Materials and Methods of Fiction Part 4

Meredith's "Evan Harrington" is the great Mel, whose death is announced in the very first sentence of the novel. Hawthorne, in "The Marble Faun," never clears away the mystery of Miriam's shadowy pursuer, nor tells us what became of Hilda when she disappeared for a time from the sight and knowledge of her friends.

After the novelist has selected from his entire story the materials he means to represent, and has patterned these materials into a plot, he enjoys considerable liberty in regard to the point at which he may commence his narrative. He may begin at the beginning of one or another of his main strands of causation, as Scott usually does; or he may adopt the Homeric device, commended by Horace, of plunging into the midst of his plot and working his way back only afterward to its beginning. In the first chapter of "Pendennis," the hero is seventeen years old; the second chapter narrates the marriage of his father and mother, and his own birth and boyhood; and at the outset of the third chapter he is only sixteen years of age.

It is obvious that, so long as the novelist represents his events in logical sequence, it is not at all necessary that he should present them in chronological succession. Stories may be told backward through time as well as forward. Thackeray often begins a chapter with an event that happened one day, and ends it with an event that happened several days before; he works his way backward from effects to causes, instead of forward from causes to effects. In carrying on a plot which is woven out of several strands, it is hardly ever possible to represent events in uninterrupted chronological succession, even when the author consistently works forward from causes to effects; for after he has pursued one strand of his plot to a certain point in time, he is obliged to turn backward several days or weeks, or possibly a longer period, to pick up another strand and carry it forward to the same point in time at which he left the first.

Retrogression in time, therefore, is frequently not only permissible but necessary. But it is only common-sensible to state that chronological sequence should be sacrificed merely for the sake of making clear the logical relation of events; and whenever juggling with chronology tends to obscure instead of clarify that logical relation, it is evidence of an error of judgment on the part of the narrator. Turgenieff is often guilty of this error of judgment. He has a disconcerting habit of bringing a new character into the scene which stands for the moment before the eye of the reader, and then turning the narrative backward several years in order to recount the past life of the newcomer. Frequently, before this parenthetic recital is completed, the reader has forgotten the scene from which the author turned to the digression.

In most plots, as has been stated, the _nouement_ is more significant than the _denouement_, and the causes leading to the tying of the major knot are more interesting than the effects traced during the process of untying it. This is the reason why the culmination is usually set well along toward the conclusion of the story. Sometimes even, when the major knot has been tied with a Gordian intricacy, the author sets it at the very end of his narrative, and suddenly cuts it instead of carefully untying it. But there is no absolutely necessary reason why it should stand at the end, or, as is more frequently the case, at a point about three quarters through the story. It may even be set at the very beginning; and the narrative may concern itself entirely with an elaborate _denouement_. This is the case, for example, in the detective story, where a very intricate knot is a.s.sumed at the outset, and the narrative proceeds to exhibit the prowess of the detective-hero in untying it.

A well-constructed plot, like any other sort of well-articulated pattern, is interesting in itself; and certain novels and short-stories, like Wilkie Collins' "Moonstone" and Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," maintain their interest almost through the element of plot alone. But since the purpose of fiction is to represent reality, a story will fail of the highest effect unless the people acting in its pattern of events produce upon the reader the illusion of living human beings. We must therefore turn our attention next to a study of the element of character.

CHAPTER V

CHARACTERS

Before we proceed to study the technical methods of delineating characters, we must ask ourselves what const.i.tutes a character worth delineating. A novelist is, to speak figuratively, the social sponsor for his own fict.i.tious characters; and he is guilty of a social indiscretion, as it were, if he asks his readers to meet fict.i.tious people whom it is neither of value nor of interest to know. Since he aims to make his readers intimate with his characters, he must first of all be careful that his characters are worth knowing intimately.

Most of us, in actual life, are accustomed to distinguish people who are worth our while from people who are not; and those of us who live advisedly are accustomed to shield ourselves from people who cannot, by the mere fact of what they are, repay us for the expenditure of time and energy we should have to make to get to know them. And whenever a friend of ours asks us deliberately to meet another friend of his, we take it for granted that our friend has reasons for believing that the acquaintanceship will be of benefit or of interest to both. Now the novelist stands in the position of a friend who asks us to meet certain people whom he knows; and he runs the risk of our losing faith in his judgment unless we find his people worth our while. By the mere fact that we bother to read a novel, thus expending time which might otherwise be pa.s.sed in company with actual people, we are going out of our way to meet the characters to whom the novelist wishes to introduce us. He therefore owes us an a.s.surance that they shall be even more worth our while than the average actual person.

