The Art of Inventing Characters By GEORGES POLTI Author of The Thirty-six Dramatic Situations (Translated by Lucile Ray) Franklin, Ohio JAMES KNAPP REEVE 1922 COPYRIGHT, 1922 JAMES KNAPP REEVE THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I SOME STRANGE OMISSIONS. 1 Feminine Types Yet Uncharacterized. 2 The Literature of Character. 3 What is Permissible? CHAPTER II THE GREAT PREJUDICE. 1 Does "Character "Exist? 2 The Non-Existent Ego. 3 A Little Commentary on "The Imitation of Christ." CHAPTER III Nor CHARACTERS, BUT ATTITUDES. 1 Attitudes. 2 Roles and Occupations ; Professional and Tradi- tional Types; Character-Types; Characters More Individualized; Portraits. 3 New Combinations. CHAPTER IV THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS. 1 The Systems to be Harmonized. 2 The Systems Harmonized and Explained. 3 Of the Four Temperaments. CHAPTER V THE LAW OF FOUR-CENTURY PERIODS. (An Application of the Preceding Chapter). THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS CHAPTER VI THE Six DIRECTIONS OF ENERGY. 1 The Temperaments Combined Two by Two, Forming Six Types. 2 Historic Tendency to General Groupings of Six. 3 Analogous Groupings of Seven and Three. CHAPTER VII THE ART OF INVENTION. 1 Pythagoras; Philosophic Romanticism. 2 Various Numerical Groupings. 3 Discovering and Inventing. CHAPTER VIII EPIC AND TRAGEDY. 1 Homer; The Iliad and Odyssey. 2 Law of Generation by Which Tragedy Springs from Epic. 3 The Three Systems of Poetry. CHAPTER IX THE TWELVE GODS OF ALL NATIONS. 1 A New Explanation of the Origin of Gods. 2 Heroes, Eponyms, Tribes, Federations, Patri- archs, Peers, Disciples, Apostles, Parts of the Mass, Articles of the Creed, Stones, Totems, Idolatries, Heresies, Systems, Schisms and Nationalities. 3 Geography; History. CHAPTER X GENERAL CLASSIFICATION OF HUMAN BEINGS. 1 Plan of the Classification. 2 Classification: VESTA: The Pious. The Wise. The Faithful. TABLE OF CONTENTS JUNO: The Jealous. The Vengeful and Just. The Strict and Severe. NEPTUNE : The Avaricious and Grasping. The Despotic. The Ambitious. MINERVA: The Daring and Romantic. Adventurers. The Eloquent and Boastful. VENUS: The Seductive and Seducing. Courtesans. The Vicious. APOLLO: The Impassioned. The Chimerical. The Intellectual. MERCURY: The Shrewd. The Traitorous. The Knavish. JUPITER: The Arrogant and Insolent. The Haughty and Dignified. The Majestic and Protecting. CERES: The Generous and Prodigal. The Gay and Sensual. The Vulgar and Practical. VULCAN: The Earnest and Serious. The Deluded and Discouraged. The Unselfish and Devoted. THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS MARS: Murderers and Assassins. The Violent and Rebellious. The Bold and Fearless. DIANA: The Tender and Sentimental. The Weak. The Pure. 3 The 369 Unpublished Characters and their 164,980 Varieties. CHAPTER XI A TREATISE ON THE PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 1 The Complete Soul. 2 From Without Inward; Politics and Psychology; Theophrastus. 3 St. Bernard, St. Benoit and Seneca. CHAPTER XII PERSPECTIVE m MATTERS OP PSYCHOLOGY 1 Comparative Perspective. 2 The Characters of Moliere, Shakespeare, Plautus, Balzac, etc. 3 Vacancies to be Filled. CONCLUSION. The Art of Inventing Characters CHAPTER I Some Strange Omissions I FEMININE TYPES YET UNCHARACTERIZED "Woman," said the great Goethe to Eckermann one afternoon, resting his cup of Rhine wine on the table, "Woman is the sole remaining object upon which we may pour out our ideality. As to men, there is nothing more to be done. Homer has taken them all." Our moderns, nevertheless, are yet far from taking possession of the new world thus pointed out on the horizon by our Father of Weimar. The student of the literature of character, even the most recent, invariably turns from it disappointed to find it so poorly balanced that, while surcharged with varied masculine types, carefully drawn and distinct, it presents hardly a feminine character in the least degree original and unforeseen. And his justifiable disappointment condemns us. Will neither novels nor plays, neither the writings of moralists, the greatest of epics, the most piquant of memoirs even when written by women or by specialists in feminism will they never cease to exhibit this shameful poverty? 12 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS In explanation of "it, certainly, several theories exist. There are always theories with which to excuse our failures. But a following up of the present inquiry will, better than idle discussion, effectually destroy this supposed resemblance of all women to one another, this classification according to the merely sexual aspects of their life; maidens, sweethearts, wives, mothers, etc. Truly an easy simplification, but one which in reality denotes, on the part of the author making use of it, a field of vision limited by a state of erotic obsession. . . .Take a turn in the air, my dear sir, and return refreshed to pursue the pres- ent study! You have been too greatly occupied by their femininity to be able to see them as com- plete individuals (and by this I mean from foot TO HEAD, of which they have, believe me, quite as much as you) ! Let us imagine for a moment a new Amazonate, wherein the blue-stockings, monopolizing literature, in their turn do not deign filled with pride and selfish desire to consider anything in man except their sexual ideal. Many a physiognomy in our eyes marvelous, would in theirs, fixed upon shapely limbs or graceful elegance, lose all its glory, and the figures of athletes or of handsome pages would soon eclipse the profiles, to us so distinct, of Hamlet, of Ulysses, of Job, of Newton, of Boni- face VIII or of Junius Brutus. SOME STRANGE OMISSIONS 13 A view so imperfect (and of which the symptoms may perhaps be diagnosed in more than one feminine romance) would however be justified by a social state. Thus that of the antique city explains the small number of its feminine crea- tions. Antigone was the ideal Daughter, Electra, the Sister, Alceste and Penelope represent the Wife, near at hand or far away during absence, war and labors. In Andromache was incarnated the Young Mother ; Hecuba and Jocaste represent the Aged Mother and her griefs; Helen realized the Inconstant Beauty, Medea the Dangerous Mis- tress, and Ariadne the Sacrificed. For woman, in whatever was not relative to man, had no place in that literature of the agora, civic tragedy, epic chanted in the public square, history recited to the four winds, lyricism dedicated to gymnasts, philosophy of gardens and banquets. But we, who for a century have so presumptuously claimed the creation of a literature of the soul, of the indi- vidual, of the home; we who see women mingling in all things, sharing all activities, truly we are inexcusable ! And we are duly punished. Note, in brief, this principle, which we shall verify more than once in the course of the book ; poverty of subdivision of a general type brings about a poverty rigorously proportionate in the elements which in turn com- pose each individual type. 14 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Each new character, once drawn in literature, represents a veritable discovery, in the scientific sense of the word, in that it brings to light a latent and heretofore unfamiliar part of our soul, of which we become conscious in the suddenly aroused interest; a conquest wrested by our con- sciousness, aided by this example, from the sub- conscious wherein it stirs as deeply buried as within an animal. From the day, then, when in the above hypothesis we ceased to distinguish between Hamlet and Job, we should already have ceased to discern in the former his catholic con- science, his tendency to dreaming, etc., and, in the Arab, his patience, the unshakeable firmness of his faith, and so forth, perceiving in them only those points which they have in common, their lack of eroticism, among others. And thus a corresponding confusion would reign anew among the inward faculties of each human being of the time. Now, absurd and humiliating as such a confu- sion may appear to us, we tolerate in ourselves one precisely similar with respect to the very many women whom we classify merely as "cold" and "mystic". Need we be surprised, after this, if, in all women, each one of whom might personify a special region and clearly illustrate it for us, we find ourselves inevitably arrested at some time by the incomprehensible, upon the frontier of a SOME STRANGE OMISSIONS 15 strange country inaccessible to our logic, or, if you will, to our consciousness, which is the author of its own defeat. And as love alone which is to say the inconscient can serve us as guide, however hazardous a one, we do not hesitate to test it. A consequence still more serious: to forget, to refuse to understand this or that type of woman, because not amorous, is to condemn ourselves to an ignorance of almost all women, outside their compliant but servile, fugitive and uncertain dependence upon ourselves; it is to condemn ourselves furthermore to an ignorance and mis- understanding, not only of half of the human race, but of HALF OF OUR OWN INDIVIDUALITY. For every man has within him, morally, the femi- nine character complete, neglected and believed by him annihilated at the time of puberty, hidden in a shadow rich in reality with inexplicable reve- lations, just as, on the other hand, every woman possesses also the male character. (How else would it be possible for the father to bequeath to the daughter, and the mother to the son, a portion, sometimes so considerable, of their characters, while nevertheless the masculine and feminine types do not become less distinct?) Again, a cause of the silence to which antique society reduced woman might be found in the 16 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS nature of each man, as it is even yet found in those (otherwise often beautiful and strong) of the Moslem, the Buddhist, the polytheist, of the non-Christian, to use a general term, for the Hindu, the Persian, the Chinese or Malay cannot be called uncivilized. Man, then, was a Citizen or a Subject; he was not a Soul, in the absolute sense of the word, separate and complete. Even when such a man loved a woman, he showed, in consequence of the contrast between the radiation of his pride and his blindness toward her, a sort of pederasty, an idolatry of Passion, a monologue before Flesh. He fell upon and assaulted her; he never contemplated her fairly face to face. Whether one regrets or commends the change everywhere inaugurated by Christianity, the OTHER BEING, freed from the oppression hereditary since the "fall," has begun to speak in our hearts, and, we must admit, more clearly from century to century. It is this dialogue in us which we hear in the Sacred Writings, in the greatest of poets and the profoundest of philosophers. From this dualism vainly proscribed and which Nature, one might say, has symbolized in the symmetry of the two halves of our bodies as divided by a perpendicular line result the many disconcert- ing contradictions of our conduct, the perversions of our will, the antinomies over which Racine wept, by which Poe was fascinated, from which 17 Hegel reasoned. And the "mauvais menage" wherein each of us contends with himself, results from the persistence of our vanity in its ignorance, or rather its indolence in the interpretation of one-half of the human race. Shall we not attempt it? This will be, however, but a beginning. For, equilibrium once re-established between the sexes, we shall be led to re-establish it between the divers types of our own. We cannot sufficiently wonder at the lacunae which, from this point of view also, literature presents, and at the great number of characters encountered in life, whose portraits we never meet in books or upon the stage. To assure himself of this, the reader need but enum- erate his relatives and friends, for example, defin- ing them with the precision for which he will here find the means. II THE LITERATURE OF CHARACTER No epoch heretofore has appreciated so highly as our own the art of character-drawing. The merit which the Romantic school attributed to the invention, most illusory after all, of subjects and "situations," the Realist school has since trans- ferred to the invention, the "creation," to use the current word, of characters. 18 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS These, extracted from surrounding life by means of a mysterious chemistry, then condensed by skilful syntheses, should illustrate social studies in brilliant genre-pictures, in the way in which "Romantic" plots have been credited with embody- ing those reconstitutions of history recently pro- moted to the dignity of a "new science." In emulation, we have come, on our side, to reserve the title of "creative genius" for the author of a great number of well-defined characters ; this is the reason for the special veneration we profess for Homer, Shakespeare, Moliere, Balzac and Zola (the latter nevertheless so weak and so little varied in his drawings of women). The classic writers, indeed, did not think as we do. Even the fathers of the drama and of modern realism refused any pre-eminence of psychology. "It is for the situations" declares Diderot positively, "to decide the characters. The plan of a drama may be drawn, and well drawn, before the poet knows anything of the character he will give to his personages." And Beaumar- chais acknowledged, for his part, that the choice of characters was, in his plays, determined by the necessities of the plot. These revolutionaries thus confirm, in their modesty and sincerity, the enor- mous experience condensed in the Aristotelian "Poetics." "Action is the object of tragedy. . . SOME STRANGE OMISSIONS 19 Without action there can be no tragedy. There may be one without morals. . . To develop a moral is not to create a tragedy," etc. Besides, the founders of realism gave them- selves no illusions as to the small number of characters. The same Diderot, after Voltaire, could discover albeit with a somewhat super- ficial look only a dozen more or less, he assures us. (For in those happy days of "elegant" literature, one did not pass for a chimerical soul, an occultist, if one ventured to introduce into the prevailing mental confusion the luminous preci- sion of arithmetic.) The classic authors? They ingenuously de- manded from legend and tradition not only the stories, but the heroes ready-made. They bor- rowed them and bequeathed them to one another with the generosity of indifference, the merit consisting far more, in their eyes, in a presenta- tion, a perspective which brought in evidence some aspect until then imperfectly seen, and above all, in another and better harmony of com- position shown throughout the entire work, even to its humblest details. They well knew, these great originals, that one does not create new characters, only situations, plots, or symbols. If I have been able to reduce to about thirty-six -the figure given by Gozzi, Goethe and Schiller 20 the number of Dramatic Situations, it should be still easier to show exactly the limited number of creatures who compose our swarming humanity. However, such a simplification is much less the object of the present inquiry since it would increase the actual poverty than is the remedy- ing of that poverty by drawing from precisely this simplification a method for multiplying elements in infinite combinations. I shall give but the method ; it will convince only those minds desirous of applying it. But I shall furnish successively tangible and living results in a multitude of figures exactly 12,915 which are admittedly unpub- lished and newly characterized. Let them hasten and group themselves, to satisfy first of all that desire for "new characters" which torments thee, O contemporary reader! How symptomatic it is, this desire! Perhaps it tends to found a form of literature which shall be chiefly devoted to the representa- tion of character. For it must be recognized, despite what we hear repeated and re-echoed, such a form has never yet existed. The theatre? By virtue of its visual destina- tion and its gestures, it is obviously better suited to the representation of action than of character or even morals. Comedy itself, although its less ominous gestures have a less hypnotizing effect, SOME STRANGE OMISSIONS 21 has flourished, and widely, before this learned character-drawing was thought of, and its merriest form, and consequently the most personal, has continued to live, and prospers more than ever, in opposition to the comedy of character once con- ceived by Menander. The latter has never consti- tuted more than a special branch, precisely that whose incessantly but vainly renewed springs (romantic substitutions, the call of the blood, theses, etc.) grate the more at each turn of the action, and characters superpose themselves in unpleasant fashion, as a superb but misplaced display, upon the supple steel of comic plot, which remains the indispensable, the essential. The novel? Besides its formless aspect, since it no longer follows the outlines of the epic, fiction has always, by virtue of its redundancy of wordy detail, better presented morals than characters. To these the epic, the novel of more vigorous ages, assuredly offers a place which, albeit second- ary, is yet broader. The epic, in short, approxi- mates the story which offers, in a conventional and abstract light, its "portraits" from which we need only remove the proper names and dates to make of them but general sketches, worthy of being signed by La Bruydre. He thought to continue Theophrastus. But, instead of a Menander, he produced but a Des- 22 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS touches. Not that he has, in reality, augmented the catalog of his predecessor ; far from it ! He has, notably, enriched to excess all that concerns worldly vanity, which passion alone fills more than four-fifths of his book, so surprisingly meager otherwise, as to violence (one example), lust (almost nothing), ingenuity, etc. The list of his characters represents but the merest fraction of our psychological world-map. To complete it we must resume the plan, much more comprehensive, simpler and more profound, of the great Theophrastus. He commenced, it is said, at the age of ninety-nine years, his admirable book, the result not only of a philosophic system (derived from Aristotle) but of a century of per- sonal observation. From it, indeed, we may see spring, fully armed, the New Comedy. The plays of Menander are unfortunately almost entirely destroyed, and, despite the frag- ments recently recovered, the secrets of creation which their ensemble would have imparted to us, by comparison with the book of Theophrastus, can be obtained only in a slight degree by following the figurines of La Bruyere in the Comedy of Character of the eighteenth century, trivially argumentative, narrow and automatic. It may likewise be interesting to infer what the Homme de Cour promised by Moliere as his CHEF D'OEUVRE SOME STRANGE OMISSIONS 23 would have been, in contemplating his famous "portraits" of the Misanthrope. Moreover, the maker of "portraits" precedes, in literary history, but secondary comedy, the comedy of character, and, coming always after tragedy, already overflowing with varied and powerful characters, he does not sufficiently explain to us the genesis of these. And before them we find the true Moralists. The Gnomics and Pythagoras usher in the Greek theater. A Montaigne and a Thomas Aquinas by the Council of Trent influence Shakespeare, and Rochefoucauld, Charron, Nicole, Pascal, find themselves again upon the stage, comic or tragic, of the seventeenth century in its second half, like the imperious Ignatius Loyola in Corneille. How does this transfer take place? We see it operate in the bosom of a family, and perhaps simply of a man, with Seneca or the Senecas. The better yet to follow it, let us take Plutarch; a moralist, does he not detail to us, bit by bit, in sage reflections, even in anecdotes, each of the characters which he has during his life studied or imagined (which is the same thing)? See him arrange before us, with his famous parallel biographies, Caesar-Alexander or the Ambitious, Cicero-Demosthenes or the Liberal Orator, Demetrius-Antony or the Voluptuous Com- mander, Aristides-Cato or the Earnest Thinker, 24 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS etc. And, as for portraits, all history subse- quently will proceed from him; a Janssen, a Taine, a Mommsen clearly work in the same way. This machine, built wheel by wheel, sentence by sentence, by the Moralist, and elevated by the Historian, the Dramatic Author, laying his analy- sis back in its box, has but to set in motion. The man anatomically studied, then defined, drawn and reconstructed, he has but to make move before our eyes, and behold! a new character upon the stage. Shakespeare and Corneille have not done otherwise. Ill Is IT PERMISSIBLE? They are wrong, it appears! Menander was wrong to elaborate Theophrastus, and Schiller in being guided by Kant. And Kant and La Bru- yere, Mommsen and Plutarch and Theophrastus sinned in endeavoring to draw portrait types; Emerson, consequently, was equally in error. For the science of character can have no existence. It should have none our modern pedants having so decreed. "There is no science of the individ- ual," they declare. Nothing can be more pathetic, surely, than the survival in them, so naively expressed, of mediae- val realism. According to all evidence, these folk still believe that there is something else than the individual. They believe, evidently, that the SOME STRANGE OMISSIONS 25 abstract Horse exists independently of this or that horse on earth, and the ideal Hat beyond all hats, taken one by one. Let the reader be reassured. We shall enter upon no argument with these descendants of the Scholastics. For us it suffices that the "Agnes" of Moliere is distinguished clearly enough from Catherine de Medici, for example, that we believe ourselves right in studying separately their respec- tive features. And since they are no more to be confused than are a sprig of parsley and a sprig of hemlock, we have the right to regard them as two physiognomies of a difference which may well be utilized with a view to a classification or arrange- ment most fecund, and which touches us more closely than any other. To speak plainly, moreover, no classification, even scientific, has reality. It is ingenious, cer- tainly, to have chosen the flower by which to classify botanic species, or the bony structure (instead, this time, of the sex) to distribute those of the animal species who have bones (which have permitted even the least intelligent of them to approximate man, to his great surprise) this is highly ingenious but unassailable. A classifica- tion is but a lingo, a catalog analogous to that which, according to the pretty legend, Adam made of the countless varieties of fauna and flora in the ' 26 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Garden of Eden. But Babel has since prevailed, and to its confusion our methods periodically return. Cuvier, although he has not yet con- stituted the definitive table of zoology, has none the less drawn from his a method more fecund than many of our contemporaries are able to draw from systems stricter yet equally transitory. It must be admitted, nevertheless, that the connoisseur of human souls may, without being taxed with indolence, shrink from the classifi- cations offered concurrently by the various phi- losophers who have attempted the problem. Shall he adopt the ternary method of Ribot, or shall he fall back, with Fouillee, u;pon the ancient Temperaments, labelled with these new names: Sensitive, of prompt reaction (the Sanguine) ; Sensitive, of intense reaction (the Nervous), etc. which render less humiliating to him, in the universal progress in which we live, this little return to the past? Shall he pretend, with Paulhan, to separate clearly unsound minds from others, the sheep on one side, the goats on the other? Shall he, still stricter, exclude, with Ribot, from all classification the "amorphous" and the "unstable" (the PAPILLONNE of Fourier still dis- quieting the minds of our philosophers) ? Shall he rather listen to Azan, Le Bon, Perez, Seeland, Payot? SOME STRANGE OMISSIONS 27 He will feel himself, with their treatises in hand, all the more perplexed before Life and its image, Literature, in that these masters, soaring in alcanian spheres, do not in any case deign to cite, in their volumes, more than half a hundred examples. Moreover, these names are always the same; Napoleon alone invariably appears a good fifteen times (despite the contempt for ideologists of this conqueror, so little complex of soul). Can one imagine a course of botany at the end of which the poor student has not heard named more than fifty plants, no more unfamiliar than the cabbage, the rose, the chestnut? He will be little the wiser for having, in compensation, heard abundantly the primary banalities of twenty other sciences! Let us recognize that the scien- tists have done well to themselves classify the myriad beings with whom their respective realms are occupied, without awaiting the work of the philosophers, and respectfully but firmly to shut the door in their faces. Even as these investigators of visible and pon- derable nature have rid themselves of the fanciful so-called Physicists of former times, so today must our scientists of the human heart reject the would- be philosopher-psychologists. By ' 'scientists of the human heart" I regret to add that I do not mean the physiologists, whose studies of the nervous system are very interesting, but stop, 28 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS unfortunately, at a point of view at least as external to our true subject, and consequently as superficial as were, to the future thermo-dynamics, the naive exclamations of the RlG-VEDA. There is no question here of those eternal "faculties of man" in general those imaginary entities nor of laboratory studies whose incer- titude with respect to practice exceeds that of meteorology but simply of the Human Heart, which is to say, of precisely that which is most individual in humble man. Anatomists and alcanians will not deign to consider, of course, a thing so small, so trivial, so wretchedly literary. Happily for us, a thousand geniuses have not shared the disdain of these excessive generalizers, and they have devoted themselves to exploring this poor thing, thereby losing, it is true, some- times their happiness, and, according to the cus- tom of inventors, even their lives. Also, by "scientists of the heart" these must be understood: dramatists, historians, novelists (real- ist or not), moralists, confessors, lyrists, perspica- cious biographers, old epic poets, theologians, casuists, story-tellers. Their innumerable and often minute analyses make of a library, even a limited one, a treasure most extraordinary, this verse of Verlaine or of Sappho, that dialog of Job or of Philoctetes offering more facets, skilfully cut, SOME STRANGE OMISSIONS 29 of the human soul, than have ever been observed in any laboratory. It is only necessary to organ- ize this formidable science, the only one in which all civilizations have labored, and for this purpose, in the first place, to gather all these together and set them in order. The Great Prejudice CHAPTER II "What means then, less deceptive than those proposed by the philosophers and psychologists, do you bring us, rash author, for classifying, separating, defining, labelling human characters?" None. And this for the reason that such a means cannot exist. For I THERE ARE No CHARACTERS Listen to the admission which escapes from the author of "Characters" himself: "Men have no character, or, if they have, it consists in having none which is constant, which does not belie itself, and in which they are always recognizable They have opposing passions and contradictory failings; it is easier for them to unite extremes than to have a con- duct one part of which springs naturally from another." What! All "unstable" to use the philosophic jargon of the day, and to be rejected, as a natural consequence, by the most celebrated contemporary classifications ! "But," it is explained, "La Bruyere let this cry escape but in a moment of discouragement; THE GREAT PREJUDICE 31 does not his undertaking itself bear witness that such was not his opinion?" It bears eloquent witness, on the contrary, to the sincerity and also the truth of this passage- Amusingly and exclusively ''characteristic," his figurines are not humanly complete. Compare, if you doubt it, the too logical Onuphre with Tartuffe, who contradicts himself so well! The silhouettes of our moralist move too automati- cally; we do not see their breasts heave with the respiration of universal life. We cannot turn one of them around without perceiving artifice. The drawing of a character is made, necessarily, from a fixed point, and the conception of it remains relative. Sylla, to us a monster, shines in the German histories, and Robespierre, before whom our greybeards palpitate with admiration, appears to the disciples of Taine but a vain and heartless pawn. But let us take, from La Bruyere himself, one of his portraits at random : Irene repairs at great expense to Epidaurus, sees Aesculapius in his temple and consults him on her ills. First she complains that she is tired and spent with fatigue, and the god declares that this comes from the length of the journey she has made ; she says that in the evening she has no appetite, the oracle orders that she dine lightly; she adds that she is subject to insomnia, and he 32 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS advises her not to remain in bed except during the night; she asks him why she feels dull, and what is the remedy, the oracle replies that she should rise before noon and should occasionally walk; she tells him wine disagrees with her, he tells her to drink water; that she has indigestion, he advises her to diet; "my sight is failing," says Irene, "use glasses" says Aesculapius; "I myself am failing" she continues, "I am neither so strong nor so healthy as I was," - "that" says the god, "is because you are growing older." "But how can this languor be cured?" "The shortest way, Irene, is to die, as your mother and grandmother have done." "Son of Apollo," cries Irene, "what counsel are you giving me? Is this all of that science which men proclaim, and which makes you revered the world over? What are you telling me which is rare or mysterious? Did I not already know all these remedies you are recommending?" "Why, then, did you not use them," replies the god, "without coming so far to see me, and shortening your days by the fatigue of a long journey?" Most malicious, but most exact as a portrait, and most particular, is it not? Are not all the character's little weaknesses presented completely as complacently? It is Madame de Montespan who is the subject. THE GREAT PREJUDICE 33 At this name there come to mind other "char- acters" which might as legitimately be drawn from her; the extravagantly ambitious, the intemperate of speech, so ready with insult, the devotee of black masses, etc. No, the character does not exist any more than an exact portrait exists in painting. So many painters, so many colors, so many expressions, so many lines, even in each feature of the model! While as to photography, it is as has been scientifically demonstrated to those aberrants who do not see it with their own eyes the worst of lies. And if "there are no characters" it follows naturally that II THE SELF DOES Nor EXIST The self is but a formidable suggestion. The child is taught this false idea in exactly the same way in which a dog is taught to answer to a name, or, what comes to the same thing, to a certain whistle or blow of the whip, even to the point of responding to it by the most dangerous and painful feats. This blow of the whip impera- tive and categorical or its acoustic imitation, the whistle or call to a slave, has later been modi- fied for each of us in a particular fashion, and one 34 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS so much the more personally menacing, in the Name, that corner-stone, if I may now change the image, of the "I." The Name, first of the orders which the poor human being receives, will be the source of all the others, and the Name will dominate our whole existence. At bottom, we so well feel the artificial origin of the "self" that we admit a most strange hypo- thesis, namely that this "self," supposedly the essential, does not exist, so to speak, before the cabalistic age of seven years. Until then, parents and strangers agree in considering the "con- science," the "personality" of the child so feeble, so vague that his acts remain almost altogether "innocent." This "conscience," soon to be so responsible before the law, and even if not in theory, at least in the practice of daily life, quite as much so before the so-called determinist philosophy, this "conscience," this "self," this "individual" does not undertake his complete and this time overwhelming responsibility until the age, not less cabalistic, of three times seven years, an age at which he is invited by society, more imperiously from century to century, to the operations of military murder, of voting and of legal reproduction. Nevertheless, if the "self" is a "conscious per- sonality," and rests on the "memory," it will be THE GREAT PREJUDICE 35 necessary to admit, for each one of us, at least several "selves," successive and totally inde- pendent of one another. Already the "self" of the twelfth year has forgotten that of the second year, and how few things has the adult retained in memory, compared to the immense forgetful- ness of the self, emotional and reasoning, almost entirely effaced, of the twelfth year? A few epi- sodes, external and distorted, are all that remain to us. If the memory alone connects, in our intimate consciousness, these "selves" so little like to one another, it is by how slender a thread! Many such threads break in silence daily; the greater part of those which subsist remain throughout the course of life buried in shadows in our vast Unconscious; a few, a very few, will, if we live long enough, come again to light perhaps a single time, only to disappear again forever. What were you doing at this hour, on this day of the month, in the year 1895? Or two months later in the following year, at three o'clock in the afternoon? Externally, on the contrary, a strict "responsi- bility" chains one to another, like so many galley- slaves, all those successive "selves," in such a manner that each of them exhausts itself carry- ing the weight of acts the greater part of which 36 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS are completely effaced from the memory, and others of which appear but as the phantoms of inexplicable legends. So, through idolatry of Nature and her terrible enchainments, do we superstitiously hold the unity of the Self that chimera preferable to all charitable justice, to our happiness and even to hope! And now, it appears, not only this unity (sprung, I believe, from the brain of some unlucky arith- metician), but even the "I" has no existence! So many individuals mingle in the multiple personality, so many strangers are entering and departing by all the ceaselessly swinging doors, that it can no longer constitute a "social entity" nor a durable "moral creature." There are Selves which, the greater part of the time, let us acknowledge, hold all the scene with their uninterrupted march, dictating, disposing, acting on the way, and disappearing in the crowd without, which continues to launch toward that within its monotonous signals. Strange, it is none the less this incoherent march, these pres- sures of crowds unknown to one another and without tradition, which the philosopher pro- claims an irreducible unity, in order to brandish 37 it in his exalted imagination with such pride that he opposes it, quite alone, to the non-self sche- matized on the other hand. After which, our philosopher goes to bed, and as for his "self," does he even know whether or not he takes it with him, or in what place it hides among the chaos of his dreams? "There are two men in me!" In vain we recall this dreadful plaint which for three thousand years has come from humanity. In vain we show that only the existence of these "two men" is necessary to cause the fall of the systems, to shake tribunals amid their parody; in vain we detect the most energetic and single-minded individual accomplishing acts in direct contra- diction of the unique Self acknowledged by him; he will stoop to lying, to playing the hypocrite, in order to maintain his idol upon its altar. And the most sincere and the most cynical of us do the same. In despite of truth, of justice, of charity, this dogma of the single Self imposes itself upon us. To it the freest among us sacri- fices docilely his sincerity; worse yet, to this fundamental and diabolic talsehood we sacrifice obstinately the genius which each of us, with his complete humanity, possesses. 