CHAPTER III Nor CHARACTERS, BUT ATTITUDES.

Not Characters, But Attitudes
CHAPTER III
I ATTITUDES
Only attitudes, and this explains how the
same (that is, what we take for the same) character,
regarded from one point of view will excite
our admiration, and from another, our amusement.
A single man can exhibit all attitudes,
which is to say, all characters, and consequently,
whether simultaneously or alternately, those
which are utterly contradictory.
But the habit of this or that attitude becomes
so well established, and transmitted by heredity,
education or example, that it becomes, as it were,
ankylosed within the organism, which ends by
exhibiting so restricted a number of these attitudes
that it seems unable to break away from
them, and thenceforward they produce that deceptive
illusion which is called a Character.
Thus each of us, having potentially all the mental
attitudes, has the whole human soul, always
and everywhere the same in itself, since complete,
since formed in the image of the Infinite,
as the Biblical legend has so profoundly expressed
it.* Also, according to Plato, Aristotle and Christianity,
it is God whom we love in each human
being; that is to say, that human being in his
completeness. "Love thy neighbor as thyself,"
says the Gospel, and nothing can be more natural,
since in his completeness he is like yourself and
you are identical with him. "Love" here signifies
"see" or "recognize," recognize the image,
faithful and complete, of God. Those who
"having eyes yet see not," have in their eyes a
"beam," that of the cross, to which, exalting
themselves as judges, they despite St. Paul,
despite the Gospel condemn their neighbor,
which is to say God, which is to say themselves
transcendentally.
No, the lover does not create for himself illusions
as to the beloved, evidences of his own passion.
On the contrary, it is he alone who shows
himself lucid, and his admiring words reveal to
his beloved many sides of her nature of which
she herself was unaware. .
Also, this link which every moralist instinctively
seeks, and which connects all the Personages
of fiction and history, all the "characters"
in a sort of logical succession in which we may
see them spring one from another, this link,
this indefinable all-essential which shall be called
HUMANUM, Bossuet thought he discovered in
LOVE, root of all passions, and La Rochefoucauld,
turning toward the solitude in which he had
isolated the human heart, in SELF-LOVE; our
moderns see it incontestably in SEXUAL LOVE,
the primitive act of our life, wherein lie the problems
of heredity and of races, which interest
them so deeply.
The old mediaeval theology said, in a broader
sense, DIVINE LOVE, or the HOLY SPIRIT, and it
identified under this term the reciprocal love of
the two other Divine Persons, the love of all
Three for man and that of man for Them, and
for his neighbor through love of Them, the
animating principle of creation, inspirer of minds
and giver of wisdom and knowledge, even that of
the human Word and its modifications, the
languages; grace in all senses of the word.
For the common herd, and for many writers,
a Character is constituted, even firmly established,
as soon as three or four characteristic
aspects are shown, connected with one another
by the thread of a logical idea relating them in
cause and effect. Tragedy and Comedy, on the
contrary, exist but to demonstrate how sad and
ridiculous a thing it is, subjectively or objectively,
to BE but one poor character, but one ankylosed
attitude !
Now, in their totality, these attitudes, through
which every man worthy of the name can or
originally could pass; through which passes, at
least in imagination, the genius of the "poet of a
thousand souls," these diverse attitudes, which
it is his mission to show us, each in turn, in his
works, in order to break our enslaving "ankylosis,"
these attitudes may be counted, as well
as those of the body. Have we not, moreover,
already reduced to the number of 36 their conflicts?
Since they may be counted, they may be
classified.
No one has succeeded, no one should succeed
in counting and conveniently distributing
"characters" in the insulated sense in which the
word is commonly used. It is but right that
such semblances, mistaken for individual beings,
should vanish from the hands which would restrain
and put them in cages. But the "attitudes"
which are not persons, but ephemeral roles,
nothing prevents our enumerating them. From
the beginning, the people of the drama have
been brought on and off in spite of themselves,
so to speak, to be labelled and ticketed, very
imperfectly, I admit, because of their excessively
conventionalized life, a life having one side only,
for the personage of drama is concerned only with
that side which he turns toward the audience, the
others, like those of the moon, remaining invisible!
The OCCUPATIONS of the stage have been
counted. And this term evokes curiously that
of those "Professional Types" which began in
the Middle Comedy of the Greeks, with its Fishvendor,
its Courtesan, its brutal Soldier, its
Parasite, its Cook, the drama of observation,
before, in the New Comedy of Menander, the
study of more individualized characters was
approached.