This is not to say that they should necessarily be better; they may, of course, be worse: but they should be more clearly significant of certain interesting elements of human nature, more thoroughly representative of certain phases of human life which it is well for us to learn and know.

In deciding on the sort of characters that will be worth his readers'

while, the novelist must of course be influenced by the nature of the audience he is writing for. The characters of "Little Women" may be worth the while of children; and it is not an adverse criticism of Louisa M. Alcott to say that they are not worth the while of mature men and women. Similarly, it is not an adverse criticism of certain Continental novelists to say that their characters are decidedly unfit companions for adolescent girls. Our judgment of the characters in a novel should be conditioned always by our sense of the sort of readers to whom the novel is addressed. Mr. Henry James, in his later years, has written for the super-civilized; and his characters should be judged by different standards than the pirates of "Treasure Island,"--a story which was written for boys, both young and old. One reader may be bored by pirates, another by super-subtle cosmopolitans; and each reader has the privilege of avoiding the society of the characters that weary him.

But the very greatest characters of fiction are worth everybody's while; and surely the masters need have felt no hesitancy in asking any one to meet Sancho Panza, Robinson Crusoe, Henry Esmond, Jean Valjean, or Terence Mulvaney. In fact, the most amazing thing about a great fict.i.tious figure is the mult.i.tude of very different people that the character is capable of interesting. Many times we willingly absent ourselves from actual society to pa.s.s an evening in the company of a fict.i.tious personage of a cla.s.s with which we never a.s.sociate in actual life. Perhaps in the actual world we would never bother to converse with illiterate provincial people; and yet we may not feel it a waste of time and energy to meet them in the pages of "Middlemarch."

For my own part, I have always, in actual life, avoided meeting the sort of people that appear in Thackeray's "Vanity Fair"; and yet I find it not only interesting but profitable to a.s.sociate with them through the entire extent of a rather lengthy novel. Why is it that a reader, who, although he has crossed the ocean many times, has never cared to enter the engine-room of a liner, is yet willing enough to meet on intimate terms Mr. Kipling's engineer, Mac Andrew? And why is it that ladies who, in actual society, are fastidious of their acquaintanceship, should yet a.s.sociate throughout a novel with the Sapho of Daudet? What is the reason why these fict.i.tious characters should seem, for nearly every reader, more worth while than the very same sort of people in actual life?

The reason is that great fict.i.tious characters are typical of their cla.s.s, to an extent rarely to be noticed in any actual member of the cla.s.s they typify. They "contain mult.i.tudes," to borrow Whitman's phrase. All idealistic visionaries are typified in Don Quixote, all misers in Harpagon, all hypocrites in Tartufe, all egoists in Sir Willoughby Patterne, all clever tricksy women in Becky Sharp, all sentimentalists in Mr. Barrie's Tommy. But the average actual man is not of sufficient magnitude to contain a mult.i.tude of others; he is comparatively lacking in typical traits; he is not, to such a great extent, ill.u.s.trative of life, because only in a small measure is he representative of his cla.s.s. There are, of course, in actual life, certain people of unusual magnitude who justify Emerson's t.i.tle of "Representative Men." Benjamin Franklin, for example, is such a man.

He is the only actual person entirely typical of eighteenth-century America; and that is the main reason why, as an exhibition of character, his autobiography is just as profitable a book as the master-works of fiction. But men so representative are rare in actual life; and the chief business of fiction is therefore to supply them.

It is mainly by supplying this need for representative men and women that the novelist can make his characters worth the while of every reader. But after he has made them quintessential of a cla.s.s, he must be careful also to individualize them. Unless he endows them with certain personal traits that distinguish them from all other representatives or members of their cla.s.s, whether actual or fict.i.tious, he will fail to invest them with the illusion of reality.

Every great character of fiction must exhibit, therefore, an intimate combination of typical and individual traits. It is through being typical that the character is true; it is through being individual that the character is convincing.

The reason why most allegorical figures are ineffective is that, although they are typical, they are not at the same time individual.

