How to Write a Novel Part 3

The first thing is to _realise_ your characters--_i.e._ make them real persons to yourself, and then you will be more likely to persuade the reader that they are real people. Unless this is done, your hero and heroine will be described as "puppets" or "abstractions." I am not saying the task is easy--in fact, it is one of the most difficult that the novelist has to face. But there is no profit in s.h.i.+rking it, and the sooner it is dealt with the better. The history of character representation in drama is full of luminous teaching, and a study of it cannot be other than highly instructive. In the early _Mystery_ and _Morality_ plays, virtues and vices were each apportioned their respective actors--that is to say, one man set forth Good Counsel, another Repentance, another Gluttony, and another Pride. Even so late as Philip Ma.s.singer's "A New Way to Pay Old Debts," we have Wellborn, Justice, Greedy, Tapwell, Froth, and Furnace. Now this seems very elementary to us, but it has one great merit: the audience knew what each character stood for, and could form an intelligent idea of his place in the piece. In these days we have become more subtle--necessarily so. Following the lead of the Shakespearean dramatists, we have not described our characters by giving them names--virtuous or otherwise--we let them describe themselves by their speech and action. The essential thing is that we should know our characters intimately, so intimately that, although they exist in imagination alone, they are as real to us as the members of our own family. Falstaff never had flesh and blood, but as Shakespeare portrayed him, you feel that you have only to p.r.i.c.k him and he will bleed. The historical Hamlet is a mist; the Hamlet of the play is a reality.

This power of realisation depends on two things: _Observation with insight, and Sympathy with imagination_. Observation is a most valuable gift, but without insight it is likely to work mischief by creating a tendency to write down just what you see and hear. Zola's novels too often suggest the note-book. Avoid photographing life as you would avoid a dangerous foe. The newspaper reporter can "beat you hollow," for that is his special subject: life as it is. Observe what goes on around you, but get behind the scenes; study selfishness and "otherness," and the inter-play of motives, the conflict of interests which causes this tangle of human affairs--in other words, obtain an insight into them by asking the "why" and "wherefore."

Above all, learn to see with other people's eyes, and to feel with other people's hearts. For instance, you may find it needful to attend synagogue-wors.h.i.+p in order to obtain a first-hand knowledge of the religion of your Jewish heroine. When you see the men in silk hats, and praying-shawls over their shoulders, you may be tempted to despise Judaism; the result being that you determine not to c.u.mber your novel with a description of such "nonsense." Well, you will lose one of the most picturesque features of your story; you will fail to see the part which the synagogue plays in your heroine's mental struggle, and the portrayal of her character will be sadly defective in consequence. No; a novelist, as such, should have no religion, no politics, no social creed; whatever he believes as a private individual should not interfere with the outgoing of sympathy in constructing the characters he intends to set forth. Human nature is a compound of the virtuous and the vicious, or, to change the figure, a perpetual oscillation between flesh and spirit. Life is half tragedy and half comedy: men and women are sometimes wise and often foolish. From this maze of mystery you are to develop new creations, and actual people are your _starting-point_, never your _models_.

Methods of Characterisation

By characterisation is meant the power to make your ideal persons appear real. It is one thing to make them real to yourself, and quite another thing to make them real to other people. Characterisation needs a union of imaginative and artistic gifts. In this respect, as in all others, Shakespeare is pre-eminent. His characters are alike clear in conception and expression, and their human quality is just as wonderful as the large scale on which they move, covering, as they do, the entire field of human nature.

There are certain well-known methods of characterisation, and to these I propose to devote the remainder of this chapter. The first and most obvious is for the author to describe the character. This is generally recognised as bad art. To say "She was a very wicked woman," is like the boy who drew a four-legged animal and wrote underneath, "This is a cow."