It is to Professional Types, moreover, that the
herd clings. To the question, "What is Mr. Soand-
So?" three people out of four will reply,
"He is an attorney," or "He is a shoe-maker."
Apparently they would reply, if asked about St.
Matthew, "He was a clerk," or of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, "He was a servant." From what does
this come, if not from the fact that such a classification,
so easy, corresponds to a primary psychological
tendency, albeit a vulgar one? Clearly
it is easier to recognize a justice in his official robe
than a just person seated among the accused; a
Jesuit in his professional garb than a Tartufe also
ever-faithful to Success, and today perhaps chanting
the songs of the "International!"
From the day when there were united for the
first time, in a new form of art (which we call
the comedy of manners), several examples of the
same trade or profession, it became very neces
sary to discern in them several roles in the same
rank; for example, given a ministerial bureau,
there will almost inevitably be found therein the
ill-tempered, the jocose and waggish, the beastof-
burden, etc., all a little colored by whichever
of these characters remains attached to their
chief. These are like moral liveries, which the
PERSONNEL distribute among themselves, at first
with some fumbling, but with which each of them
identifies himself little by little, according to the
instinctive demand and pressure of the environment.
The same phenomenon is repeated in the
habitues of a salon, of a public place, of the editorial
rooms of a journal, among the workmen
of a farm or shop, the sailors on a vessel, the
members of an association, commission, academy,
or any group. In this entertaining distribution
of roles one can perceive the birth of Traditional
Characters. In turn, the complete series of these
Traditional Characters in their professional or
social MILIEU (as the Clerks of Balzac), could be
compared to the series, equally complete, of
another MILIEU, and again of others; thus was
gathered the collection which the author called
the COM&DIE HUMAINE.
The fact of having been able to transport, true
to himself, from one of these MILIEUX (a bureau)
to another (a boulevard), then a third (a bank or
newspaper or the world of women) his Bixiou,
for example, proves that he has given him, in a
broader sense than we realize, a Human Character.
Nevertheless it is but a role become a man, this
Bixiou; one might almost say it is the mere face
of an actor, such as Daudet's Delobelle. Remarking
this ankylosis in a single attitude, that of
sarcasm, what reader has not said to himself that
there should be something else in Bixiou than the
side Balzac has shown us?
And that "something else" certainly existed in
the back of the author's mind. The exaggeration
of the type has here a hyperbolic aspect, and
necessarily so. Balzac overdraws it at this point
only through condescension toward us, and in
order to give us that impression of "character"
which we expect and understand. Only by means
of such deceptive representations do we perceive
it, and so the other sides of the character are
deliberately thrust back into the shadow.
They are, I say, thrust back, but not suppressed.
For, with a great writer, or, what
comes to the same thing, in a great legend, the
production not of the masses, but of anonymous
genius, these "other sides" are never lost; it
is they which permit the author, when he wishes,
to present with verisimilitude his personage in an
attitude absolutely opposed to the first one.
Whereas, in such a VOLTE-FACE, the writer who
is a mere arranger of puppets never fails to contradict
or mutilate his first conception, to the
bewilderment of his public.
Furthermore, it is, I say, precisely back of the
most pronounced '"character" that we find that
delicate play of light and shade which gives it
life and verisimilitude. Unlike the uniformity of
the Corneillean heroes, unlike the crude contrasts
of the Hugoesque figures with their too-simple
dualism, some naif detail of a poem or a hagiography
renders comprehensible and akin to us a
humanity nevertheless so superhuman. What a
child-like heart is revealed by the tears of the
hard Achilles, or by the jokes of the audacious
spouse of the Lady Poverty!
II ROLES AND OCCUPATIONS; PROFESSIONAL
AND TRADITIONAL TYPES;
CHARACTER-TYPES; CHARACTERS MORE
INDIVIDUALIZED, AND PORTRAITS.
Let us recapitulate the seven aspects through
which passes, by means of contrasts, the generation
of "Characters" in literature.
(1) Roles. These are hardly more than the
persons of the verb in grammar, united to the
active or passive voice, as: the Pretagonist, the
Antagonist, the disputed Object (a woman loved
by two rivals, a child in a divorce, a prince between
two courtesans, a judge solicited by both parties),
the PERSONNAGE-LIEN or Connecting Character,
who is only the preceding passed from the passive
to the active voice (the common friend of two
combatants, the mother of brothers at enmity),
then the Instigator or Instigators (confidant,
confessor, counsellor, mentor, lago), and the
Instrument or Instruments (messenger, angel,
executioner, hired assassin, mob), and finally the
Chorus (the odious thesis-characters of Ibsen
and Dumas FILS, the SERMONNEUR of the Miracles,
part of the RAISONNEURS, neighbors, witnessess),
plus the DEUS-EX-MACHINA (prologue-characters,
the narrator, the letter lost and found, the useful
coincidence, etc.).
