MUST LITERARY ART DENY NATURE?

Otago Witness, Issue 2896, 15 September 1909, Page 77

MUST LITERARY ART DENY NATURE?

By Constancb Clyde. It is usual to speak as if literary fic-tion-writing of to-day were simple and true to real life. Whatever other faults it may haye — shortness of scope, want of style, etc. — it at least deals more intimately with the real facts of human nature than was customary in previous generations. Whether this be so or not, it is certain that modern fiction, even of the highest kind, succeeds only- by postulating certain attributes in human nature that ate true only of a small minority of human beings. Over and over again these characteristics have to be- assumed before we can have a story at all. With-, out them, indeed, there could be no etory. Take, for instance, the frequency of the moral struggle in real life : experience shows us that moral struggles aie extremely rare in Teal life. We do not wrestle much either with good or bad an/jels, but give way to one or other with astonishing facility. Nevertheless, influenced by the splendidly-written fiction that has been penned on the other assumption , we do not realise this. We laugh at the cheap melodramatic villain committing crime after crime without compunction ; we look on him as a mere property figure, a convention. As a matter of fact the history of crime shows us that this so-called stock figure is the realily. It is Macbeth that is the convention. The truth is that the real murderer and the -real thief a/re commonplace and uninteresting to the last degree. Therefore, in the regions of the imagination the literary man invents him and shows him in the agonies of a remorse and the whirl of a moitil struggle tha.L could never take place. We applaud the splendid analysis, and believe that the human soul is unveiled before us. but everything is based on an assumption which is altogether wrong. The Dean Mainlands of real life are not hero and criminal in one ; they either do not keep silence at all. or they keep it to the very end. To be capable of so terrible a crime as that 20 years' false witness means an incapabilitj for the virtue- that should finally break it. Yet who would forego that pulpit scene for a mere question of psychological fact? would give up Hestei Prynne's ministei hero-\iilain. Richard 111, or the many nightmares of a hundired otlters who have been immortalised as moral stru^srlers? History shows us commonplace realities mi haunted by spiritual phenomena of any .-ort, but literature ha* no upb for th-e^e poor realities, and prefers the more substantial ehqdows. There a,re many truths in human nature which must of neef=sity b? ignored by the fietiomst. Take, for instance, the question of the mixed motive. In leal life we have very f^sltlom only cne motive for a certain pction, or for any r.ew departure in life. Motives and sub-motives have their part, and it is neither a very big motive (as the old school made out) or a very uniniDortant matter, as the subtler analysts affirm, that decides. Many motives decide. Yet -tories which bring in this truth are usually the weaker for it. The reader must e-ee his chief character under the sway of cne motive only. Fo seen he makf-s a greater imr>n?s-ion of force and reality, though he is, in fact, much loss tru« to Nature. However modern writers may deny it. they mu^t in resp.e<?i say good-bye to tiuth when an effect is to be obtained. In regard to ait in literature, is not the grew iiKj theitri' a!i»>m in modern story- writ mc; somewhat of a mistake? The tendency which shows itself so markedly in the rn-to-date fenilleton, with its preliminary list of characters, as in a stage, prosrranrme,. is present in fiction of a higher sort. A favourite and, indeed,

' interesting £yp© of story is that of a duologue, wherein each character show® by small actions how the words of the other speaker affect him or h-er. "Gerald clenched his hand till the knuckles were white." "An involuntary spasm contracted her features." We are so accustomed to these phrases that we never stop to reflect how overdone and unnatural it all is (only Kipling seems able to combine the natural amd the effective in this style of wilting). On the stage, such little movements aire necessary, for the author cannot come to the front every minute and say, "Gerald then became nervous," o. "Oedia was now alarmed." This is exactly, however, what the novelist can do, this is what be did do in the days of Srr Walter Scott asnd Jane Austen, and in later tiroes. The characters talked, and what could not be inddcated by their conversation was told 1 outright by the author without any handtwitohings or face gymnastics whatever. It is the right way, the really literary •way, yet who can deny that the dramatic — one might say the melodramatic — <way is the more admired now even by the truly cultured ! -