38 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS For this falsehood of the single Self, of the Character, the Identity, with its bondage and responsibility, alone assures the social state. And so much the worse for you if your "self" alter- nates inexhaustibly between passion and judg- ment, making impossible for you the self-examina- tion so much recommended! So much the worse if, precisely because one of your "selves" has said "white," the other should declare "black!" So much the worse if you do not know why at certain moments you hate the woman you love best, and that from the bottom of your heart your single heart! So much the worse if you deny every faith you hold, if you profane every virtue you possess! Of what importance to us are these puzzling trifles, of which your soul perishes? Falsify with us; we must, above all, in piling up the Systems and their complementary hypocrisies, maintain boldly the unity of the Self. But you do not find, you say, the same "self" at home and upon the rostrum, with your friend or your wife, before your janitor or with the mistress with whom you divest yourself of your "unity" so respectable and burdensome, in the presence of your superiors, or in solitude, or amid honors. ... If you are discovered contradicting yourself, you will declare that this time you were shamming, belying yourself, but previously THE GREAT PREJUDICE 39 Ah, if the human ego were one and unique, between whom then and whom, pray, would the struggles of conscience take place? What gro- tesque picture do you show me of a tribunal wherein the judge is alone and bounces from bench to bar, from side to side of the court? Would not one who, entering, observed such a spectacle, conclude with reason that the judge was a lunatic? You, nevertheless, are no lunatic; it must be, then, that your Self is not one, but several. The Self, full of illusions and of pride, which was so enterprising, was it not sincere? What a contrast to its successor, who, with courage broken, comes to bear witness sadly against it! Should you not henceforth abide by the expe- riences and declarations of this latter? But no, you cannot, on pain of perishing quickly with it; you can no more do so than you can begin life over. . . Each mistress who has loved you loved but one of your "selves," which differed from the others to such a degree as not to recog- nize any of those who had previously loved you, and the deep motive which puts a weapon in the hand of the jealous is her failure to find in the body of the deceiver the being she has loved; she desires to avenge his destruction upon the usurper! What do I say? Perhaps upon the same day, at an hour's interval, the wife and the 40 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS mistress embrace in you two men, sometimes two really sincere, forgetful of one another, or perhaps even averting their eyes in the embarrass- ment (admit it, unlucky one!) of not compre- hending one another. Where then is your unique ego, where is your true character? Say no more; invent no further falsehoods ! Ill A LITTLE COMMENTARY ON "THE IMITATION OF CHRIST" Thus the "character," which some go so far as to call the "self," is, in the dissolution thereof, revealed as that which both the one and the other are, AN APPEARANCE. This negative value of the "I" or individual character illuminates with a strong light the Christian doctrine, less and less understood, of humility ("But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the LOWEST room." Luke XIV, 10) and of the obedience which logically results from it. ("It is a great matter to live in obedience, to be under a superior, and not to be at our own disposing . . go whither thou wilt, thou shalt find no rest but in humble subjection." IMITA- TION OF CHRIST, I, 9). "The highest and most profitable learning is the true knowledge and consideration of our- THE GREAT PREJUDICE 41 selves. It is great wisdom and perfection to esteem nothing of ourselves." (I, 2). To humble oneself, in short, to obey, to deny and abase oneself, this is to destroy and overwhelm that negation, that mutilation which is the Self or so-called character, and let spring in its place the suppressed organs of the complete human being, the true image of God, as GENESIS says, and consequently of Jesus Christ. And the pious author cries to God, before that lacuna, that nonentity which is literally the self: "Thou accomplishest all things, Thou fillest all things, only the sinner Thou leavest empty!" (Ill, 3); then, turning toward us: "Of thyself thou always tendest to nothing." (Ill, 4). Do we under- stand, now, why "where heavenly grace enter in, and true charity, there will be no place for self- love." (111,9)? "But," it will be asked, "why put ones own Self, low as it may be, still lower than the other human selves which humble it?" They do not humble it nor make it suffer, for by themselves they can do nothing. Humiliations, torments, it is from God alone that we receive all these things, Whose instruments they are; from His hand, of which they are the members. "The truly patient man minds not by whom he is exercised, whether by his superiors, by one of his equals, or by an inferior; whether by a good and holy man or by 42 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS one that is perverse and unworthy. But indif- ferently from every creature, how much soever or how often soever anything adverse befalls him, he takes it all thankfully as from the hand of God, and esteems it a GREAT GAIN." (Ill, 19.) And he will confess "I cannot say that any crea- ture hath ever done me wrong." (Ill, 41.) The other "selves," the other characters, like our own, being in fact but appearances. # * # # * The "character" is but the impression upon others (who reflect it back to us and convince us of it) produced by one or several of our actions, undertakings, intentions divined or assumed, apologies, theories, etc., manifested once for all or repeated in various analogous forms. In reality, then, we find nothing solid, at the bottom of this conception, but the idea of action. And the present study might have taken as epi- graph that affirmation which was thought pre- mature in THE THIRTY-SIX DRAMATIC SITUA- TIONS: "Characters ARE what they DO." Now, if action, taken abstractly, may be defined by us as the shock of two forces, the conflict of two beings, it consists to consider it by halves, that is to say each of these two beings in an impulse, in an act, in a simple movement. This, in turn, is but the passage from one attitude to another. . . All is thus reduced, in the end. not to Characters in themselves, but to Attitudes, Not Characters, But Attitudes CHAPTER III I ATTITUDES Only attitudes, and this explains how the same (that is, what we take for the same) charac- ter, regarded from one point of view will excite our admiration, and from another, our amuse- ment. A single man can exhibit all attitudes, which is to say, all characters, and consequently, whether simultaneously or alternately, those which are utterly contradictory. But the habit of this or that attitude becomes so well established, and transmitted by heredity, education or example, that it becomes, as it were, ankylosed within the organism, which ends by exhibiting so restricted a number of these atti- tudes that it seems unable to break away from them, and thenceforward they produce that decep- tive illusion which is called a Character. Thus each of us, having potentially all the men- tal attitudes, has the whole human soul, always and everywhere the same in itself, since com- plete, since formed in the image of the Infinite, as the Biblical legend has so profoundly expressed it.* Also, according to Plato, Aristotle and Chris- tianity, it is God whom we love in each human *Genesis 1:27: "So God created man in his own image." 44 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS being; that is to say, that human being in his completeness. "Love thy neighbor as thyself," says the Gospel, and nothing can be more natural, since in his completeness he is like yourself and you are identical with him. "Love" here signi- fies "see" or "recognize," recognize the image, faithful and complete, of God. Those who "having eyes yet see not," have in their eyes a "beam," that of the cross, to which, exalting themselves as judges, they despite St. Paul, despite the Gospel condemn their neighbor, which is to say God, which is to say themselves transcendentally. No, the lover does not create for himself illu- sions as to the beloved, evidences of his own pas- sion. On the contrary, it is he alone who shows himself lucid, and his admiring words reveal to his beloved many sides of her nature of which she herself was unaware. . Also, this link which every moralist instinc- tively seeks, and which connects all the Person- ages of fiction and history, all the "characters" in a sort of logical succession in which we may see them spring one from another, this link, this indefinable all-essential which shall be called HUMANUM, Bossuet thought he discovered in LOVE, root of all passions, and La Rochefoucauld, turning toward the solitude in which he had NOT CHARACTERS, BUT ATTITUDES 45 isolated the human heart, in SELF-LOVE; our moderns see it incontestably in SEXUAL LOVE, the primitive act of our life, wherein lie the prob- lems of heredity and of races, which interest them so deeply. The old mediaeval theology said, in a broader sense, DIVINE LOVE, or the HOLY SPIRIT, and it identified under this term the reciprocal love of the two other Divine Persons, the love of all Three for man and that of man for Them, and for his neighbor through love of Them, the animating principle of creation, inspirer of minds and giver of wisdom and knowledge, even that of the human Word and its modifications, the languages; grace in all senses of the word. For the common herd, and for many writers, a Character is constituted, even firmly estab- lished, as soon as three or four characteristic aspects are shown, connected with one another by the thread of a logical idea relating them in cause and effect. Tragedy and Comedy, on the contrary, exist but to demonstrate how sad and ridiculous a thing it is, subjectively or objectively, to BE but one poor character, but one ankylosed attitude ! Now, in their totality, these attitudes, through which every man worthy of the name can or 46 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS originally could pass; through which passes, at least in imagination, the genius of the "poet of a thousand souls," these diverse attitudes, which it is his mission to show us, each in turn, in his works, in order to break our enslaving "anky- losis," these attitudes may be counted, as well as those of the body. Have we not, moreover, already reduced to the number of 36 their conflicts? Since they may be counted, they may be classified. No one has succeeded, no one should suc- ceed in counting and conveniently distributing "characters" in the insulated sense in which the word is commonly used. It is but right that such semblances, mistaken for individual beings, should vanish from the hands which would restrain and put them in cages. But the "attitudes" which are not persons, but ephemeral roles, nothing prevents our enumerating them. From the beginning, the people of the drama have been brought on and off in spite of themselves, so to speak, to be labelled and ticketed, very imperfectly, I admit, because of their excessively conventionalized life, a life having one side only, for the personage of drama is concerned only with that side which he turns toward the audience, the others, like those of the moon, remaining invisible! NOT CHARACTERS, BUT ATTITUDES 47 The OCCUPATIONS of the stage have been counted. And this term evokes curiously that of those "Professional Types" which began in the Middle Comedy of the Greeks, with its Fish- vendor, its Courtesan, its brutal Soldier, its Parasite, its Cook, the drama of observation, before, in the New Comedy of Menander, the study of more individualized characters was approached. It is to Professional Types, moreover, that the herd clings. To the question, "What is Mr. So- and-So?" three people out of four will reply, "He is an attorney," or "He is a shoe-maker." Apparently they would reply, if asked about St. Matthew, "He was a clerk," or of Jean- Jacques Rousseau, "He was a servant." From what does this come, if not from the fact that such a classi- fication, so easy, corresponds to a primary psycho- logical tendency, albeit a vulgar one? Clearly it is easier to recognize a justice in his official robe than a just person seated among the accused; a Jesuit in his professional garb than a Tartufe also ever-faithful to Success, and today perhaps chant- ing the songs of the "International!" From the day when there were united for the first time, in a new form of art (which we call the comedy of manners), several examples of the same trade or profession, it became very neces- 48 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS sary to discern in them several roles in the same rank; for example, given a ministerial bureau, there will almost inevitably be found therein the ill-tempered, the jocose and waggish, the beast- of -burden, etc., all a little colored by whichever of these characters remains attached to their chief. These are like moral liveries, which the PERSONNEL distribute among themselves, at first with some fumbling, but with which each of them identifies himself little by little, according to the instinctive demand and pressure of the environ- ment. The same phenomenon is repeated in the habitues of a salon, of a public place, of the edi- torial rooms of a journal, among the workmen of a farm or shop, the sailors on a vessel, the members of an association, commission, academy, or any group. In this entertaining distribution of roles one can perceive the birth of Traditional Characters. In turn, the complete series of these Traditional Characters in their professional or social MILIEU (as the Clerks of Balzac), could be compared to the series, equally complete, of another MILIEU, and again of others; thus was gathered the collection which the author called the COM&DIE HUMAINE. The fact of having been able to transport, true to himself, from one of these MILIEUX (a bureau) NOT CHARACTERS, BUT ATTITUDES 49 to another (a boulevard), then a third (a bank or newspaper or the world of women) his Bixiou, for example, proves that he has given him, in a broader sense than we realize, a Human Character. Nevertheless it is but a role become a man, this Bixiou; one might almost say it is the mere face of an actor, such as Daudet's Delobelle. Remark- ing this ankylosis in a single attitude, that of sarcasm, what reader has not said to himself that there should be something else in Bixiou than the side Balzac has shown us? And that "something else" certainly existed in the back of the author's mind. The exaggeration of the type has here a hyperbolic aspect, and necessarily so. Balzac overdraws it at this point only through condescension toward us, and in order to give us that impression of "character" which we expect and understand. Only by means of such deceptive representations do we perceive it, and so the other sides of the character are deliberately thrust back into the shadow. They are, I say, thrust back, but not sup- pressed. For, with a great writer, or, what comes to the same thing, in a great legend, the production not of the masses, but of anonymous genius, these "other sides" are never lost; it is they which permit the author, when he wishes, to present with verisimilitude his personage in an 50 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS attitude absolutely opposed to the first one. Whereas, in such a VOLTE-FACE, the writer who is a mere arranger of puppets never fails to con- tradict or mutilate his first conception, to the bewilderment of his public. Furthermore, it is, I say, precisely back of the most pronounced '"character" that we find that delicate play of light and shade which gives it life and verisimilitude. Unlike the uniformity of the Corneillean heroes, unlike the crude contrasts of the Hugoesque figures with their too-simple dualism, some naif detail of a poem or a hagiog- raphy renders comprehensible and akin to us a humanity nevertheless so superhuman. What a child-like heart is revealed by the tears of the hard Achilles, or by the jokes of the audacious spouse of the Lady Poverty! II ROLES AND OCCUPATIONS; PROFES- SIONAL AND TRADITIONAL TYPES; CHARACTER-TYPES; CHARACTERS MORE INDIVIDUALIZED, AND PORTRAITS. Let us recapitulate the seven aspects through which passes, by means of contrasts, the genera- tion of "Characters" in literature. (1) Roles. These are hardly more than the persons of the verb in grammar, united to the NOT CHARACTERS, BUT ATTITUDES 51 active or passive voice, as: the Pretagonist, the Antagonist, the disputed Object (a woman loved by two rivals, a child in a divorce, a prince between two courtesans, a judge solicited by both parties), the PERSONNAGE-LIEN or Connecting Character, who is only the preceding passed from the passive to the active voice (the common friend of two combatants, the mother of brothers at enmity), then the Instigator or Instigators (confidant, confessor, counsellor, mentor, lago), and the Instrument or Instruments (messenger, angel, executioner, hired assassin, mob), and finally the Chorus (the odious thesis-characters of Ibsen and Dumas FILS, the SERMONNEUR of the Miracles, part of the RAISONNEURS, neighbors, witnessess), plus the DEUS-EX-MACHINA (prologue-characters, the narrator, the letter lost and found, the useful coincidence, etc.). (2) Occupations. An empirical attempt of the comedians to group themselves, and of which they have taken the more account as they are obliged to seek therein, in default of masks or make-up sufficiently exaggerated, the "physical means" necessary to the material representation of the real elements of character. This division is to the preceding almost what the contingent physiognomy is to the moral life. Here, never- theless, presented only with a little more of order than has been shown heretofore, are the ordinary 52 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS titles, whose artificial spirit I have scrupulously respected: Young Princesses (Iphigenia, Zaira) and Ingenues (Agnes). JBUNES PREMIERS, Lovers (the Marquis de Presles, the Delaunays, Don John of Austria). JEUNES PREMIERES, Feminine Lovers (Philiberte, Dona Sol). These border upon Premier Roles (Thisbe, Marion Delorme, Countess Almaviva, Celimne, Almaviva, Don Juan, Alceste, Buridan) and upon Great Prin- cesses (Hermione, Camille). PREMIERS ROLES (Ruy-Blas, Mary Tudor, Lucretia Borgia, Mar- guerite de Bourgogne). Premier Character Roles (Don Ruy Gomez, Don Quexada). RA1SON- NEURS (Philante). Noble Fathers (the Gerontes of "Le Menteur" and "Le Joueur," Boursault's Aesop, Verdelet in "Le Gendre de M. Poirier"). Dotards and Dolts (Geronte in "Le Legataire," Argante in "Les Fourberies"). Financiers (Turcaret, M. de Sottenville, M. Guillaume in "Patelin"). Tertiary Roles (traitors and tyrants, Don Salluste, Saltabadil, the deceived husbands and villains of modern drama, Begearss). Premier Comic Roles (Figaro, Giboyer, I'lntime, Gros- Rene, Sganarelle in "Le Festin de Pierre," Scapin in "Les Fourberies"), and Secondary Comic Roles (all the valets and jesters except that of the "Legataire," which is a premier; Jodelet in "Les Precieuses," the Marquis in "Le Joueur," Covielle, NOT CHARACTERS, BUT ATTITUDES 53 Mascarille in "Depit," Dandin in "Les Plaideurs," M. Loyal, Thomas Diaforus). Soubrettes, etc. As we see, a well-turned figure, hollow features or a round paunch are sufficient to cause passage from one of these categories into another. I refrain from here taking account of distinctions altogether local and peculiar. (3) Professional Types in which social rank, so dear to the vulgar, emerges from the preceding classification : The Valet and the Marquis (our "snob") from the Premier and Secondary Comedy Roles; the Pedant and the Tutor from the "Dotards," the Tyrant from the Tertiary Roles, the Courtesan from the Premier Roles, etc. Now let us add to these certain specializations particularly well carried out: the Molieresque Doctor, the Cook of Greek drama (that ancestor of the innkeepers and cooks of Dumas, of "La Reine Pedauque" and of "Cyrano"), the Athenian Fish-vendor, the boastful Soldier, the Parasite, the antique Slave (forerunner of the Valet), the Spanish Go-between, the Gendarme (escaped from the puppet-theatre), our Usurer, our Functionary, etc. (4) But such of these Professional Types as appeared in the "Occupations" of comedy there contend, obscurely mingled, with the Traditional Types admired in former days, and who, under 64 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS the new names fastened like masks upon their faded visages, yet fill, without the public's observ- ing it, about three-fourths of the drama (and, I would say, of modern literature). Here is Lelio, or the Lover, a slightly sad JEUNE PREMIER. Here, more naif, is Pierrot, shall we call him Gringoire for a change? Let us hasten on to Jocrisse, the Foolish Servant, past Palisse, Cadet- Roussel, Calino and the primitive Harlequin (for the present shrewd Harlequin rejoins, by way of Mascarille and the valets, one of the two types of Slave which in the plays of Aristophanes form an antithesis to the credulous and the dupe). Polichinelle, fighter and brawler^ reappears, a little more obscene, in Karagheuz, and more filthy in Ubu. The sly Columbine returns to the professional type of soubrette, but beside her, Isabelle, from whom come the folk of the JEUNES PREMIERES, is but too much a "tradi- tional!" (5) Character-Types ! Here, in brief, is every- thing the public demands. It will, for a long time to come, prefer these to more exact studies. Dickens, Daudet, and, most of the time, Zola, have but built upon some vicious habit or some gross and conspicuous trait of the traditional puppet; Nana, we might say, is the eternal Cour- tesan, Saccard is the Financier, according to the invariable formula from Lesage to Mirbeau. NOT CHARACTERS, BUT ATTITUDES 55 Renee springs especially from the department of Occupations, a radiation from the Feminine Lovers, and she alone tempted momentarily from the enormous work of the Rougon-Macquart Family our great national actress, so admirably identified with her "occupation" that she is always cited in connection with it. She has realized, we say it without irony, the perfection of her art. It is forbidden to the actor to raise himself higher, and he exercises thereby a regrettable influence not only upon the stage, where the evil remains well restrained, but unhappily upon literature, even the most serious, thence upon history also, and through it upon the tendency of an age fallen into the stupidity of taking .the player for an artist, the hypocrite for a poet "bleeding with sincerity," and the banal "occupation" for a new and liberating conception of life. It is, moreover, merely in a spirit of concession that I have accorded this Paragraph 5 to Charac- ter-Types, since, in the final analysis, they all come from the two preceding (Professional Types and Traditional Types). (6) The Stage is closed to Characters More Individualized. Tartufe and the better heroes of Shakespeare had access to it only because their authors happened upon it before them. I say, observe, "more individualized," and not simply "individual." We may partially discover 66 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS the reason above, apropos of Balzac. In the case of characters of whom he has tried to tell, if not everything, at least too much at one time, he has made them indistinct, and they mingle in a confusion wherein we wander among a vague crowd of human beings. (7) The Portrait in reality, be it drawn from nature by a Balzac, be it by a historian exceptionally conscientiqu^, in losing its gen- erality loses also, contradictory as it may appear, something of its clearness. It proves to be less truthful, as Aristotle has already remarked, than the poetical representation of men and events. Unless, of course, it follows the usual process; in that case it will embrace in a complete view the career of an illustrious man, or at least consider a very large part of it,- in order to exhibit him camped in a certain immobile and striking posture of soul; M. Masson has done thus with his Bona- partes. The Imperfect of the Indicative is here a great resource. The Portrait corresponds in this manner to one of the Traditional Types, and ranges itself in one of the ever-ready pigeon- holes under the eternal labels: The Chivalrous, The Debonnaire, The Haughty, The Tyrant, The Sage, The Lion (today the Superman). The historic epithets attached to the names of so many princes, and SO LITTLE VARIED, are a curious evidence of this tendency. NOT CHARACTERS, BUT ATTITUDES 57 III NEW COMBINATIONS If each one of the seven, or rather of the six classes which we have just extracted one from another, encroaches upon its neighbors, it will nevertheless be observed that this does not result in confusion. There is not even combina- tion among them, there is only juxtaposition, only mosaic, owing to the unskilfulness of their authors. Each of these classes will offer, according to the angle from which the writer considers its contents: 1st: Comic Characters. 2nd: Tragic Characters. 3rd : Serious Characters, a sort of hybrid utilized at will by tragedy and comedy, by satire and by historical romance and poetry. 4th : Among Comic Characters a particularly interesting series, Parody Characters. These were originally tragic characters, who have been trans- ferred from right to left, so to speak, such as Don Quixote and his numerous but too-feeble posterity. Ariosto and his French and Italian predecessors, the Greek SATYRIQUE drama and our modern burlesque have left much to be done. 5th : Symmetrically opposite, amid the Tragic Characters, will be the Paradoxical Characters, in 68 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS former days farcical, but now presented in a pathetic light. The infirmities of Richard III or of Quasimodo give us as yet only physical examples, but Dickens and Daudet are full of caricatures which, if not tragic, are at least pitiful. We might still distinguish, 6th, Characters heretofore odious, presented sympathetically: The thief Jean Valjean, the daughters of Roman- ticism and Naturalism, heirs of Mary Magdalene; the hypocrite in "Le Cure de Village" and in many English novels. Then, 7th (recommended to anarchists, inno- vators and professional "free souls"), Characters heretofore sympathetic, presented under a repug- nant or despicable aspect; we have had many of them within recent years, but others remain; working men, children, etc. On the comic side we shall have, 8th, to paint ridiculously the characters ordinarily spared, as the betrothed young girl, the man of theses. And, 9th, to present seriously and sympathet- ically Characters heretofore grotesque. It has been done for the deceived husband and the jealous lover; there is nothing to prevent doing it for the usurer, the undertaker, and many others. These changes of place will be found fecund in all the Literature of Character, and not alone, NOT CHARACTERS, BUT ATTITUDES 59 as might be supposed, in drama and romance. A Michelet, for example, has not seldom done thus, in his design of lightening the unconscious remorses of our nation. There is nothing more malleable in this respect than history, so long as it has not grown and hardened into a myth (more truthful because the expression of the collective consciousness); a Clytemnestra obviously does not so readily lend herself to this treatment as a Madame Syveton. Real or imaginary, lofty or trivial, vague or clearly drawn, often diverse in their portraits, sometimes contradictory of aspect, I have evoked these human Figures from out the centuries and from all parts of the globe. For we must rid ourselves, as I have realized, before it is too late, of our false ideas concerning superior and inferior races, and welcome contact with all humanity. The dominance, recent enough and, I am con- vinced, unprecedented for intrigue and destruc- tiveness, of Occidental and notably Protestant or free-thinking peoples, corresponds to an equal and moreover logical impotence in original and durable creation. Many a reduced or subju- gated race, such as the Italian or the Hindu, represents well enough what a poet of genius becomes, or an ill-dressed hero, introduced into the parlor of rich and vulgar money-worshippers, mocking and scornful; they will bewilder him 60 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS with their figures, complacently watch him envelope himself in silence and ennui; will despoil him, if he still possesses anything, under the pre- text of enriching him, and chuckle afterward over having so easily vanquished him. There is nothing to prevent the situation being some day reversed, and that perhaps sooner than we expect ; the premonitions of it are already appear- ing throughout the world; strange surprises are in store, and very probably, in such an event, the new order of things will annihilate, until but a memory remains of it, this ugly and stupid age of PARVENUS, which will meet the fate of so many other vainglorious barbarisms, likewise proud of their industries, their arms and their wealth. From the great pile-built cities of China, from the immemorial records of Peru and Egypt, from Central Africa, rich in traditions too long disdained, from the humblest "primitives," from the chronicles of Iran, from fiery Malaysia, from paradoxical Japan and from reviving Arabia; from the snow huts of Lapland, the streets of Stamboul, the paths of Ceylon and the plateaux of Thibet; from the 72 books of the two Testa- ments, from the Greek and Latin literatures, modern as well as ancient, from Norse and Finnish songs and from all the mythologies; finally from the remotest corners of occidental civilization, and all the writings which it has set down in NOT CHARACTERS, BUT ATTITUDES 61 modern languages, even to the most recent, and scattered over the world, O sisters, O brothers, from all regions of earth, from the future as well as the past, in your motley and ever-changing costumes or your lamentable and touching nudity, from all the ranks from which you have turned at my appeal, from all the ages of life when you have sent out a cry which has reached me, I have gathered you, in unforeseen groups where our sad modern menagerie, in its hopeless decay, reaches out its hands to the most radiant Goddess of the Dawn, where the prattling infant, the greybeard and the light-o'-love become of a sudden identical ! I am aware that an interminable procession of more and more banal replicas will follow after. But the unison of their monotonous voices will not drive away those detached and heretofore unknown figures, hastening from out the mass, and astonished to find themselves suddenly in the light. Sometimes, too, my calculations hav- ing apparently permitted me to silhouette a certain type between two related ones, I have nevertheless summoned it in vain; nothing appears, from literature or zodiacs, in that lacuna of human personality! We shall march, O reader, with a sure step toward silent and lonely regions. And there, 62 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS beneath the brush of a virgin land, we shall dis- cover, slumbering, the Unpublished Being. She will awake when we take her by the hand. And this heroine of the Poet to come, this Eve of future endless maternities, we shall bring back through the ranks of astonished Lovelaces, to the still empty pedestal where her Figure, all unblemished, shall shine among the too-conven- tional attitudes of her companions. Thus shall we bring forward ten, a hundred, a thousand and more, exactly 369, 12,915, 154,980, augmenting the unprecedented chorus disposed at the feet of Her who shall summarize them all in her perfection, nevertheless so human. The Four Temperaments CHAPTER IV I THE SYSTEMS TO BE HARMONIZED Let us remember, in the beginning, that the object of the present study is not to reduce the attitude-types, the pretended "characters," to a small number of elements, a task but too easy ! On the contrary, it is a question of multiplying them, and at the same time, as I have already explained, of examining the analysis of each one of them ; of each one of us. Every one of these types, I have said, is in reality but one face, one ATTITUDE of the human Soul, and that soul remains whole and identical in all men; there is not one of them who could not, originally, present all these attitudes, pass from one to another of them, exhibit all their gestures. But heredity, education, example and social cus- tom with its false duties have ankylosed in us a much reduced number of these attitudes. It is at this point that Kant saw but four pos- sibilities for all humanity ; four, not one more, not one less; four, not even combinable among themselves to engender another! There are but four, he affirms in his absolutism, and they can no more mingle "than the four forms of the syllogism." 64 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS To these four irreconcilable aspects of humanity he gives the ancient name of "temperaments," but evidently without retaining its etymological sense (TEMPERAMENTUM, equilibrium). It must be recognized that the philosophers and classifiers, more or less consciously, always return to this antique medical theory. The majority admit, like their founders, that the four tem- peraments mingle, two by two or three by three, in variable proportions, like the famous "humours" from which they were drawn. Assuredly, it is a strange spectacle to see thus surviving in psychol- ogy the consequences of a classification so long obsolete in physiology! And it is most amusing to see certain writers taking as great pains to justify all this in the name of Science (with Fouillee) as others (such as Paulhan and Ribot) take to avoid it, seeking to abandon and leave behind them the "unstable," the ill-balanced, the "amorphous" etc., which is to say, the major part of mankind. It is curious too that the former should find themselves to be the idealists, and that the positivism of the latter should seek support in the classic distribution of mental faculties: will, emotion, intelligence. Observe that their "Obstinate" types recall strangely the ancient Bilious (which included the Ambitious, the Dominating, etc.) and their "Emo- THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS 65 tionals" the Nervous. Their "Inconsistents" com- prising chiefly, I am afraid, the adversaries of their vaunted Systems, it only remains to pick from among their stragglers the "Amorphous" and the "Unstable" to discover in them our tradi- tional Lymphatic and Sanguine! As to M. Fouillee, who does not pretend to break so violently with the past, he defines the Sanguine as "Sensitive, of prompt reaction" and the Nervous as "Sensitive, of intense reaction;" the Bilious or Choleric as "Active, of prompt and intense reaction" and the unfortunate Lymphatic or Phlegmatic as "Active, of slow and not intense reaction"; definitions more scientific than exact, to tell the truth, but so much the more appro- priate for the contemporary reader. II THE SYSTEMS HARMONIZED AND EXPLAINED It is several years since the author of the pres- ent work, in a little book entitled "The Theory of Temperaments," divided as follows the Four Temperaments . Two of these Temperaments he found to pos- sess a sensitive or "subjective" character, in their evident propensity to let emotionalism prevail over the detached and reasoning Self, even to the extent of absorbing all and assuming full control. These two were the Nervous and the Sanguine. Their common verb, indicating what there is of 66 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS jealousy, selfishness and egotism in such natures, is to Possess, to Have, or to Enjoy. To these were opposed, under the title "Objec- tive" (that is to say, temperaments more disposed to externalize, to MANIFEST themselves) the Lym- phatic (or Phlegmatic) and the Bilious: (of this latter, be it said in passing, determination is much more characteristic than irritability, although the latter, because it is a RESULT of determination before an obstacle, has given to the Bilious Temperament the misleading name of "Choleric," thus creating an annoying confusion with the Sanguine and the Nervous, which are quite as much inclined to choler). While as to the term "Objective", it appeared from the first, and appears now, to the author, more appropriate by far than that of "Active," applied by M. Fouillee at the same time to the Bilious and to the Lymphatic! It was observed in "The Theory of Tempera- ments" that the Nervous and the Bilious, the one by its imagination and the other by its strength of will, represented the "Intellectual." Have they not a common tendency to abstraction, to ideal- ization? Likewise, the Sanguine and the Lym- phatic, with their tendency to materialism, to realism, represent the "Physical," both being devoted to practical life and comfort, the one with greater ardor, the other with greater constancy. THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS 67 The antithesis between the Active and Passive offered the last binary combination which can be made between these four Temperaments, and consequently united on the one hand the Bilious (that is, the Obstinate) with the restless Sanguine, while on the other the Nervous and the Lymphatic are drawn together by their faculty of feeling, of suffering. The diagram on next page will give a clear idea of the perfect concord between the diverse classes which we have, after a fashion, just reduced to a common denominator. This analysis has a double advantage : 1st: It defines with precision, for the first time, the Four Temperaments in their psychological significance, gives them a constitutive formula and measures exactly the distance which separates them one from another. The Bilious is thus defined, simply by its position in the diagram, as an Intellectual-active-objective; the Lymphatic as a Physical-passive-objective, etc. 2nd: It ramifies into six chief branches as genealogy of new types derived from the first Four. And these six new types, less generous, begin to press more closely upon the human reality. Fur- ther, it had, as we have just seen, the advantage of putting into accord, several years ago, two con- flicting systems which are to this day opposed. 68 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS * THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS 69 Does it not reconcile, in a common reality, the four-division system extolled by M. Fouillee with the three-divisional method of other philosophers, and introduce a binary system as well? True, it did not in the beginning attach much importance to justifying itself from a medical point of view; its origin was more poetic than scientific, and it does not hesitate before those questions which the Poets, at all times and among all peoples, have better studied than the Physicians. It prefers, with its Masters, to take flight from medical ter- ritory, wherein the first malady will transform the physiological temperament and nevertheless modify only secondary parts of the character, toward the open sky of the great natural Analogies. Ill OF THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS We recall the manner in which these Masters have compared, in lines at once profound and beautiful, the autumn of life and the twilight of the day and the year, to the sadness of the Ner- vous type amid the historic decadences; the winter to the aged Lymphatic approaching life's night- time ; the spring, in its morning, to some Neitz- schean adolescent, choleric and barbaric, and noon or midsummer to the Sanguine in the enjoy- ment of life, careless and forgetful, in his ephem- eral strength, of the weakness of the past and the future. 