The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-04-15
PORTRAITS IN FICTION.
How Far an Author Has the Right to
 Present His Contemporaries.


 Present His Contemporaries.
 The appearance of an obvious, though thinly disguised, portrait of Herbert
 Spencer in a recent novel raises point in literary ethics which concerns all
 readers and writers of fiction. How
 far is it justiiable in imaginative W. ting, in poetry, fiction and the drama, to introduce recognizable portraits of ones contemporaries? In the histori- cal novel the question of justification does not arise in the same form;- histo- ry is an open book in which he who
 can may read, and if an author. draws portrait of Queen Elizabeth or of
 Cromwell which is either inconsistent with the known facts of their lives, or else fails to convince readers that his new interpretation of the character is the real one, he lays himself open to ordinary criticism. But the introduc- tion of contemporaries, whether they be famous or insignificant, is another mat ter. The majority of characters in f1c- tion are no doubt drawn, directly or in
 directly, from friends of the author or
 from prominent persons of the day.
 Most of us who have known novelist
 or two have probably recognized, or fancied we could recognize, some char acteristic of our own in one Of the dra-
 matic personae Of our authors stage. If these characteristics are unsympa- thetically portrayed there will not De wanting a candid friend to point them out. But these are in the majority Of cases not portraits at all, and unless they are clearly recognizable and libel lous, the original nas no remedy; his fate is one of the privileges of his friendship with the author. Even on the opposite supposition, the subject Of
 the libel will probably succeed only in
 making himself ridiculous if he has re- course to the law. But the point here raised in the ethics of fiction is rather different. The portrayal of prominent contemporaries in the guise of fiction is practice so common among famous writers that it can hardly be con demned out of hand. .,> No writer is justified in using his art as a pillory; if he wishes to fling stones at the age.. let him name hfmsslf satir- ist, and not writer of romance. But provided that there Is no malice in the portrait, and the author reveals no per-
 sonal details which are not public prop erty, there seems no objection to the in troduction of distinguished contempo- raries into the imaginary trappings of fiction, though the practice may not make for good literature" The novel in it's present form dates, as is well known, from the eighteenth century, and the greatest of the eighteenth ce1- tury novelists was Fielding, who cer-
 tainly put real persons on his canvas,
 though they were not famous till he made them so. If the Rev. William Young had not sat for his portrait to
 Fielding, Parson Adams could hardly have escaped oblivion by now, or at least he would be known to the classi- cal expert as the collaborator in a translation of one of Aristophane's plays. Miss Charlotte Cradock, too,
 who was F'ielding's first wife, might have been forgotten, for all her virtues, if we could not identify her with Anne lia and with the Sophia Western of ''Tom Jones'"
 MT. Young and Miss Cradock have at least no reason to complain, but Smol- let, who appears in Sterne's "Sentimen- tai Journey as Smelfungus, may well have felt resentment at the portrait. In Smollett's own works the only real character who can be identified is the author himself, who may be assumed to
 take the title parts in "Roderick Ran dom" and "Peregrine Pickle" and that of Matthew Bramble in Humphrey
 Clinker" The Rev. Charles Goldsmith, vicar of Pallasmore, County Longford, achieved literary immortality at the
 hands of his son. Little dreamt the humble village preacher" says Forster, in his Life of Goldsmith" that from the date of that November 10 on which his son Oliver was born, his, own vir- tues and very foibles were to be leg acy and pleasure to many generations of men," These foibles and virtues
 may be traced in the father of the Man in Black in the Citizen of the World"
 in the preacher of the Deserted Vil- lage" and in the vicar of Wakefield. In varying degree all fiction is autobio-
 graphical. David Copperield'' and "Pendennis' are obvious examples, and in Charlotte Brontes "Villette" the au- thor appears as Lucy Snowe. Many
 characters in the novels of Thomas Love Peacock are half ironical presen- :tations of the author himself and his ideas. In George Meredith's "Egotist"
 some critics have seen an autobio-
 graphical sketch in the portrait of the wise youth, Vernon Whitford, and to take more modern example still, MT. Jerome's Paul Kelver'' is supposed to
 be based in part on the writer's life. Tense, however are portraits in a rath- CT unusual sense, but there will be no difficulty in. finding instances of the in troduction of contemporaries in modern fiction. Leigh Hunts identity with Harold Skimpole of Bleak House" was denied by Dickens; the incident is a good example of the danger which nov elists run in crediting some peculiari-
 ties of a friend to an otherwise fcti- tious character. Many readers have
 found Mark Pattison in the pages of
 "Middlemarch." and MT. Meredith has thought it well to state that readers
 were wrong in thinking Diana of the
 Crossways' a portrait of Mrs. Norton, the granddaughter of Sheridan, though
 another work of his, "The Tragic Co.,