(2) Occupations. An empirical attempt of
the comedians to group themselves, and of which
they have taken the more account as they are
obliged to seek therein, in default of masks or
make-up sufficiently exaggerated, the "physical
means" necessary to the material representation
of the real elements of character. This division
is to the preceding almost what the contingent
physiognomy is to the moral life. Here, nevertheless,
presented only with a little more of order
than has been shown heretofore, are the ordinary
titles, whose artificial spirit I have scrupulously
respected:
Young Princesses (Iphigenia, Zaira) and
Ingenues (Agnes). JBUNES PREMIERS, Lovers
(the Marquis de Presles, the Delaunays, Don
John of Austria). JEUNES PREMIERES, Feminine
Lovers (Philiberte, Dona Sol). These border
upon Premier Roles (Thisbe, Marion Delorme,
Countess Almaviva, Celimne, Almaviva, Don
Juan, Alceste, Buridan) and upon Great Princesses
(Hermione, Camille). PREMIERS ROLES
(Ruy-Blas, Mary Tudor, Lucretia Borgia, Marguerite
de Bourgogne). Premier Character Roles
(Don Ruy Gomez, Don Quexada). RA1SONNEURS
(Philante). Noble Fathers (the Gerontes
of "Le Menteur" and "Le Joueur," Boursault's
Aesop, Verdelet in "Le Gendre de M. Poirier").
Dotards and Dolts (Geronte in "Le Legataire,"
Argante in "Les Fourberies"). Financiers
(Turcaret, M. de Sottenville, M. Guillaume in
"Patelin"). Tertiary Roles (traitors and tyrants,
Don Salluste, Saltabadil, the deceived husbands
and villains of modern drama, Begearss). Premier
Comic Roles (Figaro, Giboyer, I'lntime, Gros-
Rene, Sganarelle in "Le Festin de Pierre," Scapin
in "Les Fourberies"), and Secondary Comic Roles
(all the valets and jesters except that of the
"Legataire," which is a premier; Jodelet in "Les
Precieuses," the Marquis in "Le Joueur," Covielle,
Mascarille in "Depit," Dandin in "Les Plaideurs,"
M. Loyal, Thomas Diaforus). Soubrettes, etc.
As we see, a well-turned figure, hollow features
or a round paunch are sufficient to cause passage
from one of these categories into another. I
refrain from here taking account of distinctions
altogether local and peculiar.
(3) Professional Types in which social rank,
so dear to the vulgar, emerges from the preceding
classification : The Valet and the Marquis (our
"snob") from the Premier and Secondary Comedy
Roles; the Pedant and the Tutor from the
"Dotards," the Tyrant from the Tertiary Roles,
the Courtesan from the Premier Roles, etc.
Now let us add to these certain specializations
particularly well carried out: the Molieresque
Doctor, the Cook of Greek drama (that ancestor
of the innkeepers and cooks of Dumas, of "La
Reine Pedauque" and of "Cyrano"), the Athenian
Fish-vendor, the boastful Soldier, the Parasite,
the antique Slave (forerunner of the Valet), the
Spanish Go-between, the Gendarme (escaped from
the puppet-theatre), our Usurer, our Functionary,
etc.
(4) But such of these Professional Types as
appeared in the "Occupations" of comedy there
contend, obscurely mingled, with the Traditional
Types admired in former days, and who, under
the new names fastened like masks upon their
faded visages, yet fill, without the public's observing
it, about three-fourths of the drama (and, I
would say, of modern literature). Here is Lelio,
or the Lover, a slightly sad JEUNE PREMIER.
Here, more naif, is Pierrot, shall we call him
Gringoire for a change? Let us hasten on to
Jocrisse, the Foolish Servant, past Palisse, Cadet-
Roussel, Calino and the primitive Harlequin (for
the present shrewd Harlequin rejoins, by way of
Mascarille and the valets, one of the two types of
Slave which in the plays of Aristophanes form
an antithesis to the credulous and the dupe).
