The Principles of Aesthetics

by De Witt H. Parker

Of course, since we secure no personal triumphs in reading, and every one wishes to play his own part successfully in real life, literature cannot become a substitute for life, except with the artist who triumphs in making his story. Nevertheless, as Henry James says, fiction may and should compete with life, and this it can do by giving us the feelings aroused by action without imposing upon us the responsibilities and the fateful results of action itself; there we can learn new things about life without incurring the risks of participation in it. We can play the part of the adventurer without being involved in any blame; we can fall in love with the heroine without any subsequential entanglements; we can be a hero without suffering the penalties of heroism; we can travel into foreign lands without deserting our business or emptying our purses. Hence, although no one would exchange life for literature, one is better content, having literature, to forego much of life.

The elements of every story are these five: character, incident, nature, fate, and milieu—the social, historical, and intellectual background. Character and incident are capable of some degree of separation, so far as, in novels of adventure, the personalities necessary to carry on the action may be very abstract or elementary, and so far as, in so-called psychological novels, the number of events related may be very small and their interest dependent upon their effect on character; but one without the other is as inconceivable in a story as it is in life itself, and the development of fiction has been steadily in the direction of their interdependence. Aristotle's dictum regarding the superior importance of plot over character applies to the drama only, and because character cannot well be revealed there except through action. The construction of character depends upon the delineation of distinctive and recognizable physical traits, a surprisingly small number sufficing, a mere name being almost enough; upon the definition of the individual's position in a group—his relation to family, townspeople, and other associates—a matter of capital importance; and, finally, information about his more permanent interests and attitudes. This construction is best made piecemeal, the character disclosing itself gradually during the story, as it does in life, and growing under the stress of circumstances. The old idea of fixity of character does not suit our modern notions of growth; we demand that character be created by the story; it should not preexist, as Schopenhauer thought it should, with its nature as determinate and its reactions as predictable as those of a chemical substance. And although in their broad outlines the possibilities of human nature are perhaps fewer in number than the chemical substances, the variations of these types in their varying environments are infinite. To create a poignant uniqueness while preserving the type is the supreme achievement of the writer of fiction. We want as many of the details of character, and no more, as are necessary to this end.

By incident is meant action expressing character or action or event determining fate. There are a thousand actions, mechanical or habitual, performed by us all, which throw no light upon our individuality. Almost all of these the novelist may neglect, or if he wishes to describe them, a single example will serve to reveal whatever uniqueness they may hide. There are an equal number of actions and events like blind alleys leading nowhere; from these also the novelist abstracts; it is only when he can trace some effect upon fate or character that he is interested. The delineation of nature or the milieu is governed by the same reference: a social or intellectual environment, no matter how interesting in itself, without potent individualities which it molds, or scenery, no matter how romantic, unless it is a theater of action or a spiritual influence upon persons, has no place in a story. Each of these, however, may by itself become the subject-matter of a literary essay, provided the writer's own moods and appreciations are included; otherwise it is a topic for sociology, history, or topography, not for literature.

By fate in a story I mean the writer's feeling for causality. As the maker of an image of life, the writer must portray life as molded by its past and by all the circumstances surrounding it. He must present character as determined by personal influence, by nature and the milieu; he must have a vivid sense for the interrelation of incidents. The feeling for fate is independent of any special philosophical view of the world; it does not imply fatalism or the denial of the spontaneous and originative force of personality; it is simply recognition of the wholeness of life. Nor, again, does it imply the possibility of predicting the end of a story from the beginning, for the living sequence, forging its links as it proceeds, is not mechanical; but it does imply that after things have happened we must be able to perceive their relatedness—the beginning, middle, and end as one whole. In the story, there must be the same kind of combination of necessity and contingency that there is in life: we must be sure that every act and incident will have its effect, and we must be able to divine, in a general way, what that effect will be; but owing to the complexity of life, which prevents us from knowing all the data of its problems, and owing to the spontaneity of its agents and the creative syntheses within its processes, we must never be able to be certain just what the effect will be like; our every calculation must be subject to the correction of surprise. Suspense and excitement must go hand in hand with a feeling for a developing inner necessity. There is no story without both. Yet no formula for the amount of each can be devised. The dependence of man upon nature makes inevitable the occurrence of what we call accidents, violent breaks in the tissue of personal and social life, unaccountable from the point of view of our human purposes. By admitting the part played by the non-human background in determining fate, the naturalistic school of writers have enlarged the vision of the novelist beyond the range of the tender-minded sentimentalist. It is to be expected, moreover, that coincidences should occur,—the meeting of independent lines of causation with consequences fateful to each. A careful investigation would disclose that most interesting careers have been largely determined by coincidences. The only demand that we can make of the artist in this regard is that he do not give us so many of these that his work will seem unreal. We must not feel that he is making the story in order to surprise us and thrill us—the purpose of melodrama; the story should make itself. Hardy's The Return of the Native is an illustration of failure here; the coincidences are so many that it seems magical, the work of a capricious genius, not of nature.

