III
But let us discriminate. In “drawing from life” much will depend, as Aristotle might say, on (a) the extent, (b) the manner, (c) your intention: as likewise upon (d) the person drawn. I exclude all such portraits as are likely to provoke an action at law; for these come to be assessed under separate rules of criticism: and in general we may say of them that they should be avoided from the instinct of self-preservation rather than on grounds of disinterested aesthetic.
Confining ourselves, then, to portraits which are not actionable, we may take, as an extreme instance, Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. For in this book the persons portrayed are the author’s own parents, and he portrays them in a manner and with intention to make them odious, and to any extent: which seems to involve the nice moral question whether a person the best able to do a thing should not sometimes be the person who least ought to do it. And should the injunction against laying hands on your father Parmenides cover Parmenides if he happen to be your maiden aunt?—and maybe, too, she can retort, because you come of a literary family, you know! This power of retort, again, complicates a question which, you perceive, begins to be delicate. Ought you to catch anyone and hit him where he cannot hit back? Parmenides is no longer a relative but (say) a publisher, and you have—or think you have—reason to believe that he has cheated you. (And before you answer that this is incredible, let me say that I am dealing with an actual case, in which, however, I was not a party.) Are you justified in writing a work of fiction which holds him up to public opprobrium under a thin disguise? In my opinion you are not: because it means your attacking the fellow from a plane on which he can get no footing, to retaliate.
But it may be urged against him that Dickens by consent, and pretty well on his own admission, drew portraits of his mother in Mrs. Nickleby, and of his father in Mr. Micawber, and again in old Mr. Dorrit of the Marshalsea—this last, I am sure, the nearest to life. Well, I pass the question of provocation or moral excuse, observing only that Dickens tholed a childhood of culpable, even of damnable, neglect, whereas the parents of Samuel Butler did at least wing, with a Shrewsbury and Cambridge education, the barbs he was to shoot into their dead breasts. Dickens’ parents turned him down, at ten, to a blacking-factory, and, as we saw in our last lecture, when the moment came to release him from the blacking-warehouse his mother tried to insist on his returning.
“I do not,” he records to Forster, “write resentfully or angrily, for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am; but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.”