The Creation of Character in Literature, by John Galsworthy.

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THE CREATION OF CHARACTER IN LITERATURE

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" ... Being no philosopher, then, this lecturer advances suspicions rather than conclusions. He suspects the substratum of the human being to be energy, or whatever the fashion of the moment calls it, identical with the energy of which everything else alive is made, so that it has basic touch with every other living thing, and sympathetically receives the impacts therefrom. ... "

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"More fluidly, perhaps, one may think of the sub-conscious mind as a sort of lava of experience, over which the conscious mind has formed in a crust more or less thin, and more or less perforated by holes through which the lava bubbles. And we may think of what we loosely call creative genius as a much more than normal perforation of the crust, combined with a very high aptitude for shaping the emergent lava into the characters of fiction, into pictures, music, or what not. So much, vaguely and tritely, for the make-up of the creative mind."

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" ... It is true that the biographer has not, like the portrait-painter, to resist the magnetic current emanating from one sitting in a flesh which revolts from being unfavourably, or shall we say truthfully, portrayed; but he has, not uncommonly, to steel himself against the susceptibilities of ancestor worship. In fact, when we contemplate the lions in the path of the biographer, we need not wonder if he is sometimes eaten, and not infrequently lost in the jungle. ... The secret of the best biography, as of the best portraiture, lies in a magical blending of sympathy and criticism. When Gainsborough painted his little daughters that they might dwell for ever catching butterflies, hand in hand, in summertime, he gave us a perfect illustration of the touching beauty that may breathe in the art of re-creation; when Boswell wrote his Life of Johnson he revealed to us the amazing possibilities of intimacy in that art."

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"Admitting that a dramatist should know the trend and ending of his drama before he sits down to write it, he will be ill advised if he does not give his characters every chance to dictate to him, within that limit. For, even then, he is not so free as the novelist, and, if an inquiry were taken over the whole range of plays and novels, the surviving creations of character in novels would far outnumber those in plays. One might almost say that plays are recalled as plays, and novels by the characters in them."

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" ... second great drawback to character creation in drama — the physical limitation, set by a stage, to the dramatist’s creative freedom. ... Except perhaps in his first play, he will not easily avoid the feeling that, however intensely he may use his imagination, the imagined creature will not come out on the stage as he imagined it. There is no such thing as ideal casting; casting is a question of more or less right representation. And knowledge of this induces in the playwright a certain looseness of conception and workmanship in order that the garments of character may fit a greater selection of impersonators. Some dramatists are so acutely conscious of this particular limitation that they merely create roles for selected players. This is to super-observe the rules of the medium in which they work, and the process cannot be dignified with the label ‘character creation’."
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"In those few character creations which endure is a quality which can best, perhaps, be described as homespun yet vital; they are vivid from ever revealing themselves without seeming to. ... What the mainspring itself is remains mysterious. Call it, if you will, vital spark, ‘breath of life’. One thing is sure: The enduring characters in literature are ever such as have kicked free of swaddling clothes and their creators. Theirs is a sublime unconsciousness of the authors of their being. They toddle and strut, and hale you with them into the streets, the fields, the sands, and waters of their private pilgrimages, that you may see their stars and share their troubles, laugh with them, love with them, draw with them the breath of their defiances, suffer in their struggles, float out with them into the unconscious when their night comes.

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July 27, 2021 - July 27, 2021.

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