Polichinelle, fighter and brawler^ reappears, a
little more obscene, in Karagheuz, and more
filthy in Ubu. The sly Columbine returns to
the professional type of soubrette, but beside
her, Isabelle, from whom come the folk of the
JEUNES PREMIERES, is but too much a "traditional!"
(5) Character-Types ! Here, in brief, is everything
the public demands. It will, for a long
time to come, prefer these to more exact studies.
Dickens, Daudet, and, most of the time, Zola,
have but built upon some vicious habit or some
gross and conspicuous trait of the traditional
puppet; Nana, we might say, is the eternal Courtesan,
Saccard is the Financier, according to the
invariable formula from Lesage to Mirbeau.
Renee springs especially from the department of
Occupations, a radiation from the Feminine Lovers,
and she alone tempted momentarily from the
enormous work of the Rougon-Macquart Family
our great national actress, so admirably identified
with her "occupation" that she is always cited in
connection with it. She has realized, we say
it without irony, the perfection of her art.
It is forbidden to the actor to raise himself higher,
and he exercises thereby a regrettable influence
not only upon the stage, where the evil remains
well restrained, but unhappily upon literature,
even the most serious, thence upon history also,
and through it upon the tendency of an age fallen
into the stupidity of taking .the player for an
artist, the hypocrite for a poet "bleeding with
sincerity," and the banal "occupation" for a new
and liberating conception of life.
It is, moreover, merely in a spirit of concession
that I have accorded this Paragraph 5 to Character-
Types, since, in the final analysis, they all
come from the two preceding (Professional Types
and Traditional Types).
(6) The Stage is closed to Characters More
Individualized. Tartufe and the better heroes
of Shakespeare had access to it only because their
authors happened upon it before them.
I say, observe, "more individualized," and not
simply "individual." We may partially discover
the reason above, apropos of Balzac. In the case
of characters of whom he has tried to tell, if not
everything, at least too much at one time, he
has made them indistinct, and they mingle in a
confusion wherein we wander among a vague
crowd of human beings.
(7) The Portrait in reality, be it drawn
from nature by a Balzac, be it by a historian
exceptionally conscientiqu^, in losing its generality
loses also, contradictory as it may appear,
something of its clearness. It proves to be less
truthful, as Aristotle has already remarked, than
the poetical representation of men and events.
Unless, of course, it follows the usual process; in
that case it will embrace in a complete view the
career of an illustrious man, or at least consider
a very large part of it,- in order to exhibit him
camped in a certain immobile and striking posture
of soul; M. Masson has done thus with his Bonapartes.
The Imperfect of the Indicative is here
a great resource. The Portrait corresponds in
this manner to one of the Traditional Types, and
ranges itself in one of the ever-ready pigeonholes
under the eternal labels: The Chivalrous,
The Debonnaire, The Haughty, The Tyrant,
The Sage, The Lion (today the Superman). The
historic epithets attached to the names of so many
princes, and SO LITTLE VARIED, are a curious
evidence of this tendency.
III NEW COMBINATIONS
If each one of the seven, or rather of the six
classes which we have just extracted one from
another, encroaches upon its neighbors, it will
nevertheless be observed that this does not
result in confusion. There is not even combination
among them, there is only juxtaposition,
only mosaic, owing to the unskilfulness of their
authors.
Each of these classes will offer, according to
the angle from which the writer considers its
contents:
1st: Comic Characters.
2nd: Tragic Characters.
3rd : Serious Characters, a sort of hybrid
utilized at will by tragedy and comedy, by satire
and by historical romance and poetry.
4th : Among Comic Characters a particularly
interesting series, Parody Characters. These were
originally tragic characters, who have been transferred
from right to left, so to speak, such as
Don Quixote and his numerous but too-feeble
posterity. Ariosto and his French and Italian
predecessors, the Greek SATYRIQUE drama and
our modern burlesque have left much to be done.
5th : Symmetrically opposite, amid the Tragic
Characters, will be the Paradoxical Characters, in
former days farcical, but now presented in a
pathetic light. The infirmities of Richard III
or of Quasimodo give us as yet only physical
examples, but Dickens and Daudet are full of
caricatures which, if not tragic, are at least pitiful.
We might still distinguish, 6th, Characters
heretofore odious, presented sympathetically:
The thief Jean Valjean, the daughters of Romanticism
and Naturalism, heirs of Mary Magdalene;
the hypocrite in "Le Cure de Village" and in
many English novels.
Then, 7th (recommended to anarchists, innovators
and professional "free souls"), Characters
heretofore sympathetic, presented under a repugnant
or despicable aspect; we have had many of
them within recent years, but others remain;
working men, children, etc.
