Aspects of the novel
where the secret life is visible, to a world that is not and cannot be
ours, to a world where the narrator and the creator are one. And now we
can get a definition as to when a character in a book is real: it is
real when the novelist knows everything about it. He may not choose to
tell us all he knows--many of the facts, even of the kind we call
obvious, may be hidden. But he will give us the feeling that though the
character has not been explained, it is explicable, and we get from this
a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life.
For human intercourse, as soon as we look at it for its own sake and not
as a social adjunct, is seen to be haunted by a spectre. We cannot
understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal
ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a
makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can
know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading,
we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. In this
direction fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the
evidence, and each of us knows from his own experience that there is
something beyond the evidence, and even if the novelist has not got it
correctly, well--he has tried. He can post his people in as babies, he
can cause them to go on without sleep or food, he can make them be in
love, love and nothing but love, provided he seems to know everything
about them, provided they are his creations. That is why Moll Flanders
cannot be here, that is one of the reasons why Amelia and Emma cannot be
here. They are people whose secret lives are visible or might be
visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible.
And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can
solace us; they suggest a more comprehensible and thus a more manageable
human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.
[Footnote 3: Paraphrased from _Système des Beaux Arts_, pp. 314-315.
I am indebted to M. André Maurois for introducing me to this
stimulating essay.]
IV
PEOPLE (_continued_)
WE now turn from transplantation to acclimatization. We have discussed
whether people could be taken out of life and put into a book, and
conversely whether they could come out of books and sit down in this
room. The answer suggested was in the negative and led to a more vital
question: can we, in daily life, understand each other? Today our
problems are more academic. We are concerned with the characters in
their relation to other aspects of the novel; to a plot, a moral, their
fellow characters, atmosphere, etc. They will have to adapt themselves
to other requirements of their creator.
It follows that we shall no longer expect them to coincide as a whole
with daily life, only to parallel it. When we say that a character in
Jane Austen, Miss Bates for instance, is "so like life" we mean that
each bit of her coincides with a bit of life, but that she as a whole
only parallels the chatty spinster we met at tea. Miss Bates is bound by
a hundred threads to Highbury. We cannot tear her away without bringing
her mother too, and Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, and the whole of
Box Hill; whereas we could tear Moll Flanders away, at least for the
purposes of experiment. A Jane Austen novel is more complicated than a
Defoe, because the characters are inter-dependent, and there is the
additional complication of a plot. The plot in _Emma_ is not prominent
and Miss Bates contributes little. Still it is there, she is connected
with the principals, and the result is a closely woven fabric from which
nothing can be removed. Miss Bates and Emma herself are like bushes in a
shrubbery--not isolated trees like Moll--and any one who has tried to
thin out a shrubbery knows how wretched the bushes look if they are
transplanted elsewhere, and how wretched is the look of the bushes that
remain. In most books the characters cannot spread themselves. They must
exercise a mutual restraint.
The novelist, we are beginning to see, has a very mixed lot of
ingredients to handle. There is the story, with its time-sequence of
"and then ... and then ..."; there are ninepins about whom he might
tell the story, and tell a rattling good one, but no, he prefers to tell
his story about human beings; he takes over the life by values as well
as the life in time. The characters arrive when evoked, but full of the
spirit of mutiny. For they have these numerous parallels with people
like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently
often engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book. They "run
away," they "get out of hand": they are creations inside a creation, and
often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they
kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they
revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay.
These trials beset the dramatist also, and he has yet another set of
ingredients to cope with--the actors and actresses--and they appear to
side sometimes with the characters they represent, sometimes with the
play as a whole, and more often to be the mortal enemies of both. The
weight they throw is incalculable, and how any work of art survives
their arrival I do not understand. Concerned with a lower form of art,
we need not worry--but, in passing, is it not extraordinary that plays
on the stage are often better than they are in the study, and that the
introduction of a bunch of rather ambitious and nervous men and women
should add anything to our understanding of Shakespeare and Tchekov?
No, the novelist has difficulties enough, and today we shall examine two
of his devices for solving them--instinctive devices, for his methods
when working are seldom the same as the methods we use when examining
his work. The first device is the use of different kinds of characters.
The second is connected with the point of view.
i. We may divide characters into flat and round.