70 The Nervous type suggests to our minds Asia, lyrical and mystical, subtle, fond of silks, of tea and coffee, of hasheesh and opium, creator of paradises, religious and artificial. His transparent skin, delicate and smooth to the touch, suggests ivory. We note the large eyes, the high forehead, the head broad at the back, the contracted and trembling motions of his handwriting, hesitant, narrow, angular, full of flourishes; the hearing developed more than the other senses (which are often defective). We hear his voice low and vibrant, serious; his incer- titude of motion extending also to his language, which is interspersed with hesitant "ahs." We array him, this man of the eastern plains, in melancholy greens, in blacks or silken stuffs of strange design. Neuroses and hallucinations do not surprise us in this being whose cerebral con- stitution is feminine, nor do the mental zigzags so illogical in appearance, the forgetfulness of the principal parts of his discourse, the confusion, the perpetual recommencement. The character, imag- inative above all, has those flashes of intuition which Goethe attributed to that one of his four prin- ciples which he called the DEMONIAC. Aristocratic, sensitive, we do not tire of his confidences, of his incurably LYRIC nature, of his tendency at first to deny and spurn that which later enraptures him, nor of his mysticism, so in accord with the elliptic THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS 71 turn of his mind, suggestive and stimulating. In short, we admire in him the echo of that which is most human in the animal nature. With the Bilious type we turn, on the contrary, towards the Occident, ambitious, hardy and con- quering, more brutal but keenly logical, forceful in language, imperious; the veritable muscle of humanity. We remark the aquiline nose, the deep-set eyes, commanding and far-sighted, the salient Napoleonic chin, the ruggedness of visage which reminds us of roughly sculptured stone. In the broad forehead we see the spirit of domination, of headstrong argument. The gestures are precise and definite, the handwriting clear and firm, with short well-made strokes; the speech brief and sententious, hammered out syllable by syllable, yet sometimes with a pontifical and majestic quality. We notice how firmly- woven fabrics in the pronounced and classic colors (reds and bright blues) cling and hang upon this muscular figure with its powerful biceps. Such a temperament, idealistic but dogmatic and authoritative, aspires above all to establish and assert itself. Its weakness lies in its mania for deducing all things from a single principle, with a logic more or less exact, but relentless even before the absurdity of the results. We may observe a rapport between the fickle- ness so characteristic of the Sanguine Tempera- 72 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS ment and that of the Negro race. We find in this type, in southern lands, a jesting disposition, a tendency to hasty and exaggerated affirmations, vivacity, sociability, a love of strong and varie- gated colors, of gaudy gold-trimmed uniforms and plumes, of tinsel decorations, of theatricals and dramatic scenes; a democratic and turbulent spirit, practical instincts, a habit of sophistry and pretense (both to himself and others), easy morals, scepticism, a pr oneness to impulsive folly, a character by turns audacious and cowardly. The flesh tints are warm, the skin pliant to the touch, almost oily, the movements vigorous and agile, whence the handwriting of round open letters, often illegible, however, because of its rapidity. The noisy speech is well adapted to sudden flares of anger, to quarrels, jests and arguments. His sense of smell is keen, his taste is for highly spiced food. We clothe him in conspicuous and amusing costumes. For the rest, we may heartily praise his initiative, his gaiety, his energy, his practical habits, his adaptability to all circumstances. The Lymphatic, lastly, we discover near the Poles (or at least near that one toward which humanity withdrew before the great sea which anciently advanced upon it from the south). It is under the snowy skies of the north that we find dispassionate, patient souls, deep thoughts (some- times vague and misty on contact with others), THE POUR TEMPERAMENTS 73 didactics, the scientific spirit, the memory well developed but encumbered with documentary facts; utilitarianism, slow speech, heavy gestures, interminable sentences, and a disposition to long and sometimes dreamy discourses. The hand- writing is negligently traced, without firmness, the letters rather broad than high ; the style is descrip- tive. The weak point of such a type is its dullness. Regularity of life, realism in philosophy, a utilitar- ian indifference in politics, an inclination to endless study, a strongly developed sense of taste, a liking for soft clothing and soft colors such as rose and grey-blue, pallid flesh, cold and soft to the touch, these characterize this northern or mountain type, which may be compared to the fish or the reptile in the animal world or to the humid sea- wrack in the vegetable world. Our analysis even forms a sort of Crystallog- raphy of Human Traits, which furnishes the artist with elements analogous to those just evolved for the student of human souls. Thus will be understood the four following schemes or caricatures. (Page 74.) As we see, the profile is divided into four regions : occiput, sinciput, nose, jaw. I have apportioned, theoretically, the upper half of each of these parts to the signs of the Bilious and the Lymphatic (B and L), and the lower half to the lines of the Nervous and the Sanguine (N and S). These 74 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS JfU~J r r~^- r~^ ' ' z t ' VkrJ THE POUR TEMPERAMENTS 75 lines consist, for the Bilious and Nervous, in CONVEXITIES; for the Lymphatic and the Sanguine in CONCAVITIES. It will be remarked, not without surprise, that this plan, so simple, gives also the four characteristic physiognomies of the four traditional Temperaments. We have now but to continue over the entire body. The anatomists and draughtsmen have long pointed out certain correspondences of form, not absolute, but frequent, between the three elements of the TRIADS into which the whole human body is divided and then subdivided. Thus, first the Head, the Thorax and the Abdomen respectively supporting, 1st: the two crooked bones which by their joining in front form the lower jaw; 2nd: the arms, and 3rd: the legs. Each of these pairs of members divides itself again into THREE: the thigh, the leg and the foot; the arm, the forearm and the hand; the perpendicular part of the lower jaw, the horizontal part and the part in which the teeth are set. The teeth correspond also to the phalanges of the fingers and the toes. We know that each finger in turn has THREE phal- anges, etc. Now, we usually find a correspondence of con- formation, in an individual, between the parts of his various members (knees and elbows, wrists and ankles, etc.) and between the extremities or 76 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS the central regions of his diverse parts: it is this which gives so special an aspect, for example, to the hand of a hunchback. We may then sketch also, from head to feet, four human beings in whom the two concavities and the two convexities, upper and lower (by which we have already characterized in occiput, sinciput, nose and jaw our Lymphatic, Sanguine, Bilious and Ner- vous) will continue to show themselves in the outlines of the shoulder-blades, the chest, the pelvis and the abdomen ; then of the two posterior and the two anterior halves of the thighs ; the arms, forearms, legs; even of each phalange; in a word, in every one of the parts into which we have just divided the human silhouette. Finally, each of these parts, as we have seen, is divided into four regions: lower posterior, upper posterior; lower anterior, upper anterior. These respectively appertain, in a greater or less degree, to the signs of the Lymphatic, the Nervous, the Bilious and the Sanguine. Let it be said once more, it is not a question of exact and inevitable concordance, but of establish- ing FOUR FUNDAMENTAL TYPES, which will extend the human Proportions, theoretically and ideally, and will be a point of departure for the variations which may be executed within the limits of these proportions. Still less is it a question of an infallible process for the divination of character THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS 77 by facial traits, since, we repeat, the "character" is but a habit or group of habits fixed upon a human being, and not the being himself, who in spite of it remains complete, and capable of taking, with greater or less pliancy, other habits and other attitudes. The physiognomy is but the envelope or cover, so to speak, formed by habit (especially hereditary), and less quickly modified than the habit itself, although infinitely more so than we think, and than the too uniform life of our civili- zation lets appear. The Law of Four-Century Periods CHAPTER V (AN APPLICATION OF THE PRECEDING CHAPTER) How many analogies does the Theory of Tem- peraments permit us to weave! It draws threads not only from all points of space and from all manifestations of mind, but likewise from time and history. Having remarked, for example, that the order of evolution of the Four Temperaments, by their analogy with the Seasons, the Ages of Life, etc., presents regularly the Bilious or Obstinate fol- lowed by the happy Sanguine, this by the Nervous and it in turn by the Lymphatic, to recommence with the Bilious, and so on, which is equivalent to saying in face of every activity: Growth, Complete- ness, Decline and Repose, is it not plain that the 17th, 13th, 9th, 5th and 1st centuries of our era (those of Louis XIV, of Saint Louis, of Charle- magne, of Clovis and of Augustus, which our histories call the "Grands Siecles"), like the 4th, 8th, 12th and 16th of the pre-Christian era (those of Alexander, of Romulus, of Agamemnon, of Sesostris), return every 400 years, like a full moon, or a historic Summer? THE LAW OF FOUR-CENTURY PERIODS 70 Besides the nine great Figures just named, they bring, like bolts of thunder, the most tre- mendous downfalls and destructions with which the world has resounded : the fall of Jericho, the fall of Troy, the fall of Nineveh, that of the Per- sian Empire, that of Jerusalem, that of Rome, that of the Carlo vingian Empire, that of the Hohenstaufens, that of the Catholic Empire. And at the same time are precipitated the most irre- sistible invasions and streams of migration: the Jews into the Promised Land, the Heraclides across Greece, the black Ethiopians into Egypt, the blonde Gauls to Rome, the brown Romans to the limit of their conquests, the great Invasions, in return, to the very heart of that Empire; those of the Northmen across its reconstitution, of the Mongols into Europe in the 13th century, and the expansion of France over Europe and the world (17th century). And finally, in one of these Summers of History there rises the figure of Christ. The dark centuries of Winter (10th, 6th, 2nd B.C.; 3rd, 7th, llth, 15th and 19th A.D.) offer, by contrast, grave and often sorrowful and bitter, figures : the Buddha (whether of the 10th or the 6th century), then Confucius (with Zoroaster, it is said, and Pythagoras) ; the aged Cato ; four hundred years later the great heresiarch Mani, whose despairing philosophy dared equalize God 80 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS and the Devil; in the 7th century the fatalist Mahomet, in the llth Ghibellinism, happily over- come by Gregory VII at Canossa; John Huss, and finally Hegel and Schopenhauer. Ages of transition and of grievous yet fecund error! Napoleon (whose prefiguration seems to have been the Gaulish Sigovese, conquering the German tribes 24 centuries earlier), Mahomet II, William the Conqueror and the founder of the Sassanids; Ardashir and Marius and Cyrus the adventurer and Erechtheus form the tokens of it, behind these heroes of the advance-guard: the Revolu- tionaries, Jeanne d'Arc, the Cid and the Guelphs; the Gracchi, Harmodius and Aristogition, the first Brutus. Livingstone followed by Stanley and Christopher Columbus followed by the Con- quistadores correspond to the first Crusaders and to the Arab Conquest, as Verlaine to Villon. It is as if the travail of germination pierces, for the ages to come, the cold black earth of the Louis-Philippes and the Louis XI's, the Roths- childs and the Jacques Coeurs, the Croesuses and the Eclectics. This is also a series of Germanizing centuries; every one of them wears, as an armor, the Germanic grandeur, from the formidable organization of the Prankish and Sueve Leagues (3rd century) and the preponderance of the Mayors of Austrasia (7th), to the Franconian House (llth) and that of the Habsbourgs (15th) and the tri- umphant rise of the Hohenzollerns (19th). THE LAW OF FOUR-CENTURY PERIODS 81 Each one of them, as a night or winter, extin- guished and swept away the century immediately preceding, this latter belonging to the series of Autumn or Evening. In the Autumn or Sunset periods to which we now come, we find always elegance enraptured with itself, a varied and fragile splendor, luxury and profusion; always the vintage-time of a declining civilization. Even the kings are so learned that they pose as sages! Joseph II and Catherine of Russia, and thou, Charles V, father of the mortal schism of the West, wherein perished our supremacy in Europe; and you, the Basileus philosopher^ of 10th century Byzantium; even thou, Chilperic, the grammarian of the 6th century, succeeding Marcus Aurelius and the Antonines (2nd century), who follow 400 years after the Ptolemies of Alexandria; and thou, Solon (7th century B.C.) and finally, at the summit, thou, Solomon, author or not of the Book of Wisdom! With the sneering scepticism which Voltaire, across four times four centuries, received as a her- itage from Lucian, reigns also the most absurd credulity; Cagliostro, Rosenkranz and the Free- masons of the 14th century, occultism of the time of Gerbert, the frenzied Gnostics, and that dis- quieting pythoness of Endor whose words resounded in the troubled mind of Saul, the 82 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS foolish king, prefiguration, four centuries in advance, of Nebuchadnezzar, and by 24 centuries of our Charles VI ! grins, convulsions, the appearance of the animal grimace beneath the human mask. And with this series of centuries is connected the birth of idolatry which tradition makes contemporaneous with Ninus. Thought would perish, if the learned, everywhere modestly limited to the tangible, did not extract some elements of survival; Thales and the sages, Archimedes and Euclid, Ptolemy the geographer, the lawyers of Justinian, the Arabian scholars and the inventors of the 14th century have done so. In contrast, let us unroll the series of Spring. If Jesus chose one of the Summer-cycles for His glory ; if Idolatry rose in the decline of the Autumn cycles; if some yet mysterious menace darkens those of Winter, it was one of the cycles of Spring that saw the creation of this beautiful world, according to the Bible; in the 41st century before Christ (the date most frequently adopted, notably by Bossuet, Daunou, Dreyss, etc.). Four times 400 years nearer to us, in the 25th century, Creation was reborn, purified by that fantastic baptism, the Deluge. The Flood of Deucalion is still 400 years nearer (21st century) ; it corresponds to the epoch of the Jewish people's origin in Abraham. THE LAW OF FOUR-CENTURY PERIODS 83 But hark while rises, from the slopes of Sinai, the divine poetry of Moses! (17th century B.C.), and, following like an echo below from the sea, that of Orpheus (13th century). Who are the greatest of creators, if not Homer (9th century), the Tragics of the 5th century, Virgil (1st century B.C.); in sacred literature, the sublime Fathers of the 4th century (St. John Chrysostom, Jerome, Augus- tine, Ambrose, Basil, Athanasius, Gregory Nazi- anzen, founder, it is said, of the Christian theatre), and in non-Christian literature, the Eddas (8th century) ; then the French and German epics of the 12th century, and, finally, Shakespeare. Our 20th century belongs to this glorious family. Let us not forget that each of the giants whom I have just evoked marches amid the luxuriant flowering of all the arts; the Renaissance dawns over almost all Europe, despite Protestant ana- thema, as, 800 years earlier, reviving Byzantine art triumphed over the Iconoclasts; the ogival architecture of the 12th century (Notre Dame de Paris) rivals that of the Parthenon after four times 400 years ; but who could enumerate the poets and artists of these privileged ages? Even war is ennobled, and seems made for dreams and visions : the expedition of the Argonauts, the Medic Wars, the glory of Greece, the struggles for equality in Rome, the conflicts with the Arian belittlers of the great Mystery, the combat with 84 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS the Saxons, and that of Roland at Roncesvalles, preluding, four centuries in advance, the Crusades of the 12th century against Islam; lastly the religious wars in resistance to the sectarianism of that new Arius, Luther. But special disciplines have each time responded to new heresies : Loyola, St. Bernard, St. Benoit, St. Augustine and the Nicene Creed, the Incarnation, Socrates, the just Herakles, the Decalogue (17th century B.C.,) appear at intervals of four centuries and confirm the ancient call of Abraham (21st century) and the splendid forecast of the Bow of Promise (25th century). Do we not see, even in the midst of our surprised indifference, religious passion reviving, and decor- ative art everywhere throwing over the ugliness of the past century its network of beauty? solemn portents, and perhaps the last. Four times four make sixteen; the first 16 centuries, which com- prised the world's youth, expired with the sobs of Buddha, that personification of disillusion; the intoxicating fruits of maturity ripened, on the thrice sacred shores of the Mediterranean, between Homer and Mahomet. Is it old age, is it decline, which began under the pale skies of the north, with the Eddas and the ancestors of the Carlo vingians, to terminate with the 23rd century? may it be that humanity has but four more centuries to live? Strangely, already the commentators of the THEfLAW OF FOUR-CENTURY PERIODS 85 Apocalypse profess to discover therein that the Last Judgment will follow not long after the year 2000, and from elsewhere the prophecies of St. Malachy announce but ten more Popes to lead the Church to the fulfillment of her task. The Six Directions of Action CHAPTER VI I THE TEMPERAMENTS COMBINED TWO BY TWO, FORMING SIX TYPES We may see, by this single example, the fecun- dity of our analogies. It is most natural to extend them. It is most natural to extend the Four Temperaments into the Six Types (three pairs or two trios, according to need) which our Theory has extracted from them, as we have seen above. But first let us define with precision these Six Types: The Objective, a combination of the Bilious and the Lymphatic, has as its dominating desire that of Being more, of Manifesting itself in works ; ELOQUENCE, ADVENTURE, PRIDE and LABOR are derived from this desire. (We shall see, in Chap- ter X, why these words are emphasized.) The features of this Type are broad, calm and har- monious, the demeanor grave and straightforward, the bodily posture upright even to the point of leaning backward. The body, of medium height, white of flesh and cold, lacks the thrill of life even when the blood is rich; the muscles, often over- developed, add to its heaviness. The hand- THE SIX DIRECTIONS OF ACTION 87 writing is small, regular and a trifle cramped. The mind is broad and tolerant, through absence of passion; the ideas travel in immense circles without a clearly apparent object. The style is oratorical, explanatory, given to enlarging, by successive developments, points at first trivial. The natural tendency of opinion is conservative, plutocratic, even BOURGEOIS, hierarchic, friendly to law and order, to harmony, to respectability, with happiness or serenity as the aim. A defect of this type is slowness of mental processes. In philosophy, these are the pantheists; in science, the physicians; in art, the sculptors. The women of this type love like men; the children prefer their mother to their father. The Subjective, or better yet, the Possessive, since the dominant instinct is to Have, to Pos- sess, is a combination of the Nervous and the Sanguine. Whether grasping or prodigal, these are monopolists, and thereby sentimentalists also; jealous and frequently despotic, they live in a state of passion and are often unjust in con- sequence. Thought, with them, springs from within outward. Their unquiet hearts are the source of their faults or their vices. They are chthonians, Titans, always in eruptions or in tempests. In science, they will be chemists; in art, painters or musicians; in politics, judges or dictators. Theirs are expressive faces, yet with 88 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS inequalities caused by this or that ugly feature; skin like alabaster, flashing eyes whose gaze easily hypnotizes. Their gestures are enthusias- tic, imperious, excited; steps short and unequal; handwriting full of variations and flourishes. The speech is animated, the style spirited, full of antitheses and rhetorical figures. The children of this type prefer their father to their mother. Later, especially if the Sanguine be predominant, this tendency renders disturbing their admiration for virile beauty. The Active, a mingling of the Sanguine and Bilious, closely approaches the preceding, but its formula is Action. People of this type do not limit themselves to passionate censure or con- demnation, like the Subjectives; they revolt, they strike; neither do they travel in circles like the Objectives; their energy has a more active effect. Their thought is, above all, practical and shrewd. Bold, clever, sometimes unscrupulous, often patronizing and protecting, dangerous as adversaries, they have the art of leading the crowd, which is always militarist as soon as its fears are overcome, and which finds in this type something of its own grossness, its own brutality. Well developed virile figures, bearded faces, tanned complexions; gestures forceful and concentrated, restless bodily attitudes as though always on the point of action, coarse language and vigorous THE SIX DIRECTIONS OF ACTION 89 methods in all things are characteristic of them. They lie with facility, risk life readily, have a tendency to take the shortest cut to the object in view; they are experimenters, ever ready to try something new, with the audacity of scepticism and with a total irreverence for the past, which they neither understand nor appreciate. Their handwriting is rapid; they have a lively narrative style and furnish many popular story-writers. They have an egotism which is readily condoned, and an ability to extricate themselves from almost any difficulty. They love the natural sciences. The Passive, or rather Sensitive, since their great role is to Feel, unite in themselves the Nervous and the Lymphatic. They pass from art to faith, from fidelity to sensuality, since, sensitive and emotional, they vibrate to every contact. Their flesh is fine and delicate, even morbidly so; the outlines of the figure are rounded. Gestures as well as words are often involuntary; the postures indolent, the manner well-poised. The handwriting remains always immature. The style is harmonious, flowery, descriptive. This nature is essentially musical, and frequently becomes religious. Impressions from without overcome impulses from within. In politics, they are devotedly legitimist, faithful to the throne as to the altar, influenced by ancient traditions of 90 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS loyalty and royalty, of "divine right," of aris- tocracy, of "the good old times." They have a profound seriousness in matters of sentiment, which expresses itself in delicate old-fashioned language. Will-power is deficient, artifice and hypocrisy frequent. Sometimes there is coquetry, sometimes worse; but the family virtues are usual in this type. The Intellectual (Bilious- Nervous) are abstract thinkers; their role is to Idealize. The possessive instinct in them translates itself into avarice or ambition; emotionalism into prudence, virtue, theology; activity into subtility. Theoretical, mathematical, systematic, their mentality has both a literal and an imaginative tendency. Their language is full of strange expressions, acquired and used almost unconsciously. Their style, concise, elliptic, intense, vivid, reveals their originality, which we discover also in their BIZARRE handwriting, jerky and angular, in their odd personal mannerisms, in their long and somewhat heavy steps, with an excessive bend- ing at the knees. Their opinions are essentially individualistic, anarchistic, destructive, pessimis- tic; a strong sense of the rights of personality causes them to hold all things admissible which lead toward the ideal state in which individuals and ideas shall not be dominated by mass stu- pidity. They are usually thin of flesh, with THE SIX DIRECTIONS OF ACTION 91 rounded shoulders and chest; the nose is nerve RETROUSSE, for all the bodily lines curve from above downward. Lastly, the Physical, whose constant aim is to Realize, to Materialize, and in whom the Sanguine and the Lymphatic mingle, show, on the contrary, heavy flesh, sometimes plump and dimpled, sometimes bloated and ugly. The facial and bodily lines tend to turn upward. They are always thickset; their movements, neverthe- less, are easy, and neither in step nor posture are they hampered or clumsy. Prosaic dullness is the defect of their minds, whose grossness is sometimes expressed in violent or voluptuous tastes. The letters of the handwriting are short, rounded, heavy. Their opinions, social in ten- dency, rest upon some doctrine of solidarity, of cooperation, of mass effort, and have little regard for initiative and for that inequality which is so fecund. They are socialistic levellers. A mind of this type often ends in materialism; its science will be that of industry, its life one of adaptation, its art merely a photographic realism. II HISTORIC TENDENCY TO GENERAL GROUPINGS OF Six Now these six moral and physical types, so distinct, are nothing else than the extension of our energy in one of the six directions into which 92 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS the three dimensions of space divide themselves: height (upward, downward), breadth (to right, to left), depth (before and behind). Already the organs of our bodies are adapted to these six directions: our legs carry us forward and back- ward, our arms extend to right and left, while, in an eternal antithesis, our heads look upward and the weight of our bodies draws us downward. Now the SOUL cannot escape these conditions, whether we regard spiritual energy as simply a subtilization of physical energy, or whether we see in the latter but a symbol of the soul. If the soul dwell upon vulgar things, it ABASES itself, as we say; it UPLIFTS itself toward God in its expansion and detachment from earthly things ; it inclines toward the RIGHT, so to speak, in actions clearly governed by the will, and to the LEFT in those governed by emotional impulse; to "possess," is not this to be held BACK, and to "manifest" to go FORWARD? To manifest and to possess, to act and to feel, to idealize and to materialize, is not this the whole of life? We see the Orator, "rising," deliver his EXOR- DIUM. "Before" him, "before" us, he places his PROPOSITION. His NARRATION, following, carries us "back" with him into the tyrannical past. He brandishes, as a sword in his "right" hand, THE SIX DIRECTIONS OP ACTION 03 his CONFIRMATION, and, to the "left," wards off sinister attacks with the buckler of his REFUTA- TION. Then his discourse "descends" and ends with the PERORATION. Such, according to Rhe- toric, are the six parts of an oration; the six directions of its force. Poetry also, if we believe Aristotle, contains six corresponding parts. And the Politics of Plato enumerates six types of government : the objective and majestic MONARCHY, the abstract and lofty ARISTOCRACY, the military and active TlMOCRACY, the materialistic OLIGARCHY of the plutocrats, the sentimental DEMOCRACY of the masses, and the jealous TYRANNY. They succeed one another inevitably in the same order, and the philosopher seeks not merely an image, but THE CAUSE, in the six types of human char- acter, which is to say, for us, in their six "attitudes" respecting the passions There were too (was it for this reason?) six Classes in Rome, as there were six cases in its declensions, one reflects with a smile. And Physics, which in nature envisages only force, only energy, is it not also divided into six parts? Does not Crystallography reduce all its polyhedrons to six groups of forms? And, if we would amuse ourselves longer with these butterfly-flights which are called Analogies 94 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS (and which likewise begin in childish poetic caprice, to end perhaps as a science), we may still cite the six "days" or periods of Creation, which, fifty-two times a year, the Christian, Jewish and Moslem week repeats and celebrates in its six days.* The seventh period was consecrated to rest. But Sunday, according to Genesis, saw the birth of light and darkness; Monday, the fluids, air and water; Tuesday, the principal minerals and vegetables; Wednesday, the astronomical organ- ization of our sun and stars; Thursday, the fish and birds of our earth; Friday, the terrestrial animals and humanity. The six gods early established over these six days correspond to the six types which we have just drawn from the four temperaments com- bined two by two. The Sun-god is our Sensitive, the Moon our jealous Possessive; Mars is our Active, virile and brutal; the ingenious Mercury is our Intellectual, the majestic Jupiter our Objective and the sensual Venus our Physical. These six types have had an incomparable fortune; not only have they served all the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but we find them, "The Mass is also divided into six principal parts. Each one sym- bolizes one of the moments of the Passion, center and resume of the world's history. THE SIX DIRECTIONS OF ACTION 96 clearly specified, in Shakespeare, who makes constant allusion to them* and evidently constructs from them a method for his classification of men. We find them again in Schiller, who seems for a time to have preferred them to the four primi- tive temperaments dear to his master Kant.** Ill ANALOGOUS GROUPINGS OF SEVEN AND THREE As for the seventh type, that of Saturn, it has been little used except by dullards who have corrupted the system. It rests, in effect, on the superstitious idea of Evil Fortune. Its charac- ters are alternately those of the six others, obscured by this conception, which, as we shall see further on, is one of the subdivisions of Apollo, stripped of personal passion. If vicious, it cor- responds to the type of Venus, and if cold, to Diana; dry and abstract, to the intellectual Mercury; hard and destructive, to Mars. It seems to have been invented merely for the sake of reaching the cabalistic number of 7. All the personages, human or divine, of this seventh class, may be reduced to the number of half a dozen, by the fact that they all contain a compo- site and central type. This keeps, from the depths at which we see it, the too bright or too *See, for example, the portrait which Hamlet draws of his father. **Wallenstein, etc. 96 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS sombre color of its origin. Of the seven princes of the Devs, six are thus subordinated to the sinister Ahriman, whose emanations they represent, and the seven Amschasfands, for their part, signify simply the six Gahanbars (each placed over a season or double-month of the year), plus the Universal Ormuz. For, although we prefer to divide the year into four seasons, in which we have seen above sug- gestive analogies with the temperaments, races, ages, centuries, parts of the day and of the world which it lights, we should not forget that it is not NECESSARILY thus divided. And it has not always been thus divided, as we have just observed in the case of the Persian year, and as we may observe in the case of the liturgic year, also divided into six parts, but unequal ones: Advent, Christmas season, Septuagesima, Lent, Paschal season and the season after Pentecost. The Greeks, too, showed perhaps a finer sense of life than ours when thsy recognized but three seasons : Ear, Op6ra and Chim6n, or the Green, the Fruitful and the Sad. They identi- fied these with the Beotian Thallo, Carpo and Auxo, symbolizing Flower, Fruit and Growth; with the Cretan Irene, Eunomia and Dirce (Harmony, Power, Justice), more abstract, but having the same profound significance; they THE SIX DIRECTIONS OF ACTION 97 compared them to the three Graces, the gentle Aglaia, the joyous Euphrosyne and Thalia of the feasts; to the three Gorgons, to the three Sirens and to the three Eumenides, whose roles in destiny we know. It is this habit of mind which explains how Aristotle, by analogy, draws in his ''Poetics" but three ages of man: Youth, Maturity and Age, although, accustomed to our four seasons, we moderns tend always to insert a fourth. Observe that the three seasons of the Greeks readily divide themselves into the six of the Persians: Season of Buds and Season of Foliage; Season of Harvest and Season of Vintage; Season of Darkness and Season of Snow. Although some of these divisions may appear variable, because they blend into one another like the colors of the spectrum, we cannot there- fore pronounce them artificial and unreal. Such an ingratitude to Analogies, so constantly fecund in the human mind, would be both precipitate and imprudent. The Art of Invention CHAPTER VII I PYTHAGORAS; PHILOSOPHIC ROMANTICISM Numbers, wherein we moderns see nothing but figures, are not so dead and inert as we have decreed. A strange sentence, indeed, which we have not passed on anything else in this vast universe, wherein we pique ourselves on finding, singing and celebrating only "Life!" Number also is a part of Life. It is Rhythm. Perhaps it shows itself even more essentially living than most of our sensations, and, far from being a mere convention established by prehistoric arithmeticians, has as its origin in ourselves the very beat of our hearts. This exclusion of Number presents an incom- prehensible anomaly. All our sciences, Astron- omy, Physics, Mechanics, Chemistry, are based on Mathematics, whose importance increases from day to day; Philosophy alone, although open to all these sciences which everywhere encompass it, remains inhospitably closed to the master of them all. Upon Number alone and its nature does Philosophy refuse to meditate. It is perhaps needless to seek further for the cause of that decadence into which it is irresistibly slipping, and THE ART OF INVENTION 99 of its visible impotence before moral and meta- physical questions, which it persists in treating according to the worn-out processes of a banal lifeless scholasticism, in the paltry style of an old professor of rhetoric attempting to produce literature. And this because, since the time of Pythagoras, we have completely lost our perception of the simple, warm, natural life of Numbers. That great thinker, earliest of the philosophers, has been ridiculously deformed by legend. We should not forget, nevertheless, that from his school came Aeschylus, creator of Tragedy, Epicharmus, founder of Comedy, and a hundred other poets, mathematicians, artists, legislators, naturalists, all creators, who in reality constituted the Hellenic grandeur, the origin of our civilization. A Socrates, a Plato, an Aristotle represent, in fact, but the second outpouring of Greek thought. Again, we should recall the unanimous testimony of the ancients. This same Pythagoras whom we see, on the solemn eve of the Medic Wars, inspiring the minds of their heroes and of the geniuses of the Age of Pericles, is believed to have revived the tradition of teachings attributed, more or less authentically, to that Orpheus whom we find, near the epoch of Troy, in the dawn of that other great epoch of Greece, which gave us Homer and Hesiod. 100 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Is it surprising to discover that in this Orpheo- Pythagoric teaching, although today disdained, there lies a treasure of human thought? Unhappily, Orphism and Pythagorism have only come down to us disfigured in the most ridiculous fashion, first by the Alexandrine char- latans and later by those of the Renaissance, that is to say, by the decay of the two great original eras of Europe, the Greek and the Med- iaeval. This does not at all signify, however, that at the end of the first the authentic documents of Pythagorism had disappeared. On the contrary, we find the powerful influence of the doctrine, its spirit of ANALOGY, and particularly of numer- ical analogy, in almost all the best thought of the Middle Ages (notably in theological writings), thought thereby far removed from our own, but thereby akin to that of Greece and Asia. It is possible that the last Pythagoric works may have finally disappeared, with so many others, at the time of the Hundred Years War and the Turkish invasion of Europe. Let us not forget that, ignorant as we still are of mediaeval litera- ture, we can necessarily form but a very incomplete idea of its sources. Only the survival of these old Hellenic writings can explain that extraordinary MELANGE of marvellously suggestive passages, otherwise inaccountable, and of base absurdities THE ART OF INVENTION 101 which forms the "hermetic" books of the 15th and 16th centuries. It was said, indeed, even during the lifetime of Cornelius Agrippa, that intrigu- ing boaster whose OCCULT PHILOSOPHY contains, besides its superstitious imbecilities, the curious relationships of his Analogical Tables, that this noisy wizard had merely plagiarized unintelli- gently a manuscript of the Arabian Picatrix, which was at that time to be found in the library of the Kings of Spain. It is needless to recall how many Greek works have come to us by way of the Arabs, or how many have been lost which they possessed. The philosophy of the ancients comes to us today with its most vigorous half amputated, so to speak. By a singular tradition, the philosophic teaching of modern peoples disguises this formid- able mutilation. It invites us to glide over so disturbing a subject. Nevertheless, if ever that prodigious lacuna should be filled by the reappear- ance of the Pythagoric writings so esteemed by all the Greek thinkers (for neither Aristotle nor Plato, nor any of their rivals of the old school, manifested any of our disdain for them) a veritable revolution, comparable to that of romanticism in literature, will be produced in our philosophy, so erudite, subtile, purist like the last classics, difficult, minute and particular, but curtailed, narrow and "scholastic" in the etymological sense of the word! 102 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Great is the distance from these mere academic games to those antique doctrines each of which founded a civilization! The Greek sage appears intimately and naturally mingled with the tumul- tuous life of the people, which he expressed and transformed, almost in the fashion of the founders of our religious orders. Whereas, coldly with- drawn from the public to the fireside and the library, our philosophy of professors and of themes, by its evident impotence, yields place to the gross empiricism of the modern leaders of men and of those writers and artists who inspire them. Between the imitation of defunct ages and the ugliness of formless personality the last three centuries have oscillated, with no bold new har- monies to meet the storms of the future. To the Greek so admirably endowed, and also, it must be remembered, not yet desiccated and hardened by an artificial and inelastic learn- ing, mathematical formulae sang like chords. The smallest new discovery of this kind, instead of being limited to scientific and mechanical applica- tions, penetrated him throughout, thrilled his nerves and muscles and communicated its vibra- tion to all his thoughts, by its analogies, inexact, no doubt, as they always are, and as he knew, but so much the more fecund. When the Infinite opens itself to our souls, the classification of their responding impulses which is least artificial is that THE ART OF INVENTION 103 which assumes a mathematical character, since it is Mathematics alone which challenges the Infinite to all possible combinations. Do we begin to perceive what I seek to suggest rather than to demonstrate the pro- fundity of the Pythagorean conception? It is certain that no treason could be more fatal to it, and in fact none has been, than the inept numerical superstitions of Alexandrine and of modern hermeticism. For to limit certain numbers to some narrow meaning, to reduce to some exclusive property their enormous fecundity, is to go precisely contrary to the great Thinker to whom these vile charlatans pretend to be attached, but whose deadly parasites they are. Even M. Chaignet, in his conscientious work on Pythagoras, has done little but strive with the superstitions which these gentry have heaped about this great name, and whose crying contra- dictions dishearten this excellent scholar, even while he seems to perceive behind them, though he lacks the power to seize it amid their conflicts something lofty, rational, philosophic; in a word, truly Greek. In short, the monument yet remains to be raised by our own strength. I believe that the surest method will be the humblest: to gather patiently, in a sort of dictionary, the numerical 104 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS analogies, extending them progressively to all things with which we are acquainted, at least as far as possible; then to seek in some way to mul- tiply them by means of the known laws of arithmet- ical combinations; to note with care, on the other hand, the point at which each one of these anal- ogies ceases to be exact, and to try to trace thus a sort of provisory limit which will give them a contour, a physiognomy less arbitrary and espe- cially less limited than that inflicted by superstition upon the numbers 13, 7, etc. Ill VARIOUS NUMERICAL GROUPINGS Strange work this, to be sure, the aspect of which will perhaps be excused in view of the end to be attained, so far distant, and of the utter lack of methods for its attainment from which our age suffers. Christopher Columbus had to do without charts for his first voyage, although his forerunners had probably perished for that reason. So, for example, in this expedition toward the antipodes of known common sense, we can observe, with regard to Odd and Even Numbers, the habit- ual and instinctive preference of scientific classifi- cations for the latter. It seems, in fact, that the Odd Numbers, and especially the Prime Numbers, draw us slily toward the artificial. On the con- trary, the Even Numbers, thanks to their common THE ART OF INVENTION 105 root 2, show themselves favorable to subdivisions, and likewise to a liberty of research which is more hospitable to ulterior discoveries. Let us take another example, this time from nature. A group of friends most commonly comprises three, plus an additional one who serves as a lien with other groups, thus leading the first three to collective action. This curious law has been perceived and brought to light by the authors (of mentalities so different) of THE THREE MUSKETEERS, of WITH FIRE AND SWORD, and of L'CEUVRE. Now this sentimental law manifests at the base of the family. A child forms, like the fourth friend, a lien between two groups, here two families, the one represented by a man and his two parents, the other by a woman and hers. And in each group of friends (3 -f- 1) we may observe the roles, firm and paternal of one, indul- gent and maternal of another, adventurous of a third, and of the fourth a role of transition to the second group of 3. These friends sometimes exchange their roles, perhaps even assume each one of them in turn. It is in this sense that it will be necessary to seek here the "limit" of which I have spoken. We shall have, on the other hand, to count the number of friendly groups, connected as I have 106 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS just indicated, which is necessary and sufficient to constitute a society, a