A Writer's Notebook (68 page)

New York. She was the secretary of a wealthy woman, and she lived in a small hotel in which lived also the father of an English poet. She had a passionate admiration for the poet, and for his sake befriended his father who was poor, alcoholic and really rather disreputable. He loved his son and was proud of him. Then the poet came to New York to stay with her employer. She felt sure that he could not know in what poverty his father lived, and as soon as he found out would do something to relieve his distress. But the days passed and he made no sign of wishing to see his father, and at last, one day when she was answering letters for him, she told him that she knew his father, that they lived in fact in the same hotel, and
that his father wanted terribly to see him. “Oh?” he said and went on with his dictation. She was horrified. She felt obliged to tell the old man. He chuckled. “He's ashamed of me,” he said. “He's a lousy poet,” she said indignantly. “No,” he answered, “he's a lousy man; he remains a great poet.”

It is essential for a writer unceasingly to study men, and it is a fault in me that I find it often a very tedious business. It requires a great deal of patience. There are of course men of marked idiosyncrasy who offer themselves to your observation with all the precision of a finished picture, they are ‘characters', striking and picturesque figures; and they often take pleasure in displaying their peculiarity, as though they amused themselves and wanted you to share their amusement. But they are few. They stand out from the common run and have at once the advantage and the disadvantage of the exceptional. What they have in vividness they are apt to lack in verisimilitude. To study the average man is an affair of quite another sort. He is strangely amorphous. There is someone there, with a character of his own, standing on his own feet, with a hundred peculiarities; but the picture is hazy and confused. Since he does not know himself, how can he tell you anything about himself? However talkative, he is inarticulate. Whatever treasures he has to offer you he conceals with all the more effectiveness that he does not know they are treasures. If you want to make a man out of these crowded shadows, as a sculptor makes a statue from a block of stone, you want time, patience, a Chinese ingenuity and a dozen qualities besides. You must be ready to listen for hours to the retailing of secondhand information in order at last to catch the hint or the casual remark that betrays. Really to know men you must be interested in them for their own sake rather than for yours, so that you care for what they say just because they say it.

The Outward Man. One of the difficulties that confronts the novelist is how to describe the appearance of his characters. The most natural way is of course the formal catalogue, the height, the complexion, the shape of the face, the size of the nose and the colour of the eyes. This may be given all at once or mentioned as occasion arises, and a salient trait by repetition at apposite moments may be impressed upon the reader's attention. It may be given when the character is introduced or when interest has already been excited in him. In any case I do not believe that the reader gets any clear impression. The older novelists were very precise in their enumeration of their characters' physical parts, and yet if any reader could see in the flesh the person whom the author has thus elaborately described I do not believe he would recognise him. I think we seldom form any exact image in our minds as a result of all these words. We have a clear and precise picture of what the great characters of fiction looked like only when an illustrator like Phiz with Mr. Pickwick or Tenniel with Alice has forced his own visualisation upon us. The cataloguing of characteristics is certainly dull, and a good many writers have tried to give liveliness to their description by an impressionistic method. They ignore the facts altogether. They scintillate more or less brightly on the subject of their characters' appearance and expect you from a few epigrammatic phrases, from the way he strikes a vivacious onlooker, for instance, to construct in your mind a human being. Such descriptions may often be read with a pleasure which you cannot get from a sober enumeration of traits, but I doubt whether they take you much further. I have a notion that their vivacity often conceals the fact that the author has no very clear picture in his mind of the character he is inventing. They shirk the difficulty. Some writers seem unconscious of the importance of physical characteristics. It appears never to have struck them how great is their influence on character. The world is an entirely different place to the man of five foot seven from what it is to the man of six foot two.

Monserrat. Like a poem, harsh and difficult, of a poet forcing his verse to strange harmonies and wrestling with his medium in the effort to make it carry a significant beauty and a power of thought that words are incapable of expressing.

Zaragoza. The chapel was dimly lit with candles on the altar, and at the altar steps two or three women and a man were kneeling. Above the altar was a Christ on the Cross in polychrome and almost life-size. With his low brow, thick black hair and short, straggling black beard he had the look of a peasant of the Asturias. In a dark corner of the chapel, away from the others, a woman knelt, with her hands not joined in the common way of prayer, but with the palms open towards the altar, the arms a little away from her body, as though on an invisible platter she were bearing the offering of an anguished heart. She had a long face, smooth and unlined, and her great eyes were fixed upon the image over the altar. There was an infinite pathos in her posture, that of a suppliant, helpless and defenceless, who sought aid in her confused distress. You would have said that she could not understand why this pain had been given her to bear. I did not believe that it was for herself she prayed, but for another that she interceded. A child in danger of death, a husband, a lover in prison or exile? She remained strangely still, and her eyes, unblinking, were set fast on the face of the dying Christ. But it was not to the living presence of which the image was no more than a crude symbol, it was literally to the grim, realistic figure, the work of human hands, that she made her passionate plea. There was in her eyes utter submission, resignation to the will of God, and yet a complete and intense confidence that from that wooden statue relief and succour might
come if she could but move the heart within the wooden body. Her face shone with the radiance of her faith.

There is nothing to say of Murillo (except that he is not so bad as Valdes Leal) but that his pictures are very good furniture for sacred buildings. From any other standpoint they are profoundly insignificant. He has a pleasing talent for composition, his colour is soft and pretty; he is loose, sentimental, graceful and superficial. And yet when you see these paintings in the places for which they were painted, dimly lit and magnificently framed, in a chapel of which the rich tones complete their colour, you cannot deny that they have something. They appeal to an over-wrought, sickly devotion, the other side of the Spanish violence, crudity and brutishness. They appeal to the faculty of shedding abundant tears, the love of children, the casual admiration of a pretty girl and the half superstitious charitableness, which are to be found in the average Spaniard.

La Celestina. It can be read with interest, but it can hardly today excite. Its importance is historical. It was, it appears, the forerunner both of the picaresque novel and of the Spanish drama. Certain of its characters have been repeated and emphasised by a number of succeeding authors. But the terms in which historians of literature speak of it are exaggerated, and to describe it as a great masterpiece is absurd. The intrigue is inane. The dialogue is praised for its naturalness and doubtless it is written in an easy and idiomatic language; but every one of the persons expresses himself in the same fashion, with a constant use of the wise saws which is the curse of Spanish literature and which even Cervantes overdid. The humour is all of a pattern and consists in the rank absurdity of putting moral apothegms in the mouth of the old procuress who is the chief character, and the most living, of the tragi-comedy.
But it is seldom that this provokes even a smile. One would have to be very easily moved to mirth to laugh. Some of the scenes are gay and lifelike. You can approve them, but you are never carried away by them. Though the story concerns the love of a young cavalier and a high-born damsel and there is much to-do about the extremity of their emotion, there is never a thrill of passion from the first page to the last. It is a love story from which love is absent. Of course it is a mischance that Calisto should be a fool and Melibea a half-wit; a half-wit, however, with the culture of a blue-stocking, for when she is about to throw herself from the top of a tower in desperation at her lover's death, she pauses to deliver, after Plutarch, a series of reflections on the mutability of human things, with examples drawn from classical story.