If that boy had succeeded in drawing a cow there would have been no need to label it; and, in the same way, if you succeed in realising and drawing your characters there will be no need to talk about them. The best characterisation never _says_ what a person is; it shows what he or she is by what they do and say. I do not mean that you must say nothing at all about your creations; the novels of Hardy and Meredith contain a good deal of indirect comment of this kind; but it is a notable fact that Hardy's weakest work, "A Laodicean," contains more comment than any of the others he has written. Stevenson aptly said, "Readers cannot fail to have remarked that what an author tells us of the beauty or the charm of his creatures goes for nought; that we know instantly better; that the heroine cannot open her mouth but what, all in a moment, the fine phrases of preparation fall from her like the robes of Cinderella, and she stands before us as a poor, ugly, sickly wench, or perhaps a strapping market-woman."

There is another point to be remembered. If you label a character at the outset as a very humorous person, the reader prepares himself for a good laugh now and then, and if you disappoint him--well, you have lost a reader and gained an adverse critic. To announce beforehand what you are going to do, and then fail, is to put a weapon into the hands of those who honour you with a reading. "Often a single significant detail will throw more light on a character than pages of comment. An example in perfection is the phrase in which Thackeray tells how Becky Crawley, amid all her guilt and terror, when her husband had Lord Steyne by the throat, felt a sudden thrill of admiration for Rawdon's splendid strength. It is like a flash of lightning which shows the deeps of the selfish, sensual woman's nature. It is no wonder that Thackeray threw down his pen, as he confessed that he did, and cried, 'That is a stroke of genius.'"

The lesson is plain. Don't say what your hero and heroine _are_: make them tell their own characters by words and deeds.

The Trick of "Idiosyncrasies"

Young writers, who fail to mark off the individuality of one character from another, by the strong lines of difference which are found in real life, endeavour to atone for their incompetency by emphasising physical and mental oddities. This is a mere literary "trick." To invest your hero with a squint, or an irritating habit of blowing his nose continually; or to make your heroine guilty of using a few funny phrases every time she speaks, is certainly to distinguish them from the other characters in the book who cannot boast of such excellences, but it must not be called characterisation. It is a b.a.s.t.a.r.d attempt to economise the labour that is necessary to discover individuality of soul and to bring it out in skilful dialogues and carefully chosen situations.

Another form of the trick of idiosyncrasy is the bald realism of the sensationalist. He persuades himself that he is character-drawing. He is doing nothing of the kind. He takes snap-shots with a literary camera and reproduces direct from the negative. The art of re-touching nature so that it becomes ideal, is not in his line at all: the commercial instinct in him is stronger than the artistic, and he sees more business in realism than in idealism. And what is more, there is less labour--characters exist ready for use. It is easy to listen to a lively altercation between cabbies in a London street, when language pa.s.ses that makes one hesitate to strike a match, and then go home and draw a city driver. You have no need to search for contrasts, for colour, for sound, for pa.s.sion: you saw and heard everything at once. But the truth still remains--the seeing of things, and the hearing of things, are but the raw material: where are your new creations?

The trick of selecting oddities as a method of characterisation is superficial, simply because oddities lie upon the surface. You can, without much difficulty, construct a dialogue between a blacksmith and a student, showing how the unlettered man exhibits his ignorance and the scholar his taste. But such a distinction is quite external; at heart the men may be very much alike. It is one thing to paint the type, and another to paint the individual. Take Sir Willoughby Patterne. He is a man who belongs to the type "selfish"; but he is much more than a typically selfish man; he is an _individual_. There is a turn in his remarks, a way of speaking in dialogue, and a style of doing things which show him to be self-centred, not in a general way, but in the particular way of Sir Willoughby Patterne.

There is one fact in characterisation for which a due margin should always be made. Wilkie Collins, you will remember, says of his Fosco: "The making him fat was an afterthought; his canaries and his white mice were found next; and the most valuable discovery of all, his admiration of Miss Halcombe, took its rise in a conviction that he would not be true to nature unless there was some weak point somewhere in his character." You must provide for these "afterthoughts" by not being too ready to cast your characters in the final mould. Let every personality be in a state of _becoming_ until he has actually _come_--in all the completeness of appearance, manner, speech, and action. Your first conception of the Jewess may be that of one who possesses the usual physique of her cla.s.s--short and stout; but afterwards it may suit your purpose better to make her fairer, taller, and slighter, than the rest of her race. If so, do not hesitate to undo the work of laborious hours by effecting such an improvement. It will go against the grain, no doubt; but novel-writing is a serious business, and much depends on trifles in accomplis.h.i.+ng success; so do not begrudge the extra toil involved.

