Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

We say that character-drawing in fiction, for instance, is an art. A writer holds a certain picture of a man or woman in his brain, as the story containing this character develops. In drawing a low character, the mind must be altered and deformed for its expression. In a book of fiction of a dozen different characters, the productive energy passes through a dozen different matrices before finding expression. These forms lie in the mind, during the progress of the novel; and since our own characters are formed of the straight expression of the thought as it appears in the brain, one does not need to impress the conclusion that we are being false to ourselves in the part of fictionists, no matter how consummate we become as artists.

It is an old story how the daughter of Dickens sat forgotten in his study, while he was at work upon some atrocious character of the under London world, possibly Quilp; how the great caricaturist left his desk for a mirror, and standing there went through the most extraordinary grimaces and contortions, fixing the character firmly in his mind for a more perfect expression in words.

In this same regard, one of the most interesting and sorrowful of all observations is the character disintegration of those who take up the work of acting as a career. Yet fiction writing is but a subtler form of acting in words. The value of our books is in part the concision of character portrayal—the facility with which we are able to lose ourselves and be some one else. Often in earlier years, I have known delight when some one said, "You must be that person when you are writing about him." I would answer: "He comes clearer and clearer through a book and presently begins to do himself. After that one goes over the early part of the book during which the character is being learned, and corrects him in the light of the more nearly finished conception."

It was a betrayal of glibness, of lightly-founded character, a shiftiness which must pass.

The utterance of truth is not aided by passing through a brain that is cut like a hockey rink from the passage of many characters. The expression of truth preserves its great vitality by passing in as near a straight line as possible from the source through the instrument. The instrument is always inferior. It is always somehow out of true, because it is human and temporal. It is not enhanced by human artifice, by actings, nor by identification with fictions. The law of all life tells us, and we do not need to be told if we stop to realise, that the spirit of man is integrated by truth in expression, that the more nearly the truth we speak, the more nearly we bring the human and temporal to a par with the immortal within us. Bringing the mind to interpret the immortal is the true life, the true education, the fruits of which are the love of men and serenity and growth. I once heard it said that Carlyle, Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson and such men could not be artists in the fiction sense—that their efforts were pathetic, when they tried to enflesh their literary efforts in story form.

This is true. Yet we do not count our greatest novelists and actors above them in the fine perspective of the years, for they were interpreters of the human spirit. They interpreted more and more, as the years mounted upon them, the human spirit as it played through their own minds, which steadily conformed more nearly to truth. The point of the whole matter is, that in learning to interpret the human spirit more and more directly, by actions in the world or written words apart, the mind draws increasingly deep from a source that is inexhaustible, and its expression finally becomes so rich and direct and potent that acting and fictioning of any form is impossible.

Again, it is the straight expression of things as they find them, that charms us in the words of children and masters. The true education is to encourage such expression, to keep the passage between the mind and its centre of origins wide open for the forth-sending of the inimitable and the actual.

The young minds here are trained to realise that the biddings of their inner life are more interesting and reliable than any processes merely mental can possibly be. Unless their teacher fails, they will become more and more the expressionists of themselves. No matter what form their work takes in the world, the ideal is held that the dimension of the human spirit will be upon their work, and this alone makes the task of any man or woman singular and precious and of the elect.

I hear again, "But you will make them solitaries...." The solitary way is first—all the great companions have taken that way at first. Solitude—that is the atmosphere for the conception of every heroism. The aspirations of the solitary turn to God. Having heard the voice of God—then comes the turning back to men.... To be powerful in two worlds—that is the ideal. There is a time for nestlings—and a time for great migratory flights.