CHAPTER XII

CHARACTER

For broadest popularity possibly the prime single requisite in fiction is action plot, but, if so, character drawing is at least a close second. Human nature's interest in human nature is undying and intense. By the tests of the somewhat indefinite thing we call literature, character probably ranks first. Action, on the other hand, seems the more primitive and the more fundamental; early man undoubtedly acted first and thought later; when he learned to analyze his fellows it was for purposes of action.

_An Experiment_.--It is interesting to look back over the centuries and consider the stories that have had sufficient hold to endure. Which do you remember first and the most distinctly, "Sherlock Holmes," "Mulvaney," "Richard Feveril," "Amyas Leigh," "John Silver," "Becky Sharpe," "Old {171} Scrooge," "Quasimodo," "Don Quixote," "Falstaff," "Hamlet," "Lady Macbeth," "Faust," etc., or the plots and action in which they were concerned? "Arthur," "Tristan," "Roland," "Siegfried," "Finn McCool," etc., or their adventures? "Aeneas," "Hector," "Ulysses," etc., or what they did?

I have made no laboratory tests on other people, so can risk no conclusions from this test beyond venturing that, as the race grew older and its literature developed, character interest tended to take first place over the more primitive action appeal. Make your own tests, allowing for the differences between stories of the last few centuries and those of long ago. After trying out yourself, try out as many other people as you can. If you do, you'll get valuable knowledge--and understanding--not likely to be found in books.

You'll get not only some useful fundamental ideas on the values and relative values of plot and character, but possibly, by contrast with others, a sound idea as to whether your real bent is for plot or for character, and, best of all, you will have done something toward forming or strengthening {172} the laboratory habit of examining facts instead of swallowing at theories, and the habit of thinking for yourself instead of using the weakening crutch of accepting other people's theories that they in turn probably accepted from other people _ad infinitum_.

In any case character drawing--human nature--is one of the two most important elements in fiction. Yet the lack of it marks the majority of submitted manuscripts. In many of these cases it is an utter, total, complete, absolute lack, unless you count the crude class distinction between hero and villain. Characters are merely proper names, lucky if there is even an individualized or slightly individualized physical body to cling to, and twice lucky if said body has clothes or habits of its own. You can lift them out of one story and substitute them in another with no damage to them or to either story and with decided profit in the case of the first. It is pitiful--and maddening.

The tragedy of it is that it can easily be remedied by any writer of average human intelligence. All he needs for comparatively decent characterization is a certain very simple recipe.

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_A Recipe_.--I don't know whose recipe it is, having heard it years ago and forgotten his name, though I think its accredited father dates back a century or so, but he should be crowned in honor and the use of his recipe made compulsory by law. Apparently not one writer in ten thousand ever even heard of it.

You can dig out that recipe for yourself by the laboratory method advocated above, if you will trace English literature back toward its beginnings. And if I give you a broad hint by suggesting a bit of thoughtful, practical consideration of the morality plays, you should have no trouble at all.

There it is, simple, elemental, effective--_assign to each person in your story one single trait of character and make him show it by actions, words, thoughts._

Carry it into as much detail as possible. If I remember aright, the recipe's reputed father took as example a character whose one trait was cruelty and said that if he were made to walk in a garden he must be made to knock off the heads of flowers with his cane as he passed.

That's as far as the recipe goes, so far as {174} I remember, but try a second elementary step--show the reaction of this single predominant trait upon the other persons in the story, in what they say to him, do to him, think of him, always, of course, in the light of their own single traits.

Third step: Assign one or more persons a second trait, a minor trait, and proceed as before.

Try it, if you are not beyond the need of fundamental suggestions as to characterization. You will not only reap a rich harvest of concrete results but will also be getting a most excellent training.

Only a few days ago I was told of a case in which it has had a thorough test. I've never read anything by the author in question, but know that he turns out a consistent and steady flow of books whose sales are enormous though treated with condescension by critics of literature. The report is that in the actual writing of his stories he does not even give names to his characters but uses the name of the predominant traits he assigns to them--Cruelty, Honesty, Vanity, and so on. When the story is finished he, or perhaps his secretary, goes through the {175} manuscript, strikes out these names of traits and gives each character whatever name meets general requirements. _Voilà_! Personally, I'd give a good deal to know what would happen to his sales if he abandoned this method and the kind of characterization it produces--to know, rather, whether he would ever have had enormous sales if he had not used this recipe.

Just using the morality plays--and _Pilgrim's Progress_--as a sound foundation. Maybe it's funny, but maybe you could profit by it yourself. Heaven knows that plenty of writers could!

_Tags_.--If I could, I'd hang over almost every writer's desk a large card bearing in very black letters these words:

"Remember that yours is not the only story in the world and that it has to compete for the reader's attention with countless other stories. Your interest in it is particularized and personal; his is not. Also, you already know everything in the story; he does not. You may have failed to put on paper part of what you know; in that case he will never know it.