On the comic side we shall have, 8th, to paint
ridiculously the characters ordinarily spared, as
the betrothed young girl, the man of theses.
And, 9th, to present seriously and sympathetically
Characters heretofore grotesque. It has
been done for the deceived husband and the
jealous lover; there is nothing to prevent doing
it for the usurer, the undertaker, and many others.
These changes of place will be found fecund in
all the Literature of Character, and not alone,
as might be supposed, in drama and romance.
A Michelet, for example, has not seldom done
thus, in his design of lightening the unconscious
remorses of our nation. There is nothing more
malleable in this respect than history, so long as
it has not grown and hardened into a myth (more
truthful because the expression of the collective
consciousness); a Clytemnestra obviously does
not so readily lend herself to this treatment as
a Madame Syveton.
Real or imaginary, lofty or trivial, vague or
clearly drawn, often diverse in their portraits,
sometimes contradictory of aspect, I have evoked
these human Figures from out the centuries and
from all parts of the globe. For we must rid
ourselves, as I have realized, before it is too late,
of our false ideas concerning superior and inferior
races, and welcome contact with all humanity.
The dominance, recent enough and, I am convinced,
unprecedented for intrigue and destructiveness,
of Occidental and notably Protestant or
free-thinking peoples, corresponds to an equal
and moreover logical impotence in original and
durable creation. Many a reduced or subjugated
race, such as the Italian or the Hindu,
represents well enough what a poet of genius
becomes, or an ill-dressed hero, introduced into
the parlor of rich and vulgar money-worshippers,
mocking and scornful; they will bewilder him
with their figures, complacently watch him
envelope himself in silence and ennui; will despoil
him, if he still possesses anything, under the pretext
of enriching him, and chuckle afterward
over having so easily vanquished him. There
is nothing to prevent the situation being some
day reversed, and that perhaps sooner than we
expect ; the premonitions of it are already appearing
throughout the world; strange surprises are
in store, and very probably, in such an event, the
new order of things will annihilate, until but a
memory remains of it, this ugly and stupid age
of PARVENUS, which will meet the fate of so many
other vainglorious barbarisms, likewise proud of
their industries, their arms and their wealth.
From the great pile-built cities of China, from
the immemorial records of Peru and Egypt,
from Central Africa, rich in traditions too long
disdained, from the humblest "primitives," from
the chronicles of Iran, from fiery Malaysia, from
paradoxical Japan and from reviving Arabia;
from the snow huts of Lapland, the streets of
Stamboul, the paths of Ceylon and the plateaux
of Thibet; from the 72 books of the two Testaments,
from the Greek and Latin literatures,
modern as well as ancient, from Norse and Finnish
songs and from all the mythologies; finally from
the remotest corners of occidental civilization,
and all the writings which it has set down in
modern languages, even to the most recent, and
scattered over the world, O sisters, O brothers,
from all regions of earth, from the future as well
as the past, in your motley and ever-changing
costumes or your lamentable and touching nudity,
from all the ranks from which you have turned
at my appeal, from all the ages of life when you
have sent out a cry which has reached me, I have
gathered you, in unforeseen groups where our
sad modern menagerie, in its hopeless decay,
reaches out its hands to the most radiant Goddess
of the Dawn, where the prattling infant, the
greybeard and the light-o'-love become of a
sudden identical !
I am aware that an interminable procession of
more and more banal replicas will follow after.
But the unison of their monotonous voices will
not drive away those detached and heretofore
unknown figures, hastening from out the mass,
and astonished to find themselves suddenly in
the light. Sometimes, too, my calculations having
apparently permitted me to silhouette a
certain type between two related ones, I have
nevertheless summoned it in vain; nothing appears,
from literature or zodiacs, in that lacuna of
human personality!
We shall march, O reader, with a sure step
toward silent and lonely regions. And there,
beneath the brush of a virgin land, we shall discover,
slumbering, the Unpublished Being. She
will awake when we take her by the hand. And
this heroine of the Poet to come, this Eve of
future endless maternities, we shall bring back
through the ranks of astonished Lovelaces, to
the still empty pedestal where her Figure, all
unblemished, shall shine among the too-conventional
attitudes of her companions.
Thus shall we bring forward ten, a hundred, a
thousand and more, exactly 369, 12,915,
154,980, augmenting the unprecedented chorus
disposed at the feet of Her who shall summarize
them all in her perfection, nevertheless so human.