They are abstractly representative of a cla.s.s; but they are not concretely distinguishable from other representatives or members of the cla.s.s. We know them, therefore, not as persons but merely as ideas. We feel very little human interest nowadays in reading over the old morality plays, whose characters are merely allegorical abstractions. But in criticising them we must remember that they were designed not so much to be read as to be performed upon the stage; and that the actors who represented their abstract and merely typical characters must necessarily have endowed them with concreteness and with individuality. Though a character in one of these allegorical plays might be called "Everyman," it was one particular man who walked and talked upon the boards; and he evoked sympathy not so much for the type as for the individual. But allegory written to be read is less likely to produce the illusion of reality; and it is only when allegorical characters are virtually conceived as individuals, instead of mere abstractions, that they touch the heart. Christian, in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" is so conceived. He is entirely representative of seventeenth-century Christianity; in a sense he is all men of Bunyan's time and Bunyan's religion; but he is also one man and one only, and we could never in our thought confuse him with any other character in or out of fiction.

But just as a character may be ineffective through being merely typical, so also a character may be unsignificant through being merely individual. The minor figures in Ben Jonson's Comedies of Humours are mere personifications of exaggerated individual traits. They are caricatures rather than characters. d.i.c.kens frequently commits the error of exhibiting figures devoid of representative traits. Tommy Traddles is sharply individualized by the fact that his hair is always standing on end; but he exhibits no essential truth of human nature.

Barkis, who is always willin', and Micawber, who is always waiting for something to turn up, are emphatically distinguished from everybody else in or out of fiction; but they lack the large reality of representative characters. They are individualities instead of individuals. They do not exhibit an agglomeration of many different but consistent traits rendered unified and single by a dominant and informing characteristic, such as ambition in Macbeth, senility in Lear, or irresoluteness in Hamlet. A great fict.i.tious character must be at once generic and specific; it must give concrete expression to an abstract idea; it must be an individualized representation of the typical qualities of a cla.s.s. It is only figures of this sort that are finally worth while in fiction,--more worth the reader's while than the average actual man.

But there is yet another reason why it is often more valuable for the reader to meet fict.i.tious characters than to meet people of the same cla.s.s in actual life; and this reason is that during the day or two it takes to read a novel he may review the most significant events of many years, and thus get to know a fict.i.tious character more completely in a brief s.p.a.ce of time than he could get to know him, if the character were actual, in several years of continuous acquaintanceship. We meet two sorts of characters in the pages of the novelists,--characters which may be called static, and characters which may be called dynamic. The first remain unchanged throughout the course of the story: the second grow up or down, as the case may be, through the influence of circ.u.mstances, of their own wills, or of the wills of other people. The recurrent characters of Mr. Kipling's early tales, such as Mrs. Hauksbee, Strickland, Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, are static figures. Although they do different things in different stories, their characters remain always the same. But Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are dynamic figures; they grow and change throughout the novel; they are, each in his own way, bigger and wiser people when we leave them than they were when first we met them. To show a character developing under stress or ripening easily beneath beneficent influences is one of the greatest possibilities of fiction.

And to exhibit the gradual disintegration of a character, as George Eliot does in the case of t.i.to Melema, is to teach us more of the tragedy of life than we might learn in many years of actual experience.

Only after the process of creation is completed, and a character stands living in the mind of the novelist, need he consider the various technical expedients which may be employed to make the reader conscious of the character as a personal presence. These technical expedients are many; but they may all be grouped as phases of one or the other of two contrasted methods of delineating character, which may be called, for convenience, direct and indirect. According to the first method, traits of character are conveyed directly to the reader through some sort of statement by the writer of the story: according to the second method, characteristics are conveyed indirectly to the reader through a necessary inference, on his part, from the narrative itself. In employing the first, or direct, method, the author (either in his own person or in that of some character which he a.s.sumes) stands between the reader and the character he is portraying, in the att.i.tude, more or less frankly confessed, of showman or expositor.

In employing the second, or indirect, method, the author seeks to obliterate himself as much as possible from the reader's consciousness; and having brought the reader face to face with the character he desires to portray, leaves the reader to make his own acquaintance with the character. The indirect method is of course more difficult, and, when successfully employed, is more artistic, than the direct method. But seldom is either used to the exclusion of the other; and it would be possible to ill.u.s.trate by successive quotations from any first-rate novel, like "The Egoist" for example, how the same characteristics are portrayed first by the one and then by the other method.

And each of the two methods shows itself in many different phases.

There are several distinct ways of delineating character directly, and also several distinct means of indirect delineation. It is perhaps serviceable for the purposes of study to distinguish them somewhat sharply one from another; but it must always be remembered that the masters of fiction usually employ a commingling of them all, without conscious awareness of any critical distinction between them. Bearing this ever in mind, let us venture on a critical examination of some of the most frequently recurrent phases, first, of the direct, and secondly, of the indirect method.

