The first thing is to realise your characters—i.e. make them real persons to yourself, and then you will be more likely to persuade the reader that they are real people. Unless this is done, your hero and heroine will be described as "puppets" or "abstractions." I am not saying the task is easy—in fact, it is one of the most difficult that the novelist has to face. But there is no profit in shirking it, and the sooner it is dealt with the better. The history of character representation in drama is full of luminous teaching, and a study of it cannot be other than highly instructive. In the early Mystery and Morality plays, virtues and vices were each apportioned their respective actors—that is to say, one man set forth Good Counsel, another Repentance, another Gluttony, and another Pride. Even so late as Philip Massinger's "A New Way to Pay Old Debts," we have Wellborn, Justice, Greedy, Tapwell, Froth, and Furnace. Now this seems very elementary to us, but it has one great merit: the audience knew what each character stood for, and could form an intelligent idea of his place in the piece. In these days we have become more subtle—necessarily so. Following the lead of the Shakespearean dramatists, we have not described our characters by giving them names—virtuous or otherwise—we let them describe themselves by their speech and action. The essential thing is that we should know our characters intimately, so intimately that, although they exist in imagination alone, they are as real to us as the members of our own family. Falstaff never had flesh and blood, but as Shakespeare portrayed him, you feel that you have only to prick him and he will bleed. The historical Hamlet is a mist; the Hamlet of the play is a reality.
This power of realisation depends on two things: Observation with insight, and Sympathy with imagination. Observation is a most valuable gift, but without insight it is likely to work mischief by creating a tendency to write down just what you see and hear. Zola's novels too often suggest the note-book. Avoid photographing life as you would avoid a dangerous foe. The newspaper reporter can "beat you hollow," for that is his special subject: life as it is. Observe what goes on around you, but get behind the scenes; study selfishness and "otherness," and the inter-play of motives, the conflict of interests which causes this tangle of human affairs—in other words, obtain an insight into them by asking the "why" and "wherefore."
Above all, learn to see with other people's eyes, and to feel with other people's hearts. For instance, you may find it needful to attend synagogue-worship in order to obtain a first-hand knowledge of the religion of your Jewish heroine. When you see the men in silk hats, and praying-shawls over their shoulders, you may be tempted to despise Judaism; the result being that you determine not to cumber your novel with a description of such "nonsense." Well, you will lose one of the most picturesque features of your story; you will fail to see the part which the synagogue plays in your heroine's mental struggle, and the portrayal of her character will be sadly defective in consequence. No; a novelist, as such, should have no religion, no politics, no social creed; whatever he believes as a private individual should not interfere with the outgoing of sympathy in constructing the characters he intends to set forth. Human nature is a compound of the virtuous and the vicious, or, to change the figure, a perpetual oscillation between flesh and spirit. Life is half tragedy and half comedy: men and women are sometimes wise and often foolish. From this maze of mystery you are to develop new creations, and actual people are your starting-point, never your models.
Methods of Characterisation
By characterisation is meant the power to make your ideal persons appear real. It is one thing to make them real to yourself, and quite another thing to make them real to other people. Characterisation needs a union of imaginative and artistic gifts. In this respect, as in all others, Shakespeare is pre-eminent. His characters are alike clear in conception and expression, and their human quality is just as wonderful as the large scale on which they move, covering, as they do, the entire field of human nature.
There are certain well-known methods of characterisation, and to these I propose to devote the remainder of this chapter. The first and most obvious is for the author to describe the character. This is generally recognised as bad art. To say "She was a very wicked woman," is like the boy who drew a four-legged animal and wrote underneath, "This is a cow." If that boy had succeeded in drawing a cow there would have been no need to label it; and, in the same way, if you succeed in realising and drawing your characters there will be no need to talk about them. The best characterisation never says what a person is; it shows what he or she is by what they do and say. I do not mean that you must say nothing at all about your creations; the novels of Hardy and Meredith contain a good deal of indirect comment of this kind; but it is a notable fact that Hardy's weakest work, "A Laodicean," contains more comment than any of the others he has written. Stevenson aptly said, "Readers cannot fail to have remarked that what an author tells us of the beauty or the charm of his creatures goes for nought; that we know instantly better; that the heroine cannot open her mouth but what, all in a moment, the fine phrases of preparation fall from her like the robes of Cinderella, and she stands before us as a poor, ugly, sickly wench, or perhaps a strapping market-woman."
There is another point to be remembered. If you label a character at the outset as a very humorous person, the reader prepares himself for a good laugh now and then, and if you disappoint him—well, you have lost a reader and gained an adverse critic. To announce beforehand what you are going to do, and then fail, is to put a weapon into the hands of those who honour you with a reading. "Often a single significant detail will throw more light on a character than pages of comment. An example in perfection is the phrase in which Thackeray tells how Becky Crawley, amid all her guilt and terror, when her husband had Lord Steyne by the throat, felt a sudden thrill of admiration for Rawdon's splendid strength. It is like a flash of lightning which shows the deeps of the selfish, sensual woman's nature. It is no wonder that Thackeray threw down his pen, as he confessed that he did, and cried, 'That is a stroke of genius.'"
The lesson is plain. Don't say what your hero and heroine are: make them tell their own characters by words and deeds.
The Trick of "Idiosyncrasies"
Young writers, who fail to mark off the individuality of one character from another, by the strong lines of difference which are found in real life, endeavour to atone for their incompetency by emphasising physical and mental oddities. This is a mere literary "trick." To invest your hero with a squint, or an irritating habit of blowing his nose continually; or to make your heroine guilty of using a few funny phrases every time she speaks, is certainly to distinguish them from the other characters in the book who cannot boast of such excellences, but it must not be called characterisation. It is a bastard attempt to economise the labour that is necessary to discover individuality of soul and to bring it out in skilful dialogues and carefully chosen situations.