salon, etc. The ancients held that guests should not be fewer in number than the Graces (3 or 4), nor more than the Muses. Must we understand by this that a third complete group will lead to inharmonious divisions, with a majority and a minority? Let us pass, from these first examples of a psychology singular because unfamiliar, but never- theless founded on experience, to the deeper work of Numerical Analogies, which we may arrange in tables, in a sort of atlas or dictionary. The table of Dualities is one of the most instruc- tive. Let us enumerate first, without comment or order, some of the most renowned: Day and Night, Black and White, God and Satan, Ormuz and Ahriman, Jesus and Judas, Cain and Abel, Good and Bad, the Laugh and the Tear, Great and Small, Man and Woman, Telescope and Micro- scope, Aryans and Semites, Idealists and Sen- sualists, Masters and Slaves, Metaphysics and Positive Science, Faith and Doubt, Affirmation and Negation, Authority and Liberty, Dorians and lonians, Being and Non-being, Stoics and Epi- cureans, Mine and Thine, Rights and Duties, Church and State, More and Less, etc. It is hardly possible to superpose two of these Dualities but that there springs into view a THE ART OF INVENTION 107 sort of subtraction working in our minds some one of the great errors which, in consequence of an unconscious identification of these dualities, have distracted and still distract unfortunate humanity. Whence does this come but from the fact that it lacks sufficient flexibility of mind for these ana- logical subtractions? The "barbarism" against which the little towns of Greece struggled when awakened by Pytha- gorism, resided in nothing else than this rigidity. Even among us, if a professional agitator toss two of these dualities to the crowd, unskilled in the poetic game of comparison, it will instantly see therein identity, and therewith enrich the two camps which, in its simple eyes, must tear asunder and divide the world. I have intended here to give an example grossly visible. But it will not be difficult to surprise more than one so-called "intellectual," more than one philosopher, in flagrant offenses of the same sort in respect of certain dualities. What, then when we pass from dualities to triads, to tetrads, and so on? To this day, no science or system exists for training us to associate methodically all ideas most remote, as well as to dissociate, not less methodically, all ideas apparently most indissolu- ble. Our philosophy has well recognized the 108 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS capital importance of association, and, more recently, of dissociation of ideas (a Nietzschean reversal of values) ; nevertheless it has not thought to seek a process which enables us to accomplish this work from top to bottom. Numerical Analogies furnish this precious proc- ess, at least for everything which is concerned with the notion of Number AND ITS DERIVATIVES: the notions of extent, of quantity, of duration, of intensity, of force, etc. And we know that, from day to day, in all our sciences, a great number of ideas come back to this, even some which at first we thought altogether refractory. Long ago, in a sublime presentiment, Pythagoras alone systematically led the Greek thinkers along this path. We know today that he labored to reduce all things to numerical relationship, although we have unfortunately lost the greater part of these relationships, and those which remain to us have been ridiculously interpreted, at the same time that the theory of the Master was travestied by the Alexandrine charlatans, to the point of rendering incomprehensible and unbe- lievable the influence it exercised upon the most vigorous effort which has ever yet been put forth by human thought! The poets alone have preserved, by pure instinct, a vague sense of these things. We find THE ART OF INVENTION 109 to turn again to these gross and visible dualities the antithesis everywhere in the creative activity of a Hugo, for example. We saw, when constituting our Four Tempera- ments, how 2 dualities (Mind and Body, Activity and Passivity) could, instead of being reduced, according to vulgar custom, to a false identity, be multiplied one by the other. After which, com- bining 2 by 2 in their turn the 4 elements thus obtained, \ve drew from them a third duality, since 4 elements, 2 by 2, furnish 6 combinations: this third duality was Objectivity-Subjectivity. Let us now amuse ourselves by gathering triads, tetrads, pentads, hexads, heptads. They can combine among themselves in a fashion equally fecund; not, be it repeated, by identifications, (the unconscious and habitual process of the vulgar), but by means of superpositions, followed perhaps by a subtraction (this is the case of all critical comparisons), perhaps by a multiplication (we have just seen an example in the generation of the Four Temperaments), perhaps by still other operations. Let us first enumerate the most celebrated triads : The 3 primary colors (red, yellow and blue) whose combinations engender the 3 others (orange, green and purple). The 3 persons of the verb, whose augmentation (plural) also doubles the 110 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS number. The 3 forms of poetry which correspond to them (I = lyric, THOU = dramatic, HE = epic). The 3 primitive conceptions of Time, Space and Number, carrying each one the idea of a movement, which necessarily begins by dividing them. The 3 theological virtues, which double the 3 intellec- tual virtues too little popularized, in truth intelligence, knowledge and wisdom. The 3 classes of science (natural, physical and mathematical), not less prompt to divide themselves each into two groups. The ancient TRIVIUM (grammar, rhetoric, logic). The 3 parts of rhetoric (invention, dis- position, execution). The 3 parts of speech. The 3 forms of the triangle. The 3 musical modes. The elements of the orchestra (wood, brass and strings). The cousinly trinity, the Good, the True and the Beautiful. The 3 Greek Tragics. The no less representative 3 Masters of Italian painting. The 3 orders of classic architecture. The 3 Divine Persons. The parts of penitence (confession, contrition, expiation). The divisions of the body (head, thorax, trunk) ; of each member ; of each finger. The appetites, according to Plato. Etc., etc. We may likewise form a list of groups of Four, in addition to those which I have cited in the chap- ter on the Temperaments: The 4 elements. The 4 rules of arithmetic. The 4 cardinal virtues. The 4 branches of the THE ART OF INVENTION 111 Cross. The 4 sacred animals. The 4 great Prophets. The 4 Evangelists. The 4 principal Fathers of the Church. The 4 parts of the New Testament (Gospels, Acts, Epistles and Apoca- lypse). The 4 branches of philosophy (realism, idealism, scepticism, mysticism), whose coinci- dence with the ages of man, of a race, and seem- ingly of humanity, Goethe has indicated in his incomparable PENSEES. The 4 principles of des- tiny, according to the same Goethe (Daim6n, Eros, Tuche, Elpis). The 4 forms of animal locomotion (walking, flying, swimming, creeping). The 4 divine raptures, according to the Greeks (that of the Muses, that of Dionysos, that of the prophetic Apollo, that of Aphrodite). The materials of the sacraments (wine, oil, water, bread). The princi- pal winds (Auster, Zephyr, Eurus, Boreas). The point, the line, the plane and the depth in geom- etry. The colors of eyes (black, blue, brown and green) and of hair (black, blonde, chestnut and red). For the Five: The senses. The arts (music, architecture, sculpture, painting and poetry). The 5 wise and the 5 foolish virgins. The fingers. The universals. The joyful mysteries of the Rosary (Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Puri- fication, Finding the Child in the Temple), the sorrowful mysteries (Gethsemane, Scourging, Crown of Thorns, Bearing the Cross, Crucifixion) 112 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS and the glorious (Resurrection, Ascension, Descent of the Holy Ghost, Assumption, Coronation of Mary). The acts of a play (not only our own, but the Chinese). The Chinese count also: 5 great social relationships (between parents and children, governors and governed, between spouses, between friends, between old people and young people), 5 sorts of habiliment, 5 orders of great dignitaries. For Six: The parts of the body, as indicated above. The days of Creation. The double- months of the Persians, and the other examples given in the preceding chapter. The kinds of misfortune, according to Chinese philosophy. The series of double-trinities indicated above by the number 3. For Seven: The notes of the scale. The planets. The Wonders of the World. The capi- tal sins. The parts of the Lord's Prayer. The heads of the Hydra. The branches of the cande- labra. Every pleiad, astronomic or poetic. The orifices of the face. The sacraments. The sages of Greece. The ecclesiastical orders. The 7 series of visions of the Apocalypse, and, in the first four, the 7 churches, the 7 seals, the 7 trump- ets, the 7 vials, as well as the 7 heads of the Beast. The gifts of the Holy Ghost. The 7 deacons instituted by the Apostles. The 7 words of Christ on the Cross. THE ART OF INVENTION 113 III DISCOVERING AND INVENTING For the triads, we shall arrange 3 vertical columns, between which we shall divide, on a horizontal line, the 3 terms of each triad, first in one order: ABC A' B' C' A" B" C", etc. then in a second: ABC A' C' B' A" B" C", etc. then a third: ABC B' C' A' A' B" C' then in a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. We may compare each one of these orders, for there are six pos- sible for each triad, with each of those of every other triad (the triads A B C, A B C and others). And we may note accordingly the ANALOGIES, the CONTRASTS and the DIFFERENCES perceived in the course of these comparisons. We may do the same for the tetrads (each is susceptible of 24 orders) by means of 4 columns; for the pentads, the hexads, etc., by means of 5 and of 6 columns, etc. 114 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS The ANALOGIES observed in the course of these comparisons, member by member, between the diverse dyads, triads, tetrads, etc., will be of several species: Consequence, Connection, Echo, etc. The CONTRASTS also: Duel, Love, Exclusion* Complementarism, etc. The DIFFERENCES will be measured by means of the "Analogical Sub- traction." Of this Analogical Subtraction I have already spoken. It consists, as before explained, in first superposing two couples, two trinities, two tetrads, etc. After which, we note the difference or resem- blance between their first members, between the second, and so on. Then we must note whether this difference or resemblance between the first members is equal, superior or inferior (and wherein) to that observed between the second members, then to that between the third and fourth mem- bers, etc., superposed in this operation. Finally* make similar comparisons between the second members and the third, the second and the fourth, etc. These various deviations, once noted, will continue to exactly define the relationship con- necting the two dualities, trinities, etc., which we wish to compare. It is easily understood that we shall thus be led to the discovery of the element which will sym- metrize the two dualities, trinities, etc. The THE ART OF INVENTION 115 "Analogical Subtraction" thus puts us in posses- sion of an Art of Discovering, an Art of Inventing. It is of course necessary to guard, here also, against yielding, in an impatient desire of further discovery, to the spirit of system, to hasty sym- metrizing. We shall, however, run little risk of it by advancing slowly, with a perpetual conscious- ness of our method, whereas our moderns, who fear to systematize voluntarily, are constantly misled in their groping course by false symmetries. Even if the element discovered by our Analog- ical Subtraction, instead of producing instantly before our eyes the symmetry sought, brings a new dissymmetry, this should rejoice us, for instead of closing our inquiry it will inaugurate one more extended and more fertile in the unknown. I have spoken only of Analogical Subtraction between two dyads, triads, tetrads, etc. But it can be made between each dyad and all the other dyads, between each triad and all the others, and so on. It can be made even between a dyad and a triad, a tetrad or a pentad, etc. This operation will offer great varieties. In short, one number is in diverse arithmetical or geometrical relations with another. Thus, the three elements of a triad being disposed in SPACE, and, for example, in a triangle, the elements of the tetrad which we wish to compare with it can be disposed, first, in a 116 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS triangle formed of three from among them, the fourth remaining at the center; then in a second triangle, a third, etc., in which these four elements will change place turn about, the fourth relating itself in a greater or less degree to the three others, and the triangle changing its proportions. Then we can dispose this triad and this tetrad in TIME, that is to say, their respective elements in various orders of succession. In this succession in TIME or according to a unilinear disposition, the same triad, tetrad, etc., can reappear from place to place; or perhaps it will be a pair or a trinity of triads, tetrads, etc., which will reappear. This will create a sort of refrain or rhythm. This rhythm will be subject, like all rhythms, whether of music, poetry or form, to the principles, evolved by decorative artists, of Alternation (binary, ternary, etc.), of Intersection, of Sym- metry, of Contrast, of Gradation, ascending and descending, of Radiation and of Consonance (rhyme, repetition, leit-motiv). We can also always dispose as to ACTION the terms of two or several dyads, triads, etc., to be compared among themselves, or of a dyad to be compared with a triad, a tetrad, a pentad and so on. For example, we will take for subject and for verb the two superposed members of two triads, or of this triad and that tetrad; or for subject, verb and predicate the three superposed members of THE ART OP INVENTION 117 three triads, or of two triads and a tetrad. In the second column, on the contrary, we will reverse this grammatical relationship. In the third, we will adopt that of the first column, or that of the second, or both successively, unless we adopt a new one. The results once gathered, we may change the "grammatical" arrangement of each column into all the combinations not employed the first time ; from this, new results. Then, instead of "grammatical" relationships, we may arrange those of logic (causality, etc.). Now, by the examples which I have just given, we already begin to perceive that there is in reality a whole science here opening up before us, and of which we may establish, with a little patience, not allowing ourselves to be disheartened by the initial difficulties, the tables of loga- rithms.* "The reader will perhaps ask, by way of proofs in favor of this method, what discoveries I have made by it. I offer the present work in its entirety as the result and the proof of my method, as the assembling of the examples gives evidence of its efficacy. In no other way was I able to bring into unity the classifications, often contradictory, of characters, temperaments, world- types, etc., or to reduce to a single law of generation all the polytheisms of Chapter IX. The Law of Four-Century Periods, the proof here following of the existence of a single Homer, the minute analyses of characters created by poetry or legend, and the secrets of literary technique which I have sown by handfuls through the rest of this book are, we may be assured, simply the "remainders" of my Analogical Subtractions, simply the "unknown ' outlined by means of the "Equations" whose principal rules I have just indicated, simply the rhythms obtained by patient comparisons of the same elements transported from Time to Space, and from Space to Movement or Number. 118 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS They will form a part, if I am not mistaken, of the Pythagorean studies, persistent in tracking down vague ideas (those idols of the moderns), to master them, and wrest from them a thousand precious secrets of the Unconscious. And thus I would explain the preoccupation common to all the great men who came from that school unique in the world, to all the contemporaries of that cen- tury which was the most wonderful of Greece and of all history, that of Numerical Relationships. We find it again, this obsessing preoccupation, at the base of their music ; we find it in the estab- lishment of the Canon in sculpture; we find it in their architecture, so minutely precise and delicate ; again in the definitive design of their lyric rhythms and in the strict rules of their tragedy; we redis- cover it in that fixed idea of Proportion which they carried everywhere, into art, into astronomy, into politics, into morals. It has for us a character literally SACRED and inspiring. Pythagqras, although he did not create it, revived it forcefully at a time when Greek ethnic individuality was menaced, a time from which dates also the revival of favor for the great national Homeric poetry. In short, we find it here, this spirit of Proportion, in such clearness that it has enabled me to estab- lish, despite the grave nonsense with which German and Philistine philology has so long stupe- fied the world, the existence of a unique Homer, which I shall demonstrate. Epic and Tragedy CHAPTER VIII I HOMER: THE ILIAD AND ODYSSEY Better proof of Homer's existence could hardly be desired than the perfect and mathematical symmetry between the two works which he has left, and the strict internal symmetry of each of them, indication of as tyrannical a plan as ever a poet imposed upon himself, and with which no two authors were ever known to bind each other. This being demonstrated, it appears to me idle to go on refuting the many attempted refutations of the existence of Homer, refuta- tions which contradict one another to an extent truly comical. Wolf, father of the Zollian school, held that the supposed primitive poems never existed; that the works were constituted slowly by the patching together of many pieces of different origins and different epochs. His intellectual descendants, Hermann, Fauriel, Kayser, etc., held that original poems did exist, but in slight and meager form, and that they were little by little lengthened by additions. Guigniaut, in turn, attempted to show that they were simply achieved by the Homerides, after a plan bequeathed them by their ancestor! 120 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS Croiset, on the contrary, held that the principal parts of the poems were the author's, but that the plan was of a more recent epoch, as well as the additions and connecting parts necessary to this thesis. Koechly and Kirchoff share this opinion. But all three differ as to which are the original parts and which the additions. All these hypotheses rest, of course, upon other hypotheses: imbecility of Greek critics, barbarism of the period after the taking of Troy, non-exis- tence of the latter (which however has since been discovered), etc. The ILIAD and the ODYSSEY contain each 24 books. The author has divided each into two parts inversely symmetrical; we call them the LESSER ILIAD (which goes from an indecisive situation under the walls of the city to the shore upon which the Greeks find themselves thrown back), and the GREATER ILIAD (which goes from this extreme point of their weakness to the final fall of Troy); the GREATER ODYSSEY (in which Ulysses wanders, far from Ithaca) and the LESSER ODYSSEY (in which he returns). Each of these halves comprises exactly 12 books. If this clear distribution of the epic material be the work of grammarians, then we must regret that we can discover nothing as ingenious in the anti-Homeric writings of ours. EPIC AND TRAGEDY 121 Each half -poem may now be divided into equal groups: ILIAD LESSER ILIAD (Books I-XII). The first of the two groups (I-VI) confines itself, very logi- cally, to the EPHEMERAL ADVANTAGES OF THE GREEKS. The second (VII-XII) to THEIR INFER- IORITY MORE AND MORE DISASTROUS; in the second shines Hector (who appeared only episodically in the first, which ends with the famous farewell to Andromache); since in his strength lies the weakness of the Achaians, it follows, in effect, that by his presence is personified the distress to which the anger of Achilles has abandoned them. And here Hector watches and fights without rest on the field of combat. GREATER ILIAD (Books XIII-XXIV). This, in the first part, consists of the DESPERATE STRIFE ON THE SHORE. Near the beginning of the second part, on the contrary, Achilles solemnly renounces his rancor, the cause of the three periods just ended, and this last quarter of the poem con- sequently narrates only HIS EXPLOITS (XIX- XXIV) which are thus pendant to those of the Trojan heroes. Likewise are Books XIII-XVIII (DESPERATE STRIFE) pendant to I-VI (EPHEMERAL ADVANTAGES). Thus the four parts of this tragic symphony, far from exhibiting the confusion which nineteenth-century criticism has stupidly 122 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS ascribed to them, are framed with faultless symmetry. Let us range the six books of each part in four parallel columns, according to the manner in which they thus correspond: LESSER ILIAD GREATER ILIAD I VII XIII XIX II VIII XIV XX III IX XV XXI IV X XVI XXII V XI XVII XXIII VI XII XVIII XXIV The first books of these columns (I, VII, XIII, XIX), recounting CONFLICTS IN WHICH FOUR HEROES, ALMOST EQUAL, ARE MATCHED TWO BY TWO, are filled with alarming discords, whose wailing reminds us of those which open the "Funeral March" of the musical Homer. Book I : The impiety of Agamemnon ; the pestilence. Then the injustice of the king of kings; the discord between the chiefs, and the departure of Achilles. Book VII : The two next most redoubtable adversaries engage in combat, Hector and Ajax; which will triumph? Night puts an end to the unsolved question. Sepulture of the dead, whose funeral pyres illumine the darkness. The terrible presages of the Gods EPIC AND TRAGEDY 123 Book XIII: Ajax and Hector dispute anew; they passionately insult one another. This time the struggle takes place among the ships. Ido- meneus strikes in vain. Book XIX: Achilles returns and renounces his resentment; Agamemnon relinquishes Briseis; all the rude caprices of the first book are at an end. Achilles weeps bitterly over Patroclus. Shall we now take the second book of each of these half dozens? They will tell us, four times, of the solemn INTERVENTION OF THE GODS in the conflict: a thrilling pause follows the short foot- falls of the opening, that their menace may be the better apprehended. Here (Book II) is the deceptive dream sent by Zeus, which is followed by preparations and by the assembling of the troops. The Goddesses, in Book VIII, are with difficulty kept within bounds by their master and king; the prayers of Hera have obtained a momentary success for the Greeks, but the Goddesses attempted disobedience quickly brings about their repulse. In Book XIV Hera naturally takes her revenge: she has lulled Zeus to sleep, and the anti-Zeus, Poseidon, springs to the aid of the Greeks. In Book XX all the Gods descend to the combat! The third books of these four groups show invariably the ACTION BROUGHT ON IN A NEW 124 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS WAY, BUT ALWAYS IN VAIN. The duel of Meme- laus and Paris, which might settle the quarrel of the two peoples, does not take place, Paris being miraculously carried away (Book III). The embassy to Achilles, another attempt at the decisive, also fails (IX). The Greeks, favored by the slumber of Zeus, lose all their advantages on his awakening; they are even driven back to their ships; already that of Protesilaus takes fire (XV). Achilles in person meets a conqueror in the river-god Xanthus; he, however, is stopped by the Gods, who find, in their turn, among their own race, adversaries impossible to overthrow (XXI). All solutions here appear impossible. The fourth book of each series (IV, X, XVI, XXII) is that of GREAT CATASTROPHES: breaking off of the truce; Pandaros treacherously wound- ing Menelaus (IV); the deaths of Dolon and especially of Rhesus assassinated in his tent, repay one treachery with another (X). And if to underline once more these antitheses Patroclus is killed in Book XVI, Hector, succumb- ing in the corresponding book (XXII) pays, accord- ing to the same law of composition, for his death. The fifth books, on the contrary, are devoted to the glory of the heroes: the EXPLOITS OF DlO- MEDES give title to Book V, as the EXPLOITS OF AGAMEMNON to Book XI and those of MENELAUS EPIC AND TRAGEDY 125 to XVII. What plainer signs of symmetry could be desired? If Book XXIII is that of the FUN- ERAL GAMES IN HONOR OF PATROCLUS, does not this mighty apotheosis offer an even more striking MISE EN SCENE than his exploits? Finally, the sixth book of each series terminates the threnody, at first mournful, then religious, then violent and sterile as the billows, then lamenting an illustrious warrior, then singing the praise of another, with a final sigh of elegies and tears. Ready to rejoin the fatal Paris, Hector clasps his Andromache at the Scaean gate (Book VI); exhausted, the Greeks yield their wall condemned by the Gods (XII); Thetis, in tears, has the arms forged in which her son will perish (XVIII). Priam brings back the body of his son amid the wailing of the Trojans (XXIV) . ODYSSEY Such long connected threads, such broad sur- faces could not be carried from a work of war through a pleasanter and more varied narrative. The means of changing and varying which occurred to the author were found in a different division of the same number of books; the framework remaining identical (24 = 2X12), he changed the internal distribution. The division of each half of the poem was in this case ternary. It thus furnished the poetic creator a SINGLE creator, 126 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS as I think we begin to see an aspect exactly COMPLEMENTARY to the first, which, as we have just seen, rested on a binary division. Homer here gained, at a stroke, smaller surfaces (groups of four books instead of six) to be more delicately sculptured, and at the same time an ENSEMBLE less bare and simple. GREAT ODYSSEY LESSER ODYSSEY I V IX XIII XVII XXI II VI X XIV XVIII XXII III VII XI XV XIX XXIII IV VIII XII XVI XX XXIV GREATER ODYSSEY (Books I-XII) : The first of the three groups (I-IV) shows ITHACA WITHOUT ULYSSES; the second (V-VIII) ULYSSES, UNKNOWN, AMONG THE PHEACIANS; the third (IX-XII) the NARRATIVES OF ULYSSES (HIS DISTANT ADVEN- TURES). LESSER ODYSSEY (Books XIII-XXIV) : Here first is ULYSSES IN ITHACA (XIII-XVI); then ULYSSES, UNKNOWN, IN HIS OWN PALACE (XVII- XX); lastly, the EXPLOITS BY WHICH HE RECON- QUERS HIS THRONE (XXI-XXIV). These two triads are perfectly balanced. ITHACA WITHOUT ULYSSES and ULYSSES IN ITHACA; ULYSSES, UNKNOWN, IN THE STRANGERS' PALACE and ULYSSES, UNKNOWN, IN HIS OWN PALACE; DISTANT ADVENTURES and ADVENTURES EPIC AND TRAGEDY 127 IN HIS OWN COUNTRY, like the two dyads of the Iliad: EPHEMERAL ADVANTAGES OF THE GREEKS and their DESPERATE STRUGGLE ON THE SHORE; VICTORIES OF HECTOR and TRIUMPH OF ACHILLES. Here, then, is the same esthetic, based on Number, which Pythagoras is later to define as "Analogy." Here, likewise, the first books of the groups present analogous situations: A HERO IN GREAT WEAKNESS WHO NEVERTHELESS ACQUITS HIMSELF WITH COURAGE: Telemachus alone among the suitors (I) ; Ulysses clinging to a wreck in the tempest (V); again when he and his escape from Polyphemus (IX); again, alone, when he awakes abandoned in Ithaca and does not recognize it (XIII); when he enters, a scorned beggar, his pillaged palace (XVII); when this beggar puts his hand to the great bow which the suitors can- not bend (XXI). And the second book of each series offers, in recompense, A MAN SUFFERING REVERSES, BUT AIDED BY A KIND INTERVENTION. After the gather- ing of the suitors, the assembling of the people; and, if they refuse Telemachus the vessel he ask , the w.ise Mentor promises him one (II). To Ulysses, destitute and naked, Nausicaa gives garments (VI). Against Circe, Hermes forearms him (X). In his distress he meets with the fidelity of the humble Eumaeus (XIV). Penelope, 128 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS by her attitude, consoles him for the insults and attack of the beggar Iros, without knowing him (XVIII). Before the suitors, Athene, first in the form of a darting swallow, then with her shield, encourages and protects him (XXII). If the first and second books of each series balance one another, the third and fourth are not less symmetrical: the latter accentuates, at every stroke, the idea of the former. Here is Telemachus at Pylos (III), then at Sparta (IV). Here is Ulysses entering the palace of the Pheacians (VII), then feted by them (VIII). Here are the Dead evoked (XI), and the Monsters appear (XII). Here is the return of Telemachus (XV), then the discovery of his father, object of his search, in Ithaca (XVI). Here is the project of testing the suitors by means of the bow (XIX), then the prudent organizing of the massacre (XX). Here, finally, is Ulysses master of his home (XXIII) and of his kindgom (XXIV). A like method observed in the two works shows that they come from the same hand, if it were not sufficiently proved by both being apologies for vengeance, and by both tending to point the same moral; the one negatively, by blaming the INEVITABLE DISCORD OF PLURALI- TIES; the other positively, exalting THE CONSTANCY AND THE VICTORY OF THE INDIVIDUAL TYPE; the one chanting an emotion, the other a man! EPIC AND TRAGEDY 129 In each of these poems the truly extraordinary symmetry between the parts which compose it demonstrates that the hypotheses of interpola- tions and of lacunae of any importance must be rejected. I defy any one to cite a single work, as strictly planned and calculated in all details as are these, which COULD have been executed by several artists of different epochs, or even by two collaborators, however closely united. Whence, then, can have sprung the strange and profoundly anti-artistic conception of a plurality of authors for these compositions marked by so leonine a hand? The answer is simple: from the admirable independence which each member of these masterpieces retains. Far from losing its own individuality in the mass of narrative, a single canto a 24th part of a poem, a 48th part of the double work can be considered separately and alone, and can satisfy. A single Homer conceived his epic in this wise, and so executed it. And herein lies the secret of its eternal youth. II --LAW OF GENERATION BY WHICH TRAGEDY SPRINGS FROM EPIC The second of these poems contains, in advance, the technique of Tragedy. Take away the third part of the ODYSSEY (IX-XII: the Narratives of Ulysses) and we 130 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS have before us the five visible portions of tragedy, which engendered our traditional five acts, a division which we find even among the Chinese. As for the Narratives of Ulysses, they form the invisible side, which is in all tragedy invisible for the very simple reason that it serves as a base ; the base upon which a cube rests is not apparent to the eye. It is to this part, formed of events anterior to the beginning of the action, that the exposition of every first act makes allusion. From it emanates the mystery which permeates the work. From it springs the agnition in which, finally, it becomes visible at the moment of the catastrophe. Thus, in the four dramas which in succession form the ILIAD, the second canto of each is the mystery and the explanation, which must be veiled and diffused in a scenic adaptation. All well-constructed epics rest upon multiples of 6: the ILIAD has 24 cantos, the ODYSSEY 24, TELEMAQUB 24, LES MARTYRS 24, the ^ENEID 12, the THEBAID 12, PARADISE LOST 12, REYNARD THE Fox 12, ARAUCANA 36, LE LUTRIN 6. Of what weight, in view of this, is the HENRIADE? Neither the LUSIAD (10 cantos) nor DER MESSIAS (20 cantos) have the qualities of the works just cited. If the PHARSALIA has but 10 cantos and the ARGONAUTICA but 8, it is because these two poems are incomplete. I find no valid exception EPIC AND TRAGEDY 131 but JERUSALEM DELIVERED (20 cantos), and we can hardly refrain from criticizing its narrowness of horizon, when we consider the oceanic immen- sity of the Crusades.* The Bible contains 72 books. And all the Idyls come back to 12 invariable themes. Ill THE THREE SYSTEMS OF POETRY There are three great systems of poetry: Parallelism, Quantitative poetry of long and short syllables, Our poetry of accent. These may be subdivided: the metrical poetry of the ancients, the tonic poetry of the Germans, Spanish assonance, rhyme, etc. They may be combined: thus liturgic poetry has synthesized all the systems. Parallelism (Chinese, Semitic) remains close to logic and rhetoric. Thence comes its privilege of "translatability" into all idioms. Parallelism is to poetry, in a manner, what ideography is to writing. It opposes whether by SYMMETRICAL comparison, by ANTITHESIS or by a more vague and subtile analogy which is called SYNTHETIC two propositions. *I have not cited the Asiatic poems, nor those of our Middle Ages, which are not cut up into detached cantos. 132 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Examples : 1st, of SYMMETRIC parallelism : "The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents : The kings of Sheba and of Seba shall offer gifts." (Psalm LXXII) 2nd, of ANTITHETIC parallelism: "Faithful are the wounds of a friend: Deceitful are the kisses of an enemy." (Prov. XXVII) 3rd, of SYNTHETIC parallelism: "The law of the Lord is perfect, Converting the soul : The testimony of the Lord is sure, Making wise the simple: The statutes of the Lord are right, Rejoicing the heart." (Psalm XIX) Now grammar teaches us that a proposition is reduced, in the last analysis, to three elements: subject, verb and predicate. This then makes, in a Parallel, 6 elements (2 subjects, 2 verbs, 2 predicates) arranged face to face in two trinities. The verb, central element of each trinity, expresses the idea of RAPPORT, like the hori- zontal bar in each of the two terms of an algebraic equation : EPIC AND TRAGEDY 133 1st term: 2nd term: For his anger A C His kindness endures = endures for the twinkling B D for a lifetime, of an eye : Parallelism, we hasten to add, has like its survival among us, our proverbs recourse to assonance or rhyme in order to accentuate still further the connecting of two ideas hitherto separated or insufficiently compared. What is assonance and what is rhyme, upon which our versifications are based? "Quel negre fou Nous a forge ce bijou d'un sou" . . . ? (Verlaine: ART POETIQUE.) They are cousins and kindred of the pun. And what is the pun but a play on words? It is a language laughing at its own infirmities. We can imagine an ideal language in which, on the contrary, the words resemble each other exactly in the proportion in which the ideas they express resemble each other. May such a mar- vellous language have once existed, in accordance with the ideal of a primitive human superiority, and must ambiguity, double-meaning and puns be traced to Babel? According to this amusing hypothesis, assonance, alliteration and rhyme 134 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS would historically precede, instead of following parallelism in reactionary fashion, and a Verhaeren, bringing us back to the latter, would be closing a vast cycle. In any case, whether we make use of the QUATRAIN of short lines constructed on two rhymes, complementary, since, in the classics, one is masculine and the other feminine, "Un vieux chne etait la: sa tige "Eut orn6 le seuil d'un palais. "'Le cur de Meudon?' lui dis-je; "L'arbre me dit: 'C'est Rabelais.' " (Hugo: CHANSON DBS RUES ET DES BOIS.) or whether, from reminiscence of the ancients, but in verse more labored and artificial than theirs, we concentrate on the DISTICH of four hemistichs, "Le crepuscule vint et je tournai la tete, "Mon ivresse 6tait morte avec la tache faite." (H. de Regnier: JEUX RUSTIQUES ET DIVINS.) we come back, after all, like the parallelists, to symmetric dualities. Our versifiers have long noted in each of these dualities an average of 6 points of sonority, or tonic accents, distributed in two groups of 3, EPIC AND TRAGEDY 135 between the two halves of the verse. Four of these accents, in the following example, are stronger, because they coincide with the final syllables, while the two others proceed simply from the individual rhythm of the verse; from the sense of the phrase. 