The most obvious, and at the same time the most elementary, means of direct portrayal is by a deliberate expository statement of the leading traits of the character to be portrayed. Thus, at the outset of "The Vicar of Wakefield," the author, writing in the person of the Vicar, thus expounds the traits of Mrs. Primrose:--

"I was ever of opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population. From this motive, I had scarce taken orders a year before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife as she did her wedding-gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well. To do her justice, she was a good-natured notable woman; and as for breeding, there were few country ladies who could show more. She could read any English book without much spelling; but for pickling, preserving, and cookery, none could excel her. She prided herself also upon being an excellent contriver in housekeeping; though I could never find that we grew richer with all her contrivances."

This elementary means of portrayal has the obvious advantage of succinctness. The reader is told at once, and with a fair measure of completeness, what he is to think about the character in question.

For this reason the expedient is highly serviceable at the outset of a story. So excellent an artist as Stevenson, in the "New Arabian Nights," began each tale in the collection with a paragraph in which he expounded the main traits of the leading character. But the expedient has also several disadvantages. In the first place, being expository, it is not narrative in mood; it savors of the essay rather than the story; and if it be used not at the outset but during the course of a narrative, it halts the progress of the action. In the second place, it is abstract rather than concrete; it does not bring the reader into the presence of a character, but merely into the presence of an explanation; and it leaves the reader in an att.i.tude exactly like that which he holds toward certain actual people, concerning whom he has been told a great deal by their friends, but whom he has never met himself. The whole first chapter of "The Vicar of Wakefield" is a series of little essays on the various members of the Primrose family. Nothing happens in the chapter; the characters never step bodily into view; and we feel at the end that we have heard a great deal of talk about people whom we should like to meet but whom as yet we have not seen.

It is therefore in certain ways more satisfactory to portray character directly through a descriptive, rather than an expository, statement.

Thus, in the second chapter of "Martin Chuzzlewit," we are told of Mr.

Pecksniff:--

"His very throat was moral. You saw a good-deal of it. You looked over a very low fence of white cravat (whereof no man had ever beheld the tie, for he fastened it behind), and there it lay, a valley between two jutting heights of collar, serene and whiskerless before you. It seemed to say, on the part of Mr. Pecksniff, 'There is no deception, ladies and gentlemen, all is peace, a holy calm pervades me.' So did his hair, just grizzled with an iron-gray, which was all brushed off his forehead, and stood bolt upright, or slightly drooped in kindred action with his heavy eyelids. So did his person, which was sleek though free from corpulency. So did his manner, which was soft and oily. In a word, even his plain black suit, and state of widower, and dangling double eye-gla.s.s, all tended to the same purpose, and cried aloud, 'Behold the moral Pecksniff!'"

This statement, being in the main concretely descriptive rather than abstractly expository, brings us face to face with the character at the same time that it tells us what to think of him. And whereas we feel that we have merely heard about Mrs. Primrose, we feel that we have really seen Mr. Pecksniff.

It was the custom of Sir Walter Scott, at the introduction of a character, to furnish the reader with an elaborate set portrayal, partly expository and partly descriptive of the traits and features of the character; and to allow this initial direct statement to do duty through the remainder of the novel. The trouble with this off-hand expedient is that the reader inevitably forgets the set statement of the author before the narrative has very far progressed. It is therefore more effective to make a direct portrayal of character, whether expository or descriptive, little by little rather than all in a lump; and to present at any one time to the reader only such traits or features as he needs to be reminded of in order to appreciate the scene before him. Thus, in Mr. Kipling's masterpiece, called "They,"

we catch this initial glimpse of Miss Florence:--

"The garden door--heavy oak sunk deep in the thickness of the wall--opened further: a woman in a big garden hat set her foot slowly on the time-hollowed stone step and as slowly walked across the turf.

I was forming some apology when she lifted up her head and I saw that she was blind.

"'I heard you,' she said. 'Isn't that a motor car?'"

And it is only after five pages of narrative that the writer deems it the proper time to add:--

"She stood looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay, and I saw for the first time that she was beautiful."

