FullReads

In explanation of Miss Julia’s sad fate I have suggested many factors: her mother’s fundamental instincts; her father’s mistaken upbringing of the girl; her own nature, and the suggestive influence of her fiance on a weak and degenerate brain; furthermore, and more directly: the festive mood of the Midsummer Eve; the absence of her father; her physical condition; her preoccupation with the animals; the excitation of the dance; the dusk of the night; the strongly aphrodisiacal influence of the flowers; and lastly the chance forcing the two of them together in a secluded room, to which must be added the aggressiveness of the excited man.

Thus I have neither been one-sidedly physiological nor one-sidedly psychological in my procedure. Nor have I merely delivered a moral preachment. This multiplicity of motives I regard as praiseworthy because it is in keeping with the views of our own time. And if others have done the same thing before me, I may boast of not being the sole inventor of my paradoxes–as all discoveries are named.

In regard to the character-drawing I may say that I have tried to make my figures rather “characterless,” and I have done so for reasons I shall now state.

In the course of the ages the word character has assumed many meanings. Originally it signified probably the dominant ground-note in the complex mass of the self, and as such it was confused with temperament. Afterward it became the middle-class term for an automaton, so that an individual whose nature had come to a stand still, or who had adapted himself to a certain part in life–who had ceased to grow, in a word–was named a character; while one remaining in a state of development–a skilful navigator on life’s river, who did not sail with close-tied sheets, but knew when to fall off before the wind and when to luff again–was called lacking in character. And he was called so in a depreciatory sense, of course, because he was so hard to catch, to classify, and to keep track of. This middle-class notion about the immobility of the soul was transplanted to the stage, where the middle-class element has always held sway. There a character became synonymous with a gentleman fixed and finished once for all–one who invariably appeared drunk, jolly, sad. And for the purpose of characterisation nothing more was needed than some physical deformity like a clubfoot, a wooden leg, a red nose; or the person concerned was made to repeat some phrase like “That’s capital!” or “Barkis is willin’,” or something of that kind. This manner of regarding human beings as homogeneous is preserved even by the great Moliere. Harpagon is nothing but miserly, although Harpagon might as well have been at once miserly and a financial genius, a fine father, and a public-spirited citizen. What is worse yet, his “defect” is of distinct advantage to his son-in-law and daughter, who are his heirs, and for that reason should not find fault with him, even if they have to wait a little for their wedding. I do not believe, therefore, in simple characters on the stage. And the summary judgments of the author upon men–this one stupid, and that one brutal, this one jealous, and that one stingy–should be challenged by the naturalists, who know the fertility of the soul-complex, and who realise that “vice” has a reverse very much resembling virtue.

Because they are modern characters, living in a period of transition more hysterically hurried than its immediate predecessor at least, I have made my figures vacillating, out of joint, torn between the old and the new. And I do not think it unlikely that, through newspaper reading and overheard conversations, modern ideas may have leaked down to the strata where domestic servants belong.

My souls (or characters) are conglomerates, made up of past and present stages of civilisation, scraps of humanity, torn-off pieces of Sunday clothing turned into rags–all patched together as is the human soul itself. And I have furthermore offered a touch of evolutionary history by letting the weaker repeat words stolen from the stronger, and by letting different souls accept “ideas”–or suggestions, as they are called–from each other.