Characterisation is the finest feature of the novelist's art. Here you will have your greatest difficulties, but, if you overcome them, you will have your greatest triumphs. Here, too, the crying need is a knowledge of human nature. Acquire a masters.h.i.+p of this subtle quant.i.ty, and then you may hope for genuine results. Of course, knowledge is not _all_; it is in artistic appreciation that true character-drawing consists.

CHAPTER V

STUDIES IN LITERARY TECHNIQUE

Narrative Art

David Pryde has summed up the whole matter in a few well-chosen sentences: "Keeping the beginning and the end in view, we set out from the right starting-place, and go straight towards the destination; we introduce no event that does not spring from the first cause and tend to the great effect; we make each detail a link joined to the one going before and the one coming after; we make, in fact, all the details into one entire chain, which we can take up as a whole, carry about with us, and retain as long as we please."[63:A] How many elements are here referred to? There are plot, movement, unity, proportion, purpose, and climax. I have already dealt with some of these, and now propose to devote a few paragraphs to the rest.

Unity means unity of effect, and is first a matter of literary architecture--afterwards a matter of impression. It has been said of Macbeth that "the play moves forward with an absolute regularity; it is almost architectural in its rise and fall, in the balance of its parts.

The plot is a complex one; it has an ebb and flow, a complication and a resolution, to use technical terms. That is to say, the fortunes of Macbeth swoop up to a crisis or turning-point, and thence down again to a catastrophe. The catastrophe, of course, closes the play; the crisis, as so often with Shakespeare, comes in its exact centre, in the middle of the middle act, with the Escape of Fleance. Hitherto Macbeth's path has been gilded with success; now the epoch of failure begins. And the parallelisms and correspondences throughout are remarkable. Each act has a definite subject: The Temptation; The First, Second, and Third Crimes; The Retribution. Three accidents, if we may so call them, help Macbeth in the first part of the play: the visit of Duncan to Inverness, his own impulsive murder of the grooms, the flight of Malcolm and Donalbain. And in the second half three accidents help to bring about his ruin: the escape of Fleance, the false prophecy of the witches, the escape of Macduff. Malcolm and Macduff at the end answer to Duncan and Banquo at the beginning. A meeting with the witches heralds both rise and fall.

Finally, each of the crimes is represented in the Retribution. Malcolm, the son of Duncan, and Macduff, whose wife and child he slew, conquer Macbeth; Fleance begets a race that shall reign in his stead."[65:A]

From a construction point of view, a novel and a play have many points in common; and although the parallelism of events and characters is not necessary for either, the account of Macbeth just given is a good ill.u.s.tration of unity of effect and impression. Stevenson's "Kidnapped"

and "David Balfour" are good examples of unity of structure.

Movement

How many times have you put a novel away with the remark: "It _drags_ awfully!" The narrative that drags is not worthy of the name. There are a few writers who can go into byways and take the reader with them--Mr Le Gallienne, for instance--but, as a rule, the digressive novelist is the one whose book is thrown on to the table with the remark just quoted. A story should be _progressive_, not _digressive_ and episodical. Hence the importance of movement and suspense. Keep your narrative in motion, and do not let it sleep for a while unless it is of deliberate intention. There is a definite law to be observed--namely, that as feeling rises higher, sentences become crisp and shorter; witness Acts i. and ii. in _Macbeth_. Suspense, too, is an agent in accelerating the forward march of a story. There is no music in a pause, but it renders great service in giving proper emphasis to music that goes before and comes after it. Notice how Stevenson employs suspense and contrast in "Kidnapped." "The sea had gone down, and the wind was steady and kept the sails quiet, so that there was a great stillness in the s.h.i.+p, in which I made sure I heard the sound of muttering voices. A little after, and there came a clash of steel upon the deck, by which I knew they were dealing out the cutla.s.ses, and one had been let fall; and after that silence again." These little touches are capable of affecting the entire interest of the whole story, and should receive careful attention.