By fate in a story we do not mean, of course, the mere causal concatenation of events, for some relation to a purposeful life is always implied. But since this relation is a general condition applying to all art, we shall consider it here only as it affects the unity of a story. No rule can be laid down for the compass of a story; it may cover a small incident, as in many short stories, or it may embrace the whole or the most significant part of a life. The requirement that there be a beginning, middle, and end holds, but does not enlighten us as to what constitutes an end. Death makes one natural end to a story, since it makes an end to life itself; but within the span of a life the parts are not so clearly defined. Yet despite the continuity and overlapping of the parts of life, there are certain natural breaks and divisions,—the working out of a plan to fulfillment or disaster, the termination or consummation of a love affair, the commission of a crime with its consequences, or more subtle things, such as the breaking up of an old attitude and the formation of a new one. In life itself there are incidents that are closed because they cease to affect us deeply any more, purposes which we abandon because we can get no farther with them or because they have found their natural fulfillment, points of view which we have to relinquish because life supplies us with new facts which they do not include. The unity of a story should mirror these natural unities. The search for the wholeness of life should not blind us to the relative isolation of its parts; and there is fate in the parts as well as in the whole.

The selection of incidents for their bearing upon fate, the selection of significant traits for the construction of character, with the resulting unity and simplicity of the parts and the whole, is responsible for most of the ideality of fiction as compared with real life. Real life is a confused medley of impressions of people and events, a mixture of the important and the unimportant, the consequential and the inconsequential, with no evident pattern. Of this, literary art is the verklartes Bild. It is not because, in literature, men are happier and nobler that life seems superior there; but because its outlines are sharper, its design more perspicuous, the motives that sway it better understood. It has the advantage over life that a landscape flooded with sunshine has over one shrouded in darkness.

The way the literary artist builds up the ideal social world of fiction follows closely the method which we all employ in constructing the real social world. In real life we start from certain perceived acts and utterances, to which we then attach purposive meanings, and between which we establish relations. The process of interpretation is so rapid that, although strictly inferential in character and having imagination as its seat, it seems, nevertheless, like direct perception. As we see people act and hear them talk, it is as if we had a vision, confused indeed, yet direct, of their inner lives. And yet, as we have insisted, the real social world is constructed, not perceived.

The literary artist, unless he calls dramatic art to his aid, cannot present the persons and acts of his story; he can only describe them and report their talk. Description must take the place of vision, a recorded conversation the place of a heard one. Yet, by these means, the artist can give us almost as direct an intuition as we get from life itself; he can make us seem to see and overhear. From the acts which he describes we can infer the motives of the characters, and from the reported conversations we can learn their opinions and dreams. Or the novelist may insert a letter which we can read as if it were real. The resulting image of life will be clearer than any we could construct for ourselves; for the artist can report life more carefully than we could observe it; and he can make his characters more articulate in the expression of themselves than ordinary men, giving them a gift of tongues like his own. This last is especially characteristic of the drama, where sometimes, as in Shakespeare, men speak more like gods than like men. And we can listen to the intimate conversation of friends and lovers, upon which, in real life, we would not intrude.

This direct method of exposition through the description of acts and events and the record of conversations is the basis of every vivid story. It leaves the necessary inferences to the reader, just as life leaves them to the observer. In the hands of a master like Fontane, this method is incomparable; nothing can supplant it. It is the only method available for the dramatist, who, however, can make it still more effective through histrionic portrayal. Yet it does not suffice to satisfy our craving for knowledge of life, for only the broader, more obvious feelings can be inferred from the acts of men; the subtler and more remote escape. Even in conversation these cannot all be revealed; for many of them are too intimate to be spoken, and many again are unknown even to those who hold them. To-day we ask of the novelist that he disclose the finest, most hidden tissues of the soul. To this end, the microscopy of analysis, the so-called psychological method, must be employed. The novelist must perform upon his characters the same sort of dissection that we perform when, introspecting, we seek out the obscurer grounds of our conduct. And in the pursuit of this knowledge the novelist can oftentimes do better with his characters than we can do with ourselves. For utter sincerity regarding ourselves is impossible; the desire to think well of ourselves prevents us from recognizing the truth about ourselves. The novelist, on the contrary, can be unprejudiced and can know fully what he himself is creating. In order to accomplish this same purpose, the dramatist has to introduce bits of self-analysis, unusually sincere and penetrating, spoken aloud,—in the old style, monologues. And yet, without sacrificing the truthfulness of his own art, he cannot go so deep here as the novelist.

Through his analysis of his characters, the novelist must, however, construct them; otherwise he is a psychologist, not an artist. A synthetic vision of personality must supervene upon the dissection, and the emotional interest in character and action must subsist alongside of the intellectual interest. He must not let us lose the vivid sense of a living presence. In order to keep this, he must continue to employ the direct method of description of person and action, and report of conversation. How far the analytic method may be carried and at the same time the sense of personality kept intact, may be inferred from the work of Henry James, who, nevertheless, seems at times to fail to bring the out-going threads of his thought back into the web which he is weaving.