ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHARACTER IN FICTION
Maxwell Gray
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.