Aids to Description

THE POINT OF VIEW

So much has been said in praise of descriptive power, that it will not be amiss if I repeat one or two opinions which, seemingly, point the other way. Gray, in a letter to West, speaks of describing as "an ill habit that will wear off"; and Disraeli said description was "always a bore both to the describer and the describee." To some, these authorities may not be of sufficient weight. Will they listen to Robert Louis Stevenson? He says that "no human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes one suspect we hear too much of it in literature." These remarks will save us from that description-wors.h.i.+p which is a sort of literary influenza.

The first thing to be determined in descriptive art is _the point of view_. Suppose you are standing on an eminence commanding a wide stretch of plain with a river winding through it. What does the river look like?

A silver thread; and so you would describe it. But if you stood close to the brink and looked back to the eminence on which you stood previously, you would no longer speak of a silver thread, simply because now your point of view is changed. The principle is elementary enough, and there is no need to dwell upon it further, except to quote an ill.u.s.tration from Blackmore:

"For she stood at the head of a deep green valley, carved from out the mountains in a perfect oval, with a fence of sheer rock standing round it, eighty feet or a hundred high, from whose brink black wooded hills swept up to the skyline. By her side a little river glided out from underground with a soft, dark babble, unawares of daylight; then growing brighter, lapsed away, and fell into the valley. Then, as it ran down the meadow, alders stood on either marge, and gra.s.s was blading out of it, and yellow tufts of rushes gathered, looking at the hurry. But further down, on either bank, were covered houses built of stone, square, and roughly covered, set as if the brook were meant to be the street between them. Only one room high they were, and not placed opposite each other, but in and out as skittles are; only that the first of all, which proved to be the captain's was a sort of double house, or rather two houses joined together by a plank-bridge over the river."[69:A]

SELECTING THE MAIN FEATURES

The fundamental principle of all art is selection, and nowhere is it seen to better advantage than in description. A battle, a landscape, or a mental agony, can only be described artistically, in so far as the writer chooses the most characteristic features for presentation. In the following pa.s.sage George Eliot states the law and keeps it. "She had time to remark that he was a peculiar-looking person, but not insignificant, which was the quality that most hopelessly consigned a man to perdition. He was ma.s.sively built. The striking points in his face were large, clear, grey eyes, and full lips." Suppose for a moment that the reader were told about the pattern and "hang" of the hero's trousers, his waistcoat and his coat, and that information was given respecting the number of links in his watch-chain, and the exact depth of his double chin--what would have been the effect from an artistic point of view? Failure--for instead of getting a description alive with interest, we should get a catalogue wearisome in its multiplicity of detail. A certain author once thought Homer was n.i.g.g.ardly in describing Helen's charms, so he endeavoured to atone for the great poet's shortcomings in the following manner:--"She was a woman right beautiful, with fine eyebrows, of clearest complexion, beautiful cheeks; comely, with large, full eyes, with snow-white skin, quick glancing, graceful; a grove filled with graces, fair-armed, voluptuous, breathing beauty undisguised. The complexion fair, the cheek rosy, the countenance pleasing, the eye blooming, a beauty unartificial, untinted, of its natural colour, adding brightness to the brightest cherry, as if one should dye ivory with resplendent purple. Her neck long, of dazzling whiteness, whence she was called the swan-born, beautiful Helen."

After reading this can you form a distinct idea of Helen's beauty? We think not. The details are too many, the language too exuberant, and the whole too much in the form of a catalogue. It would have been better to select a few of what George Eliot calls the "striking points," and present them with taste and skill. As it is, the attempt to improve on Homer has resulted in a description which, for detail and minuteness, is like the enumeration of the parts of a new motor-car--indeed, that is the true sphere of description by detail, where, as in all matters mechanical, fulness and accuracy are demanded. In "Mariana," Tennyson refers to no more facts than are necessary to emphasise her great loneliness:

"With blackest moss the flower-pots Were thickly crusted, one and all; The rusted nails fell from the knots That held the pear to the gable wall.

