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.