12 3 456 Oui, je viens dans son temple adorer 1'Eternel ; 123 4 56 Je viens selon 1'usage antique et solennel, etc. Now, if these dualities the distich and the quatrain are the rudiment of our stanzas, the parallelist also outlines his in a quatrain. So, either in parallelism or in our own versification, we invariably arrive at the following scheme: (A / B=C / D) = (E / F=G / H) Sub., verb, pred. Sub., verb, pred. Sub., verb, pred. Sub., verb, pred. of the of the of the of the 1st proposition 2nd proposition 1st proposition 2nd proposition of the of the 1st parallel 2nd parallel 1st 2nd 3rd 1st 2nd 3rd 1st 2nd 3rd 1st 2nd 3rd points of accent points of accent points of accent points of accent of 1st hemistich of 2nd hemistich of 1st hemistich of 2nd hemistich in the in the 1st distich 2nd distich or or 1st line 2nd line 3rd line 4th line of quatrain. of quatrain. "But," it may be objected, "y ur groups of 3 accents represent, in reality, each 3 pairs and not 3 unities. In each one, beside the point of accent on which you fix our attention, beside the THESIS of the Greeks, there is the weaker part, or ARSIS. This, with us, is next the long syllables 136 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS in the spondee, or the BREVES in the dactyl and the anapest. In German verse, beside the tonic syllables are other syllables. Again, in some French poetry, beside the syllables most accented, and others of equal strength, are the syllables sacrificed by our method of scanning. And, in uneven rhythms, in which best survives among us the Aryan prosody, is it not the pause in expectation of one of these syllables (this time not merely diminished but suppressed) which gives that unforeseen effect, musical and pathetic, that sense of being "in the air" so beloved by our Verlaine? In reality we arrive, as the ancients did before us, at a total of a dozen demi-metres, alternative aspirations and respirations, by turns strong and weak." Yes. And so it is analogically that each of the Homeric poems is divided into twelve double- cantos, the ^NEID into twelve cantos, our own poetry into twelve fixed forms: six with refrain (RONDEAUX, simple and double, CLOSE, BALLADE, CHANT ROYAL and TRIOLET) and six with com- binations of rhymes (LAI, VIRELAI, SONNET, PANTOUM, VILLANELLE and SEXTINE), as the year is divided into twelve months! since it is, in short, twelve lines or ARETES which bound the Cube formed, as I have shown, by the six faces from which our energy moves across the three dimensions of space. The Twelve Gods of All Nations CHAPTER IX I A NEW EXPLANATION OF THE ORIGIN OF GODS These twelve ARfiTES have a significant aspect worthy the attention of the analogist (I dare not say of the philosopher, since this term today passes as the exclusive property of solemn persons who will shrug their shoulders on hearing me invoke Him who nevertheless invented their fine name of "philosophers"). In the eyes of the poet, then, the greatest votary of analogy, although by pure instinct, in the eyes of the dreamer, does not each of these ARfiTES mark the limit of the violent expansion of one of the six efforts of which we are capable? Now this limit is imposed precisely by the expansion of one of the four adjoining efforts, to the first obstacle which causes it to deviate and brings it back obliquely to us. In reciprocally cutting each other off they form an ARfiTE; they become to one another the "thou shalt not," the impre- scriptable law. There were, in the supreme Greco-Latin Olym- pus, but 12 great gods: Vesta, Juno, Neptune, Minerva, Venus, Apollo, Mercury, Jupiter, Ceres, 138 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Vulcan, Mars and Diana, to enumerate them in the order consecrated by their worship. And it was not only thus in the classic pantheon, but in India, where the 12 great gods bear the corre- sponding names of Maia, Indrani, Vishnu, Sara- couati, Lakchmi, Indra, Boudha, Brahma, Gon- dopi, Ganeja, Siva and Bhavani, and preside respectively OVER THE SAME MONTHS OF THE YEAR; in Egypt, where they bear the names of Athor, Neith, Remfo, Bouto, Surot, Pi-re, Piromi, Pi-Zeous, T'Armouth, Fre, Ertosi, and Poubasti; in the Scandinavian Valhalla, where the Aesir are called Vora, Frigga, Niorder, Snorra, Freya, Balder, Loke, Thor, Freir, Heimdall, Oulloir and Gefiona; among the Japanese, who count 12 gods and demi-gods; among the ancient Persians, who divided the sombre and the bright months between the six Amschasfands and the six Devs, opposed face to face; in far-away Peru, in ancient Etruria, even in Tahiti, where today they still invoke Papiri, Ovnounou, Paroromoua, Paromori, Mouria, Heacha, Taoa, Hourororera, Houriama Teaire, Tetai, Ouehao, Ouea; and in the various Polynesian isles, in a word, among all poly- theistic peoples. Why? Must we here see, with Dupuis, who enumer- ates the 12 Etruscan cantons, the 12 strategi, the 12 lictors, the 12 Arval Brethren, the 12 altars of THE TWELVE GODS OF ALL NATIONS 139 Janus, the 12 columns of the temple of Heliopolis, the 12 palaces of the Labyrinth, the 12 gates of the Dodocapylon, those of the New Jerusalem in the APOCALYPSE, the 12 angels who guard them, the 12 foundations of the wall, according to St. John (Ap. XXI); the 12 branches of the candlestick, the 12 stones in the breastplate of the Jewish high priest (and, we might add, in the MIEN or head-dress of the Emperors of China); the 12 fountains of the desert, the 12 sacred cushions, the 12 stars of the dream of Joseph, the 12 TCHEOU or provinces of the Chinese Empire, etc., must we herein see, as he did, an eternal and monotonous commemoration of the signs of the zodiac? Ingenuous fancy of an astronomer! Humanity does not pass through life with its eyes glued to the nocturnal firmament, counting and annotating the constellations. And, when such an allegory has been mingled with the "signs" consecrated to these constellations, the Divine Figures have remained deprived of per- sonality, whereas, in the imagination of races, nothing i$ more vivid than these Twelve Gods who everywhere loom sublime, smiling and awesome. Astarte, the Hindu Lakchmi, Venus of our Latin Occident, Aphrodite, Slavic Lada, Persian Enyo, Mexican Ichcouina, Celtic Roth, Finnish Sakamieli, Salammbo of Babylon, Scandinavian Siona, Saxon Magada, again Freia, Arabian 140 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Alzoarah, is it not, everywhere, the same ideal allurement which burns in our own hearts, and to which, even today, we make ceaseless allusion? Does not the sword of war everywhere sparkle in the hand of him whose name only changes: Mongol Daitching, Gaulish Hesus, Russian Lede, Ares, Mars, Saxon Pepenouth, Quirinus, Poly- nesian Rimarou, Ertosi the protector of Sesostris, Assyrian Nergal, Phoenician Baal-Thurz, Ares- kovi of the Hurons, Vitzlibochtli of Mexico, Hindu Skanda, Alemane of the Rhine, three- headed Japanese Nequirou-Denichi-Maristin? Do not the thunders sound, in all climes, from the judicial throne of the same majestic Jupiter, Zeus, Indra, Celtic Taran, Arab Moch- tara, Lamppic Oragalls, Esthonian Perkoun, Bur- man, Sigeann, Egyptian Pi-Zeous, Slavonic Peroun, Wotan, Ethiopian Assabine, Cartha- ginian Baal-Samen? And do we not find everywhere creeping in, artful and identical, Mercury, Hermes, Nebo, Piromi from the Nile, Quetzalcoatl from Mexico, Ogma of the Gauls, Eghouere the Parsee Dev, Etruscan Xudan, Germanic Jedod? From all lands resounds the hammer of the Irish Danan, who is Vulcan, who is Hephaestos, who is Sidek, who is Mimir, who is Ilmarenen in Finland, Luno in Norway, who is Siorlamh, who is Diamich, THE TWELVE GODS OF ALL NATIONS 141 who is Vicouakarma. Just as everywhere flour, ishes Ceres, Rhea-Demeter, Fauna, Gondopi- Kouong-in pou-tsa in China, T'Armouth in Egypt, Schaka, Ops, full-breasted Copia, Dame Nature of our modern sentimentalists! In the heavens, Grann the Alsatian Apollo, Braga the Scandinavian, Abelios the Cretan, the lyric Phoibos, Mahanna of the Tahitians succeed, the same under a myriad names, to the identical Diana, Artemis, Pooh, pale beneath her black locks, or Selene, weaving her threads of silver over the nocturnal sea, the sea, from whose sinister depths rises the rebellious and greedy Poseidon, Ahriman, Satan, Jemma, Despot of the Japanese hells, Tuiston, the Gallo-German Pluto, Gouleho of the Friendly Islands, Houe-Koub of the Araucanians, Toia scorching his terrified adorers in Florida, the Hindu Kansa, Czernobog the dark god of the Varegues, Kronos, Scariafing of Formosa, the destroyer Akerouniamen of the ancient Umbrians, Gwaiotta of the Gouanches in Teneriffe, the Siamese Tevetat, envious rival of his brother the Buddha; Agnian, seated upon Brazilian tombs, Derevech of the Parsees, Maboia and Bouii in whom Caribs and Toungouses like- wise have recognized the Devil; Sova in Guinea, Larthisca of the Moluccas, the vermiform Angat of Madagascar, Koupai the Peruvian, Atre the Angle-Saxon, Asuman, Nikken of the Danish 142 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS isles, Usous in struggles with the hardy Phoeni- cian vessels, Perdoit of the Prussian coast, Magus- can of the Carthaginians, Tsoui-Kouan foaming against Chinese prows, lebicon who defies the Japanese, Orre-orre before whom the Tahitian trembles in his log canoe, Mitg of Kamschatka, Teuaratai who separates the Polynesian isles. And at the hearth presides the pious Vesta, Anouke, Dehemeh, Metis, Voltumna standing amid the Etruscan councils, Conso in the Roman senate, Egeria the eternal guardian fairy, to whom stands in eternal antithesis the jealous Hera, Juno, Nemesis, the solar Malina of Green- land. We have considered above these Twelve Figures concentrated in six or seven types. One very striking point in these half-dozen visages is their PLETHORIC character. None of us can have failed to remark that there is a superabundance, an excess of expression in the gods as the Renaissance has painted them. In this respect the Jupiter of Rubens, of Cornelius Agrippa or of Marlowe goes far beyond that of Phidias or of Homer; he has too much of flesh and blood, of muscle, of self-consciousness. The same may be said of the too sturdy Venus of the moderns, who has come to be confused with the orgiac Demeter. Mars becomes Herculean, and the others fare THE TWELVE GODS OF ALL NATIONS 143 likewise. Each of them, in fact, has within him the equivalent of a second god. And each of them, as we have observed, shows but the wild and unrestrained flight of our energy in one of the six directions which space opens to it. When our Twelve Figures definitely outlined themselves; when, driven by the spirit of analogy so powerful of old, they were imposed upon all things, successively established over all, over the provinces of the fatherland and over the countries of the earth; over the social classes and the successive generations of the past; over the virtues and the laws; over public powers and the organs of our bodies ; over our natural actions and our ceremonies ; over familiar and sacred objects, what more natural than that those men who sought also in the heavens for these types should likewise perceive them at the twelve almost equidistant points which divide the year? They placed the phlegmatics, such as Vesta, the vindictive Juno and the greedy Neptune in the months of winter; the youthful and smiling Venus, Minerva and Apollo in the months of spring; Mercury, Jupiter and Ceres in the summer affected by the sanguines, and, for their grim sincerity, Vulcan, Mars and Diana in the sombre autumn. Here, then, in my opinion, is all we need retain of the theory of Dupuis. 144 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS To this astronomical localization, nevertheless, I find it legitimate to subordinate certain of the dozens grouped by him as examples, but cer- tain ones only, and on condition, I repeat, that the astronomic localization be itself subordinated to the conception of a psychology infinitely more human and more profound. The origin of this conception is not exterior to man; it proceeds from our mental constitution itself, and is but ITS IMPRESSION IN BELIEF. In a word, there never have been, in religion, more than twelve great Gods clearly defined, for the very simple reason that no more could be created. For the rest, we may remark: If, in face of the astronomic system of Dupuis, other mytholo- gists have been easily able to range the ETYMO- LOGICAL system, in which every myth results from an EQUIVOQUE, a homonymy, a metaphor interpreted literally, an imperfection in the lan- guage, or finally from a sort of pun or play on words, if they have been able to win over to that theory the majority of old partisans of the former, they have nevertheless not destroyed it. For it still remains for them to explain in a satisfactory manner the numerical coincidences so surprising and so numerous.. . . More- over, their new thesis, a trifle ignoble, it must THE TWELVE GODS OF ALL NATIONS 146 be admitted, was quite as quickly found weari- some and unsatisfying, and we have seen, in default of better solutions, many weak and at the same time curious minds led astray in the morass of occultism, while intellects more robust^ but repelled by the etymological doctrine, con- tent themselves regretfully with the vague so- called PSYCHOLOGICAL doctrine. This affirms that myths are a natural creation of the human mind, and that the human mind ought naturally to create them, but without attempting to demon- strate either how or why! To those awakened minds which have never been satisfied with the somewhat feminine "because . . ."of this theory, the present analysis has furnished already an explanation of the analogies, twelve by twelve, so patiently ranged by Dupuis, and has not feared to further enrich them. It can furnish, in addition, the explanation of the etymological resemblances: they are not less interesting, although less numer- ous, it must be admitted, and especially less striking. It is not impossible to reduce the morphology of languages to a limited number of generative laws. These laws bear especially upon the essential and primitive words, notably on those which are connected with the fundamental idea of BEING: we know the unique importance of this verb among all others, in all languages. 146 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Now the idea of Being PAR EXCELLENCE is easily identified with that of "Supreme" or "Divine" Beings. We have just seen that, according to the ety- mological system, the mythic particularities which were attached to these various divine types resulted precisely in homonymies or involuntary "puns," in a lexical CONFUSION. Believers will be pleased to remark that this does not contradict the sacred legend. Without doubt, the ety- mologic system will readily date this confusion from the very origin of the human being. But it must be recognized that scientifically it is not permissible to go back to so remote an epoch. And we may recall that legend ascribes to the same historic moment the beginning of polythe- isms and the difference of languages, which would thus have determined, and not followed, the dispersion of men, thenceforward incapable of understanding one another. I am here advancing, I need hardly say, only a hypothesis, barely sketched, but amusing. May I be permitted another remark? To accept the etymological system, according to which mythol- ogy is but a foolish "malady of language," is to accept the implicit conclusion that since the earliest ages (since the beginning, say the believers ; in any case, for a longer time than any other THE TWELVE GODS OF ALL NATIONS 147 race) the one Chosen People has, despite the idioms so diverse and so pagan which it has successively adopted, maintained itself unscathed by this linguistic malady, and consequently by the mental malady which it engenders. Since this people created, or, according to its own humble avowal, providentially received and simply conserved this triumphal idea of the Unity of Being, how reconcile the assertions of the modern critic? Is language, then, not the cause nor mythology the effect? Or is this con- ception of the One Being more ancient among this people than is admitted? And is this primi- tive language of the Hebrews superior to others, since it alone remained free from the great "malady" which contaminated them all until the idea of Being was forced into a delirious flowering? Of this flowering, nevertheless so supremely beautiful, let us study the morphology in the light of our idea, which finally puts into accord the three mythologic systems. II HEROES, EPONYMS, TRIBES, FEDERA- TIONS, PATRIARCHS, PEERS, DISCIPLES, APOSTLES, PARTS OF THE MASS, ARTICLES OF THE CREED, STONES, TOTEMS, IDOLA- TRIES, HERESIES, SYSTEMS, SCHISMS AND NATIONALITIES. 148 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Man, as observed at the beginning of this book, is above all else DOUBLE. And this is very natural, if we reflect that he is the product of two beings. He is, then, above all, a contradiction, a dialogue, a duel. His pretended individuality, the absolute Self of the philosophers, remains as chimerical, as inconsistent as the mathematical point ; it has no more real existence than the point; it appears simply when two lines, two hereditary impulses, coincide. These lines at least present a conti- nuity, a durable will. Now, in pursuing the same geometric comparison, is not a line found at the meeting of two surfaces, is it not an ARETE? Thus symbolically the human figure presents itself before us. ... The twelve Divine Figures reveal themselves as the very incarnations of the TWELVE CON- TRADICTIONS produced bwtween the six directions of energy. Thus they correspond to man: the twelve human-types, the twelve eternal ancestors. He may meet them, recognize them, evoke them on all his paths. Not in the heavens alone, but in the past he finds them, at first in the legendary period of eponyms, then in authentic history, whose heroes, simplified in memory, he has obsti- nately identified with one of these twelve types. Here, then, is the explanation of the fourth and last mythologic system, EUHEMERISM. THE TWELVE GODS OF ALL NATIONS 149 Yes, the heroes of humanity pass, after death, to the state of divinities. But the divine roles which are attributed to them were ready in advance; the roles existed before the actors, for these were not the authors; they did naught but enter and shape themselves, as they could well do, to a mould already constructed. The type of Jupiter existed before the most ancient of mortal Jupiters, and from each of them has been accepted only what was appropriate to the type, only what in each was Jupiterian. Thus may be explained the multiplicity of heroes blended in a single legend, with neverthe- less an admirable unity of poetic tone (Hercules, Buddha, etc.). Do we not, moreover, assist in this work? are not words and sayings thus transferred from one celebrated man to another? We may verify this by Voltaire, for example, who inherited, for the most part, from English authors his biting sallies of wit, to which have been added others, imagined since his death. Napoleon, despite his square jaw and his ple- beianism, must needs be a Caesar of triangular and aquiline visage; Caesar in turn an Alexander, Alexander a Sesostris, a Rama. A gocl, an individual-type, is then an ARETE, a dialogue, one of those primitive combinations such as we encounter at our first step in descending to 150 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS the interior of the human soul. And this prob- ably explains why, of the 12 inevitable gods, there are so often 6 masculine and 6 feminine, as if through need to express, by means of the one, the victory of the paternal (or vital) prin- ciple, and by means of the other, that of mater- nal principle in our individual-type. By the milogynism of the pre-Manichaean pessimists, duality was expressed by GOOD and BAD demons, amschasfands and devs of Iranian origin, rather than by sexual antitheses. The Japanese SUPERPOSED six gods and six demigods. In the pure intellectuality of the Judaic-Christian religion, sex is effaced, and between the twelve personages there is no more than the tie of broth- erhood, natural or spiritual: the twelve tribes of Israel descend from twelve patriarchs, sons of Jacob, and the Christ expressly says to his apostles: "Ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel." (Matt. XIX, 28).* So we should not be surprised to find this obsess- ing number 12 at the base of most social groupings ; it is a natural result, psychological and inevitable, *The idea of the COUPLE here subsists, nevertheless: "And he re- called unto him the twelve, and began to send them forth by two and two; and gave them power over unclean spirits." (Mark VI, 7). Together went the brothers Andrew and Peter, the two sons of Zebedee (John and James), Jude and James the less (cousins of Christ), their brother Simon with Judas, the wise Philip and Bartholomew, and lastly Thomas and Matthew. THE TWELVE GODS OP ALL NATIONS 151 and has nothing to do with this or that astro- nomical conception, mystic and artificial. It is not only the 12 Jewish tribes and the 12 Etruscan, the 12 tribes of the Platonic Republic, the 12 confederated towns of Ionia, those of JEolia, those of the Achaian League, or the 12 burghs of Athens which may be cited, but, if we will, in the two most vigorous republican efforts of modern times, the 13 cantons which first formed and for many centuries constituted Switzerland, or the 13 original United States: the number 13 being to the number 12, psychologically, what 7 is to 6, its centralization around a dominating unity. Likewise it is sometimes 12 equal comrades, and sometimes these accompanied by their chief (comparable to Joseph, Jesus, etc.) whom we find in all the orders of chivalry, from the famous Peers of Charlemagne (Roland, Oliver, Turpin, Estoult, Haton, Gerin, Gorier, Samson, Girart, Anseis, Berangier, Hue, according to the generally accepted list) to the order of the DAME DE L'ECU VERT founded by Bouciquat (he and his brother Geoffrey, Charles d'Albret, chief of the order, Gaucourt, Bonnebaut, Torsay, B6tas, Colleville, Chateaumorant, d'Aubissecourt, Castelbayac, Chambrillac, LignieYes) in conformity with the plan given by Philippe de Mezidres for his ideal Chivalry of the Passion, in which, about the 152 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS "Prince," were grouped the Constable, the Chancellor, the Marshal, the Admiral, the Treas- urer, the Procurator, the Provisor, the Advocate, the Moderator, the Justiciar and the two Consuls. Confucius had 12 disciples. If the Jews enumerated 4 Great Prophets (Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah and Daniel), they added to them the 12 Lesser Prophets Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Mal- achi, just as the Christians connect the Acts of the Apostles with the writings of the 4 Evangel- ists. The 4 sacred figures (the Angel, the Lion, the Calf and the Eagle) which accompany these last, accompanied the 4 Great Prophets. They accompany in turn the 4 Fathers of the Greek Church (Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom) and those of the Roman (Jerome, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Ambrose) connected with the 12 great classic Doctors (the same, plus Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Fran- cis de Sales, Alphonse de Liguori, Hilaire, Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard and Peter Damien). We may recall the care with which Jevohah disposes the 12 tribes in 4 groups, according to the 4 cardinal points. "On the east the camp of Judah . . . next unto him the tribe of Issachar then the tribe THE TWELVE GODS OP ALL NATIONS 153 of Zebulon ... on the south the camp of Reuben. . . and by him the tribe of Simeon . then the tribe of Gad ... on the west the camp of Ephraim . . . and by him the tribe of Manasseh . . . then the tribe of Benjamin . . . the camp of Dan on the north . . . and by him the tribe of Asher . . . then the tribe of Naphtali . they shall go hindmost with their standards." (Numbers II, 3-31.) And in fact we see always the tribes defile in the same order. Need we recall here the 12 parts composing the Mass, which celebrates the Passion, itself the resume and center of history? These are: the INTRODUC- TION between the preparation of the faithful and the Confession, the Introit or ENTRANCE OF THE CHOIR with the litany and the "gloria," the EPISTLE flanked by the collect and the psal- modies, the GOSPEL of the day with the homily, the CREDO, the OFFERTORY, the secret prayer and the PREFACE, the canon and the solemn ELEVA- TION, the PATER, the FRACTION and the "agnus," the COMMUNION, lastly the graces, the BENE- DICTION and the gospel of St. John. I have already noted the senary subdivision of the Mass. I have indicated also how each of the 6 days or periods of Genesis is divided into two antithetic creations. And it is interesting to observe that geology reckons, in the history of our globe, 12 upheavals before the appearance of man. 164 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS Now the same poetic tradition which, in the representations of the Apostles, places on the forehead of each one of the 12 precious stones (attributed also to the 12 Patriarchs), and figuring likewise in the Jewish high priest's breast- plate and in the foundations of the columns of the New Jerusalem in the Apocalypse) the same tradition which gives to Andrew the sapphire (of Naphtali), to Peter the jasper (of Gad), to James the chalcedony (the carbuncle of Dan), to James the Less the yellow topaz (of Simeon), to Matthew the green peridot (of Ephraim), to Jude the chrysoprase (of Issachar), to gentle John the emerald (of Judah), to zealous Simon the hya- cinth (or ligure of Asher), to Matthias the purple amethyst (of Zebulon), to Thomas the aquama- rine or beryl (of Benjamin), to Bartholomew the carnelian (of Reuben), and to Philip the orange sardonyx (of Manasseh) wrote also at their feet the 12 articles of the CREED which has trans- formed human thought and has served as its basis for twenty centuries. "I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth," said the prince of the Apostles. "And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord," continued Andrew. "Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary," affirmed James. "Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried," testified John. THE TWELVE GODS OP ALL NATIONS 165 "Descended into hell," recalled Philip. "The third day he rose from the dead," declared the majestic Bartholomew. "He ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty," proclaimed Matthew. "From whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead," prophesied Thomas. "I believe in the Holy Ghost," resumed the pious James the Less, cousin and counterpart of Christ. "The Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints," confessed Jude. "The forgiveness of sins," added Simon. "The resurrection of the body and life everlasting," concluded Matthias. Thus tradition* has it that they announced in unforgettable terms the dogmas of the CREED, before dispersing, three toward each cardinal point, as we have already remarked: westward, John (Ephesus and the Greek world), Peter (Rome), and James (Spain); southward, James the Less (Jerusalem), Simon (Egypt) and Matthew (the vast Ethiopia of the black races); eastward, Jude (Persia), Bartholomew (India) and Thomas (Major India and the Extreme Orient); north- ward, Philip (Cappadocia, Asia Minor), Matthias (Colchis, the Caucasus) and Andrew (Scythia and the barbarian lands of the north). A generation later their work is almost everywhere historically visible, and the world is shaken by it. *Still living in the XV century; see, among other works, "LB TRIOMPHANT MISTERE DES ACTES DES APOSTRES," by Simon Gresban. 166 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Now, since the Apostles Creed in its 12 articles summarizes the Faith, every heresy must consist of an attack upon at least one of these articles, and the heresies may thus be distributed upon the same duodenary plan. Furthermore, the idolatries, according to sacred teaching, were but primitive heresies, indurated. "Twelve gates give access to Heaven, for the people of various reli- gions," said the Brahmins. The bad habits, the attitudes of mind which the idolatries fixed, the mental vices on which they lived, degenerated sometimes into fetichism, or into the animalism whose totems, like the god-types, are everywhere found to be almost the same (wolf, lion, dog, bull, etc.) be it on many altars, the Egyptian among others (whence the Golden Calf perhaps emigrated with the Exodus), be it even, an uncon- scious reminiscence, in the blazon of heraldry or among the gracious allegories of the fabulists, to be one day summed up so well in the dozen types of REYNARD: Noble the lion, Reynard the fox, Bruin the bear, Isegrim the wolf, Tybert the cat, Grimbert the badger, Morhou the dog, Kyward the hare, Baldwin the ass, Chantecler the cock, the Monkey and Beaucent the boar. Not only may we thus lay out a world-map of the heresies, idolatries and aberrations of the Faith, but has not the great Varro, according to St. Augustine in THE CITY OF GOD, classed the THE TWELVE GODS OF ALL NATIONS 157 philosophies (those indispensable crowns of the antique idolatries as of the modern heresies), in observing their most characteristic effort, the conception of the Sovereign Good, in 12 principal ideas, from which come, as he demonstrated, the 288 possible systems, and to which yet turn, it must be admitted, all our actual theories. The Intoxication of Life, Contemplative Repose, or the two reconciled in Epicurean voluptuous- ness, or all three finally augmented by the Primordial Blessings of Nature (health of body and mind) are alternately the objects of inquiry, either direct or by means of virtue, or simply for the sake of the research itself. To one contemplating history from a detached point of view, the nationalities are revealed as simple links of that more general and durable chain, a religion. This is clearly visible in Greece. It is not less visible throughout Europe. And Schism appears as the first effort, the first fissure of that separatism provoked by the weight of despotism, by the tyrannic ambition of a new power. Its ideal, if it preserves one, in religion, must be totally different, and tends consequently toward one of the types which we have enumerated : every nationalism (Judaism, Anglicanism, Galli- canism), ends in a rudiment of idolatry, in some sort of distortion of the great complete which is to say divine human Type. And it is 158 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS interesting to grasp here the incompatibility of Church and Tyranny or, according to our phrase, Church and State. It is, moreover, much less the heresy or schism which captures the interest of the really profound historian than the manifestation of the dogma which they prepare, which they necessitate: the FILIOQUB provoked by the quibbles of the Byzantine schism, this is the "fiat lux" of the Occident; the Council of Trent, this is the Catholic Shakespeare. Ill GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY But, whether already separated or not, each State remains none the less a member of a group of a dozen equals. In connection with the Church (our "Vesta"), can we not observe that from the moment when we let Poland disappear, our France, its equilibrium changed at a blow, saw her hegemony pass to England, whose role was at the same time inherited by the United States: of this dozen of civilized nations, Germany increased her strength by all the power vainly wrested by us from the house of Austria; Russia, the Scandinavian world and the Low Countries counterbalanced each other; Spain descended a little lower, Italy rose as much higher. And perhaps it is because Turkey is being effaced that Japan, an element likewise foreign, now rises upon our horizon. THE TWELVE GODS OF ALL NATIONS 159 Most of these States are composed of two elements primitively hostile, comparable to the two planes whose intersection forms the lines of an ARfiTE. For it is one of the gross errors of our time to identify RACE and NATION. A nation, a state, seems, on the contrary, to have no other mission than to unite and bind opposed races, with a view to some human combination as yet unknown; to attempt to limit a nation to one race would be as foolish as to limit one family to incestuous unions. Anglo-Saxons and Celts on the island of Great Britain, northern French and Albigenses, Germans of north and south, Austrians and Hungarians, and for a long period Swedes and Norwegians, their new divorce perhaps the precursor of other separations in Europe, illustrate my assertion. Moreover, each one among these couples formed not a unity but a dozen, when it existed indepen- dently. We can still find in the real France (the North) the types, so distinct in features, language and arts, curiously grouped by antitheses, of the Breton and the Norman, the Fleming and the Champenois, the native of the Ile-de-France and the heavy Beauceron, the artistic Limousin and the Auvergnat, the nonchalant Touranian and the Poitevin, the Lorrain and the Burgundian. In that one of the two dozens which, in any country, shows itself morally superior to the 160 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS other, we can discover a national subdivision into two half-dozens: Scotland and Ireland, Asiatic Greece and Morea, Gascony and the Rhone valley, etc. Let us go further: tradition, yet living, divides each one of these 12 regions among 12 little peoples in turn. And one could go on thus into every country, into every one of its natural provinces. Imperial Italy, it is true, was divided into ten provinces only, but because its administration failed to join to it the two halves, so characteristic, of Cisalpine Gaul. These 12 divisions survive in the ethnic physiognomies, so clearly cut, of the modern Italians. There were 12 kingdoms in Spain: Old Castile, New Castile, Leon, Galicia, Navarre, Aragon, Murcia, Jaen, Cordova, Seville, Granada and Valencia. Germany comprises two dozen states, Sweden 24 LANS, etc. From another point of view: is not the govern- ment of a country formed of a dozen ministers? Worship (Vesta), Finance (Juno), Marine, (Nep- tune), diplomatic Foreign Affairs (Minerva), the Interior with hygiene, police and . . . charity (Venus), Public Instruction with the fine arts (Apollo), Commerce and Mails (Mercury), Justice (Jupiter), Agriculture (Ceres), Public Works (Vulcan), War (Mars) and the Colonies with their wild and virgin lands (Diana). And, very recently, Labor, which has mysteriously replaced the first. THE TWELVE GODS OF ALL NATIONS 161 Each of the 4 great Races which cover the globe, the choleric and ambitious White, the sanguine and careless Black the phlegmatic Yel- low and the melancholy Red or Brown so widely scattered, throws out three important branches. We have seen how the EUROPEAN branch of the White Race ramifies into one dozen great peoples, of whom the smaller peoples are the detached branches. We may see the same in the case of the SEMITES, and of the NON-SEMITES remaining in Asia (Hindus, Persians, etc.), whom, in my opinion, we are too much inclined to connect with the European, for they are equal to it in numbers, and differ from it in mind, physiognomy and arts not less than the Arab. Finally, geographically, if we divide the world longitudinally into three slices, beginning from about 25 West, we obtain the three actual worlds: the OCCIDENTAL, between the EXTREME ORIENTAL (from 90 East to 150 West) and the American (from 150 West to 25 West). Or, if you prefer to cut the world into four slices, very well, you will have: for the first (25 W. to 65 E.) our HIS- TORIC WORLD; then eastward (to 155) the Orient, Hindu, Japanese, Chinese, Malayan; therefrom to 115 W., the mysterious Pacific whose isles appear here and there like the last remaining columns of a destroyed temple; and finally, America. 162 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Over these four quarters of the earth are reign- ing each moment the four parts of the day, in such a way that, if we wish, we may subdivide it into 24 parts, like the face of a clock. Each twelfth of this longitudinal clock each couple of hours means a civilization. To gratify Japan, we call her the Empire of the Rising Sun, whose light announces a vernal day; while the day breaks, calm morning has dawned over Korea, the laborious day has commenced for New Zealand ; when it is but half past nine in smiling Tahiti the first quarter of the day is already ending in the Far West. Two o'clock, three o'clock, moment of the siesta, sound over the ancient colonies, those which threw off the yoke of England in the 18th century and the lighter yoke of Spain in the 19th. It is four o'clock in pensive Brazil and six on the Atlantic. Our western Europe is contemplating the sunset, eight o'clock already ! Twilight is enveloping Germany and the Angelus is sounding in Rome. Night is closing over Greece, over Egypt and Judea; it is ten and eleven o'clock in Arabia and Chaldea. Midnight sounds in the land of Ahriman and Tamerlane! The rest of the night possesses, the first two hours India and Thibet, and the hours before dawn Annam and China. Need we remind ourselves that to each of these couples of hours the spirit of analogy attached THE TWELVE GODS OF ALL NATIONS 163 a sign of the zodiac, with the god placed over it by the ancient Greeks, Hindus, etc.? Thus, space and time being united, let us now recall those Centuries whose evolution we com- pared, four by four, to that of the seasons. Each of these centuries producing three genera- tions, a generation relates itself, in the mind of the dreamer, to a Month, as, on the above longitudinal clock, to a Two-hour Period and to the civilizations which we have just seen marked out by them, or to a pair of Homeric cantos, etc. It relates itself likewise to one of the 12 great Gods. And the verifications of this, in our own annals, is curious. We know that our great national dynasty of the Capetians connected itself with Charlemagne, glory of the preceding, by his cousin-german Nebelong, grandfather of Robert-le-Fort. Twelve generations later is attained its own supreme glory in Saint Louis; another twelve generations, and it produced the splendid Louis XIV. It is pleasing to find, in connection with each of these great men, the same importance accorded to the mother, whether Bertha Broad-foot, Blanche of Castile or Anne of Austria. Pepin de Landen and Saint Arnulf were the two pillars of that dynasty. The scrupulous piety which caused both to be beatified characterized, 36 generations 164 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS later (3 x 12) the comte de Chambord, and, in the interval, it bent the knees, for a moment rebellious, of Philippe I, and surged beneath the shining armor of St. Jeanne d'Arc. It is, in short, the generation of Vesta. Louis XI and Louis XIV belong, in two dif- ferent branches, to a like generation: they have (from Juno) the spirit of chicanery which, 12 generations earlier, showed itself so plainly in their not less popular ancestor Louis-le-Gros. Ambition to the point of imprudence is shown in three branches of the family, also in a like generation, by Charles VIII, Francis I and Antoine de Bourbon, repeating thus the moral physiognomy of Louis-le-Jeune and Pepin d'Heristal. Likewise a Henri IV, eloquent and ingenious (Minerva), repeats at 12 generations' distance f almost trait for trait, the Ulyssean type of Philippe- August e. After this, one will hardly be surprised to meet, in the generations consecrated to the orgiac Ceres, the scandals of the TOUR DE NESLE and those of the PARC AUX CERFS, nor to see the weakness (Diana) of this family drag it down with the foolish Charles VI, and, 12 generations later, with Louis XVII, with the Due de Berry and Ferdinand d' Orleans. Was it for want of a Duguesclin (Mars), we ask, that Louis XVI, at least as THE TWELVE GODS OF ALL NATIONS 165 worthy the name of "Sage" as his corresponding duodenaire Charles V, found himself overwhelmed by a militarist generation? a generation which, deluded by a duodecimal remembrance, thought it found in Marie-Antoinette of Austria another Isabel of Bavaria, and in the Comte d'Artois a Charles d'Orleans, and whose first achievement as soon as it came into power, was the inaugura- tion of twenty-five years of senseless wars. Thus was the way opened for Napoleon, who lacked the control of a suzerain and moderate advisor, whose wisdom might have avoided for us the final Waterloo. Another possibility: if the honest but weak Henri V was unable to reclaim his throne, or Napoleon III to maintain himself upon his, was it through lack of a rhythm remaining suffi- ciently vibrant in the exhausted race of the former, or of a rhythm sufficiently well estab- lished in the upstart race of the latter, and because the qualities of the two could not be united in a single man capable of responding to the imperious appeal of the new dogmas proclaimed by Pius IX? What history needs, as vertebral column, is a duly organized science of Comparative Heredity. Of this science we possess the documents, marvel- ously in order, in the genealogies of the great families. We have only to note the laws. Now a law does not exist in itself. A law simply 166 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS establishes the more or less frequent return of an analogous association between phenomena, and of these phenomena it terms the more ancient the CAUSE and the more recent the EFFECT.