CHAPTER XII

THE FORMATION OF IMAGINARY CHARACTERS

I

TH

HE subject of the formation of imaginary characters covers a very wide field-as wide as the whole field of literature and indeed wider, because, as we shall see, the imagination which forms characters for the purposes of literary fiction, forms them also for other quite non-literary purposes in much the same way. In fact the imagination in all its many employments is oftenest engaged in the imagining of persons. In the following chapter dealing with this large subject I shall be able only to attempt some classification of the processes involved, and to make some few observations on each class with examples.

The characters in poetry and prose fiction may be conceived and delineated in two ways, corresponding to the two modes of thought already explained,-that is, they may be either intellectually constructed or imaginatively created. Doubtless in practice, particularly in the ordinary novel, there is often a combination of the two faculties or methods. The character is first seen in imagination and then elaborated, discussed, criticized by the intellect. But here as earlier, the imaginative conception is what demands attention. Furthermore the intellectually constructed character will always be inferior and will betray its inferiority to the imaginatively created one-first in naturalness and truth to life, and secondly in originality and depth of significance. The imaginatively created character will delight and refresh us with its novelty; it will go on acting

in our own imaginations after we have closed the book, or after we have left the theatre.1

The first requisite, then, for the writer of fiction, the requisite compared with which all the others are insignificant, is that he should see his characters in his imagination. As we have all so often used this expression of "seeing in the imagination" vaguely and thoughtlessly it may be better to say that the writer of fiction must see his characters appearing and acting before him with that "eye of the mind" I have referred to; or if his imagination is auditory, he must hear them speaking with his supersensory ear;-see or hear them almost as distinctly as we see and hear through the bodily senses. He may see them realistically moving among scenes of ordinary life; or more dramatically, like Stevenson, who describes "dozing off in his box seat" and watching his "little people" acting their parts "upon their lighted theatre;" or like Sully-Prudhomme, who says that in writing his plays, "I seemed to be a spectator at the play; I gazed at what was passing on the scene in an eager passionate expectation of what was to follow." But in some sense they must have to him the reality of true persons. Scott, who dictated the Bride of Lammermoor from his couch in illness, and who strangely after the book was written did not "recollect one single incident, character, or conversation it contained," yet conceived it with such spirit that "he arose from his couch and walked up and down the room, raising and lowering his voice, and as it were acting the parts."2 And lest it may be thought that this kind of composition is out of date I may cite a recent American writer. Speaking of his "Minervy Anns" Joel Chandler Harris says, "I have been intensely absorbed in

1 In other words the characters coming from true vision are best. This is why Mme. Rachilde preferred the characters of dream. "With one exception," she says, "all my books were first seen in dreams . . . and very often when I add chapters on my own account (de ma propre autorité) they do not turn out to be the best part of the book.” Chabaneix, Le Subconscient, p. 57.

2 Lockhart, Life, vol. vi, p. 67.

the series, more so than in anything I have ever written. There have been moments when I could hear her voice as plainly as I now hear the youngsters talking in the sitting-room." 1

Dickens, whose characters combine originality with lifelikeness to a degree hardly equalled elsewhere in fiction, owes his success, in part at any rate, to the very vividness of his imagination. He could see a fictitious character, or by use of the same faculty, assume a fictitious part. As imagination of this kind is a gift rather than an acquirement, he possessed it long before he began to write. In an account appearing in David Copperfield but written first previously as fact, he tells how as a child he devoured the old English novels and impersonated his favorite characters in them. "I have been Tom Jones (a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I verily believe . . . I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church-steeple; I have watched Strap with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest himself upon the wicket-gate; and I know that Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle, in the parlor of our little village alehouse."2 It is not strange, therefore, that when he came to write, his characters were real to him, that he lived among them and spoke of them as real persons,-"Nancy is no more," he wrote in letter to a friend after her death in Oliver Twist. Forster tells us that (except in Barnaby) it always caused him suffering at the end to part from the creatures of his fancy. He declared to Lewes that "every word said by his characters was distinctly heard by him." "When, in the midst of this trouble and pain," he writes, "I sit down to my book, some beneficent power shows it all to me, and tempts me to be interested, and I don't invent it-really do not-but see it, and write it down." This was particularly true of the Old Curiosity Shop and Little Nell. "All night I have been pursued by the child," he writes on one occasion; and on another, "I think it will come famously-but I am the 1 Julia C. Harris, Life, p. 403. 3 Life, vol. i, pp. 104, 131, 155. 2 Forster, Life, vol. i, p. 9. Life, vol. iii, pp. 306, 307.

wretchedest of the wretched. It casts the most horrible shadow upon me, and it is as much as I can do to keep moving at all. I tremble to approach the place a great deal more than Kit; a great deal more than Mr. Garland; a great deal more than the Single Gentleman. I shan't recover for a long time. Nobody will miss her like I shall."1 Surely this accounts for the hold the child has on the affections of all readers; Dickens knew her, and loved her, more even than he can express in the book.

The Old Curiosity Shop is the marvellous product of a very rare gift-rare perhaps, however, in degree rather than in quality. George Eliot and Stevenson had the same gift, and Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Joel Chandler Harris; and I suppose everyone else who has written true fiction. Even outside the ranks of literature it is not uncommon.

II

The characters of fiction are imaginative fusions of the kind we have already discussed in the preceding chapters; that is, the characteristics of different persons known to the mind are abstracted and run together to form new ideal creations. The explanation already given for such fusions in general therefore applies here. Two qualifications, however, may be added. First, these fusions of character are probably more complex than others because our experiences with persons are more numerous, are more important for us, and more deeply engage our feelings than any others. Secondly, many of them involve our own characters or personalities, more fully than the ordinary fusion; the ego enters with all its implications. Evidently an author stands in a different attitude toward a character formed by a fusion of his own person with other persons, from that in which he stands, say, to a fusion of landscapes. In both the mind of the author enters, as in every imaginative product, but in a different way and to a different degree in the two cases. Here again it will be instructive to take an example from

1 Life, vol. i, pp. 184, 186.

dreams, which often show these fusions of persons in the most simple and striking way. Just as in the earlier examples the imagination formed a damson-snail or a mushroom-golfball, it will conceive a "hyphenated" character. The following from Havelock Ellis would be a simple case. "After a day in which I had received a letter from a lady, unknown to me, living in France, and later on had written out a summary of a criminal case in which a detective had to go over to France, I dreamed that some one told me that the lady I had heard from was a detective in the service of the French Government, and this explanation, though it seemed somewhat surprising, fully satisfied me. Here, it will be seen, the idea of France served as a bridge, and was utilized by the sleeping consciousness to supply an answer to a question which had been asked by waking consciousness." Thus, according to Freud, the dream regularly utilizes a similarity in persons of any sort whatsoever, to justify the formation of a new unity. The unified person may be either an "identification," where an actual person appears in the dream, with features, however, drawn from other persons; or a "composition," where features are drawn from various originals to form an entirely novel dream character.2 The elements drawn upon from the various originals may be of any sort,— their names, their visual features, their mannerisms and habit of speech, their characteristic mental attitudes and social relations. For instance, "instead of repeating A is ill disposed toward me, and B also, I make a composite fusion of A and B in the dream, or I conceive A as doing an unaccustomed action which usually characterizes B." The persons drawn upon to form the dream character may be any of those known to the dreamer, including of course the dreamer himself. Indeedand this is a point to be particularly noted, because it may have its analogy in the case of literary fictions-according to Freud every dream treats directly or indirectly of the dreamer's own person. "In cases where not my ego, but only a strange person

1 The World of Dreams, p. 42.

2 Interpretation of Dreams, p. 297.