"Remember that your reader has met many {176} people in real life, forgotten all about most of them, including their names, and that in the great number of stories he has read he has met a far greater number of fictitious people who, along with their names, fail in even greater proportion than have the real people to register upon his attention, interest and memory. You are merely adding a few more to his hundreds of thousands. The competition is heavy. You can make no headway against it if your story-persons are only names, almost none if they are only mildly individualized and characterized, little enough even, if they are drawn fairly strongly.

"Remember, too, that when you introduce him to more than two or three new people they have to compete, also, among themselves--that he is likely to have difficulty even in straightening them out in his mind and connecting the right name with each character. If you wish your people to get and hold his attention and to have any place in his memory, you must strive with all your might to _mark_ each character, to individualize each character, by every means within your reach. If you have not a natural gift {177} for character drawing, use elementary methods."

The particular elementary, and very effective, method I have in mind is to hang on to each character one or more of what in the writing of plays are called, I believe, tags. It can be called, if you like, advertising your characters. Most of them need it. Or might be likened to the use of motifs in opera. Or you might find in it even an approximation to the conditions of real life.

Put a strongly individualized label on each of your characters and make the readers keep looking at it. This character continually introduces his speeches with "Well now"; that one is always nervously hitching up his trousers at the knees; John Jones is so interested in golf that he is perpetually dragging it into conversation; Myrtle is always tittering; Brown is conspicuously careful of his personal appearance, while his brother George wears anything that comes handy and Sister Isabel has almost a monomania for red; Judson habitually looks into the eyes of people with an intent gaze that is hard to meet; Henry in appearance and manner suggests a sheep; the peculiar blackness of {178} Maude's eyes is her most marked and impressive feature.

Never let a character remain long on the stage without presenting his tag. It individualizes more strongly than a name. It is a most useful guide-post to the reader. It strongly reinforces character-drawing and may even serve as a cheap substitute, a substitute at any price being preferable to nothing. Also, it becomes an _asset in itself_, an element of appeal that runs the range from farce to tragedy and you can mix or alternate these or other appeals with strong results. Its effect is cumulative. There is for its intrinsic value a sound grounding in fundamental human nature--a reader's unconscious pride and vanity in "detecting" it as characteristic, in being able to forecast its coming, his interest and consequent like or dislike for tags in real life, his comfort in having mental tasks made easy.

Of course, if you've drawn real character for the persons in your story, make their tags consistent with character--or, rarely, in deliberate and evident contrast. Equally, of course, a tag, like any other good thing, must be handled with judgment and not allowed to run riot.

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_Results from Tags and High-Point Characterization_.--Study the following fiction characters that have made a big and lasting "hit," so much so that they have been carried through a series of books: "Sherlock Holmes," "Captain Kettle," "Don Q.," "Brigadier Gerard," "Tartarin," "D'Artagnan," "Athos," "Porthos," "Aramis," "Mulvaney," "Ortheris," "Learoyd," "Allen Quatermain," "Wallingford"; consider also some characters of Dickens. Some of these are well-drawn and well rounded out, but others reduce to the bare bones of the "one-trait recipe" and the use of tags, really very elementary creations. Yet all are made vivid and individualized by means of tags and strongly emphasized traits of character. While the tags, for the most part, are handled with at least a fair degree of skill, the characterization in some cases, though of course not limited to a single trait, is incomplete, very elementary and not very well done. Yet all have gained a strong popular success, not just from the stories in which they appear, but as characters.

It is clear from the above that while the "one-trait recipe" and the use of tags do not necessarily spell literature they are by no {180} means incompatible with it. They are merely first steps toward really good character depiction. Their importance in any teaching of fiction is due chiefly to the lamentable fact that most writers do not take or even see them.

Even advanced writers can often profit from consideration of their values. For example, in a certain successful series of novelettes and novels told in the first person but centering on another character, the narrator was almost entirely lacking in tags and salient character traits and didn't even have a name, or a past, or a body, or, often, clothes until well along in the series. He was consistently drawn, so far as he went, but almost colorless and with little grip on interest and memory, though having a prominent place in the plot and not thus subordinated for the sake of relative values and unity around the central character. The central character was strongly drawn, tags and all, and the series as a whole had so many other merits that the colorlessness of the fictitious narrator could not wreck it, but its improvement was very marked when he was developed and brought to his proper place in the lime-light by the tags and salient traits needed in addition to the general filling in.

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_Characterization in General_.--I attempt no covering of the subject, desiring only to bring out the points that the general in-flow of manuscripts shows are, in practise, most in need of attention. There are already hosts of books giving detailed instructions, theories, examples, analyses and exercises. Some of them are useful and valuable in many cases. In general they seem to me likely to be dangerous, unless the student uses exceptional care, in that they are likely to encourage a tendency toward mechanics instead of art, artificiality instead of naturalness, strain and limitation instead of freedom, and copying instead of art. I am aware that tags and the "one-trait recipe" seem open to the same charge, but their saving clause is that they can teach the writer how to develop himself rather than how to turn out finished work by rule. Also the present need of them in practise is appalling, and perhaps that need would not be so great if writers had been trained by more naturalistic methods.

The only sound and comprehensive rule for characterization is:

Study people, first as subjects, second as recipients of the knowledge you have gained.

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