* The return which permits it to verify once more this association, this succession, what is it but Rhythm? Thus it is the mission of the scholar to ascertain rhythms. All life is movement; all movement is observed from the point of view of a relative immobility, of a repetition, of an identity rediscovered here and there in the moving stream. From these rhythms to be studied in history, I have selected the most obvious, as well as the most dis- quieting. What is this strange duodenary rhythm, the only common dividend of 2, 3 and 4, which we have felt vibrating, beat by beat, through heredity, through the history of a people, through that of humanity entire, in the roles which the various races of the world have seized upon simultaneously or have be- queathed to one another, in the flight of the hours which sound over their sleep or their activity, in the dance of the seasons and the months, in that of the years of our lives, *See, on this subject, the fine works of M. Lotus Weber in the REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE. THE TWELVE GODS OF ALL NATIONS 167 in that of generations and centuries, in the division of public powers, in the equilibrium of Europe, in that of the world, in that of each nation, of each of its cities, in the philosophic systems of various peoples, in the heresies which rend religious faith , in the articles of its Creed, in the ceremonies of worship, in song, in the poetic metres of all literatures, in the composition of the greatest poems, in the conflicts of the drama and in legendary cycles, in the idolatries, in the series of gods, into which are absorbed, and among which are ranged, one after another, prophets, apostles, eponyms, animals of the fables, and heroes of fairy tales, even the popular heroes acclaimed by our contemporaries? And still I have not detailed the 12 terrains which geologists discover between the central and unknown regions of Earth and the simple "allu- vions" of its epidermis, nor the dozen upheavals which have moulded it ! Nor the 12 solid elements found in a free state in nature (antimony, sulphur, arsenic, platinum, copper, gold, mercury, bis- muth, tellure, carbon, iron, silver). Nor the 168 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS 3x4 embranchments which Delafosse, Linne and Cuvier count in nature, nor the 2 x 12 classes which Cuvier enumerates for the animal kingdom, nor the general tendency of all these "orders" toward multiples of the same number 12. What is it, this strange, obsessing rhythm? It is the rhythm of Life. Hear it beating in your own heart, in your arteries, in your nerves What we have done for the Temperaments and the Seasons, in drawing the innumerable analogies which they suggest, what we have done for the six directions in which our energies, born of the explosive binary combinations of temperaments, can dart over the three dimensions of space, what we have begun for the twelve ARfiTES or god-types recognized in all religions and all social groupings, we have but to study more and more deeply, in descending, step by step, into the mysteries of the human heart, by means of patient comparison of the secondary types which will be successively engendered before us, carefully distinguishing them one from another in their most intimate details. The task is infinite, and I do not pretend to have completed it, but at least we shall lay hold upon realities not heretofore grasped, thanks to the classification now to be opened, the first attempted classification, I believe, of the unnum- bered Characters which, whether real or imaginary, obsess the divers peoples of the earth. General Classification of Human Beings CHAPTER X I PLAN OF THE CLASSIFICATION Each of our 12 Types will necessarily be divided into two, according to the TWO SEXES which affect it. How many are the masculine roles for which we find no feminine equivalent in literature, or even in history, equally blind and partial, it would seem, by contagion! The simple obser- vation of this fact alone suffices to cause to spring up in each of these lacunae a feminine type here- tofore unperceived. To this useful evocation, announced in the early pages of this book, the present chapter will be primarily devoted. But the binary subclassification of our human Museum will soon become quaternary, as soon as we shall observe it in the light of the two great aspects of life, the TRAGIC and COMIC. And even from the colorless mass of intermediaries ("serious characters," a species of hermaphrodite adapted to double usage) how many phantoms may be brought under one or another of these lights to be animated! We have already seen the devel- 170 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS opment of this method in Chapter III (NEW COMBINATIONS), and have seen thus produced by the combination of Comic and Tragic charac- ters, the secondary series of characters Parodic, Paradoxical, Odious presented sympathetically, Sympathetic rendered repugnant, Grotesque treated seriously, Serious treated with deri- sion, etc. Finally, we shall see, at the end of the following chapter, how this quadruple hypostasis, inevit- able for each of our 12 divine Types (male and female, tragic and comic) will be multiplied by the various ages of life and the various social ranks, in which, turn by turn, it may be studied. What penury we find, in our letters, of Old People differentiated one from another! How little varied are the Bachelors, or the Chil- dren! In contrast to the Intellectual (brahmin, artist, scholar, etc.), to the Warrior and to the Man of Money (bourgeois, merchant, etc.), how little shaded are the people of the masses! Even our "naturalistic" writers still confound the souls of a cabinet-maker of the Faubourg St. Antoine, of a mason, of a day-laborer, that modern pariah without hope, and of that pretentious aristocrat the house-painter! We shall content ourselves, in this classifica- tion neglecting for the moment the questions GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 171 of Rank and Age as secondary nuances with submitting the tetrad which inevitably results from the two sexes and the two principal aspects, comic and tragic, to a simple TERNARY SUBDIVI- SION of each Divine Type. We may, in short, inscribe under Vesta (whose line forms, it will be remembered, the frontier between idealization and emotion) natures PIOUS and FAITHFUL, placing between them the SAGES in the broadest sense of the word. Under Juno (ARETE, as we have seen, between activity and possessivity) we place natures JEALOUS and SEVERE; between them the VINDICTIVE. Under Neptune (possessivity and idealization or abstrac- tion) will be ranged the AVARICIOUS and AMBI- TIOUS, flanking the DESPOTIC. Under Minerva (idealization and self -manifestation) natures ELO- QUENT and DARING, and between these two groups the ADVENTURERS. Under Venus (emotionalism and materialism) we will inscribe the SEDUCTIVE and the VICIOUS, on either side the PROSTITUTES. Under Apollo (emotion and self-manifestation) natures PASSIONATE and ARTISTIC, between them that which our century, fathoming an antique presentiment, has called the FATED or ILL- STARRED. Under Mercury (who marks the limit of abstract idealization and energetic activity) will be disposed the SHREWD and the UNSCRUPU- LOUS, beside the TRAITOROUS and PERFIDIOUS. 172 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Under Jupiter (self-manifestation and activity) natures ARROGANT and PROTECTING; between these groups the LOFTY and MAJESTIC. Under Ceres (materialism and possessivity) the PRODIGAL and the PRACTICAL, between them inserting the SEN- SUAL. Under Vulcan (manifestation and mater- ialism) the LABORIOUS and also the DUPED or DELUDED, between whom the SELF-SACRIFICING will take their place. Under Mars (energetic activity and materialism) natures VIOLENT to a murderous degree, and the most AUDACIOUS, surrounding the REBELLIOUS. Finally, under Diana (emotion and possessivity) the SENTI- MENTAL and the CHASTE, succeeding to the WEAK or TIMID. The terms of the classification are necessarily imperfect and too elastic, and less important than the groups themselves, under whose heads I have used them only in default of better; each of these 36 groups exhibits nevertheless a remarkable coherence, and it is this alone which concerns us- This coherence will extend to each one of the sub-groups. These will present themselves in variable numbers, thus providing lacunae more and more numerous, which we shall observe and measure in descending into the individual realities here explored. But their number, although vari- able, tends always, in curious fashion, toward the Dozen. GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 173 II CLASSIFICATION VESTA I THE Pious 1. The Constant. Examples: besides the Vir- gin, the purest of the Saints, the Mexican Koat- likoe, the Hindu Aghdi and Andjani, Liane (in Richter's TITAN); Louis IX, Joachim in THE POWER OF DARKNESS. This category does not admit of parody, a case perhaps unique. A nuance of serene resignation, that of Job or of Celestin V, is wanting in the feminine examples (apart, of course, from the Virgin). 2. Religious Scholars, Theologians: TCHANG THE ANCHORET, Aeneas, St. Thomas Aquinas. In the feminine: Peta, Anouke the Egyptian, Beatrice (PARADISE), Clementine de Rothschild, St. Gertrude. In this last there appears, in softened and milder form, the venerable physiog- nomy of Friar Laurence (ROMEO AND JULIET), Friar Bonaventure (in Ford's 'TIS PITY . .)> Mordecai (ESTHER), Noah under his various names, Hebrew, Chinese, Hindu, Aztec, Chaldean, etc. 3. Mystics: Madame Swetchine, Marie Ala- coque, Bernadette, SALAMMB6, Angelique (Zola, LE RfivE), HANNELE MATERNE; Don Sebastian 174 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS (Calderon, FOR SECRET OUTRAGE . .), Ruben (in Picard's JERICHO). Nekhludoff (in Tolstoi's RESURRECTION) connects this type with modern humanitarianism. 4. The Superstitious (the comic aspect of 2 and 3). Examples: masculine, none; feminine, pos- sibly the vague Madame de Noares (BOUVARD AND PECUCHET). Menander had painted Phidias as THE SUPERSTITIOUS, in using the 14 funda- mental traits indicated by THEOPHRASTUS. 5. Bigots. Examples are few. What fine parodies of 6 and 7 could here be made! 6. The Ardently Devout. Examples: BAR- LAAM (St. John Chrysostom), POLYEUCTE, THE CONSTANT PRINCE (Calderon), SAINT LUDWINE (Huysmans), THEODORE (Corneille). 7. Fanatics: TORQUEMADA, Pastor Kroll (Ibsen, ROSMERSHOLM), Jin THE FANATIC of the Chinese theatre; the Protestant Madame Moise Piedefer and the Catholic Angelique de Granville (Balzac, THE MUSE OF THE DEPARTMENT, A DOUBLE FAMILY), MADAME GERVAISAIS (the Gon- courts). 8. Hypocrites are not connected with this group except as its opposites; they are to it what Braggarts are to the Brave. After Plutarch, La Bruydre carefully indicated the identity of the hypocrite, the unbeliever and the libertine ; Molidre GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 175 also, in his DON JUAN as in his TARTUFE. Examples: Thwackum in Fielding's TOM JONES, the modern and philanthropic De Climal (Man. vaux, LA VIE DE MARIANNE) . Feminine examples are less marked: Papelardie in the ROMAN DE LA ROSE, or the Marta of the genial Tirso de Molina. 9. The feminine sex alone, however, has given consistent Prudes to literature: Arsino6 in Moliere, GLYCfiRE (La Bruyere, CHARACTERS), and, more sympathetic, LA FAUSSE AGNES and Angelique in THE PARISIENNE (Destouches) . 10. Hypocrite by Necessity, Madame Graslin (Balzac, C6UNTRY PARSON) is connected with 11. Tragic Hypocrites: Cromwell, Elizabeth of England. There are few good modern studies. II --THE WISE I trust the Hellenists will here pardon me: the Wise appear to me to belong to Vesta, even though captured, in adventurous Greece, by Athene, whom we have seen grow equally at the expense of Ares, Artemis, Hermes and Apollo. Let us first inspect the cortege of 1. The Impious: THE LIBERTINE (Lessing); Barbarina (Gozzi, THE GREEN BIRD). 2. Sarcastic Philosophers : Voltaire, Mephisto, Schopenhauer; feminine examples are lacking. 176 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS 3. They are likewise lacking for the Sceptics: Dr. Relling (Ibsen, THE WILD DUCK). 4. Jovial Sages: Rabelais, Guido Cavalcanti (Boccacio, DECAMERON VI, 4), Luc (Gorki, THE LOWER DEPTHS) . Olympe (Dancourt , THE PARIS- IENNE) is weak by comparison. 5. JEsopic Sages: JEsop in the two comedies of Boursault, the Socrates of the BANQUETS, Melchisedec (Decameron I, 3), that prototype of NATHAN THE WISE, the ingenious and loqua- cious M. Bergeret; the young Chinese woman, PEACH-BLOSSOM, and, in Plutarch, the wife of the covetous Pythes. 6. Adventurous Sages: ZANONI (Bulwer- Lytton), the Marquis de Posa (DON CARLOS), Anarcharsis, Abaris the Hyperborean, ARCHYTAS DE METAPONTE (Mazel) and his Theano; Par- thenia (Halm, INGOMAR THE BARBARIAN). 7. Soothsayers and Good Counsellors: the Argonaut Idmon, Helenus, Protes, Poltis the Thracian king; Egeria, Cassandra, the Sybils, Bertha and Gertrude in WILLIAM TELL. 8. Healers: Borvo the god of Gaulish origin and his wife Damona, Aesculapius, the physicians of the modern novel and the MIRES of the Middle Ages, as much masculine as feminine; not a single case of the latter sex has been well drawn in literature. GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 177 9. Venerable Sages: Prospero (THE TEM- PEST), Nestor, Naimes (CHANSON DE ROLAND), Sahadeva; feminine, Marguerite de Parma (EGMONT). 10. Sad or Stern Sages: Cato (PHARSALIA), Hegesias, the Buddha; Anne (d'Annunzio, THE DEAD CITY). 11. Feeble Sages: Lambert (Claudel, LA VlLLE), Titurel (PARSIFAL); no feminine examples. 12. Sages of Comic Aspect: Primrose in THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. 13. Simple Sages: Vincent (Mowinsky, THE BLOWS OF FATE), the FIELD MOUSE (La Fontaine). t 14. Sages of Deep Understanding: Christine de Pisane, Blanche of Castile, Isabella (Lope, DISCOVERY OF THE NEW WORLD), Juliana D'Acosta; Sully. 15. Intellectual Sages: Dr. Nangel (Ibsen, THE LADY FROM THE SEA), Liu-thong-pin in THE TRANSMIGRATION OF YO-CHEOU. 16. Prudent Sages: Northumberland in KING HENRY IV, the wandering ascetic in SAKUNTALA; no feminine examples unless it be in comedy, the Elise, Eliante and Henriette of Moliere. 17. Home-lovers: Domicius the god of the home, the Lares and Penates, Deverrona. No particularized literary studies. 178 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS , III THE FAITHFUL 1. Spouses: Penelope (ODYSSEY), Sita (RAMAYANA), Tchaou-nyang (THE Pl-PA-KI), Kadidjah, Madame Stockmann (AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE), Savitri (MAHABHARATA), Mar- guerite de Provence, etc. Masculine examples are rare: Xedor the Japanese saint, and the husband in LA DORMEUSE (A. de. Lorde). 2. In Comedy: Angela (Gozzi, THE STAG KING), Elvire (TARTUFE); no masculine examples- 3. Spouses Faithful from Duty alone, without Love. Examples: masculine, none; feminine: Monime (BAJAZET). 4. Faithful even to Sacrifice: Madame Hulot (COUSIN BETTE), Madame Claes (QUEST OF THE ABSOLUTE), Silvia (d'Annunzio, GlOCONDA), Madame Royre (Bernstein, JOUJOU). No mas- culine examples. 5. Constant Fiancees: Solveig (PEER GYNT), Elizabeth (TANNHAUSER), Julie (NOUVELLE HELOISE). One masculine example, which comes from the Far East: the student Kouo-hoa in THE PLEDGED SLIPPER. 6. Sacrificed Mistresses: GERTRUDE (Bouch- inet), LA RICKE DU PASTEUR (Erik Schlaikjers). See others under Diana. The masculine type hardly exists. GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 179 7. Obstinately Faithful Widowhood: ANDRO- MAQUE, Cornelia (PHARSALIA), Madri (MAHAB- HARATA), Arganthonis (Parthenius, EROTICS), Jac- ques Brigaut (Balzac, PIERRETTE). 8. Misunderstood Fidelity: SAKUNTALA, Gen- evieve de Brabant, (Tieck, Jean Conan), Griselda (Boccacio, Silvestre), BERTHE AU GRAND PIE (Adenes le Roi); masculine examples, different enough: COLONEL CHABERT (Balzac), JACQUES DAMOUR (Zola). 9. Fathers and Mothers: Dacaratha (RAMAY- ANA), Timour (Gozzi, TURANDOT), OLD GORIOT (Balzac), A#se (PEER GYNT), Sabine (Hervieu, THE TRAIL OF THE TORCH). In comic aspect: Pantalon (Gozzi, THE STAG KING), Sostrate (Terence, HAUTONTIMORUMENOS). 10. Comic Brothers: no notable cases. Comic Sisters: BRIGITTE (Meilhac and Halevy), Serious: Bartholomew Columbus (Lope, DISCOVERY OF THE NEW WORLD), Valentine (FAUST); they are much inferior to the Sisters: ELECTRA, Anna (Marlowe, DUX)). 11. Daughters and Sons: ANTIGONE, Cor- delia (LEAR), TELEMAQUE, TCHAO-LI, Pourouvaca, Lausus (AENEID). No interesting examples in the comic genre. 12. Other Relatives: LA GRAND' MERE (Hugo), the aunts Zephirine de Guenic and 180 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Countess d'Esgrignon in Balzac's BEATRIX ; sister- in-law, his Duchess de Soria (MEMOIRS OF TWO YOUNG WIVES); nieces, his Pierrette Cambremer (A SEA-SHORE DRAMA) ; daughter-in-law, the sur- prising Li in SlE-JIN-KOUEI; UNCLE VANIA (Chekhov) and the Abb6 Lefvre, uncle of LOUIS LAMBERT. 13. Adoptive Parents: MANOUNE (Marni), Josabeth (ATHALIE), BENOITE (AND BENOIT, Haraucourt) ; Ananda, St. Joseph. For Fosterers see Vulcan. 14. Disciples: The Apostles, the Holy Women. 15. Friends: No good feminine types in the comic but LlDOIRE (Courteline) ; the academician Ho-tchi-tchan (THE GAGE OF LOVE). In the tragic: the Princess de Lamballe, Isabelle (Zelinski, BARBARA RADZIWILL) and Mile Gay (Duranty, FRANCOISE DE QUESNAY) do not equal either Pylade or Schmucke (COUSIN PONS) or Paz (THE FALSE MISTRESS) or Horatio (HAMLET). JUNO I THE JEALOUS 1. Wives and Husbands: Dejanira (THE TRACHINIANS etc.), MJ&ROPE, OTHELLO, MITH- RIDATE, ANGELO. Comic: the husband confessor GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 181 in Boccacio and various "Sganarelles" who will be found under Vulcan; Alcmene (AMPHITRYON). 2. Lovers: Comic feminine example : the Mar- quise (Baron, LE COQUET TROMPE); tragic: Her- mione, MARIE TUDOR. Tragic masculine example : Montes de Montejanos (COUSIN BETTE); comic: Robin (LE JEU DU BERGER ET DE LA BERGERE), Albert (LES FOLIES AMOUREUSES), FLORENTIN (La Fontaine). 3. Jealous Adulterers: there are few but tragic and feminine cases: Roxane (BAJAZET), Vasilissa (Gorki, THE LOWER DEPTHS), Addle (Descaves and Donnay', LA CLAIRIERE). 4. The Scorned and Revengefully Jealous: Countess Orsina (Lessing, EMILIA GALOTTl), MADAME DE LA POMMERAYE (Diderot); Fulbert the butcher of Abelard. No comic examples. 5. Jealousy without the Desire of Possessing: Diana de Belflor (Lope, THE GARDENER'S DOG). No equivalent masculine case. 6. Love through Jealousy: Morin (Candillot, CONJUGAL DUTY). Few distinct feminine ex- amples. 7. Retrospective Jealousy: Michel (Wilhelm Feldmann, THE SHADOW); the too theoretical Svava Bjornson, A GAUNTLET). 8. Jealousy of a Pure Affection (for a child): 182 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS George Braux (Fleg, THE MESSAGE) ; no feminine examples. There is no symmetric masculine for Heldne d'Aiglemont drowning her little brother from jealousy (A WOMAN OF THIRTY). 9. Jealousy of Friends: no examples. 10. Jealousy of a Mother's New Loves: the little Grandjean (Zola, UNE PAGE D'AMOUR). 11. Of a Father's: no examples. II THE VENGEFUL AND JUST 1. The Passionately Revengeful: ROUSSALKA (Pushkin), Olympias the terrible mother of Alex- ander the Great ; Jean-sans-peur, MONTE CRISTO. No comic examples. 2. Righteous Avengers of their Cause: Gideon. No comic examples. 3. The Irascible: Madame Guillemot (Bour- sault, LE MERCURE GALANT); THRASILLE (La Bruyere). There are no romantic and almost no tragic examples. 4. Avengers of their Honor: Vera Gelo, Mathilde (Frank Verax, Sanglante probldme) ; Don Diego in THE ClD. No comic examples. 5. Avengers of the Honor of Relatives: Tri- boulet (LE ROI S' AMUSE), Odard (EMILIA GALOTTl) ; few good feminine examples. GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 183 6. Avengers of Kindred: Hamon (Beaumont and Fletcher, ROLLO); Emilie (ClNNA), the ROSA- MONDES of Rucellai and of Alfieri; Constance (KING JOHN), Althee. 7. Avenger of a Mistress: Tuzani (Calderon, LOVE AFTER DEATH): of a wife: Macduff; of a husband or lover: LA TOSCA (Sardou). 8. Avenger of Friends : SON POTEAU (Metenier) . No symmetric example in the other sex. 9. Avenger of Compatriots: Xenocrite ridding Cumes of the tyrant Aristodeme the Delicate, Charlotte. Corday, Judith; see the following group, also masculine examples under Tyrannicides in Mars. 10. Judges or Enforcers of Justice: Nemesis and her counterparts in various paganisms; Aeschylus (Alfieri, TlMOLEON), the elder Brutus. A parody, which is lacking in the preceding case, is here sketched in Ibsen's Gregers Wefle (THE WILD DUCK). Ill THE STRICT AND SEVERE 1. Unmerciful Scolds: Grietje (Mitchell and Leborne, THE ABSENT) insufficiently counter- balances the physician Coitier (Delavigne, LOUIS XI) or Brother Archangias (Zola, LA FAUTE DE L'ABBE MOURET). These are parodied in 184 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS 2. Grumblers and Faultfinders: Madame Pernelle (Tartufe), Madame Grognac (Regnard, LE DISTRAIT); Clistorel, that Coitier of comedy (Regnard, LE LEGATAIRE), Geronte in LE JOUEUR, THE PHILOSOPHER MARRIED (Destouches), Anti- phon, (Plautus, STICHUS), Simon, Demea, Demi- phon, and Menedemus in the works of Terence, a specialist in this type. 3. THE MISANTHROPE of Molidre, purely comic, derives from this class. There are no feminine examples for this, nor for the more serious case of Jacques (As YOU LIKE IT). 4. Misogynists: We have lost Menander's, who was called Demyle. Lessing's MISOGYNIST is Wumshoeter, La Fontaine's is Anselme (THE ENCHANTED CUP). The corresponding feminine man-hater is lacking and both masculine and feminine are lacking in the tragic! 5. Puritans: Pastor Holm (Engel, ON THE WATERS) ; Miss Stevens in Balzac. 6. Scathing Critics: TlMON OF ATHENS, the Prophets, Juvenal, Leon Bloy; no feminine ex- amples. Cato and Jean- Jacques lead to 7. Malcontents: Prince Andrei (Tolstoi, WAR AND PEACE), parodied in 8. The Morose and Churlish: Leroy (Janvier, LES APPELEURS). GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 185 9. The Harsh and Resolute: Stockmann (ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE), Burrhus (BRITANNICUS) , Michael Angelo; comic: William Thornwill in THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. Neither 6, 7 nor 8 has good feminine examples, nor has 10. The Sarcastic: Mauly in THE PLAIN DEALER (Wycherly). Thersite la Brige, in Court- eline, leads to 11. The Litigious: Lanternois and Chiqui- noux in PANTAGRUEL, Protais (Mickiewicz, THAD- DEUS SOPLITZA); the Countess de Pimbeche (LES PLAIDEURS, Chicane (LUTRIN). 12. Vixens and Scolds : Xantippe; LaBruyeYe's DISAGREEABLE MAN, his BUSYBODY and his CRABBED MAN. In the tragic : Eleanor of Acqui- taine, Amate and Juno in the ILIAD. Here mas- culine examples are lacking. 13. The Uneven-tempered: La Bruyere's EUTICHRATE has as yet no worthy feminine. Nor has the following: 14. The Headstrong: L'OPINIONATRE (Brueys), nor 15. THE SINGULAR MAN (Balzac). NEPTUNE I THE GREEDY AND AVARICIOUS 1. The Selfish: Dr. Halpersohn (Balzac), Madame Kriwdine (Mowinsky, THE BLOWS OF 186 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS FATE). More dramatic: Klechtch (Gorki, THE LOWER DEPTHS), Madame Ambroise (Decameron VIII, 1). 2. The Covetous: Louise of Savoy, MANETTE SALOMON (Goncourt) ; Remonencq (COUSIN PONS). Comic: the Fish- vendors of the Greek drama, Rabelais' Dindenault. 3. Speculators, Stock-jobbers, etc.: TURCARET, MERCADET, Isidor Lechat (Mirbeau, LES AFFAIRES . . . ), Saccard (Zola, LA CURE, L' ARGENT, etc. There are no feminine examples, at least in literature. Nor are there for the 4. Unscrupulous Rascals: Kovacs (Zola, THE LAND), Prince Basil (Tolstoi, WAR AND PEACE). 5. The Criminally Covetous: Tarpeia, Taille- fer in Balzac, Buteau (Zola, THE LAND), Dick Hatteraick (Scott, GUY MANNERING). No comic examples. 6. Cajolers of Parents or Rich Masters: Madame Massin-Bevrault (URSULE MlROUET), Francoise (A DOUBLE FAMILY), Voltore and Corvino (Ben Jonson, VOLPONE). 7. Go-betweens and Procurers: the Lenons of the Greco-Latin stage, Kaled (Chamfort, THE SLAVE-DEALER), Bordenave (Zola, NANA), MADAME CARDINAL (Halevy), MACETTE (Regnier). 8. Keepers of Gaming Houses: Feminine ex- GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 187 amples are wanting in literature. Masculine: the Croupier in THE EARTHEN CHARIOT (Sudraka), Lie-chi-ki-ouen (THE STORY OF THE RIVER BANKS). 9. Keepers of Opium Dens: One feminine example in THE MYSTERY OP EDWIN DROOD (Dickens). 10. Saloon-keepers : No thorough study as yet. 11. Usurers: Madame la Ressource (Regnard, LE JOUEUR), poorly counterbalances GOBSECK and his twelve rivals of THE HUMAN COMEDY, Shylock, Barrabas THE JEW OF MALTA (Marlowe). 12. Misers: Harpagon follows old precedents ; Euclion (Plautus, AULULARIA), Isaac of York Tragic: Koujin the Chinese MISER, GRANDET. Feminine examples, either tragic or comic, are mediocre. 13. Luxurious Misers: the Baroness in LE CHEVALIER A LA MODE. II THE DESPOTIC 1. Domestic Despots: GRANDET, whom we have just noted in his principal aspect under Misers; the president Walter (Schiller, CABAL AND LOVE), Commander Siesi (Butti, THE TEM- PEST), Sorel (Stendhal, LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR); Madame Josserand (POT-BOUILLE), Mistress Otter (Ben Jonson, EPICOENE). 188 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS 2. Imperious Despots: TURANDOT (Gozzi), SAINT-CENDRE (Maindron). 3. Tyrannical Subordinates: Gessler (WIL- LIAM TELL), Galerius (THE MARTYRS), Wolsey (Calderon, THE SCHISM OF ENGLAND), Haman (ESTHER). Comic: LE COMMISSAIRE and LE GENDARME of Courteline; no feminine examples. 4. Tyrannical and Lustful Subordinates: the Commissaire (Mirbeau, LE PORTEFEUILLE), LE BON JUGE (Brisson). Tragic: Appius Claudius of the innumerable VIRGINIAS, Giannetino Doria (Schiller, FlESCO). No feminine examples in lit. erature. 5. Despotic and Fanatical Subordinates: Angelique Arnauld; Saul (the future St. Paul). 6. Fanatical and Intolerant Tyrants: Cather- ine de Medicis (Marlowe, THE MASSACRE AT PARIS), Pentheus (Euripides, BACCHAE), Philip II in score of plays. 7. Tyrants: Catherine de Medicis after Bal- zac, who paints her #s shrewd and unbelieving, ATHALIE, Cleopatra (RODOGUNE); Bone in BAR- BARA RADZIWILL, CAMBYSES (Preston), Atar (Beaumarchais, TARARE), Grimoald (Corneille, PERTHARITE), Al-Hassan (LALLA ROOKH), Diocle- tian (Rotrou, SAINT-GENEST), Creon in the Tragics, ATTILA (Herbert, Corneille, Werner, Bornier), TAMERLANE (Marlowe), Napoleon. GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 189 8. Pitiless Parents: Acrisius, Orchame, Echete, etc. No good feminine examples. 9. Evil Geniuses: monsters: Satan, Ahriman and other synonyms, Adamastor (LUSIADE), Poly- phemus (ODYSSEY), Polemos (Aristophanes, THE PEACE), the CYCLOPS (Euripides), the Old Man of the Dovre (PEER GYNT); ogres: Morgane (THE LOVE OF THE THREE ORANGES), L'lNTRUSE, Death in the DANSES MACABRES. 10. Base Despots: Menelaus after Euripides, Phocas (Corneille, HERACLIUS). Comic: Rabe- lais' Grippeminaud. Feminine examples are lacking. % 11. Voluptuous Tyrants; SEMIRAMIS (Cre- billon), Catherine II, Christina of Sweden; Nero, Tiberius, Henry VIII. See also the Vicious under Venus. Ill THE AMBITIOUS 1. Ordinary Ambition : Few women: Madame Rogron (Balzac, PIERRETTE); masculine: Rastig- nac, THEONAS (La Bruyere), EUGENE ROUGON (Zola). No comic examples. 2. The Ambitious Troubled in Mind, or Already Guilty: Comic: Jules Hniot (Fdvre, LES BEAUX MARIAGES), Morin (Janvier, PRES- TIGE). Tragic: Mouzon (Brieux, THE RED 190 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS ROBE), Henri Mauperin (the Goncourts), LlU- THONG-PIN. No feminine examples either comic or tragic. 3. Presumptuous Ambition: a comic example may be found in Perrault's SOUHAITS RIDICULES; tragic: Maurice Leon in LE LlVRE DU PETIT GENDELETTRE. Feminine examples might be found among our modern poetesses and artists. 4. Forceful Ambition: Solness THE MASTER BUILDER (Ibsen), BORIS GODOUNOPF (Pushkin), CAESAR (Plutarch, Mommsen). 5. Hard Ambition: Caesar in Lucan's PHAR- SALIA, Jean de Giscale, Napoleon (P. Adam, LA FORCE); Mesdames Thuillier and Camusotet de Lenoncourt in Balzac are very inferior. 6. Unbecoming Ambition: the Byzantine Placidia; Caesar after Suetonius, Shakespeare's HENRY IV. 7. Infatuated by Ambition: LA MONTESPAN (Rolland); Julien Sorel (LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR), Ruggero Flamma (d'Annunzio, LA GLORIA). 8. Murderers through Ambition: MACBETH, KING JOHN, Knut the Great, the uncle of HAMLET; Agrippina, Lady Macbeth, Tullia the parricide. 9. Vague Comic Ambitions: JEROME PATU- ROT, a general parody of this class. GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 191 MINERVA I THE DARING AND ROMANTIC 1. Daring by Circumstance: Imogene (CYM- BELINE), Helena (ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL), our Henri IV. 2. Greatly Daring Men: Hannibal, SERTOR- IUS (Corneille), David, Cyrus, Ulysses, Waina- moinen in the KALEVALA; no feminine equivalents. 3. Conspirators: Mile de Cinq-Cygne (Balzac, A DARK AFFAIR), Procida (Delavigne, SICILIAN VESPERS). Comic: Lysistrata and Praxagora (Aristophanes, ASSEMBLY OF WOMEN), Gavard (Zola, VENTflE DE PARIS), the pharmacist Don Franco (Verga, I MALAVOGLIA). 4. Daring Conquerors: Charles VIII, the young Cyrus of the ANABASIS, Brutus, legendary founder of England (THE BRUT) and other great colonizers, Dardanus, etc. 5. Knightly Adventurers: LOHENGRIN, Per- seus, St. George, AMADIS, ANTAR the Arab, EVIRADNUS (Hugo), HUON (Wieland). A parody: DON QUIXOTE. Feminine: the Valkyrie, THE AMAZONS (Mazel), Jeanne d'Arc. 6. The Chevaleresque : tragic: ALEXANDRE- LE-GRAND (Racine) , the hideous and good Tchang- KOUE (THE VICTORY OVER DEMONS), La Fayette. Comic: Pickwick (Dickens) and Mattheus (Erck- 192 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS mann-Chatrian) belong rather to the Utopian type of Apollo. 7. Explorers: Christopher Columbus, Living- stone, Marco Polo, the Conquist adores, the heroes of Jules Verne; Lady Hester Stanhope, Madame Dieulafoy, etc., are inferior. In the comic there are only masculine examples: GULLIVER, PETER WILKINS. 8. Travellers: comic: CAPTAIN PAMPHILE (Dumas), Evelpide (Aristophanes, THE BIRDS); tragic: ROBINSON CRUSOE, JAMBULE, Nauplius (Sophocles, THE NAVIGATIONS), Sindbad, WIL- HELM MEISTER. 9. The Curious and Imprudent: Psyche, Eve, Pandora, Elsa (LOHENGRIN), Bluebeard's wife and, in the comic, Schirina (Gozzi, TURANDOT) and L'lNDISCRETE (Destouches). Masculine, tragic: Actaeon; comic: LE CURIEUX IMPERTI- NENT (Destouches). 10. The Romantic: Jehan de Paris, Prince Rodolphe (Sue, THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS), Valentin (Sandeau, LA CHASSE 'AU ROMAN); feminine, tragic: Ellida THE LADY FROM THE SEA (Ibsen), Bettina von Arnim; no good comic examples. 11. Daring in Love: MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN (Gautier), CAPTAIN THERESE (Bisson GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 193 and Planquette), LA CAVALIERE (Jacques Riche- pin), Jessica in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. There are no strictly corresponding masculine types; they oscillate between 11 and 12. The Daring by Nature: D'Artagnan and other heroes of cloak and sword; Hilda in THE MASTER BUILDER. II ADVENTURERS 1. Adventurers Painted by their Enemies: the Conquistadores, Routiers, etc. 2. Adventurers by Nature: GIL BLAS, DON PABLO DE SEGOVIA. 3. Corsairs, etc.: JEAN-BART (Haraucourt) , CAPTAIN PAUL (Dumas), Duryodhana (MAHAB- HARATA), Roger de Flor, the CONDOTTIERI. 4. False Pretenders: Demetrius (Schiller, Pushkin), the heroes of THE IMPERIAL DRAGON (Judith Gautier), the false Smerdis, Naundorff. No feminine examples. 5. Criminal Adventurers: Buridan (LA TOUR DE NESLE), Cartouche, MOLL FLANDERS, (Defoe); comic: Don Caesar de Bazan (RUY BLAS). 6. Mysterious Strangers: THE FLYING DUTCH- MAN, the Stranger in THE LADY FROM THE SEA (Ibsen), the Byronic heroes, THE BLUE BIRD. No feminine examples. 194 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS 7. Intellectual Adventurers: Benvenuto Cel- lini, Beaumarchais, Villon, the Trouvdres. No feminine examples. 8. Plotters: Therese Humbert, LA FEMME D'INTRIGUES (Dancourt), the Countess in DER GROSSKOPHTA (Goethe); VOLPONE, ROBERT MA- CAIRE, ZYGMUNT PODFILIPSKI (Wissenhoff). 9. Occultists: THE ALCHEMIST (Ben Jonson), DER GROSSKOPHTA (Goethe), Chaff ery (Wells, LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM), Dousterwivel (Scott, THE ANTIQUARY) ; Mile Lenormand, Madame Fon- taine (THE HUMAN COMEDY). 10. Tragic Sorcerers: the heroes of LE LAC NOIR (Bordeaux); LA SORCIERE and other repug- nant criminals. 11. Liars: LE MENTEUR (Corneille), MON- SIEUR DE CRAC (Harleville). No good tragic masculine examples; no good comic feminine examples. A sad feminine example is LA MEN- TEUSE (Daudet). Ill THE ELOQUENT 1. Imaginative Story-tellers: Ulysses (ODYS- SEY), the Hindu Vampire of the 25 TALES OF THE VAMPIRE; Scheherezade. Tragic: the Author . of the Parables. 2. The Loquacious: Oriane and Elise (Bour- sault, MERCURE GALANT); the Marquis in THE GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 195 COUNTRY HOUSE (Dancourt), Dinacion (Plautus, STICHUS). 3. Fluent and Ready Talkers: MADAME ANGOT, MADAME SANS-GENE (Sardou); Molidre's Dorine and Martine. No symmetric masculine examples. 4. The Garrulous: Milpertius (Flers and Caillavet, LE SIRE DE VERGY). No notable fem- inine examples. 5. The Witty: Mercutio, Benedict; Rosalind, Beatrice. 6. Jesters and Banterers: Regnard's Marine and Lisette (LA SERENADE, LE DISTRAIT), Baron's Marton tmd Marion (THE JEALOUS, THE COQUETTE and THE SHAM PRUDE) ; the Satirics. 7. Mystificators and Mockers: Panurge (PANTAGRUEL), Cabrion (MYSTERIES OF PARIS), Truewit (Ben Jonson, (EPICOENE). Few women. 8. Brazen Boasters: Cleon (Aristophanes, THE KNIGHTS), NUMA ROUMESTAN (Daudet), RABAGAS (Sardou). No good feminine examples. 9. The Eloquent: John Chrysostom, a greater than Demosthenes and Pericles. Feminine reduc- tions: Portia (MERCHANT OF VENICE), Sophia (Beaumont and Fletcher, THE LITTLE FRENCH LAWYER). 10. Adventurers Luring and Misleading by 196 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS their Language : Bassanio, Lemminkainen (KALE- VALA) ; few women. VENUS > I THE SEDUCTIVE AND SEDUCING 1. Seductive and Persuasive Talkers: Lei- cester (Schiller, MARY STUART). 2. Seduction and Base Conduct : IRIS (Pinero) ; Paris (ILIAD), Egisthus in the Tragics, Mahomet (Lope, CONQUEST OP GRANADA), Leon (MADAME BOVARY). Comic: Agathon (Aristophanes, THE FEASTS OF CERES AND PROSERPINE); no similar satire in the feminine. 3. Ingenuous Impurity: Cherubin (MARRIAGE OF FIGARO), TOM JONES (Fielding), LE PETIT AMI (Leautaud); Nicette (LA CHERCHEUSE D'ESPRIT, Favart). 4. Lofty Allurement: Aspasia, the future St. Aglae of THE MARTYRS, Beatrice, Laura; St. John the Evangelist. 5. The Pretentious: MADAME GlBOU and various "snobs." 6. Tender Coquetry: Anne the wigmaker (LUTRIN), Criseis (Regnard, DEMOCRITE). No masculine examples. 7. Coquettes in Love: Titania (MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM), Pyrrha (DEUCALION AND PYRRHA, St. Foix), the Countess (Marivaux, 197 SURPRISES OF LOVE); masculine: Aubert (Adam de la Halle, LE JEU DU BERGER ET DE LA BERGERE), RoySre (Bernstein, JOUJOU), CLAVIGO (Goethe). 8. Coquettes par excellence: LA VIE DE MARIANNE (Marivaux); the symmetric masculine would necessarily be ridiculous. 9. Fickle Triflers: The traditional Marquis of repertoire has no tragic side. Comic feminine examples: Madame de Plouah (Donnay, LA BASCULE); tragic: Ida de Barancy (Daudet, JACK), Marie-Louise (Pouvillon, LE ROI DE ROME) and Rostand (L'AlGLON). 10. The Immodest and Provocative: Rosette (Gautier, MLLE DE MAUPINJ, many heroines of Boccacio. A symmetric masculine is Butti's Aldo (THE PATH OF PLEASURE). 11. Great Seducers: Don Juan (Tirso de Molina and two score authors of various lands), Lavedan's MARQUIS DE PRIOLA; Celimdne, Laura (Lope de Vega, The Mill), Cleopatra, the Queen of Sheba (Flaubert, Salomon). 12. Fops and Coxcombs: Armado (Shakes- peare, LOVE'S LABOR LOST), Kalb (Schiller, CABAL AND LOVE), Dorante (Regnard, AlTENDEZ-MOI SOUS L'ORME). Who can say that no feminine cases are to be found? 13. Fatal Seductions: Helen (ILIAD), Mohini- Maia (BHAGAVAD-GITA) , Delilah, CARMEN, LA 198 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS GlOCONDA (d'Annunzio). A single masculine example, which, on the contrary, is comic: the admirable SATYROS of Goethe. 14. Machiavellian Seducers: Lovelace, THE LIBERTINE, Lou-tchai-long; VlTTORIA COROMBONA (Webster), the Princess d'Eboli (Schiller, DON CARLOS), Adelaide (Goethe, GOETZ). II COURTESANS 1. Cold and Selfish: Sidonie, FROMONT JUNIOR AND RlSLER SENIOR (Daudet), MADAME LUPAR (Lemonnier), Ellen (Tolstoi, WAR AND PEACE). 2. Dangerous and Perfidious: Madame Mar- neffe (COUSIN BETTE), Euphrasie (THE MAGIC SKIN); masculine: Jupillon (GERMINIE LACER- TEAUX). 3. Hypocritical Parasitic Men: ANDRfi TOUR- ETTE (Muhlfield), BEL AMI (Maupassant). 4. Profligate Girls : Dol Common (Ben Jonson, THE ALCHEMIST), Anitra (PEER GYNT), Toudou of the Turkish theatre; tragic: SALOME (Oscar Wilde), Kundry (PARSIFAL), Circe (ODYSSEY), Armide (JERUSALEM DELIVERED). 5. Powerful Courtesans: MADAME DU BARRY (Belasco), Comnena (d'Annunzio, LA GLORIA), NANA. Comic: THE GIRL FROM MAXIM'S (Feydeau); masculine: the academician Alain Valran (Berton, LA MARCHE A L'ETOILE) ; tragic: GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 199 Fabriani (MARIE TUDOR), Gaveston (Marlowe, EDWARD II). A higher type: Madame de Pompadour. 6. Courtesans of Antiquity: the Bacchae, etc., or, in the Orient, the Princesses of Love (Judith Gautier) are related to 7. Humble, Tender or Innocent Girls: Mas- lova (Tolstoi, RESURRECTION), Sonia (Dostoievsky, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT), Petite-Secousse (Barres, THE GARDEN OF BERENICE). 8. Amorous Courtesans: Esther van Gobseck (HUMAN COMEDY), Goncourt's ELIZA, the cour- tesan in THE EARTHEN CHARIOT (Sudraka). 9. Affectionate Girls: Riquette (Meilhac and Halevy, MY COUSIN), THE LITTLE DUCHESS (Temens), NELLY ROZIER (Bilhaud and Henne- quin). Ill THE Vicious 1. The Inhumanly Vicious: Pasiphae, Stellius, Aristonyme of Ephesus (Plutarch, PARALLELS OF HISTORY, an apocryphal work). 2. The Infatuated: ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA (Shakespeare), the hero of VOLUPTE (Sainte- Beuve), Frantz in GOETZ VON BERLICHINGEN. 3. Gross Libertines: Catherine II, George Sand, Serenissime, ABBE PROUT (Ranson), the Turkish Karaghuez, Priapus, etc. 200 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS 4. Mature Sensualists: Lycemon (Longus, DAPHNIS AND CHLOE), THE DUENNA (Sheridan), Lady Bellaston (Fielding, TOM JONES), Marceline (MARRIAGE OF FIGARO), Hulot (COUSIN BETTE), Muff at (NANA). 5. The Disgraced and Degraded: Chevalier des Grieux (MANON LESCAUT), ROLLA, TANN- HAUSER. 6. Cruel Debauchees: Nero, Gilles de Retz, Marquis de Sade, etc.; LUCRECE BORGIA (Hugo). 7. The Insatiable: Messalina, ISABEL OF BAVARIA (Dumas), THEODORA. 8. Perfidious Debauchees: Nicele, Potiphar's wife (Lope, LABORS OF JACOB), Anne (Maeter- linck, PRINCESS MALEINE), PHAEDRA; Streck- mann (Hauptmann, ROSE BERNDT). 9. Impious Debauchees: Madame de Chante- louve (Huysmans, LA-BAS); masculine examples, such as the wicked Monks of the fables, are all comic. 10. Pedantic Debauchees: Dr. Pangloss (CANDIDE), ARISTOTE and VlRGILE in the two mediaeval Lays. 11. The Abnormal: VAUTRIN (Balzac), Jupi- ter (Marlowe, DlDO), EDWARD II (Marlowe); comic: THE CYCLOPS (Euripides); feminine: Paquita Valdes (Balzac), MLLE DE MAUPIN, etc. GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 201 12. Morphomaniacs and Opium-eaters: Marthe (Luguet and Lauras, LA PlQURE), LELIE (Willy). 13. Masochists and other Bizarre Cases: NINI L'ASSOMMEUR (Maurice Bernhardt), Albert (MLLE DE MAUPIN). APOLLO I THE IMPASSIONED 1 . Hysterical Temperaments : Adelaide Fouque (Zola, Fortune of THE ROUGONS), GERMINIE LACERTEUX (Goncourt) ; LE POSSEDE (Lemonnier). 2. The Incestuous: MYRRHA (Alfieri); Giov- anni (Ford, 'TIS PITY . . . ), Cenci (Shelley) Antiochus (Shakespeare, PERICLES). 3. Adulterers: THERESE RAQUIN (Zola), Clytemnestra (Aeschylus, AGAMEMNON). 4. Impassioned Prof aners of Religion : Marthe Rougon (Zola, CONQUETE DE PLASSANS), Hen- riette (Ancey, CES MESSIEURS), Luther, etc. 5. Generous Sacrifices of Love: Fersen (Lenoir and Lavedan, VARENNES), Lord Grenville (A WOMAN OF THIRTY), THE SORCERESS (Sardou), MADAME DE SOMMERVILLE (Sandeau). 6. Brisk Gallants: Henri IV. No symmetric feminine. 202 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS 7. Noble Hearts: TARARE (Beaumarchais), (Severus (POLYEUCTE), Nearchus (Ford, THE BROKEN HEART), Tancred (JERUSALEM DELIV- ERED), Max (Schiller, WALLENSTEIN) ; Minna von Barnhelm (Lessing). In comedy: Annette (Mow- insky, BLOWS OF FATE), Ferdinand (Shakespeare, THE TEMPEST) Tchao-ju-tcheou (THE PEAR- BLOSSOM, and the majority of the classic "JEUNES PREMIERS," a trifle vague, to be sure. 8. Sinners Redeemed by Love: MARION DELORME, CAMILLE, Lady Milford (Schiller, CABAL AND LOVE). No exact masculine equivalents. 9. Unfortunate in their Loves: Isis (Flau- bert, TEMPTATION OP ST. ANTHONY), Heloise; Hialmar (PRINCESS MALEINE), APOLLO which is remarkable in all his amours. 10. Proscribed Lovers: RHADAMISTE (Crebil- lon), Almachilde (Alfieri, ROSAMONDE), HERNANI; none feminine. 11. Forsaken or Forlorn Lovers: GRAZIELLA, DIDO, Balzac's ARIANE, Viola (Shakespeare, TWELFTH NIGHT); Antiochus (BERENICE). 12. Lovers of Married Women, not less Unfor- tunate: WERTHER, ANTONY, TRISTAN, PELLEAS. No good feminine equivalents. GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 203 II THE CHIMERICAL AND ILL-FATED 1. Vowed to Unhappiness for the Sake of Love: Camille (HORACE), PRINCESS MALEINE (Maeterlinck, DUCHESS D'AMALFl) ; Lope, Webster, Bandello and others. 2. Shamed by their Children: Priam (ILIAD), HECUBA (Euripides). 3. Victims: Cassandra (Aeschylus, AGAMEM- NON), KING LEAR, the old Moor in Schiller's ROBBERS, CEDIPUS AT COLONUS, the little Prince of Wales in Shakespeare's RICHARD III, TlN- TAGILES (Maeterlinck), Arthur (KING JOHN); see others among the Weak under Diana. 4. The Sorrowful : THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, Louis XIII, Madame du Deffant. 5. Victims of Courts: Lesurques (COURRIER DE LYON), etc. 6. The Morbidly Scrupulous: HEAUTONTI- MORUMENOS (Terence). Feminine cases, tragic cases and modern cases are lacking. 7. Vanquished by Weakness: ARMANCE (Stendhal), Leonard (LUSIADS). No feminine examples. 8. Tormented by an Obligatory Crime: ORES- TES, IDOMENEUS, JEPHTE. 9. Consequences of an Involuntary Sin: Jocasta' (CEDIPUS THE KING), Manuel (Schiller, THE BRIDE OF MESSINA). 204 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS 10. Remorse: MANFRED, Amfortas (PARSI- FAL) ; no feminine example. 11. Vanquished by Misery or Social Injustice: Gervaise (L'ASSOMMOIR), La Bruydre's ORONTE; the Morels in THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS, PHIL- OCTETES. 12. Pessimists: Buddha, ST. JOSAPHAT, TlMON OF ATHENS (Shakespeare), Athos (THREE MUSKE- TEERS), Schopenhauer. No good feminine ex- amples. 13. The Unlucky: Comic: CRAINQUEBILLE (Anatole France) , and the hero of LE PORTEFEUILLE (Mirbeau). Tragic: JACK (Daudet), RUY BLAS; Fantine in LES MlSERABLES. 