2 The Literature of Character.

II THE LITERATURE OF CHARACTER
No epoch heretofore has appreciated so highly
as our own the art of character-drawing. The merit
which the Romantic school attributed to the
invention, most illusory after all, of subjects and
"situations," the Realist school has since transferred
to the invention, the "creation," to use
the current word, of characters.
These, extracted from surrounding life by means
of a mysterious chemistry, then condensed by
skilful syntheses, should illustrate social studies
in brilliant genre-pictures, in the way in which
"Romantic" plots have been credited with embodying
those reconstitutions of history recently promoted
to the dignity of a "new science."
In emulation, we have come, on our side, to
reserve the title of "creative genius" for the
author of a great number of well-defined characters ;
this is the reason for the special veneration we
profess for Homer, Shakespeare, Moliere, Balzac
and Zola (the latter nevertheless so weak and so
little varied in his drawings of women).
The classic writers, indeed, did not think as
we do. Even the fathers of the drama and of
modern realism refused any pre-eminence of
psychology. "It is for the situations" declares
Diderot positively, "to decide the characters. The
plan of a drama may be drawn, and well drawn,
before the poet knows anything of the character
he will give to his personages." And Beaumarchais
acknowledged, for his part, that the choice
of characters was, in his plays, determined by the
necessities of the plot. These revolutionaries thus
confirm, in their modesty and sincerity, the enormous
experience condensed in the Aristotelian
"Poetics." "Action is the object of tragedy. . .
Without action there can be no tragedy. There
may be one without morals. . . To develop a
moral is not to create a tragedy," etc.
Besides, the founders of realism gave themselves
no illusions as to the small number of
characters. The same Diderot, after Voltaire,
could discover albeit with a somewhat superficial
look only a dozen more or less, he assures
us. (For in those happy days of "elegant"
literature, one did not pass for a chimerical soul,
an occultist, if one ventured to introduce into the
prevailing mental confusion the luminous precision
of arithmetic.)
The classic authors? They ingenuously demanded
from legend and tradition not only the
stories, but the heroes ready-made. They borrowed
them and bequeathed them to one another
with the generosity of indifference, the merit
consisting far more, in their eyes, in a presentation,
a perspective which brought in evidence
some aspect until then imperfectly seen, and
above all, in another and better harmony of composition
shown throughout the entire work, even
to its humblest details. They well knew, these
great originals, that one does not create new
characters, only situations, plots, or symbols.
If I have been able to reduce to about thirty-six
-the figure given by Gozzi, Goethe and Schiller
the number of Dramatic Situations, it should
be still easier to show exactly the limited number
of creatures who compose our swarming humanity.
However, such a simplification is much less the
object of the present inquiry since it would
increase the actual poverty than is the remedying
of that poverty by drawing from precisely this
simplification a method for multiplying elements
in infinite combinations. I shall give but the
method ; it will convince only those minds desirous
of applying it. But I shall furnish successively
tangible and living results in a multitude of figures
exactly 12,915 which are admittedly unpublished
and newly characterized.
Let them hasten and group themselves, to
satisfy first of all that desire for "new characters"
which torments thee, O contemporary reader!
How symptomatic it is, this desire!
Perhaps it tends to found a form of literature
which shall be chiefly devoted to the representation
of character. For it must be recognized,
despite what we hear repeated and re-echoed,
such a form has never yet existed.
The theatre? By virtue of its visual destination
and its gestures, it is obviously better suited
to the representation of action than of character
or even morals. Comedy itself, although its less
ominous gestures have a less hypnotizing effect,
has flourished, and widely, before this learned
character-drawing was thought of, and its merriest
form, and consequently the most personal, has
continued to live, and prospers more than ever, in
opposition to the comedy of character once conceived
by Menander. The latter has never constituted
more than a special branch, precisely
that whose incessantly but vainly renewed springs
(romantic substitutions, the call of the blood,
theses, etc.) grate the more at each turn of the
action, and characters superpose themselves in
unpleasant fashion, as a superb but misplaced
display, upon the supple steel of comic plot, which
remains the indispensable, the essential.
The novel? Besides its formless aspect, since
it no longer follows the outlines of the epic, fiction
has always, by virtue of its redundancy of wordy
detail, better presented morals than characters.
To these the epic, the novel of more vigorous
ages, assuredly offers a place which, albeit secondary,
is yet broader. The epic, in short, approximates
the story which offers, in a conventional and
abstract light, its "portraits" from which we
need only remove the proper names and dates to
make of them but general sketches, worthy of
being signed by La Bruydre.
He thought to continue Theophrastus. But,
instead of a Menander, he produced but a Des
touches. Not that he has, in reality, augmented
the catalog of his predecessor ; far from it ! He has,
notably, enriched to excess all that concerns
worldly vanity, which passion alone fills more than
four-fifths of his book, so surprisingly meager
otherwise, as to violence (one example), lust
(almost nothing), ingenuity, etc. The list of his
characters represents but the merest fraction of
our psychological world-map.
To complete it we must resume the plan, much
more comprehensive, simpler and more profound,
of the great Theophrastus. He commenced, it is
said, at the age of ninety-nine years, his admirable
book, the result not only of a philosophic system
(derived from Aristotle) but of a century of personal
observation. From it, indeed, we may see
spring, fully armed, the New Comedy.
The plays of Menander are unfortunately
almost entirely destroyed, and, despite the fragments
recently recovered, the secrets of creation
which their ensemble would have imparted to us,
by comparison with the book of Theophrastus,
can be obtained only in a slight degree by following
the figurines of La Bruyere in the Comedy of
Character of the eighteenth century, trivially
argumentative, narrow and automatic. It may
likewise be interesting to infer what the Homme
de Cour promised by Moliere as his CHEF D'OEUVRE
would have been, in contemplating his famous
"portraits" of the Misanthrope.
Moreover, the maker of "portraits" precedes, in
literary history, but secondary comedy, the comedy
of character, and, coming always after tragedy,
already overflowing with varied and powerful
characters, he does not sufficiently explain to us
the genesis of these. And before them we find the
true Moralists. The Gnomics and Pythagoras
usher in the Greek theater. A Montaigne and a
Thomas Aquinas by the Council of Trent influence
Shakespeare, and Rochefoucauld, Charron, Nicole,
Pascal, find themselves again upon the stage, comic
or tragic, of the seventeenth century in its second
half, like the imperious Ignatius Loyola in Corneille.
How does this transfer take place?
We see it operate in the bosom of a family, and
perhaps simply of a man, with Seneca or the
Senecas. The better yet to follow it, let us take
Plutarch; a moralist, does he not detail to us, bit
by bit, in sage reflections, even in anecdotes, each
of the characters which he has during his life
studied or imagined (which is the same thing)?
See him arrange before us, with his famous parallel
biographies, Caesar-Alexander or the Ambitious,
Cicero-Demosthenes or the Liberal Orator,
Demetrius-Antony or the Voluptuous Commander,
Aristides-Cato or the Earnest Thinker,
etc. And, as for portraits, all history subsequently
will proceed from him; a Janssen, a Taine,
a Mommsen clearly work in the same way.
This machine, built wheel by wheel, sentence by
sentence, by the Moralist, and elevated by the
Historian, the Dramatic Author, laying his analysis
back in its box, has but to set in motion. The
man anatomically studied, then defined, drawn
and reconstructed, he has but to make move before
our eyes, and behold! a new character upon the
stage. Shakespeare and Corneille have not done
otherwise.