player bowed with happy smile, whereupon the audience cheered the
more lustily. The next day the local paper came out with an account of
the affair praising the player in terms which, if applied to a Liszt,
would still be extravagant. After that, you could no more shake the
audience in its admiration of the player as a highly skilled fellow
than you could persuade it that the moon had turned to green cheese.
Ignorance won the day. Hearing the applause, even those who knew
something of music mistrusted their senses. Let a word be dropped in
criticism, and the newspaper report was produced. There it was. What
more was needed? A wrong notion was born because of convention, and
fostered because of wilful or ignorant distortion, with the result that
hundreds of young children for years to come would learn music from an
incompetent fellow. Nor, probably, would those children, with one or
two exceptions, ever learn to play straight.
Again go to a picture theater in which is being shown a reel or two
of Current Events. Roughly speaking, you would imagine, judging from
the scenes displayed, that all that was ugly, hideous, vulgar had
disappeared from the world. And naturally so, because active selection
has been at work. To get a “good” picture, the camera man and his
assistants had seen to it that undesirable sights were avoided or
hidden. In the course of time, seeing hundreds or thousands of such
pictures, the average man arrives at wrong notions as to things about
him. Indeed, it is only when the same man goes far from home to
another country, or to a far away city, that his eye and mind begin to
function. Then new things strike him. He compares them, not with the
things as they are in his own home, but with the things he has seen
portrayed, which is a vastly different matter. As a consequence, he
finds the new to compare very unfavorably with the old as he imagines
the old to be. Then he becomes verbose and a nuisance to those around
him, telling of the glories of things in Tucumcari or wherever he may
have hailed from. He forgets, or never saw, that in his native habitat
there was ugliness, brutality, debauchery, disease and deformities. So
presently, your traveler returns home, tells tales of foreign parts and
deplores the state of things abroad which are, after all, exactly the
same as in his own home town. You see, in the new place his eyes were
opened. He was shocked into seeing. In his own town he saw so often
that he ceased to see, or, being incurious, saw through other eyes.
So I have heard men deplore the poverty in rural districts in other
countries, telling of women and children toiling in the fields under a
hot sun, of families that ate little or no meat or fats from one end of
the week to another, quite oblivious of the fact that in their own land
also, children of tender age are taken from school to the field, and
that in thousands of places throughout this country, sweet potatoes and
beans form the staple diet. The same men will make merry at the expense
of a simple Mexican who crosses himself when the thunder roars, or who
wears a charm to ward off rheumatism, all unconscious of the fact that
there are Americans in plenty who hold that a buckeye carried in the
hip pocket will cure piles, or that the position of the quarter moon
foretells dry or wet weather according to the way in which the horns
are “up” or “down.” Verily, I say unto you, it is the rarest of rare
things to find a man who can see straight, and except he see straight,
how shall he set down things as they are?
To take this important matter from another angle, have you ever looked
at a set of engravings by Hogarth? To be sure there are pictures
by other artists, his contemporaries, but in them it is clear that
there was elimination and distortion. But not so with Hogarth. He
saw things as they were and so set them down. As a result, his work
is as valuable to students of social manners and customs as are the
diaries of Samuel Pepys. Not for him was the false picturization, the
idealistic conception. To be sure the London of his day had its fine
lords and ladies, but it had also its filthy beggars, its distorted
and deformed men and women, its untidy children and haggard workers,
its unfortunates with blotched and pimpled faces. So he gave us what
he saw. Therefore Fame crowned him. First he was sincere, second he
saw straight, and thirdly he set down the thing as it was. Pepys too
did that. So did Holinshed and Fielding. Their names live. Aphra Behn
played the game the other way and is forgotten. Also vanished the names
of “Ouida” and of Charles Brockden Brown.