14. Stricken by Madness: HERCULES FURENS, ATHAMAS, PENTHEUS, AJAX, Charles VI; Ophelia, Gretchen, ALICE (Bulwer-Lytton). 15. The Eccentric and Insane: the characters of Hoffman; few feminine cases. 16. Chimerical Lovers: MODESTE MlGNON, MADAME BOVARY, Mile de la Motte (Stendhal, LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR), the Troubadours of LA PRINCESSE LOINTAINE (Rostand). Comic: LES ROMANESQUES (Rostand), the Count in THADDEUS SOPLITZA, Andrason (Goethe, DER TRIUMPH DER EMPFINDSAMKEIT). GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 206 17. Superstitious but not Religious: Matthew Nikititch in RESURRECTION. There are no good literary studies. 18. Utopians: Olga Kroutchinine (Bariatin- sky, THE SAND BANKS), Catherine Theot, the Gnostics, Comtean Positivists, Fourrierists, Esper- antists, etc.; Sir Politic Would-be (Ben Jonson). 19. Sincere Occultists: Julie (St. Foix, THE SYLPH), FRUITS of CULTURE (Tolstoi), all comic. 20. Cnimerical Philosophers: Socrates (Aris- tophanes, THE CLOUDS), Louis LAMBERT. No women. 21. Collectors and Statisticians: COUSIN PONS, SYLVESTRE BONNARD (France); no good feminine examples. Ill THE INTELLECTUAL 1. Savants: Oldbuck THE ANTIQUARY (Scott) ; Madame Dacier. Pedants: Madame du Chate- let; MARGITES, Zoile and his follower Wolff, Lessing's YOUNG SCHOLAR, Begriffenfeld (PEER GYNT), Rondibilis (PANTAGRUEL) . 2. Sham Savants: Clarice (Gozzi, LOVES of THE THREE ORANGES), Square (TOM JONES). See also, under Neptune, Emperor Claude, Chil- peric, etc. 206 3. Pretentious Patrons of the Arts: Laurent (Lavedan, THE MEDICIS); feminine examples are lacking. 4. Enthusiastic Dilettantes: Maecenas, Prince Touan (STORY OF THE RIVER BANKS), Louis II of Bavaria. In literature, no feminine examples; in history: Elizabeth, Christina, our Countess of Beam. 5. Theorists of Art: Paolo Gambara and Garangeot (HUMAN COMEDY) might also be classed with either 3 or 4. No feminine examples. 6. Pedantic Scribblers: THE BLUE-STOCKINGS (Byron); THE SYMBOLIST (Kozlowski), the Scholar Limousin (PANTAGRUEL), d'Argenson (JACK). 7. Professional Pedants: our CORDONS BLEUS; the Cooks of Greco-Latin comedy, the Utopian pedicure Publicola Masson (HUMAN COMEDY), Daudet's Delobelle. 8. Sham Intellectuals: LES PRfcCIEUSES RIDI- CULES, FEMMES SAVANTES; Oronte in THE MISANTHROPE. 9. Intellectual Natures: the young Pascal, the Breton Jean Conan; Madame Leprince (LES EMPLOYES); comic: PECUCHET. 10. Fatal Intellectuality: REMBRANDT (Dumur and Josz), Poe, La Bruyere's ANTISTHENE and THfeOBALDE, TASSO (Goethe). GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 207 11. Heroes of an Idea: CORINNE (Stael), Marie Bashkirtseff, Flaubert, Palissy. MERCURY I THE SHREWD 1. Physical Adroitness: Arachne; no literary examples in the feminine. Hamouman (RAMAY- ANA), Puck (MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM), Passe- partout (Verne, AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS). 2. Valets or Slaves: Grotesque: JODELET, the Shakespearean Clowns, the Graciosos ; no feminine examples. Sly: Scapin, Face (Ben Jonson, THE ALCHEMIST) ; our soubrettes. 3. Mental adroitness: Rebecca (Lope, Story of Jacob and Esau); Saccard (Zola, LA CUREE), SHERLOCK HOLMES, Rastignac and Desroches (THE HUMAN COMEDY). 4. The Subtle: Claude Vignon (HUMAN COMEDY), Renan, Sainte-Beuve ; no very good feminine examples in literature. 5. Wise Diplomats: Acomat (BAJAZET) ; Madame de Lausac (Balzac, LA PAIX DU MENAGE), Anne de ^eaujeu. 6. Keen Diplomats: Antonio (Goethe, TASSO). 7. Odious Diplomats: Felix (POLYEUCTE), Metternich (Rostand, L'AlGLON), d'Albe (Schiller, DON CARLOS), Talleyrand. 208 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS 8. The Witty and Adaptable: Beaumarchais ; LYSISTRATA. 9. Flattering Demagogues: Cleon (THE KNIGHTS). 10. Courtiers: Commines (Delavigne, LOUIS XI), THfiODOTE (La Bruydre), Agaz in the Persian romance of AGAZ AND MAHMOUD, THE FLATTERER (J. B. Rousseau). Not a feminine example. 1 1 . Too Crafty Counsellors : PHAEDRA ; Carlos (Goethe, ClAVIGO). 12. The Cunning: Madame Bordin (BOUVARD AND PECUCHET) ; the elder Fourchon (Balzac, THE PEASANTS), the Host in THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR. 13. The Insinuating: Anna Mikhailovna (Tolstoi, WAR AND PEACE) ; the Lupeaulx nephews (THE HUMAN COMEDY). 14. Deceivers and Cheats: Philip (DECAMERON VII, 5), the REYNARD of ^Esop and La Fontaine, the Jackal of the PANCATANTRA. 15. The Artful: Melitta (Wildmann, DAUGH- TERS OF LYSANDER), the Buddhist nun in AGNI- MITRA AND MALAVIKA (Kalidasa) ; Chilon (Quo Vadis?), Bdelycleon (Aristophanes, THE WASPS), the vagabond Diccon in GAMMER GURTON'S NEEDLE. GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 209 16. The Unscrupulous: Monticelse (Webster, VlTTORIA COROMBONA), LOUIS XI (Mercier, Delavigne, Paul Fort), Frederick the Great, Tamerlane; in the feminine, but one aspect of Catherine de Medicis. II THE TRAITOROUS 1. Informers: . . . . 2. Spies (more honorable, on the whole): Corentin, Bibi-Lupin, etc. (HUMAN COMEDY); Mile Michonneau (from Balzac also). 3. Spies of War: Sinon, etc. 4. Traitors through Cupidity: Pylis of Troy; Tarpeia, Eriphyle, Delilah. No good literary studies in the masculine. 5. Treachery of Mean Natures: Pierrotin (the little valet of Dassoucy); no good feminine examples. 6. Traitors from Jealousy or Scorned Love: Rosalie de Watteville (Balzac, ALBERT SAVARUS), Eriphile (Iphigenie); Don Salluste (RUY BLAS), Laffemas (MARION DELORME), Pharnaces (MlTHRIDATE). 7. Revengeful Treachery: Guanhumara (BUR- GRAVES), Ithamore (Marlowe, THE JEW OF MALTA), lago (OTHELLO). 8. "Third Roles" in general: Feminine, tragic: Matrena (THE POWER OF DARKNESS); comic: 210 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS SmeraJdine (Gozzi, THE GREEN BIRD), Tartagliona (Gozzi, LOVES OF THE THREE ORANGES). Mascu- line, tragic: Begearss (Beaumarchais, THE GUILTY MOTHER), Catual (Camoens, THE LUSIADS), Philippe-le-Bel, lachimo (CYMBELINE), Ganelon (CHANSON DE ROLAND), Narcisse (BRITANNICUS) , Valin (RAMAYANA) ... I may be excused for not lingering over the nuances of this repug- nant collection. 9. Traitors to Love: the Wife of Bisclavaret (Marie de France), Delilah already cited; LE VAINQUEUR (Brahm). 10. Ingrates: THE INGRATE (Destouches), the minister Rassati-Rouchen (Bokhari, THE CROWN OF KINGS); see others under Ceres. 11. Betrayers of Friends or Brothers: Salieri (MOZART AND SALIERI, Pushkin), Judas, Franz Moor (Schiller, THE ROBBERS), Piccolomini WALLENSTEIN), Polymnestor (HECUBA); no good feminine examples. 12. The Envious: Tcheladin (Wenzyk, GLINSKI), Mortensgaard (Ibsen, ROSMERSHOLM) ; comic: L'ENVIEUX (Destouches). No good feminine examples. Ill THE KNAVISH 1. Evil Speakers and Backbiters: Madame Popinot (THE HUMAN COMEDY), De Chandour, GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 211 also from Balzac, Thersites (Homer and Shakes- peare), Palinure (Plautus, THE WEEVIL). 2. Calumniators: Basile (Beaumarchais), Don Mendo (Alarcon, WALLS HAVE EARS), our official historians, etc. Almost no feminine examples. 3. Degraded by Cupidity: Li-chi (THE ENEMY CREDITOR), Cibot (COUSIN PONS); Truffaldin (Gozzi, TURANDOT). 4. The Base and Mean: Jenkinson (VICAR OF WAKEFIELD). 5. The Sinister: Europe (HUMAN COMEDY), Tristan (Delavigne, LOUIS XI). 6. Knaves: MOLL FLANDERS; Gabrillon (Dancourt, FEMME D' INTRIGUES), Agavos after Homer; tragic: Jacqueline Collin (HUMAN COMEDY). 7. Daring Rogues (see also Minerva): Tchin- khi (THE ACCOMPLISHED WIFE), Don Gabriel de Herrera (Tirso, THE PEASANT OF VALLECAS). JUPITER I THE ARROGANT AND INSOLENT 1. Parvenus: the SANNIONS (La Bruyere), LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME, Trimalcion (SATYRI- CON), Crevel and Phileas Beauvisage in THE HUMAN COMEDY; Zanthia (Massinger, THE SLAVE). 212 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS The feminine parvenue has been insufficiently studied. 2. Pedants (the parvenus of the intellectual life): our sham scientists, our "philosophers" of the 18th century, which produced neither a Descartes nor a Malebranche. 3. The Impious: FAUST (Lenau), LUCIFERO (Butti) Campaneus (Aeschylus, SEVEN AGAINST THEBES), Pentheus (Euripides, BACCHAE). No feminine examples. 4. Vanity of Connections: Deborah (VlCAR OF WAKEFIELD), Madame Muller (Shiller, CABAL AND LOVE). 5. Naive Insolence: ERGASTI (La Bruyere), THE CHURL (Plautus). 6. Insolent Beggars: Irus (ODYSSEY). 7. The Haughty and Harsh : Herodiade, Vashti, (ESTHER), Madame de Montespan (Nota, DUCHESS DE LA VALLIRE), Honoria (Massinger, THE POR- TRAIT), Edward III (Belloy, THE BURGHERS OF CALAIS), Diocletian (Massinger, THE VIRGIN MARTYR) ,Viriate (SERTORIUS). 8. The Proud: Niobe, Dryden's Indamora, Almeria and Lyndaraxa (AURENG-ZEB, THE EMPEROR OF INDIA, THE CONQUEST OF GRANADA), Diana de Belflor (Lope, THE GARDENER'S DOG), the Empress-mother in Werner's ATTILA, Paulo GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 213 (Tirso, DAMNED FOR LACK OP FAITH), Bertrand de Rousillon (Boccacio, DECAMERON II, 8) Shakes- peare, ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL), GLINSKI (Wenzyk). 9. The Vain: Smeraldine (Gozzi, THE STAG KING), Lisette de Caquerino (DECAMERON IV, 2). 10. Exaggerated Pretensions: CESAR BlROT- TEAU, Fungoso (Ben Jonson, EVERY MAN HIS HUMOUR), THE FROG WHO WOULD IMITATE THE Ox. No feminine examples. 11. Vain Imitators: THE JAY IN PEACOCK'S PLUMAGE. Too few examples. 12. The Self-important: Mistress Western (TOM JONES), JOSEPH PRUDHOMME (Monnier), Worms-Clavelin (Anatole France), De Renal (Stendhal, LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR), MONSIEUR CARDINAL (Halevy), De Faverges (BOUVARD AND PECUCHET). II. THE HAUGHTY AND DIGNIFIED 1. Haughty by Nature: Duchess de Verneuil (Balzac, MODESTE MlGNON) ; CORIOLANUS (Plutarch, Shakespeare). 2. The Haughty and Ambitious: JULIUS CAESAR (Shakespeare) ; SURENA (Corneille), Honorie (Corneille, ATTILA), Zenobia. 3. Sorrowful Pride: Calantha (Ford, THE 214 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS BROKEN HEART), Cleora (Massinger, THE SLAVE), Marie Antoinette before the tribunal. 4. Lofty Dignity: Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi; LE PHILOSOPHE SANS LE SAVOIR. 5. Sham Distinction: Raoula (Nau, FORCE ENNEMl). See the Pretentious under Venus. 6. Old Beaux of Fine Manners: Vigneraie (Regnier, LES VACANCES D'UN JEUNE HOMME SAGE). See Venus. 7. See others of the Proud under Mars. Ill THE MAJESTIC AND PROTECTING 1. Royal Protectors: Ahasuerus (ESTHER), Saladin (DECAMERON I, 3), Theseus of the Greek Tragics and his son Demiphon (Euripides, HERA- CLIDES), Pelasgos (Aeschylus, THE SUPPLIANTS), Arthur (LAI DE LANVAL). No great feminine examples. 2. Severe Majesty: WALLENSTEIN (Schiller), Don Pedro (Calderon, THREE PUNISHMENTS IN ONE). 3. Scorned and Buffeted Majesty: Noble (REYNARD). 4. Majestic by Nature: the supreme Gods of all the religions, and their maritime counterparts, Neptune (^ENEID), ^Eolus (ODYSSEY), Noah or the king-patriarch of the Chaldeans, Assyrians, GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 215 Chinese, Armenians, Iranians, Hindus, Germans, Scandinavians, Arabs, etc., under his many names, Moses, Pythagoras (Mazel, ARCHYTAS DE META- PONTE), Vasco de Gama (LUSIADS); no feminine examples. 5. Lofty Bearing: QUEEN OF THE OCCIDENT (Chinese), Constantin (THE MARTYRS), Goethe, Chateaubriand. 6. The Venerable: Dhiritarastra (MAHAB- HARATA), Charles-Quint (Werner, LUTHER), Mar- quis de Nangis and Monsieur de St. Vallier (Hugo, MARION DELORME, LE Roi S'AMUSE). 7. The Calm: Madame Hedouin (Zola, POT- BOUILLE), the family aspect of Madame Lupar (Lemonnier); WILLIAM TELL (Schiller). 8. The Merciful: No feminine examples. Mas- culine: August (ClNNA), Joseph (Lope, LABORS OF JACOB). 9. Generous Tenderness : Stratonica (Plutarch, GENEROUS ACTS OF WOMEN), Sarah in the Bible; no masculine examples. 10. The Hospitable: Thespius, Acestes GENEID), Alcinous (ODYSSEY). 11. Protectors: the Manitous, Fetiches, Lares. Modern allegorical figures (Republic, Fatherland, Agriculture, Hygiene, etc.). Countess Mathilde, benefactress of the Papacy; Lord Chang (Pl-PA-Kl). 216 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS 12. Protection by the Weak: the aged Kin-lao (STORY OF THE RIVER BANKS) . No great feminine examples. 13. See others under the Chevaleresques of Minerva. CERES I THE GENEROUS AND PRODIGAL 1. Benevolent Good-nature: Madame Hans (THE ACCOMPLISHED SOUBRETTE) ; Hannon, Peri- plectomenes, Lysimachus and Hegion (Plautus, THE CARTHAGINIAN, THE BRAGGART SOLDIER, THE MERCHANT, THE CAPTIVES), ABB CON- STANTIN (Halevy). 2. The Charitable: Saints by the hundred, Bhima (MAHABHARATA), Squire AUworthy (TOM JONES), Omar Abd-el-Aziz (Bokhari, THE CROWN OF KINGS), Tchang-touan (THE JADE SCEPTER); Madame de la Chantrie (Balzac, THE OTHER SIDE OF CONTEMPORARY HISTORY). 3. The Generous: Ceres ; Aristeus (GEORGICS) . 4. The Liberal: PLUTUS (Aristophanes); Lakchmi (BHAGAVAD-GITA) . 5. The Sumptuous: Haroun-al-Raschid (THOU- SAND AND ONE NIGHTS), Hatim-tsai (KlTAB- ADAB ES SELATHIN), JEAN DE PARIS. 6. The Ostentatious: Few women; possibly GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 217 La Bruyere's ZENOBIE; his MAN OF STRANGE COSTUMES, Brussac (Capus, LA BOURSE OU LA VIE). 7. The Prodigal: Madame Ranevsky (Chek- hov, THE CHERRY ORCHARD), ^Esop's GRASS- HOPPER, La Bruydre's EGINE; Cleante (Molidre, THE MISER), Phidippides (Aristophanes, THE CLOUDS). 8. Gamesters: The heroines of Dancourt; LE JOUEUR (Regnard), Sacco (Fiesco). Tragic: several in THE LAND OF COCKAIGNE (Serao), Diard (THE HUMAN COMEDY), Yudhistira (MAHAB- HARATA). II THE GAY AND SENSUAL 1. The Gay: THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, Baubo, Mistress Waters (TOM JONES), Roger Bontemps, LE ROI D'YVETOT, FANFAN-LA-TULIPE. 2. Optimists: BASILIDE (La Bruyere), THE OPTIMIST (Collin d'Harleville). No notable fem- inine cases. 3. Quiet Epicureans: Helvetius; no women. 4. Bohemians: Jerome Coignard (Anatole France, AT THE SIGN OF THE REINE PEDAUQUE), THE CHEVALIER DE GRAMMONT (Hamilton), the heroes of Murger, Jean Frollo (NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS), Ha-fei-kinh (THE GAGE OF LOVE), Giboyer (LES EFFRONTES). No feminine examples. 218 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS 5. Buffoons: the Fool in KING LEAR, Karpin- dala (Rajacekhara, KARPAMANJARI), Wamba (Scott, IVANHOE), Sancho Panza, KARADSCHOUSCHE the Turkish hump-back, the Graciosos, Tabarin; no good feminine examples. 6. Kindly Old People: Dicepolis (Aristophanes, THE BIRDS), Calliphon (Plautus, PSEUDOLUS), Chremes and Micion (Terence, HAUTONTIMO- RUMENOS, THE ADELPHI), Lovewit (Ben Jonson, THE ALCHEMIST); few feminine examples. 7. Jovial Drunkards: Pleydell (Scott, GUY MANNERING), Bardolph and Sir Toby in Shakes- peare, Gnafron of the puppet-theatre, Silenus (Euripides, CYCLOPS) ; the Bacchantes, Anais (Berton and Simon, ZAZA), Aunt Caroline (Man- delstamm, SUSANNAH). 8. Estimable Drunkards: DON PIER CARUSO (Bracco). 9. Degraded by Drunkenness: Victorine the ragpicker (Balzac, COMTE DE SALLENEUVE), and Victoria the queen; Eilert Lovborg, Molvik and Ulric Brendel (Ibsen, HEDDA GABLER, THE WILD DUCK and ROSMERSHOLM) the Baron in THE LOWER DEPTHS (Gorki), THEAGENE and THEODAS (La BruyeYe), Santeul, Coupeau (Zola, L'ASSOM- MOffi). 10. Sinister Drunkards: Emperor Wenceslaus, GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 219 Emeric Baracs (Geza Gardenyi, THE WINE), Macquart (Zola, THE FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS), Agave (Euripides, BACCHANTES). 11. Drunken Rogues: Vermichel (Balzac, THE PEASANTS), Champagne (Regnard, THE SERE- NADE) ; feminine examples are wanting. 12. Gluttons: Gargamelle (Rabelais), various Ogresses (notably the stepmother of THE SLEEP- ING BEAUTY), GARGANTUA, Falstaff (HENRY IV, HENRY VI, MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR), the antique Hercules and Mercury s, HANSWURST (Goethe), Vitellius. 13. Gourmands and Epicures: Brillat-Savarin, Rossini, HERMIPPE and PHILIPPE (La Bruydre). No feminine examples. 14. Parasites: COUSIN PONS (the unique sympathetic case), the Greek, Latin and Hindu parasites, notably in THE EARTHEN CHARIOT, Italians like Chiaco in the DECAMERON (IV, 8) and Frenchmen like Des Rillettes (Courteline, THE BOWLING-GREEN). Ill THE VULGAR AND PRACTICAL 1. The Lazy: MONSIEUR BADIN (Courteline); no fetninine examples. 2. Egoists: Madame de Grignan and a num- ber of the MONDAINES of Balzac (Baronnes d'Aldrigger and du Chatelet, Countess de St. 220 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS Herem, etc.); the husband in Mirbeau's VlEUX MENAGE, Berg (Tolstoi, WAR AND PEACE), GNA- THON, the opulent GlTON and the intestate GERONTE (La Bruyere). 3. The Too Prudent: Chrysothemis (Sophocles, ANTIGONE). 4. The Pusillanimous: Prusias (Corneille, NlCOMEDE), Drances (^ENEID), said to be a por- trait of Cicero. Comic: Chrysale (FEMMES SAVANTES) ; Lepic (J. Renard, POIL DECAROTTE). No feminine examples. 5. The Craven: Calyphas (Marlowe, TAMER- LANE). Very few good studies. 6. Comic Poltroons: One side of Falstaff and of the Greek Hermes, Dionysos (Aristophanes, THE FROGS), John Daw (Ben Jonson, EPICOENE). 7. Moral Cowardice: Monsieur Lupar (Lemon- nier, MADAME LUPAR). No good feminine ex- amples. 8. The Rustic and Simple: the comic Nurses (ROMEO, THE LITTLE FRENCH LAWYER), mas- seuses, etc. 9. The Vulgar-souled: Madame Lechat (Mirbeau, LES AFFAIRES . . . ), ARTISTS' WIVES (Daudet). Masculine examples are gayer: Baron le Cogne (Monjoyeux) corresponding GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 221 rather to Ursule (CESAR BlROTTEAU), or to Mesdames Verson and Lupin, also from Balzac. 10. The Squalid and Dirty: Agatha Picquetard (HUMAN COMEDY), the Slave in THE CHAIN (Menander), Dulcinea del Toboso (DON QUIXOTE), the Marquis de Senantes (Hamilton, MEMOIRS OF THE CHEVALIER DE GRAMMONT), Gryllus (ODYSSEY). 11. The Stupid: Catoblepas (Flaubert, TEMP- TATION OF ST. ANTHONY). Almost no good lit- erary studies as yet. 12. Good Sense: Sarcey, Boileau, etc. 13. Vulgar Common Sense: Don Paolo (Bracco, THE TRIUMPH), BOUVARD (Flaubert). VULCAN I THE EARNEST AND SERIOUS 1. Narrow Professionals: Duchess d'Olivares (DON CARLOS) and other duennas (RUY BLAS, HERNANI etc.) ; the prefect Julien Brignac (Brieux, MATERNITY), J a vert (LES MISERABLES), Fix (AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS), our categorical "scientific minds," Bridoie (PANTA- GRUEL>. 2. The Clumsy and Awkward: Vanidre (THE MAGIC SKIN); Clotilde de Grandlieu (SPLENDORS AND MISERIES OF COURTESANS). Comic: our old 222 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS men on bicycles; the American woman in JE NE SAIS QUOI (Croisset and Waleffe), and our pro- vincials aping Parisians. 3. The Resigned and Stoical : Zeno, Epictetus, Job, Aritchandra, Hector (Hiade), Curiace (HORACE), Oliver (CHANSON DE ROLAND), Jean (Zola, THE DOWNFALL), Eustache de St. Pierre (Belloy, BURGHERS OF CALAIS), the ascetics; St. Felicite, the mother of the Maccabees, Epicharis, Le6na, Veturia. No good literary examples in the feminine. 4. The Just and Upright: Vera (RESURREC- TION), few other feminine examples; Bayard in GASTON AND BAYARD (Belloy), the ugly Don Juan (Alarcon, WALLS HAVE EARS), Godfrey de Bouillon (JERUSALEM DELIVERED), Lakchmana (RAMAYANA). 5. The Honest and Straightforward: Cornelia, mother of VlTTORIA COROMBONA (Webster); Abner (ATHALIE), the peasant SlE-JIN-KOUEI, a score of fine figures in THE HUMAN COMEDY, not long since taxed with immorality, Muller (Schiller, CABAL AND LOVE), Thomas Mowbray (Shakes- peare, RICHARD II), BENOIT (AND BENOITE, Haraucourt). Comic: the Spartans of the Greek stage, our Alsatians. 6. The Inflexible: the honest and fierce Lise Macquart of the VENTRE DE PARIS (Zola), the GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 223 elder Brutus, Timoleon (Massinger, THE SLAVE). See also the Just under Juno. 7. The Austere and Correct: Bronte (d'Annun- zio, LA GLORIA), Casca (JULIUS CAESAR). Fewer and fewer feminine examples. 8. The Grave and Laborious: RUTH, Martha in the Gospels, Denise (Zola, L'OEUVRE), Giotto as drawn by Boccacio (DECAMERON VI, 5), Demosthenes. 9. The Pious and Honorable: Mesdames Vaillant and Mathurine in Balzac; his Jean- Jules Popinot, Washington, Louis XVI, Kruger. 10. Laborious Enthusiasts: Flaubert. 11. The Physically Strong, often Weak in Character: Hercules, INGOMAR THE BARBARIAN (Halm), Pierre (Tolstoi, WAR AND PEACE), Samson, Ursus (QUO VADIS?). No very good feminine examples. II THE DELUDED AND DISCOURAGED 1. The Weak: Pierre (Tolstoi, POWER OF DARKNESS), DRAYMAN HENSCHEL (Hauptmann). No goc^d feminine examples. 2. The Forgiving: Richard (Daudet, THE LITTLE PARISH), Maurice Darlay (Capus and Arene, THE ADVERSARY): comic: BOUBOUROCHE (Courteline). No notable feminine examples. 224 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS 3. Victims of Perfidy: Alessandro Faro (Praga, ALLELUIA), Risler in FROMONT JUNIOR AND RISLER SENIOR (Daudet), Count de Restaud (Balzac, GOBSECK, OLD GORIOT), BISCLAVARET (Marie de France). 4. The Unloved: larbas (Marlowe, DIDO), De Granville (HUMAN COMEDY), MISS HARRIETT (Maupassant). 5. Ridiculous Young Wooers: the Bridegroom in PEER GYNT, De Leon (Madame du Deffand) . 6. Ridiculous Old Wooers: Don Guritan (RUY BLAS), Des Soupirs and Cheurpied (Dan- court, COQUETTES' SUMMER), Ferdinand (Bour- sault, THE LIVING CORPSE). 7. The Deceived: Chaumette (Marcelle Tinayre, THE STORM BIRD), Theseus (PHAEDRA); Marie Leczinska. 8. Deceived and Unlucky; the Freethinker in THE TWO CONSCIENCES (Anthelme), the Governor (Benavente, LA GOBERNADORA). 9. Deceived but Repellant: Marie-Therse (Rolland, LA MONTESPAN). 10. Deceived Philosophers: Thoas, Laertes. 11. Cuckolds: Dandin, Charles Bovary, Mene- laus (Shakespeare, TROILUS AND CRESSIDA) , Amphi- tryon (Plautus, Moliere, Dryden), Marcus Aure- lius. No good feminine types. GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 225 12. The Flouted and Derided: Strepsiades (Aristophanes, THE CLOUDS), the People (Aristo- phanes, THE KNIGHTS), Bruin in REYNARD, "initiates" into secret societies. 13. Hypochondriacs: THE IMAGINARY INVALID (Moliere), THE HYPOCHONDRIAC (J. B. Rousseau), Morose (Ben Jonson, EPICOENE), IRENE (La Bruyere) . 14. The Ingenuous, more touching, will be classed with the Weak under Diana, with the exception of III THE UNSELFISH AND DEVOTED 1. The Ingenuously Unselfish: Marion Kolb (LOST ILLUSIONS) and other old servants. Comic : Mysis and Sophronia (Terence) , Crocotia, Staphyla and Syra (Plautus), Smeraldine (Gozzi, THE GREEN BIRD), Pantalon (Gozzi, THE RAVEN, THE SERPENT WOMAN), Parmenon, Strasime, Trachalion, Stratilex, Tyndarus, Messenion, Gru- mon, Simon and Charion (Plautus), Geta (Terence, ADELPHI), Gilotin (Boileau, LUTRIN), Gervais (Mickiewicz, THADDEUS SOPLITZA). 2. purses and Foster-fathers: Masculine, comic: Pantalon; tragic: Christemo, Jonathas and Perez de Lagounia (Balzac, THE GIRL WITH GOLDEN EYES, THE MAGIC SKIN, THE MARANAS), Chao-Koung (841 A. C.) whose history is repeated 226 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS in that of Matsuo in THE VILLAGE SCHOOL (by the Japanese Tokido Izuma). Feminine: Bran- gaene (TRISTAN AND ISEULT), Euryclea (ODYSSEY), Euriclea (Alfieri, MYRRHA), Gilissa (Aeschylus, CHOEPHORES). Lycoris of Tarsus (APOLLONIUS OF TYRE). And above all these, St. Joseph, veritable emblem of the paternity which is not physical, but an act of faith and love. 3. Unselfish Devotion: the Moujiks of Tolstoi, Gurnemanz and Kurwenal (Wagner, PARSIFAL, TRISTAN) ; Pauline (Shakespeare, WINTER'S TALE), Coriola (Webster, DUCHESS OF AMALFI), and, in the comic, Lisette (MARIVAUX, THE GAME OF LOVE AND CHANCE), Suzanne (Beaumarchais, THE GUILTY MOTHER). 4. Devotion to the Point of Sacrifice: the servant Keou-tching-yu (THE MYSTERIOUS BOX), Manon Godard (THE OTHER SIDE OF CONTEM- PORARY HISTORY), Paolo (Anne Radcliffe, THE ITALIAN). 5. Devotion for Love of God: GENEVIEVE (Lamartine), many servants misunderstood by the masters who exploit and laugh at them, the Sisters of Charity, missionaries, etc. 6. Artful Devotion: Francoise Cochet, Mes- dames Olivier and Gobain in THE HUMAN COMEDY; the servant of Kouo-hoa in THE PLEDGED SLIPPER. 7. Important Guardians or Servitors : Heimdall GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 227 standing on the rainbow, Argus, Cerberus, Charon, the Douvalapalaias ; Iris, Heve. 8. Devotion Freely Given: Kent (KING LEAR), Achates (^NEID), Pisanio (CYMBELINE), Barach called Hussan (Gozzi, TURANDOT), Aubrey (Beau- mont and Fletcher, ROLLO). These border upon Friends (see Vesta); likewise upon the following: 9. Devotion because of an Unrealizable Love: Quasimodo, Butscha (MODESTE MlGNON), Gran- taire (LES MlSERABLES); no feminine examples which equal these. i 10. Disciples (see also Vesta): the Friends of Socrates, Mile de Gournay, Heloise, etc. 11. Zealots: Seide (Voltaire, MAHOMET), Lelius (Lucan, PHARSALIA), Argillan (Tasso, JERUSALEM DELIVERED), Ujitomo in THE SHOGUN (Japanese), Ivan (De Maistre, PRISONERS OF THE CAUCASUS); the female adorers of Robespierre. Devotion here serves as a pretext for satisfying the instinct of cruelty. MARS I MURDERERS AND ASSASSINS 1. Hired Murderers: Ithamore (Marlowe, THE JEW OF MALTA), the Moor in FIESCO (Schiller), Gubetta (Hugo, LUCRECE BORGIA), Franchissini (Balzac, OLD GORIOT). 228 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS 2. Bravos and Assassins: the Scythians in Athens, Cossacks, Baxter (VlCAR OF WAKEFIELD), etc. 3. Poisoners: the most notable cases are feminine: the wife of the poet Lucretius, Mesdames Lafarge and Syveton (in the opinions, perhaps erroneous, of their contemporaries), La Brinvilliers, Myrille (Prodrome, RHODANTHE AND DOSICLES). 4. Vindictive Murderers: Clytemnestra, the Danaides, Yanetta (Brieux, THE RED ROBE), the athlete Cleometes. 5. Slayers of Children: Medea, THYESTES (Euripides, Seneca, Crebillon, etc.) 6. Fratricides and Parricides: Cain (GENESIS, Byron, Gessner), Eteocles in a dozen famous tragedies, Balthasar (Verhaeren, THE CLOISTER), Albert (Pushkin, THE MISER BARON). No great feminine examples. 7. Unconscious Murderers: Etienne Lantier (Zola, LA BfiTE HUMAINE) ; the mythologic Scylla. 8. Cunning and Cynical Murderers: Joseph (Mirbeau, JOURNAL D'UNE FEMME DE CHAMBRE), Bernadille (Montfleury, LA FEMME JUGE ET PARTEE). No women. 9. Murderers through Desire of Wealth and Advancement: the young Tascheron (Balzac, A COUNTRY PARSON) ; no feminine examples. GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 229 10. Murderous but Ridiculous Brigands: Choppart, called the Amiable (THE COURIER OF LYONS), Jean Hiroux. No feminine examples. 11. Sinister Brigands: Dubosc (COURIER OF LYONS), Pilla Borsa (Marlowe, THE JEW OF MALTA), Taillefer (HUMAN COMEDY), Kirata (STORY OF THE TEN CHILDREN, by the Hindu Dandin), Cartouche, Mandrin; no feminine ex- amples. 12. Furious Bandits: Those who subdued Hercules, Antiphates the cannibal (ODYSSEY), Bhakas (MAHABHARATA), Polyphemus. 13. Cold-blooded Murderers: M. Thiers, author of the greatest massacre in the history of civil wars, Sylla, Marius, etc. H THE VIOLENT AND REBELLIOUS 1. Rebels against the Law: THE ROBBERS (Schiller), Pisander called Marullo THE SLAVE (Massinger), Enrico (Tirso de Molina, DAMNED FOR LACK OF FAITH), the savage and edifying Eusebio (Calderon, DEVOTION TO THE CROSS), FRA DlAVOLO, Ferrante Palla (Stendhal, CHART- REUSE DE PARME). No good feminine examples of this nature. 2. The Brutal and Primitive: Nimrod (GENE- SIS), Matho (SALAMMB6), Zamolxis (Mazel, ARCH- TAS DE METAPONTE); LA FILLE SAUVAGE (Curel). 230 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS 3. The Quarrelsome: Don Fernand the bully, the only violent "character" in La Bruydre, Bianchi (Balzac, THE MARANAS). 4. "Mousquetaires:" THE THREE MUSK- ETEERS and similar heroes of cloak and sword. 5. Braggarts: Lamachus (Aristophanes, THE ACHARNIANS), the MILES GLORIOSUS of Plautus, Thrason (Terence, THE EUNUCH), Olibrius of the MYSTERIES, the Rodomont of Boiardo and Ariosto. No feminine examples. 6. Cruel Warriors: Han-yen-tcheo (THE PAGODA OF HEAVEN), Duhcasana (MAHABHA- RATA), Alarcon in JERUSALEM DELIVERED, Davout (Tolstoi, WAR AND PEACE), THE AMAZONS (Mazel). 7. Savage Hunters: Nimrod again, ST. JULIAN THE HOSPITALLER (Flaubert), the father in THE FOSSILS (Curel), ESAU (Jehan Behourt), Hippolyte. 8. The Abusive: Vallenod (Stendhal, LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR), our polemists who fancy themselves Juvenals; the Elder Sister of the fairy tale, from whose mouth came toads. 9. The Uncivil: THE PEASANT (Epicharmus) , L'OPINIONATRE (Brueys) ; Boileau's ''BRUSQUE IMPERTINENTE" in the SATIRE ON WOMEN. 10. The Shrewish or Surly : Marianne (Grimm, THE COLLIER OF CROYDON), Katherine (TAMING OF THE SHREW); Ajax (Shakespeare, TROILUS GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 231 AND CRESSIDA), Cleomachus and Antemonides (Plautus, THE BACCHAE, THE CARTHAGINIAN), Squire Western (TOM JONES), Isegrim (Regard); MLLE FIFI (Maupassant). Tragic: AJAX (Soph- ocles, etc.), Cloten (Shakespeare, CYMBELINE), HORACE (Corneille), Romulus, Sigismond (Cal- deron, LIFE IS A DREAM), Philippe Brideau (HUMAN COMEDY), Caliban (THE TEMPEST). 11. The Irascible: Achilles (ILIAD), HAKON JARL (Oehlenschlager). 12. Ravishers: Besides the Violators (Venus), the Turk Asena, Agassamenes, Boreas, the Cen- taurs, those "picadors of antiquity." 13. The Impulsive: Mile Dumesnil; Varem- baud (Bruyerre, IN PEACE). 14. Revolutionaries by Temperament: The Titans (Hesiod, THEOGONY), DANTON (Buchner, Rolland, etc.), our Communards, Souvorine (Zola, GERMINAL), our anarchists. 15. Tyrannicides: Harmodius, Aristogiton, Caserio; CHARLOTTE CORDAY (Ponsard, Silvestre, etc.). The Regicides might here be added. Ill THE BOLD AND FEARLESS s 1. Heroines of Sacred History: Jahel, Judith; no equivalent masculine examples. 2. Patriot Heroes: Jeanne Hachette, Clelie, 232 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS the Amazons of Dahomey; NlCOMEDE, Gustav Conrad (Mickiewicz, FEAST OF THE DEAD). 3. Intrepid Warriors: SIEGFRIED, RHESUS (Euripides; ILIAD), Richard Coeur-de-lion, Hot- spur (Shakespeare, HENRY IV), THE ClD, CHARLES XII, SlE-JIN-KOUEI (by the courtesan Tchang- koue-pin), and all the Mars of all the cults. 4. Calm and Noble Courage: Porus (Racine, ALEXANDRE-LE-GRAND), Xiphares (MITHRIDATE). 5. Moral Rebels: The Prophets, St. John the Baptist; HEDDA GABLER (Ibsen), RENEE MAU- PERIN (Goncourt). 6. Enthusiasts: Nicolas Rostof (Tolstoi, WAR AND PEACE), Silvere (Zola, FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS). 7. Ridiculous Enthusiasts: Bambaef (Tour- geneff, SMOKE). 8. The Generous and Honest: Neoptolemes (Sophocles, PHILOCTETES), Nemours (Delavigne, LOUIS XI), BRITANNICUS, Seleucus (Corneille, RODOGUNE), Hemon (Sophocles, ANTIGONE), Antoninus (Massinger and Dekker, THE VIRGIN MARTYR). 9. Comic Audacity: Cecile (Labiche, DEUX TlMIDES). No masculine examples. GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 233 DIANA I THE TENDER AND SENTIMENTAL 1. The Indiscreetly Sentimental : Dona Leonor and Dona Mencia (Calderon), Dona Sol (HERNANI), Schiller's MARY STUART and the Queen in his DON CARLOS, Madame de Renal (Stendhal, LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR). No good masculine examples. 2. Easily Disposed to Follow the Beloved: Abigail (Marlowe, THE JEW OF MALTA), Sieglinde (Wagner, WALKtiRE), JULIET, THISBE; Fan in THE SACRIFICE OF FAN (Kong-ta-yong), Calyste du Guenic (Balzac). 3. The Tender: Jacqueline (Marivaux, SUR- PRISES OF LOVE), Leonie (Regnard, THE SERENADE) Glycere (Alciphron, EROTIC LETTERS), Charlotte de Kergarouet (Balzac, BEATRIX), Lieou-mei (Kiao-meng-fou, THE GAGE OF LOVE), Ingrid (Ibsen, PEER GYNT). 4. Amorous Adolescents and Children: PETIT- COEUR (Jean Viollis), Georges (NANA), Justin (MADAME BOVARY); Jeannine (Bataille, THE ENCHANTMENT). 5. Passionate Friendships of Childhood and Adolescence: not well studied as yet. 6. Lover-friends: Pauline (THE MAGIC SKIN); no good masculine equivalents. 234 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS 7. Pure Lovers: Jean-Paul Richter; Madame Rcamier. 8. Tender Visionaries: Elsa (LOHENGRIN); St. Francis of Assisi, Frederic in Picard's JERICHO. 9. The Silently Tender: Aude (CHANSON DE ROLAND). 10. Tender Self-sacrifice: BERENICE (Racine; Corneille), DUCHESS DE LA VALLIERE (Bulwer- Lytton, Dumas, Nota, etc.); Attale (NlCOMEDE). 11. Humble Lovers: GERTRUDE (Bouchinot), Cecile (Pharamond, MONSIEUR BONNET); no cor- responding masculine examples. 12. The Seduced and Betrayed: Fantine in LES MlSERABLES, Annette (Brieux, MATERNITY), Gretchen (FAUST), Marie Beaumarchais (Goethe, CLAVIGO), Elvira (DON JUAN). Comic: Molidre's Charlotte and Mathurine. II THE WEAK 1. Tenderness to Terrible Rivals: lo (Aeschy- lus, PROMETHEUS BOUND), Atalide (BAJAZET), PRINCESS MALEINE (Maeterlinck), Romilde (Alfieri, ROSAMONDE), Madame Elvsted (HEDDA GABLER). No entirely symmetrical masculine examples. 2. Beloved by Formidable Men: Junia (BRITANNICUS), Palmire (MAHOMET), Esmeralda GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 235 (NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS), Fleur-de- Marie (MYS- TERIES OF PARIS). 3. Espoused by Imposing Men: Zenocrate (Marlowe, TAMERLANE), Calphurnia (Shakespeare, JULIUS CAESAR), Leonora (FIESCO). Parodies: Madame Vital (Balzac, COMEDIENS SANS LE SAVOIR), Gina (Ibsen, THE WILD DUCK). Mascu- line parodies would be highly amusing. 4. Victims of Husbands: Desdemona (OTHELLO) and, in another nuance, Jane Grey (Webster and Dekker, SIR THOMAS WYAT), MADAME DE CHAMBLAY (Dumas), the wife of the Brigand in MAROUSSIA (Stahl). No symmetric cases in the masculine. 5. Persecution by Rejected Suitors: CLARISSA HARLOWE, the chaste Suzanne. 6. Pure and Gentle Victims: Iphigenia in a dozen tragedies, Polyxena in as many more, the daughter of JEPHTHA (Boyer, Buchanan) ; Balder. 7. Helpless Children or Young Girls: TlN- TAGILES, the LAMB of ^Esop and of Scripture, ASTYANAX in half a dozen tragedies, CHILDREN OF EDWARD (Delavigne), Arthur (Shakespeare, KJNG JOHN), ladjnadatta (RAMAYANA), Andro- meda. 8. Youthful Victims: ATYS (Quinault), Adonis, Hyacinth, etc. 236 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS 9. Victims of Social Corruption: MADAME BAPTISTE (Maupassant). 10. Moral Weakness : Lisa Bolkousky (Tolstoi, WAR AND PEACE), Madame Grandet (Balzac); Wenceslas Steinbock (COUSIN BETTE), Carlo (Praga, UNDINE), EDWARD II (Marlowe), RICHARD II (Shakespeare), Jonathan (A. Gide, SAUL). 11. Weak Parents: the Miller (Pushkin, ROUSSALKA), Juan Roxo (Lope de Vega, FON- TOVEJUNE). 12. The Shy: Orlando (Shakespeare, As YOU LIKE IT), LES DEUX TIMIDES (Labiche). 13. The Hesitant: L'lRRESOLU (Destouches), L'lRRESOLU (Berr), L'lNDECIS (Fontainas). 14. Boobies: MONSIEUR MUSARD (Picard). 15. The Capricious: Emma Regoli (Torelli, THE HUSBANDS), Angelique in ROLAND FURIEUX; THE INCONSTANT (Collin d'Harleville), PROTEUS and THE SPOILED CHILD (Destouches). 16. The Null and Banal: Many sketches in THE HUMAN COMEDY. 17. Weak in Mind, but nevertheless superior: ALICE (Bulwer-Lytton) ; THE IDIOT (Dostoievsky). 18. Madness: Ophelia (HAMLET) and Gretchen (FAUST), the heroes of Poe; comic: Triboullet (PANTAGRUEL), Androgyne (Ben Jonson, VOL- PONE). GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 237 19. Artless Simpletons: Dame Pliant (Ben Jonson, THE ALCHEMIST), the innumerable Jocris- ses and Janots, the Pierrots, the Shakespearean Clowns, Wagner in Goethe's FAUST, the sceptic Trouillogan so well scouted by our good Father Rabelais, Voltaire's CANDIDE, Han in THE TRANS- MIGRATION OF YO-CHEO, the two Poirets in Balzac, etc. We might here distinguish between (a) the ordinary Artless Simpleton, (b) the Amorous Simpleton, (c) the same married, before arriving among the "Deceived," (d) the Poltroon, (e) the Lofty Simpleton (bordering upon Jupiter), (f) the Duped Simpleton, who belongs rather to Vulcan. 20. The Heedless and Absent-minded: MENALQUE (La Bruyere), LE DISTRAIT (Regnard), the Monk with the Pot of Meal (PANCATANTRA) . No feminine examples. 21. The Ingenuously Sensible: the old Count Rostof in WAR AND PEACE, LE JONGLEUR DE NOTRE-DAME. Comic: the old Pantalon (Gozzi, THE GREEN BIRD). 22. The Humble and Pathetic: the Child in MOTHER AND CHILD (C. L. Philippe) ; CINDERELLA. Ill THE PURE s 1. Ingenues: Aminta (Tirso, THE SEDUCER OF SEVILLE), Aute (Lope, DISCOVERY OF THE NEW WORLD), Lelie (La Fontaine, THE ENCHANTED CUP. 238 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS 2. Purity Despite Impure Environment: YVETTE (Maupassant), seminarists in barracks, a potential poet in a boarding-school, etc. 3. Purity of Soul Despite Physical Impurity: Sonia (Dostoievsky, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT). 4. Purity Sweetened by Tenderness: Virginia in PAUL AND VIRGINIA, Cymodocee in THE MARTYRS, Miranda in THE TEMPEST, La Bruyere's ARTEMIRE. 5. The Pure: ION (Euripides), Joas (ATHALIE), Blanche (Huysmans, L'OBLAT), Dom Marc (Ver- haeren, THE CLOISTER). 6. The Simple: L'lNGENU (Voltaire), Friday (ROBINSON CRUSOE). 7. The Upright: Gennaro and Didier (Hugo, LUCRECE BORGIA, MARION DELORME), Rudenz (WILLIAM TELL), TELEMAQUE (Fenelon); Blanche of Castile, PIERRETTE (Balzac), Isabella (MEASURE FOR MEASURE). 8. The Chaste: HlPPOLYTE (Euripides), Joseph (PARSIFAL), St. Alexis, Daphne, Tarsia (APOLLONIUS OF TYRE) ; Sts. Catherine and Claire, and above all, of course, the Virgin Mother of Christ. Ill THE 369 UNPUBLISHED CHARACTERS AND THEIR 154,980 VARIETIES In the course of the preceding classification I GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 239 have noted the absence of 369 species of characters in our literatures. 57 other species have been but little studied. Among these 426 categories, 309 belong to the feminine, of which 155 are comic and 154 tragic. 56 comic and 61 tragic characters form the masculine contingent. Of these 426 cases, if some are met with in fiction, they are wanting in drama, or vice versa. Now all, or nearly all, may be multiplied by the 5 principal ages: Infancy, Adolescence, Youth, Maturity, Old Age. It follows, in short, that avarice, courage, love, ambition, etc., create, as I have already said, types which differ widely according as these passions reign in a child, in an old man, in an old maid, in a young wife or in a middle-aged man. Let us take only the 369 cases entirely unused. The 1845 varieties obtained by means of this multiplication by 5 will be multiplied in turn by the different social positions, for the ambition of a CESAR BIROTTEAU, for example, shows neces- sarily an aspect quite distinct from those offered in MACBETH, or in a peasant anxious to extend the boundaries of his field. 4$ince we can reckon 7 principal social classes (Royalty, Aristocracy, Upper Middle-class, Lower Middle-class, Working Class, Peasantry and Pro- letariat) we have at the least 12,915 unpublished 240 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS types, and this by confining our multiplication to the 369 cases entirely unused. Let us not forget that not only among the 57 cases lightly touched upon, but likewise among the cases already analyzed in literature, some of the 4 or 5 ages (especially Infancy, Adolescence and Old Age) and of the social ranks (notably the lowest) have been for the most part neglected. So, after a study of -these new lacunae, we can carry our figure of 12,915 to 20, 30 or 40,000. Let us keep for the present to our 12,915. In our Classification we contented ourselves with subdividing into 3 each of the 12 Divine Types, considering them in relation to the two sexes, and in both a tragic and a comic light. Each of these sub-types in itself tends likewise, in curious fashion, toward a new duodenary subdivision: the Pious offered us 11 categories, the Faithful 14, the Jealous 12, etc. And I have rather avoided than sought this perpetual grouping of the Dozen, for I wished to leave the greatest possible elasticity in the meshes of the net which I was endeavoring to draw about Humanity. "Very well," it may be said, "from your 369 unused types we see springing the 12,915 new characters which you tell us to multiply by 12, and thereby estimate 154,980 lacunae in our literature. But tell us now how to fill them, GENERAL CLASSIFICATION 241 these irritating lacunae! Tell us what to do, direct our hands, if you can, in the drawing of these 154,980 figures, or simply of these 12,915 characters, or even of the 369 unused types which you have just pointed out!" Nothing could please me better than such a request. In constituting each one of the characters which are wanting in our literatures, it is neces- sary first to establish its PROPORTIONS. After which, it remains only to study the art of presenting them, these proportions, by means of the laws of LITERARY PERSPECTIVE. These two studies the PROPORTIONS of the human soul and PERSPECTIVE in matters of psychology will form the objects of the two chapters through which I now invite the reader to follow me, before I bring this book to its conclusion. A Treatise on the Proportions of the Human Soul CHAPTER XI I THE COMPLETE SOUL In each of us, it has been affirmed above, there exists not simply one character, one individual, one Self, nor a group of two or three, nor a collectivist colony, as the more audacious psy- chologists claim, but the sum of ALL human souls, since the human soul is everywhere the same and in every one complete. But it has allowed itself not without struggles to be to some extent enslaved, ankylosed: 1st : By EDUCATION, mental, moral and physical. 