On the art of writing fiction

by Unknown

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