Still, let a man set himself deliberately to see straight, to look
at things without either rose-colored or smoke-dimmed glasses, and
even then it is not certain that there is freedom from distortion.
Just as the children studying music, of which I wrote a few pages
back, were all unconsciously heavily handicapped, so are we also
handicapped through no fault of our own. For one thing there has been
grounded into us a certain prejudice called patriotism. It is really a
reflex egoism. Because of it we are predisposed to look upon our own
nation as standing alone on star-crowned heights and to regard all
other nations and peoples as being in the gulf of ignorance, poverty
and despair. So we get a one-sided impression. Blinded by national
self-love, we see all good in our own people and little but evil in
others, except those others be our allies, when we grant them some
modicum of decent behavior and common sense just so long as, and no
longer than, they identify their interests with ours. Nationally, we go
in for the cygnification of geese on a gigantic scale. As may easily
be seen, carried to excess, that kind of thing often results in hate.
Not carried to such lengths, it means the ridiculing, as well as the
misunderstanding of others, and in addition the fooling of ourselves.
Consider the so-called “comic sheets” and the cheap vaudeville stage
where the Frenchmen, Germans, Jews, Irishmen, Mexicans and all South
Americans are used as laughing stocks. The reverse of the situation
is seen in common, cheap literature where the American stands as the
type of all that is admirable. Or, if you keep an attentive ear, you
will not fail to note that the notion permeates in such strange way
that it becomes very generally held, and even accepted to so wide
an extent, that teachers teach their charges that there exist very
strongly-marked national characteristics, as that the Dutch are very
clean, the Mexicans very treacherous, Jews very much given to cheat,
Germans to villainy and rape, Italians to idleness, Afro-Americans to
light-heartedness, the French to immorality, the Irish to wit, the
Scandinavians to pessimism, the Swiss to thrift and so on.
All of which is idle and pernicious clap trap, as a moment’s quiet
reflection will show. For each and every man in his experience has
known among his own countrymen those who were clean and those who were
dirty, those who were honest and those who were dishonest, those who
were gloomy and those who were cheerful, those who were idle and those
who were energetic. Moreover, every man knows that his own mood changes
as the wind and he who is merry a-Monday may be very sad on Saturday,
while he who is in the pink of honesty at 9 a. m. may easily be a thief
at 9:30. Yet, for all the testimony of the daily papers and in spite of
the records of the criminal courts, ninety-nine men out of a hundred
are very thoroughly imbued with the idea that their country and its
people have a practical monopoly of all the virtues. So, as might be
expected, the notion gets into literature, modified it is true, but
nevertheless it gets there.
To show it in its most crude form, I give an instance. It happened
since I commenced this essay. A man called upon me and his eyes were
bright and shining with excitement, for he had what he imagined to be
a good plot for a story, and had cut across lots to tell it to me. It
ran something like this and I quote his words as nearly as possible.
“Here is a good plot for a short story or a moving picture. There’s
a young woman on the train, a Canadian, and she is a stranger to
this here country. On the car she begins to talk with a well dressed
drummer. She is innocent and all that kind of thing. But sitting across
the aisle is a soldier. Well, at the depot this here drummer gets the
girl to go with him to a hotel and just as they are getting into a
taxi, up comes the soldier, and ‘Biff,’ he lands the drummer one that
lays him flat. So the girl’s safe. After a year or so the soldier comes
from the war and finds the girl who is the daughter of a rich man. He’s
poor of course, the soldier. Well they marry and live happy.... Of
course, you can show the American ideals in this tale and also use it
to bring about good relation between the English speaking people.”
I will not insult the intelligence of the reader by pointing out the
utter idiocy of the plot. Still, though the man who told me the story
was intelligent, a lawyer in the government service, and a reader of
the _Saturday Evening Post_, the _American Magazine_, several daily
papers, and voted the straight party ticket every election, he failed
to see the utter banality of the tale he suggested. But, it is a fair
sample of the stuff with a “patriotic” base that many hundreds send to
editors, and, more or less modified, watered, or spiced, you will at
times see something of the kind in moving-picture theaters.
So see this then; there are no characteristic national virtues and
vices. Make your hero a negro, a Chinaman, an Eskimo or a Patagonian.
It does not matter which. Man is man the world over, and it is, despite
the old saying to the contrary, a safe rule to measure other’s corn
with your own bushel. What you must do is to conceive a character, then
show him, not acting in any cut or dried fashion, but in a certain
fashion. I say a certain fashion, but might have said an uncertain
fashion, because your character will be more or less like yourself, a
being with faults, virtues, vices, meannesses, ideals and hopes, and
in him the potential angel will be mixed with a good deal of the ape,
the tiger and the pig. Then, with your creation endowed with all the
virtues and vices inextricably mixed, you have a character compounded
of subtle and profound elements. Thus one sees that an action in a
given case is indeed problematical. A man, witnessing overtures that
may lead to the seduction of a girl, a stranger to him, whether the
man was in uniform or not, would hardly be likely to make an assault
upon the supposed seducer. To make him do that sort of thing is but
to cater to the basest taste which glories in brute force. What a
character would do would depend on many things--on his mood at the
moment, whether he was drunk or sober, his immediate environment,
his early training, what he had had for breakfast, what manner of
rascal his grandfather was, how much money he had in his purse at
the time. Or it might depend on a mixture of many of these. Or again,
the fictional personage might ponder and hesitate, finally taking no
action at all, which, as a sensible man and being familiar with the old
warning, “mind your own business,” would very probably be his course.
But the character might well be supposed to be wavering in a storm of
emotion, perhaps to be swayed by subordinate characters, and, in the
end, some action might be shown which would, as it were, grow out of
the collision of the characters. For, bear in mind, the subordinate
characters must not be made mere silhouettes--they also must have their
prejudices and motives and ambitions, and the very form of their minds,
too, must be made as evident to the reader as if they were in his
presence.
Character drawing, as you see then, is a highly complicated business.
Many, even among apparently sensible men, do not suspect this. For
instance, not so long ago, I heard of a poet who declared that he
could write a dozen good short stories between Tuesday and Saturday.
His notion of fictional characters of course was of the allegorical
order, a ticketed dummy in the form of the Sunday school book or of the
transpontine melodrama, a row of Mr. Goodman’s, Mr. Evil-Livers, Mr.
Close-pennies and so on. It never for a moment occurred to him that the
test of good workmanship lay in the ability of the author to make a
distinct impression on the reader, to make him remember the fictional
personage as vividly as he remembered characters met in real life.
At this point, should you be earnest in your quest, really ambitious to
go further, I recommend to your reading as masterpieces of character
drawing, Conrad’s _Lord Jim_, Thackeray’s _Becky Sharp_, Cunninghame
Graham’s _Minor Prophet_ in his “Brought Forward,” H. G. Dwight’s _Like
Michael_ in his “Emperor of Elam,” _Uncle Toby_ in Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy, and the portrait of _Mrs. Poyser_ in George Eliot’s Adam Bede.
Or, failing these, if you are a very busy man, buy in the present
series, Nos. 41 and 72, and study the character of _Old Scrooge_ in
Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol, and of _The Scab_ in the Color of
Life.