Flat characters were called "humours" in the seventeenth century, and
are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures. In their purest
form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality: when there is
more than one factor in them, we get the beginning of the curve towards
the round. The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence
such as "I never will desert Mr. Micawber." There is Mrs. Micawber--she
says she won't desert Mr. Micawber, she doesn't, and there she is. Or:
"I must conceal, even by subterfuges, the poverty of my master's house."
There is Caleb Balderstone in _The Bride of Lammermoor_. He does not use
the actual phrase, but it completely describes him; he has no existence
outside it, no pleasures, none of the private lusts and aches that must
complicate the most consistent of servitors. Whatever he does, wherever
he goes, whatever lies he tells or plates he breaks, it is to conceal
the poverty of his master's house. It is not his idée fixe, because
there is nothing in him into which the idea can be fixed. He is the
idea, and such life as he possesses radiates from its edges and from the
scintillations it strikes when other elements in the novel impinge. Or
take Proust. There are numerous flat characters in Proust, such as the
Princess of Parma, or Legrandin. Each can be expressed in a single
sentence, the Princess's sentence being, "I must be particularly careful
to be kind." She does nothing except to be particularly careful, and
those of the other characters who are more complex than herself easily
see through the kindness, since it is only a by-product of the
carefulness.
One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily
recognized whenever they come in--recognized by the reader's emotional
eye, not by the visual eye, which merely notes the recurrence of a
proper name. In Russian novels, where they so seldom occur, they would
be a decided help. It is a convenience for an author when he can strike
with his full force at once, and flat characters are very useful to him,
since they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be
watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere--little
luminous disks of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like
counters across the void or between the stars; most satisfactory.
A second advantage is that they are easily remembered by the reader
afterwards. They remain in his mind as unalterable for the reason that
they were not changed by circumstances; they moved through
circumstances, which gives them in retrospect a comforting quality, and
preserves them when the book that produced them may decay. The Countess
in _Evan Harrington_ furnishes a good little example here. Let us
compare our memories of her with our memories of Becky Sharp. We do not
remember what the Countess did or what she passed through. What is clear
is her figure and the formula that surrounds it, namely, "Proud as we
are of dear papa, we must conceal his memory." All her rich humour
proceeds from this. She is a flat character. Becky is round. She, too,
is on the make, but she cannot be summed up in a single phrase, and we
remember her in connection with the great scenes through which she
passed and as modified by those scenes--that is to say, we do not
remember her so easily because she waxes and wanes and has facets like a
human being. All of us, even the sophisticated, yearn for permanence,
and to the unsophisticated permanence is the chief excuse for a work of
art. We all want books to endure, to be refuges, and their inhabitants
to be always the same, and flat characters tend to justify themselves on
this account.
All the same, critics who have their eyes fixed severely upon daily
life--as were our eyes last week--have very little patience with such
renderings of human nature. Queen Victoria, they argue, cannot be summed
up in a single sentence, so what excuse remains for Mrs. Micawber? One
of our foremost writers, Mr. Norman Douglas, is a critic of this type,
and the passage from him which I will quote puts the case against flat
characters in a forcible fashion. The passage occurs in an open letter
to D. H. Lawrence, with whom he is quarrelling: a doughty pair of
combatants, the hardness of whose hitting makes the rest of us feel like
a lot of ladies up in a pavilion. He complains that Lawrence, in a
biography, has falsified the picture by employing "the novelist's
touch," and he goes on to define what this is:
It consists, I should say, in a failure to realize the complexities of
the ordinary human mind; it selects for literary purposes two or three
facets of a man or woman, generally the most spectacular, and therefore
useful ingredients of their character and disregards all the others.
Whatever fails to fit in with these specially chosen traits is
eliminated--must be eliminated, for otherwise the description would not
hold water. Such and such are the data: everything incompatible with
those data has to go by the board. It follows that the novelist's touch
argues, often logically, from a wrong premise: it takes what it likes
and leaves the rest. The facts may be correct as far as they go but
there are too few of them: what the author says may be true and yet by
no means the truth. That is the novelist's touch. It falsifies life.
Well, the novelist's touch as thus defined is, of course, bad in
biography, for no human being is simple. But in a novel it has its
place: a novel that is at all complex often requires flat people as well
as round, and the outcome of their collisions parallels life more
accurately than Mr. Douglas implies. The case of Dickens is significant.
Dickens' people are nearly all flat (Pip and David Copperfield attempt