The point that a direct statement of characteristics should preferably be delivered to the reader little by little rather than all in a lump is particularly patent when the statement is not external and objective like those already quoted, but internal and subjective. In a certain type of fiction, which is commonly called "the psychological novel," the usual expedient for delineating character is a statement partly narrative and partly expository of what is taking place within the mind of the fict.i.tious person, based upon an a.n.a.lysis of his thoughts and his emotions, at important moments of the story. This expedient of portraying character by mental a.n.a.lysis is George Eliot's favorite technical device. Here is a typical pa.s.sage, from "The Mill on the Floss," Chapter V:--

"Maggie soon thought she had been hours in the attic, and it must be tea-time, and they were all having their tea, and not thinking of her.

Well, then, she would stay up there and starve herself--hide herself behind the tub, and stay there all night; and then they would all be frightened, and Tom would be sorry. Thus Maggie thought in the pride of her heart, as she crept behind the tub; but presently she began to cry again at the idea that they didn't mind her being there. If she went down again to Tom now--would he forgive her?--perhaps her father would be there, and he would take her part. But then she wanted Tom to forgive her because he loved her, not because his father told him.

No, she would never go down if Tom didn't come to fetch her. This resolution lasted in great intensity for five dark minutes behind the tub; but then the need of being loved, the strongest need in poor Maggie's nature, began to wrestle with her pride, and soon threw it.

She crept from behind her tub into the twilight of the long attic, but just then she heard a quick footstep on the stairs.

"Tom had been too much interested in his talk with Luke, in going the round of the premises, walking in and out where he pleased, and whittling sticks without any particular reason, except that he didn't whittle sticks at school, to think of Maggie and the effect his anger had produced on her. He meant to punish her, and that business having been performed, he occupied himself with other matters, like a practical person."--

And so on. It is only after four hundred words more of this sort of a.n.a.lysis that the author tells us:--"It was Tom's step, then, that Maggie heard on the stairs." This is George Eliot's way of portraying the characters of two children who have quarreled.

Much is to be said in favor of this expedient of depicting character by a.n.a.lysis. It is the only means by which the reader may be informed directly of those thoughts and emotions of a character which are the mainsprings of his acts. And since we cannot feel that we know a person intimately unless we understand the workings of his mind at characteristic moments, we derive a great advantage from this immediate presentation of his mental processes. On the other hand, the use of the expedient destroys the very desirable illusion that the reader is an observer actually looking at the action, since the details depicted do not happen to the eye but rather to the a.n.a.lytic understanding. The expedient has the disadvantages of being exceedingly abstract, and of halting happenings while the author tells us why they happened. It is certainly unfortunate, for instance, that it should take Tom a whole long page to get to Maggie after she has heard his "_quick_ footstep on the stairs." Furthermore, this expedient tends to destroy the illusion of reality by forcing the reader into a mental att.i.tude which he seldom a.s.sumes in looking on at actual life. During actual occurrences people almost never pause to a.n.a.lyze each other and seldom even a.n.a.lyze themselves. They act, and watch other people act, without a microscopic insight into motives.

And surely the purpose of narrative should be to represent events as they seem to occur in actuality, rather than to present a dissertation on their causes in the manner of an essay.

An important point, however, remains to be considered. Events are of two kinds, external and internal; things happen subjectively as well as objectively: and in representing the sort of occurrence which takes place only inside a person's mind, the expedient of a.n.a.lysis is by far the most serviceable means of making clear the elements of character that contribute to it. But if the same expedient be employed habitually in the depiction of external events as well, it is likely to give the impression of unwarrantable vivisection. There is a certain falsity of mood in giving an objective event a subjective rendering.

When, therefore, it is desired to depict a character by direct comment on his actions or his personality, there is a great advantage in allowing the comment to be made by one of the other characters in the story, instead of by the author himself in an att.i.tude of a.s.sumed omniscience. Jane Austen deftly exhibits this subtler phase of the expedient in many admirable pa.s.sages. For instance, in Chapter x.x.xIII of "Emma," Mrs. Elton thus chatters to Emma Woodhouse:--

"'Jane Fairfax is absolutely charming, Miss Woodhouse.--I quite rave about Jane Fairfax--a sweet, interesting creature. So mild and lady-like--and with such talents!--I a.s.sure you I think she has very extraordinary talents. I do not scruple to say that she plays extremely well. I know enough of music to speak decidedly on that point. Oh! she is absolutely charming! You will laugh at my warmth--but upon my word, I talk of nothing but Jane Fairfax.'"

In Chapter XXI the same character has been thus commented on by Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley. Emma speaks first:--

"'Miss Fairfax is reserved.'