The broken sheds looked sad and strange: Unlifted was the clinking latch; Weeded and worn the ancient thatch Upon the lonely moated grange."

In ordering such details as may be chosen to represent an event, idea, or person, it is the rule to proceed from "the near to the remote, and from the obvious to the obscure." Homer thus describes a s.h.i.+eld as smooth, beautiful, brazen, and well-hammered--that is, he gives the particulars in the order in which they would naturally be observed.

Homer's method is also one of epithet: "the far-darting Apollo,"

"swift-footed Achilles," "wide-ruling Agamemnon," "white-armed Hera,"

and "bright-eyed Athene." Now it is but a step from this giving of epithets to what is called

DESCRIPTION BY SUGGESTION

When Hawthorne speaks of the "black, moody brow of Septimus Felton," it is really suggestion by the use of epithet. d.i.c.kens took the trouble to enumerate the characteristics of Mrs Gamp one by one; but he succeeded in presenting Mrs Fezziwig by simply saying, "In came Mrs Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile." This latter method differs from the former in almost every possible way. The enumeration of details becomes wearisome unless very cleverly handled, whereas the suggestive method unifies the writer's impressions, thereby saving the reader's mental exertions and heightening his pleasures. He tells us how things and persons impress him, and prefers to _indicate_ rather than describe. Thus d.i.c.kens refers to "a full-sized, sleek, well-conditioned gentleman in a blue coat with bright b.u.t.tons, and a white cravat. This gentleman had a very red face, as if an undue proportion of the blood in his body had been squeezed into his head; which perhaps accounted for his having also the appearance of being rather cold about the heart." Lowell says of Chaucer, "Sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as where the Friar, before sitting himself down, drives away the cat. We know without need of more words that he has chosen the snuggest corner."

Notice how succinctly Blackmore delineates a natural fact, "And so in a sorry plight I came to an opening in the bushes where a great black pool lay in front of me, whitened with snow (as I thought) at the sides, till I saw it was only foam-froth, ... and the look of this black pit was enough to stop one from diving into it, even on a hot summer's day, with suns.h.i.+ne on the water; I mean if the sun ever shone there. As it was, I shuddered and drew back; not alone at the pool itself, and the black air there was about it, but also at the whirling manner, and wisping of white threads upon it in stripy circles round and round; and the centre still as jet."[75:A]

Hardy's description of Egdon Heath is too well known to need remark; it is a cla.s.sic of its kind.

Robert Louis Stevenson possessed the power of suggestion to a high degree. "An ivory-faced and silver-haired old woman opened the door. She had an evil face, smoothed with hypocrisy, but her manners were excellent." To advise a young writer to imitate Stevenson would be absurd, but perhaps I may be permitted to say: study Stevenson's method, from the blind man in "Treasure Island," to Kirstie in "The Weir of Hermiston."

FACTS TO REMEMBER

"It is a peculiarity of Walter Scott," says Goethe, "that his great talent in representing details often leads him into faults. Thus in 'Ivanhoe' there is a scene where they are seated at a table in a castle-hall, at night, and a stranger enters. Now he is quite right in describing the stranger's appearance and dress, but it is a fault that he goes to the length of describing his feet, shoes and stockings. When we sit down in the evening and someone comes in, we notice only the upper part of his body. If I describe the feet, daylight enters at once and the scene loses its nocturnal character." And yet Scott in some respects was a master of description--witness his picture of Norham Castle and of the ravine of Greeta between Rokeby and Mortham. But Goethe's criticism is justified notwithstanding. Never write more than can be said of a man or a scene when regarded from the surrounding circ.u.mstances of light and being. Ruskin is never tired of saying, "Draw what you see." In the "Fighting Temeraire," Turner paints the old wars.h.i.+p as if it had no rigging. It was there in its proper place, but the artist could not see it, and he refused to put it in his picture if, at the distance, it was not visible. "When you see birds fly, you do not see any _feathers_," says Mr W. M. Hunt. "You are not to draw _reality_, but reality as it _appears_ to you."

Avoid the _pathetic fallacy_. Kingsley, in "Alton Locke," says: