In this second installment of the series, we’re still looking at G.K. Chesterton, because I’ve been continuing a read-through of his works. Today, though, we’re not looking at his fiction; no, we’re looking at what his literary criticism, at his historiography- specifically chapter two of The Victorian Age in Literature. As with last time, I’ll draw out several points of interest to me and show them off, discussing both Chesterton’s opinion and my own input, as comparatively unauthoritative as that is. So, without further ado, let’s ask the question….

Must I Know My Characters Completely?

Yes, obviously.

Well, no.

The impetus for this question, which I have now so clearly answered, is this passage from Chesterton regarding George Eliot: “Her air is bright and intellectually even exciting; but it is like the air of a cloudless day on the parade at Brighton. She sees people clearly, but not through an atmosphere. And she can conjure up storms in the conscious, but not in the subconscious mind.” He compared also her earlier work to her later, arguing in brief that he sees in her earlier characters a humanity that is lacking from the “analysed dust-heaps” of her later work (spelling from original). What precisely he meant by this I do not pretend to comprehend wholly; I have not myself read Eliot’s work, either Silas Marner, the positive half of the comparison, or Daniel Deronda, the negative half.

The element of writing to which this quote speaks, in my mind, is the question of how we must know our characters. To an extent, we must know our characters propositionally. We must know that they believe such-and-such, that they love so-and-so, that they desire this-way-and-that. Of these things are their bones. What of the rest, though? How do we know them?

Consider how many ways we know people in our own lives. I know myself in one way- through reflection, through memory, through intuition, through my ongoing action. I know my family in another way, by memory of word and of deeds, by the accumulation of millions of fractional impressions and influences. I know a stranger in another way, as a hundred ineffabilities instantly perceived and as a few moments of quite concrete action. I know public figures, men of history, in another way, by a strange medley of what they wrote, of what others think of them, of comparison (accurate or inaccurate) to each other and to those I know. Finally, I know fictional characters by their thought and their word and their deed, almost like I know myself, but all within strict limits, bound to a page or a book- save when I break those limits in my imagination, when I extrapolate and even incorporate that extrapolation into my original impression. Indeed, all forms of knowledge here are contaminated by imagination.¹

If we know people in so many different ways, how are we to know our characters? Must we explicitly understand their every facet, be capable of providing propositional, scientific break-downs of all they do, say, think, and feel? No. In fact, not only is this unnecessary, I believe it to be deleterious to art, save for a few eccentric authors.

The problem, you see, is that we’re one (1) person big. Fictional characters, as a result of this and the limits of the worlds they exist within, the size of their secondary creation, are therefore much smaller than real people. If they are merely propositional, entirely concrete in our thoughts, they are limited to this size on the page; they do not suggest, except by coincidence, that they are more than the strict meaning of the words. This, if anything, is what I believe Chesterton deplores in Eliot (in part because of how he praises Dickens elsewhere).

If we engage our aesthetic conscience, however, if we start to understand our characters as living stories, then we engage that capacity of our souls which intuits the image of God in others, which assesses (consciously and unconsciously both) the sensory perceptions of other men and derives from those perceptions sight of that which is not seen, the sight of incarnate man (when all that was technically seen was the effects of the body). We as the writers operate in a growing unconscious understanding of our characters as made in His image (for they are made in the image of His image, in the image of man). They as the readers, then, are drawn to see more than propositions, to see that image reflected towards them, a man larger than can fit in another man.

So the answers I gave are both true. We need not know our characters totally in the sense we know a math problem we have completed, all strict propositions requiring certain conclusions. We must, however, know them as we know other people, in an aesthetic, instinctual sense.

Types of Conflict

Earlier in the chapter, Chesterton lays out what he sees as an integral part of the evolution of the novel: the changing basis of conflict, the loss of common ground. He sets up two examples: in the first, two peasant farmers quarrel over which one shall own a certain bit of land; in the second, one of them, being a teetotaler desires the abolition of hops, a vital ingredient of beer, from both farms. The contrast Chesterton draws here is that in the first case, the two men quarrel because of a similarity, that both would till the same ground, and in the second case, they quarrel because of a difference.²

Of course, these are both ‘differences’ in the purest sense, but there really is a difference we should recognize between conflicts of circumstance and conflicts of principle. In a conflict of circumstance, men are motivated by the same motive and with broadly similar suppositions. They live, however, at different points in the world, and so they have differing application of those motives and principles. They both want to till the land, or they both desire to go to Canterbury on pilgrimage, but their similarity overlaps. For that purpose, it turns out, they have only one acre of land or one palfrey. The conflict therefore springs up.

I contend, though, that while this conflict separates, it does not motivate the othering of the opponent. It is understood, so long as other factors do not interfere, that while the other guy is definitely in the wrong, his desires and principles are understandable. Further, neither side need change their motives to resolve the issue; the loser can still desire to farm while recognizing that he has no right to the particular plot of land.

Conflicts of principle are more fundamental and divisive, in my eye. A conflict of principle can only be resolved by fundamentally altering a participant; anything less than a modification of one side’s principle is a cease-fire or an armistice, not peace. The strict (moral) vegetarian who struggles against his venison-gorged neighbor may be forced to stop harassing him, but the conflict between them persists until the one eats meat or the other stops eating meat. This sort of conflict too encourages othering as the conflict of circumstance does not, for it points to some difference of the soul (principle, motive, worldview) and declares it important, a point of separation and strife.

Before proceeding to the next point, I would provide this note: in addition to conflicts of circumstance and principle, conflicts of subsistence, man vs nature, also exist. Further, conflicts of man with God are always eventually conflicts of principle.

Definition, What Is It Good For?

Absolutely something. Definitions are important. It may be that, as Chesterton says, “No clear-headed person wastes his time over definitions, except where he thinks his own definition would probably be in dispute,” but the fact of the matter is that definitions are generally in dispute. What is good? What is evil? What is plot? What is canon? At some point (depending on how I end up scheduling this), I wrote a two-part consideration of Death of the Author and other questions of canonicity. The simple fact is, a healthy conversation requires clarity of definition.

With that out of the way, we must also remember that definitions are derivative, not determinative. While Chesterton’s definition of a novel probably rules out some works you may have called a novel (The Lord of the Rings is, I think, right out, but also most of Henty’s work), the important fact is that the definition be clear and that it be useful. What a book is labelled changes actually nothing about its virtue or vice. It does change, however, how clearly it is seen, depending on how well the label fits and how clearly the label’s meaning is communicated to the hearer.

Not The Nasty Bits

Chesterton condemns rather heartily the habit he observed in the Victorian era of shoving the unpleasant parts of life off stage. He compliments the great authors- Dickens particularly, Thackeray, others- that they include these elements even when they are off-stage, saying, “Dickens and Thackeray claimed very properly the right to deal with shameful passions and suggest their shameful culminations; Scott sometimes dealt with ideas positively horrible….” He still condemns the practice as a grave fault in literature. He wrote, in fact, of the Victorian era, “It is impossible to express that [era’s] spirit except by the electric bell of a name. It was latitudinarian, and yet it was limited. It could be content with nothing less than the whole cosmos: yet the cosmos with which it was content was small.”

He clearly and distinctly states the essential problem of this self-censorship, so clearly that I will simply let the quote speak for me:

“Nine times out of ten, the coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the word that excuses it. A common evasion, for instance, substitutes for the word that brands self-sale as the essential sin, a word which weakly suggests that it is no more wicked than walking down the street. The great peril of such soft mystifications is that extreme evils (they that are abnormal even by the standard of evil) have a very long start. Where ordinary wrong is made unintelligible, extraordinary wrong can count on remaining more unintelligible still; especially among those who live in such an atmosphere of long words.”³

As Chesterton points out, if we abstain in our stories from portraying evil clearly, we do not sanctify ourselves but rather help entrap our readers.

Conclusion

Chesterton wrote masterful fiction, and so it is only fitting that he writes masterfully about fiction. His insights as to the ineffable parts of the human existence I have hardly touched on; I highly recommend reading Chesterton, discarding his opinion on Calvinism (which he horribly misunderstood), and then reading him again. The joy of life is strong in him. His insight too into the culture of his time, its characteristic conflicts and aversions, his understanding of the fruit thereof, is mete for us now as it was for his own time, for we live at once in the fruit of his era and at the root of the next. Also, by reading The Victorian Age in Literature, I have ballooned my reading list immensely, at once a terrible and exhilarating result.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – I have left out knowledge of God because it does not seem directly pertinent to my present point. Suffice it to say that we learn of God first by an innate awareness (Rom. 1:20-23; __) but also by literally every other avenue, though with trustworthy accuracy only on the basis of Scripture.

2 – For the curious, Chesterton seems to lament what he sees as an over-emphasis on conflicts of principle (though his works, as seen in The Ball and the Cross among others, are generally built around conflicts of principle). I must note that I have hardly plumbed the fullness of Chesterton’s thought in this section (or in the others).

3 – I believe that the two words he refers to here are ‘prostitute’ and its euphemism, ‘streetwalker’.