2nd: By verbal EQUIVOQUE, the base upon which mythologists have raised their "etymolog- ical system," which recalls to our minds that Socrates likewise attributed all sins to misunder- standing, to imperfect definitions. 3rd: By EXAMPLE, that vast "euhemerism" which descends from the heights of legendary history to the familiar relations of daily life. Such are the three routes by which the Complete Soul within every man is led to accept, to adopt the special attitude to which his companions, TREATISE ON PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMAN SOUL 243 likewise artificially moulded, wish to reduce it, in short, his "function." And by it the rest of his free activity is suppressed. He has con- sented to play a role, he has become an actor in the human comedy, a hypocrite among hypo- crites. His soul, priestess of the PARTIAL HUMAN TYPE which has been assigned to it, abjures for the sake of this idol the totality which it rightly should be, the image of God, which is infinite and perfect. Henceforth, confused by the press of unacknowledged revolts rising from the sacri- ficed portions of its plenitude, it will deny, desper- ately and boldly, the existence of this totality, will endeavor "to conform its conduct to its principles," becoming thus a double or multiple being, contradictory at all points, instead of remaining single, complete and harmonious. So, into each of these fictions which constitute a Character, we must descend. And in seeking behind the PARTIAL HUMAN TYPE which has been adopted, for the eleven others forced back into shadow, we shall establish the "Proportions" of the deformed and martyrized soul. In even the noblest Olympians, these "propor- tions" are in some degree imperfect. Among those of Hellas, for example, no place is found for tender purity. We must turn toward the ancient India of the Aryans, or toward hyper- 244 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS borean snows to find the image of innocence; in Greece it is, so to speak, obliterated by the two neighboring deities Ares and Hestia. From them, in fact, Artemis-Hecate receives, on the one hand, her cruelty and taste for violent exercises, and on the other the shadow and parody of piety in the sorceries of Thrace, while her Phcebean gentle- ness, thus corrupted, does not shine in any myth with the chaste light which our sentimentalism vainly attributes to it. What a contrast dost thou show us, O sainted Virgin of Judea! Everywhere, in each religion, each nation, each individual whom we shall find denying or neglecting one of these twelve aspects and despis- ing it as "foreign," we shall, persevering, obtain an acknowledgment of it. And it is the lacunae thus filled which will illumine for us, by complet- ing it, the Individual, the Century, the People, etc., heretofore false or illusory by role or by custom, and for that reason superficially and ill understood. II FROM WITHOUT INWARD: POLITICS AND PSYCHOLOGY: THEOPHRASTUS. The Evolution of these divers aspects, these divers instincts, these divers types through History will explain for us their succession in the single human heart. TREATISE ON PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMAN SOUL 245 Instead of proceeding, in short, from the latter, invisible and consequently unknown, to the social group, exterior, visible, tangible and known, as our age is accustomed to do, is it not more in accord with the scientific method of the age to take the opposite course? The idealist Plato, without doubt, powerfully illuminated Politics by connecting the passions with its diverse revolutions, showing in each of the latter the consequence of one of the former, and a Taine has in our own day made use, if not of the idea, at least of the image, in explaining the overthrow of the French social system. But if, taking up the profound idea of the Greek philosopher, we now examine it in an inverse sense, which is to say scientifically, proceeding from visible Politics to the mentality of the indi- vidual, what a clearly personified and OBJECTIVATED psychology will Politics incarnate for us ! This psychology history is daily broadening and consolidating; we have begun to grasp the rhythm of it through the ages (in the law of four- century periods and of twelve generations). In turn, epic or POETRY in general, if we may believe Aristotle gives us its most durable verities, as the DRAMA, with its action and mim- icry, presents its most perfect and tangible image, according to the same author. We here catch 246 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS a glimpse of what PANTOMIME, which connects these with the plastic arts, might become, were it one day resuscitated from the pitiful shroud of our Pierrots. The Roman alone perceived its possibilities of greatness when he applied it not only to the interpretation of Greek drama, but to the events of his own civil life, which he knew to be decisive in the history of the world. Thus we emerge from the psychological mists of philosophy to grasp at last concrete realities, discarding the abstract phantoms of vague ' 'faculties" to seize upon actions and forces. The irreconcilable (and hereditary) duality of our nature, the four elements or "tempera- ments" between which it continues to be torn, their six possible combinations, identified with the six directions in which our energy can move within the three dimensions of space, finally the twelve limits which are created when they meet with the first obstacle which forces them back, the twelve physiognomy- types which we have re-encountered in all groupings, all these we shall demand that every soul reveal and con- fess to, in our conviction that every soul is iden- tical with the complete human soul, and that we cannot know or account for the bases of its domi- nant "character" without first having examined it successively from these dozen angles. TREATISE ON PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMAN SOUL 247 We shall call to witness, in the first place, the THEORISTS, eldest and most original of whom is Theophrastus. A "character" in his collection is usually preceded by a definition, in conformity with the taste of his master Aristotle, and is frequently summed up in a final formula. Between these, it is sketched in traits whose number varies from 6 to 16. There is, indeed, but a single sketch in 6 traits, the TARDILY EDUCATED, so little developed that Molidre could draw from it only the first act of the BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME, and we find, on the other hand, but two figures having 16 traits, the SHAME- LESS FELLOW and the BOOR, necessarily a little heavy, while the sentences, purposely full of repetitions, reach but 15 for the LOQUACIOUS. If 8 strokes of the pencil were sufficient for the DISCONTENTED, as for the SUSPICIOUS and the IRRITATING MAN, 9 for the OSTENTATIOUS and 10 for the ZEALOUS, the PROUD and the RASCAL, it is easily seen that, with its repetitions sup- pressed, the DISSIMULATOR, and, with four of his secondary traits readily reduced to two, the SUPERSTITIOUS, both so admirable, will return to the dozen ARfiTES under which are thus pre- sented to us twenty of these twenty-eight mar- velous "tanagras." Besides the two preceding, five others consist of 11 traits each (the WHEEDLER, the ABSENT-MINDED, the BRUTAL, the VAIN- 248 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS GLORIOUS, the GRANDEE), three of 13 (the NEWS- MONGER, the SLOVEN, the BORE) and all the rest of exactly 12 (the FLATTERER, the GARRULOUS, the BOLDLY GREEDY, the NIGGARD, the MISER, the SLANDERER and the COWARD. Now these traits, these ARfiTES of a figurine, may be themselves classed in 2 categories, which is to say in a half-dozen couples; these in turn can be re-divided, sometimes into two groups, sometimes into three. The COWARD, for example, is shown in 6 attitudes at sea and 6 in war. Or again, we find in the ABSENT-MINDED, 3 groups of 4 traits each, in themselves perfectly symme- tric, the 1st, 2nd, 5th and 10th traits, the 4th, 6th, llth and 12th, the 3rd, 7th, 8th and 9th. Of these three groups, the first shows the personage IN THAT WHICH CONCERNS HIMSELF, characterized here by a perpetual absence of mind; the second tetrad describes him in the ORDINARY RELATIONS of life; the third represents him speaking and acting AS IF ON THE STAGE OF A THEATRE: he appears at first LYRIC, then EPIC, then DRAMATIC. And we need but study a little the six facets thus coupled by each of these three axes analogous to those which in Chapter VI opposed the objective and possessive, active and sensitive, intellectual and material to see appear- ing at the 12 aretes the 12 eternal figures of the gods. TREATISE ON PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMAN SOUL 249 Doubtless we have here exceeded altogether the intention of the author (although a Greek), but we perhaps exceed less the ideal' which he instinctively pursued, just as it was uncon- sciously pursued by the makers of Legend, full of beautiful tales, naive and logical, whose epi- sodes have none the less been gathered by the successors of Dupuis into a "solar myth" and the twelve signs of the Zodiac! Both Legend and Theophrastus were but obey- ing an AESTHETIC INSTINCT which consists in adaptation to the general rhythm of the universe; this rhythm proceeds from the three dimensions which oblige man, physical and moral, dynamic man to distribute his energies in six directions, until, forced back by conflicting energies, they turn obliquely and are quickly condensed into twelve laws, twelve "gods sprung from man." We know that the 28 studies of Theophrastus were drawn, as La Bruy&re says, "from the Ethics and Morals of Aristotle," and that "the founda- tion of the characters described therein comes from the same source." The stream from that source may be followed across the centuries, from the day of the author of the POETICS to the moment when, swollen by the tributaries which from every direction have brought to it Chris- tianity with its amazing decrees, it became a 250 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS vast theological river carrying the sum of all European moralities. In each of the component items accorded by St. Thomas Aquinas or his predecessors to a vice, in each of the definitions or conclusions of the Greek moralist and his successors we may grasp a link of the DIDACTIC chain whereby the monography of that vice is connected with the whole of the general classification adopted by the author; and each classification may be brought back, as we have observed, to our tab- leau of the Twelve Gods. This didactic element comes finally to com- plete the elements or tetrads, lyric, epic and dramatic, above pointed out in each "figurine" of character. In short, after having detached it from one of the articles of moral theology, we find that it exhibits, as we shall see, the 12 prin- cipal traits. Ill ST. BERNARD, ST. BENOIT AND SENECA: THE VARIOUS LITERARY FORMS Let us take from St. Bernard, for example, the TREATISE ON THE DIFFERENT DEGREES OF HUMILITY AND PRIDE. We find distributed in 3 groups the 12 steps by which the scholar descends into Pride. He here retraces inversely precisely the path by which he climbed the 12 degrees of TREATISE ON PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMAN SOUL 251 humility, according to the ride previously given by St. Benoit. From the height to which the great Patriarch led him with HUMILITY OF THE EYES, the last of the Fathers shows him beginning to descend by CURIOSITY OF MIND. LEVITY next soon causes him to lose his CALM AND GENTLE SPEECH. INAPPROPRIATE MIRTH will take from him the benefit of INFREQUENT LAUGHTER. BOASTFULNESS will destroy the work of SILENCE. Individual PECULIARITY will make him detest the COMMON RULE. ARROGANCE will replace the HABIT OF ESTEEMING HIMSELF INFERIOR TO OTHERS, a right and virtuous habit based upon a pro- found reason, as may be seen by what was said in Chapter II on THE IMITATION OF CHRIST. Foolish PRESUMPTION triumphs over a wholesome CONSCIOUSNESS OF HIS USELESSNESS. He UPHOLDS HIS FAULTS like a poor pagan, instead of CAN- DIDLY ACKNOWLEDGING EVEN HIS SINFUL THOUGHTS. PRETENDED CONFESSION destroys what edification he may have formerly given by ENDURANCE IN THE SPIRIT OF OBEDIENCE. REBEL- LION enters on the scene, in place of SUBMISSION TO SUPERIORS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD; then follows LIBERTY TO SIN, in place of SELF-DENIAL; finally, at the bottom step, the HABIT OF SIN uproots the CONSTANT FEAR OF GOD. We may go now, if we wish, to the heart of the details: the 12 types of Scholar, appearing on 252 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS the 12 steps of this ladder, may each be outlined before the reader in a dozen traits, like the Characters of Theophrastus. Upon the step of ARROGANCE do we not see standing out conspicuously the VAIN, whose admirable portrait, by the same St. Bernard, may here be quoted: "The Vain Man is loud of voice or sulkily silent; he is dissolute in joy, angry in grief; inwardly dishonest and outwardly honest; he is stiff in his demeanor, sharp in his responses; always ready to attack, always weak in defense; he yields with bad grace; he is importunate to obtain his desires; he does not do those things which he can and should do, but he is quick to attempt what he cannot and should not do." (DE MOR. XXXIV, 16). And we could, without straining a point, reduce to the same "Proportions" the portraits which fill the writings of orators and moralists in all literatures. Constantly does the effort to per- fect and condense one of these portraits lead toward these duodenary Proportions. Flaubert, that master of pure prose, observed likewise that the labor of the stylist involuntarily inclines the rhythm of a phrase toward the duo- denary proportions of the alexandrine. So in- nately is this rhythm a part of us ! TREATISE ON PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMAN SOUL 253 Need we recall the 12 visible signs of an angry man, according to Seneca (DE IRA) ? "His eyes flash and glitter; his face reddens; his heart beats rapidly; his lips tremble; his teeth grind; his hair bristles; he breathes hard and with a hiss; his joints crack as he clenches his hands; he growls or bellows; his hasty words interrupt each other; he beats his hands together; he stamps his foot," and, as the author sum- marizes him in a final 13th trait, "all his agitated being exhales menace." But why enlarge further upon the THEORISTS? It is the same with the HISTORIANS, although here the painter inscribes a famous name under his study. That of Seneca, above quoted, might be entitled NERO. We find simply that in reality the theoretical essays upon this or that passion, vice or virtue NEVER HAVE THE ABSTRACT CHARACTER they are assumed to have. Each of these essays represents a human being, duly constituted, a little anthropomorphic god (there are no others, since man, according to the Bible, is theomorphic), a demon or an angel, as the Middle Ages would have termed him, a personage necessarily equipped with all his organs. The Theatre of the subtile Middle Ages, with its Moralities especially, abounds in such little 254 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS gods; despite their allegorical names they gambol about, and in their animation display more real life than has remained in their descendants of the drama of Character, of Manners or of Plot. FALSE-SEEMING here acts and speaks with another verisimilitude, another resemblance to what we see around us, than do the characters of Messieurs C., D., L. etc.; mediaeval VAIN-GLORY is far more a human being, walking, rejoicing, eating, sleeping, than the GLORIEUX of Destouches, adorned with twenty titles of nobility, yet is not the comedy of Character superior in this respect to that of Manners or of Plot? If, instead of vaguely designating Don Fernand as his AMBITIOUS, Destouches had transferred his characteristic signs to this or that favored celebrity, he would have written a so-called HISTORIC DRAMA. In the majority of the "Characters" of the moralist La Bruy&re, we can recognize the figures drawn in the various Memoirs of the period; Memoirs which, in restoring them to their civil state, make of them also historic studies. So purely imaginary is the distinction between the art of the MORALIST and that of the HISTORIAN! Still more do the EPIC POET and the NOVELIST, more generous in their types, mingle with the moralists. The LYRIC POET in turn whether TREATISE ON PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMAN SOUL 255 he shows us one of the convulsions of his own soul, or the reflection therein of a light from this or that face of the external world does he not also give us the "document" of an attitude, of one of the ARfiTES of the Self everywhere identical, just as the epic poet, the novelist, the theologian, the historian and the moralist have already done? Perspective in Matters of Psychology CHAPTER XII I COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE Certainly it is interesting, after having con- templated the elements of a character at their crisis in the LYRIC, and after having studied its analysis by the THEORISTS of the soul, moralists, technicians, casuists, to follow, through his- tory, epic, romance, in a word, through NARRA- TIVE, the fashion in which these elements evolve, in which they succeed one another, and to con- sider them from the point of view of unilinear time. Two characters arranged in parallel, according to the manner of Plutarch, whether characters of individuals or of peoples, even three, four, five or more, whose course we observe synchroni- cally, may form not merely a historian's diver- sion, but may inaugurate a science as yet unstudied and fecund: that of Comparative Biography. Will it not be interesting to grasp them, these characters, in an epitome which permits us to perceive their reciprocal action in the group with which they are intertwined, and that of their PERSPECTIVE IN MATTERS OF PSYCHOLOGY 257 constitutive elements upon each other, thanks to certain actions? It is this which is achieved, with rigorous econ- omy, in Comedy. From Aristophanes the art springs complete. His Socrates in THE CLOUDS, inspired apparently by the Homeric MARGITES is shown us in 12 attitudes, farcical, odious or absurd, corresponding to exactly as many epi- sodes. It is these episodes which, enriched by what we call a Prologue and by the songs of the Chorus, form the whole of the play. Now, of these 12 attitudes, 4 are of ACTION and FEELING, 4 of IDEALISM and REALISM, 4 of APPEAKANCE and POSSESSIVITY, which corre- sponds, as we perceive, to our distribution within the 3 dimensions of space of the 6 directions of our energy. The 4 scenes of ACTION-FEELING are: the impious teaching of the Philosopher (Socrates here being but the incarnation of all novel philos- ophy in the eyes of Aristophanes) ; his communi- cation of Wrong Reasoning to the young man (who, it may be remembered, was brought by his father with a view to obtaining from the Master such sophisms as might permit them to evade their Debts and escape the irritating Duties which were knocking at the family door) ; the inevitable consequence, the son ill-treating the father; the 258 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS avenging reaction postponed more or less, but inevitable, the father of the family finally enlight- ened and attacking the Philosopher. The 4 scenes of IDEALISM-REALISM, of grotesque contrasts, show us: the Philosopher suspended "between earth and heaven" in a basket (the same which we encounter again in the famous LAI DE VlRGILE); then singing of the Clouds, his cousins in metaphysics and the very worthy emblems of ephemeral systems; the meditative concentration . . . under the coverlet where the unfortunate Strepsiade feels himself being devoured by bugs; the scandalous triumph of Wrong. If these scenes describe the Master himself, those which remain will tell us of his RELATIONS WITH OTHERS, his teachings: the preposterous inventions of the School; the bizarre posture of the Disciples bent earthward; the lesson in Phi- lology (remembered, like Theophrastus' descrip- tion of the TARDILY EDUCATED, by MolieYe when writing his BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME) ; and, above all, the principles of an "amoralism" and of a "struggle for life," eternally modern. Tartufe, more sinister, exhibits the hypocrisy of the "roundheads," his contemporaries. 4 attitudes present him to us IN PERSON: at church, multiplying his genuflections and signs PERSPECTIVE IN MATTERS OF PSYCHOLOGY 259 of the cross ; then his theatrical and formal entrance into the action; then bashful and awkward before Dorine, and lastly avidly usurping the property of others. 4 scenes show the INFLUENCE of his deceptive words on OTHERS: the first recounting the amaz- ing omnipotence of this mere layman; the second, the foolish infatuation of Orgon for a man pos- sessed of no authority except through the blind- ness of his victim; in the third, that of the "Et Tartufe," we can put our finger on that colossal naivete, almost amorous; another scene reminds us of it sadly and ironically in the belated obsti- nacy of Madame Pernelle. 4 scenes show Tartufe occupied in PURE ACTION : his Declaration to Elmire; the Equivoque by which he afterward withdraws himself so easily from the affairs; the Confession which he makes in Act IV of his true nature; and the final COUP DE THEATRE when he expels from the house its legitimate proprietors. The impious DON JUAN is a very brother to him; as pictured originally by Tirso de Molina; a hypocrite and libertine, who likewise mocks at Heaven and invokes it brazenly. Despite the golden and rose-colored vestures which we have since bestowed upon him, he still retains his Satanic physiognomy. 260 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS In Molidre's portrait Don Juan ventures his own Apology. His attitude toward the creditors further differentiates him; he is a rich man, or at least a man of credit, of reputation; he is a man of today, while Tartufe is but a man of tomorrow. The evil which Tartufe does to people of property Don Juan does to the poor; his filial disrespect lastly completes, with a 4th trait, his ORDINARY RELATIONS WITH OTHERS, of which the rupture with Elvire is also a part. The 4 ARfiTES which outline his PERSONAL PHYSIOGNOMY may be thus enumerated: his easy conquests of Act II and his scepticism so clearly proclaimed in Act III; then his libertinism in its two aspects; then his attitude toward the weeping Elvire, and his blasphemous parody of repentance. The 4 parts most essential to the ACTION-SEN- TIMENT seem to be: the warning felt by the poor woman; the invitation to the Commander; the fanfaronnade of the visit to him; the final and damnatory obstinacy at the moment of the avenging catastrophe. In reality this GRAND SEIGNEUR, whom it is as ridiculous for our comedians to represent in a sympathetic light as it is to show the MIS- ANTHROPE pathetically this lofty personage gives forth, as it were, in the world of deceit, the highest note of a scale which is run by Goupil in PERSPECTIVE IN MATTERS OF PSYCHOLOGY 261 the ROMANS DE RENARD; it descends by Tartufe and Socrates already cited, then by THE ALCHE- MIST of Jonson to the hero of the FOURBERIES DE SCAPIN. Although this farce has but two acts, Scapin therein has time to make his Apology (Act II, scene 3) like Don Juan. The 4 scenes of his INTRIGUE are outlined by: the story of the pre- tended forced Marriage; the bargaining for the sum destined to break it off; the story of the Galley; and the old parade of the Sack and the blows of the Stick. Scapin is especially CHARACTERIZED by: the larcenies which he himself acknowledges; the boldness with which he begs through Leandre his indispensable support; his feigned reluctance to accept the money which Argante confides to him, and his ardor in vengeance. The 4 last and secondary traits are sketched: in the stratagem of Sylvestre, disguised by him as a bravo; in that which procures him his final pardon; in his malice, and in that repetition of the paternal return which, taken from Plautus, furnished Shakespeare with so good a theme for the Falstaff of his HENRY IV. In the latter drama Falstaff is likewise por- trayed in 12 essential lines: a Portrait by others and an Apology by himself, corresponding t 262 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS the definition and the conclusion which frame the figures of Theophrastus are added to the rest, as in Moliere: the Apology in the scene to which I have just referred, and the Portrait under the form, so original, of contumely. (Act I.) Here is the first tetrade of the 12 essential lines: the amusing heaviness of the hero flying from the ambuscade prepared for him by the princely joker; his adulation when he sees, later, his boastings belied; the gluttony of which the note found in his pocket gives evidence; and, on the field of battle, his superb tirade against honor. The second tetrad consists of: his cries which make his whole part in the ambuscade ; the notched sword and the false wounds he exhibits in support of his lying narrative; his brazen reproaches to the hostess, his creditor, and his rhodomontade belied by Prince Henry. Lastly, in the tetrad of ACTION-SENTIMENT, we have: the haste with which he recruits his calamitous regiment; his conduct on the field of battle; the fashion in which he there simulates death, and that in which he claims the corpse of the heroic Hotspur. We have come to the play of TWO chief charac- ters, the dimensions of Shakespearean drama permitting, in effect, their development at the same time. Prince Henry is sketched in the PERSPECTIVE IN MATTERS OF PSYCHOLOGY 263 Portrait-monologue of Act I, pendant to the character of Falstaff, almost as a Dionysos beside his father Silenus. Then we see him in turn: exhibiting his famil- iarity with the porters at the tavern; mirthfully mimicking the reproaches which he expects from his father; dignified before the sheriff, and finally rebuking his ex-companion Falstaff, thrust behind him with all his past youthful folly. Such are his RELATIONS WITH OTHERS. His INDIVIDUALITY shows itself from the begin- ning: a joker at the expense of Francis as of Falstaff; haunted, at bottom, by the image of Hotspur; later, superior to the vain-glory which he abandons to the Falstaffian "bluff;" and, beside this, full of fraternal delicacy. The ACTION finally projects him: suddenly great before his father; brave and happy on the field of battle; obstinately gay despite his wounds, and piously affected before Hotspur, slain by him. Moliere, on the contrary, in default of the same dimensions, could not similarly detail C6H- mdne beside the MISANTHROPE. The latter, however, reveals himself by: his reproaches to Philinte; his attitude toward the sonnet of Oronte; his attacks on worldly scandal, and his obstinacy at the time of the intervention of the marshals. 264 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Coming to words with the prudish Arsinoe, blundering and maladroit toward Eliante (IV, 2) ; he is rejected by the former, whom he has wounded (V, 6), and fails equally with the latter (V, 8); all secondary actions and intended to portray his ORDINARY RELATIONS WITH OTHERS. The PRINCIPAL ACTION consists of: his quarrels with Celimne (II, 1); his jealousy conflicting with her coquetry (IV, 3); putting her to the necessity of speaking out (V, 2), and exhibiting toward her all the failings of his character, too stiff and unyielding. But the Coquette, having been once described by him (II, 1), is but half -developed -in 6 scenes instead of 12: that of the Portraits (II, 4) and that in which she caricatures Arsinoe (III, 3); that in which she contends with the said Arsinoe (III, 5) and that in which she teases Alceste (IV, 3) ; that in which she tries to steal away (V, 2) and that in which, pardoned, she still remains the coquette she has always been and will always be (V, 7). We have one Sketch of her by others (I, 1) and her Apology by herself (III, 5). The narrowness of the Classic framework explains why the characters surrounding the Protagonist are so little amplified; the breadth of the Romantic frame, on the contrary, demands PERSPECTIVE IN MATTERS OF PSYCHOLOGY 265 that the number of chief characters be increased, to avoid emptiness. For lack of an equal to his ALCHEMIST, Ben Jonson permits him to drift somewhat uncertainly, after the Portrait con- tumely of the beginning. Nevertheless the essen- tial elements are re-encountered : The rogue beseeching his innocent victim, to dupe her; his role of go-between; his boldness in defying the Spaniard in English and his feigned divination of the name of Dame Pliant complete the first drawing of our Cunning character. After which, rival of his accomplice (the dis- guised domestic Face) with the poor lady, he attempts, having been unable to obtain her himself, to make her sully herself; he flouts the candid "godchild of the fairy" and exploits him, or designs to make use of the prostitute Dol, his instrument. Thus are presented the 4 outlines of the occultist in his CONDUCT TOWARD HIS DUPES AND HIS "BROTHERS." The ACTION may be summarized in a quater- nary not less traditional : imposing, for the prom- ised success of the great work, a condition which the neophyte cannot fulfill (drolly enough, it is chastity which is here in question); bringing the property with a view to "transmuting" it; selling to the solemn Anabaptist rascals, more scrupulous in words than in conscience, the said 266 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS property, and finally preparing the general pillage, in which his professional vices cause him to be taken. The relative lack of consistency with which the rest of the characters may be charged (Dol Common, Face, Lovewit, etc.), and which we re-encounter today upon the modern stage, where, likewise, attempts are made to disguise it by frenzied action (romanticism), or, with less suc- cess, by the idle talk and "MOTS" of modernism, this lack might easily be found even in the Pro- tagonist, in default of a study sufficiently dis- closing to the author his various principal aspects. Thus LE GLORIEUX, by Destouches, repeats, even to satiety, the same effects, almost all too weak. His Portrait drags through three succes- sive scenes (Act I, sc. 2, 3, 4) independently of his sensational entrance (II, 10), a reminiscence of TARTUFE. The letter which exasperates his crisis of vanity (II, 12); the pompous enumeration of his proper- ties aind distinctions (IV, 1) ; his shame of his father (IV, 8) and the nomenclature of his titles in the contract PORTRAY him well enough. But his imprudent contempt for Lisette; her advice (a weak feature) ; the disdain which Philinte inspires in him, and the public denial of his father merely add heaviness to the piece, and we seem to feel the glacial breath of the THESIS-DRAMA. PERSPECTIVE IN MATTERS OF PSYCHOLOGY 267 As to the PURE ACTION, it is too long; the pre- tensions of the GLORIEUX to Isabelle, repeated three times (II, 11 and 13; III, 1); his haughty bearing toward her, his blundering with his partisan, his renewed blundering with Lisinon; the final maladroitness by which he alienates Isabelle, and especially his conversation, false in tone and, to tell the truth, "theatrical." Is there need to cite other proofs of duodenary Perspective? Shall we enumerate the 12 fiTOUR- DERIES of L'ETOURDI? These consist of: 1st, breaking off the apologue of Mascarille in presence of Truffaldin; restitution of Anselme's purse; his amnesia when disguised as an Armenian, and his amorous abstraction even at the table of Truffaldin. 2nd, preventing Anselme's buying of Celie; the defense of her reputation, very MAL A PROPOS, against the suspicions of his rival Leandre, which Mascarille had already almost turned aside; deny- ing that the latter had quit his service, and deliv- ering Andrds, opportunely arrested. 3rd, the inopportune invention of a pretended father of Celie, directing Truffaldin to guard her, just when Leandre, abused by the ingenious Mascarille, had imprudently confided to him the purchase; the denouncing of the project for the abduction by the said Leandre, preventing that 268 THE ART OP INVENTING CHARACTERS prepared by Mascarille; the confiding of the latter's ruse to Andre's in avowing his love for Celie; persistence in making Mascarille abandon the jargon which he affects to speak. And need we count the 12 falsehoods of LE MENTEUR? Need we cite, from various epochs and genres, THE MISER, THE BRAGGART SOLDIER, LE JOUEUR, LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME, THE CONSTANT PRINCE, THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, Bartholo in THE BARBER OF SEVILLE, Arnolphe in THE SCHOOL FOR WIVES? Not to weary the reader, I content myself with figuring their analyses in the accompanying table. We may here establish, for every well-marked character: A a, his Portrait by the persons who gravitate about him, and A b, the Apologies which he makes in person (both portraits and apologies being divisible in turn into a dozen features); B a, 4 scenes in which he REVEALS HIMSELF in his "idiosyncrasy," to speak in the philosoph- ical argot; B b, 4 scenes in which his RELATIONS WITH OTHERS especially appear; B c, 4 scenes, lastly, in which his nature forms the principal spring of the ACTION. PERSPECTIVE IN MATTERS OF PSYCHOLOGY 269 Note, in addition, that in each of these two last groups, 2 of the 4 scenes almost always counterbalance the 2 others: if the hero is at the bottom in the first couple, he is at the top in the second. II THE CHARACTERS OF MOLI*IRE SHAKESPEARE, PLAUTUS, BALZAC Of TARTUFE, of DON JUAN, of THE MISER, THE MISANTHROPE, etc., the epitomes offered us differ, but not the point of view from which the author makes us contemplate them. The "Molieresque method" being once precisely stated, it will be interesting to dispose his elements under the angle, for example, at which the Shakespearean characters appear to us, and so on for other authors. This work will give us PERSPECTIVE AS EACH MASTER HAS CONCEIVED IT. I fear, as I have said, to weary the reader; otherwise I would show how such a study, pro- ceeding from one literature, one school, one writer successively to all the others, would create for the first time a veritable philosophic and scientific LITERARY HISTORY. From a general character like the Greek Apollo, we see separating and evolving the pure Artist and the unfortunate Lover: these are reunited in Orpheus. There is also the character of the 270 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Unfortunate pure and simple. These three branches produced, in the Homeric epoch, the Unfortunate Artist (Demodocus), the Inspired and Fatal Prophetess (Cassandra), the Lover ill-fated and unknowingly criminal (CEDIPUS) and the Parricide almost equally innocent (Orestes), all overshadowed by the same god. To Parody he has given Marsyas, then MARGITES, ancestor of all pedants; elevated to a serious plane, these furnish the Fantastic types of artists, intellec- tuals, Utopians or their caricatures. The lati- tudes and developments of races and the per- sonalities of authors being here mingled, we obtain progressively, from the various branches of this "genealogical tree:" Winckelmann, Ruy- Blas, Abbe Mouret, the Misanthrope, Timon of Athens, the cook Vatel, Philaminte, Trissotin, Tribulat Bonhommet, Fourier, Balthazar Claes, the heroes of Hoffman, Cousin Pons, etc. As for the SPECIAL PERSPECTIVE of a single work, we may ascertain, in the said work: In what manner the twelve elements of a character fit into those of surrounding characters; how this relationship changes in a second work by the same author; how it changes when we pass to a new author treating the same subject, or a different sub- ject; PERSPECTIVE IN MATTERS OF PSYCHOLOGY 271 then when we pass to a new school, literature or epoch; how far these diverse works permit of sharply drawn characters, and so on But especially will it be interesting to study, in the works of a single writer, the ENTIRE SCOPE of the characters which he offers the public. Every one of these incarnates one of the souls of the "poet of a thousand souls." They dis- tribute themselves according to the inevitable division of the main enclosing lines, and each of these groups, showing us one side of the poet, tells us on what number of points and at what level will emerge the complete being, which he felt in his heart and which he wished, by means of these creations, to bring from out the shadow wherein Society endeavors to compress the greater part of our nature. MolieYe's company of actors were, so to speak, his organs ; his comedians represented and were but the "lines of ARfiTE" of his great soul. Of his women, by a curious illusion, he wished to make VESTA types: Henriette, Elise, Elmire, Psyche, Alcmene; and only little by little, in spite of himself, it is said, did he consent to let them slip toward the false and coquettish: Celimene, Angelique, and Beline. La Grange long imper- sonated his Lelies, his Valeres, his Horaces, his 272 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Cleantes, his Erastes, his Leandres, his Clitandre, his Cleonte and, above all, his Don Juan. Baron came later to double the roles dedicated to the eternal comic VENUS: Myrtil, I'Amour and Octave in the FOURBERIES. The insufficiency of Be j art (Don Louis, Madame Pernelle) obliged the Master to assume besides the MERCURIES, his ordinary roles (Mascarille, Miron, Sosie, Scapin, etc.) the jealous, tyrannical and grumbling, the dotards, the derided and the deceived (JUPITER, VULCAN, NEPTUNE): the Sganarelles, Arnolphe, Georges Dandin, Don Pedro, Orgon, Harpagon, Alceste, Chrysale, Argan. He had even to substitute, in the foolishly majestic, for Thorilliere, to whom fell the JUPITERS, and who incarnated Geronimo, Arbate, Philinte, Hali, Jupiter in AMPHITRYON, Dorante in the BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME, and the King in PSYCHE. Another Jupiter, that of PSYCHE, fell to Croisy, but that actor was better suited, by his sombre visage, to ill-tempered and pedantic types, odious or ridiculous (APOLLO- VULCAN): Metaphraste, Vadius, Lysidas, Mar- phurius the Master of Philosophy, Oronte of the sonnet, Dimanche, Harpin, Sotenville. The MARS of the company was De Brie: La Rapidre, the Commissioners, the Guards, the Master of Arms, etc. The joyous CERES blossomed in Madeleine Bejart: Marinette, Marotte, Lisette, Frosine, Dorine; the DIANAS belonged to Mile de Brie: PERSPECTIVE IN MATTERS OF PSYCHOLOGY 273 Celie, Lucile, Madelon, Climdne, Agnes, Eliante, Daphne, Claudine and Mathurine.*" Mile du Pare was for long the MINERVA: Cathos, Climdne, the formal Marquises, the prudes like Arsino6; sh< did not live to play the FEMMES SAVANTES. It would not be impossible for some Cuvier of the mimic art to reconstitute, by means of the characters of Shakespeare or Plautus, the physiog- nomies, the roles and abilities of their actors, who likewise were but the organs, but the mem- bers of the magnified person of the poet. In Shakespeare, VESTA appears, in religion, as Sister Isabella, and in the home as Helena, Her- mione, Catherine of Aragon; by a change of sex we have Friar Laurence, Horatio, etc. JUNO animates Apemantus, Jacques, Ligarius, Margaret of Anjou, Queen Constance, and Leontes, Post- humus and Othello. The Satanic Neptune is expressed in King John, Hamlet's uncle, Wolsey, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Shylock, Pandarus and Polonius. MINERVA directs Imogen and Rosa- lind, inspires Beatrice and Portia, Antony in JULIUS CAESAR, Mercutio and even Autolycus. VENUS appears in Cleopatra and Cressida; APOLLO reigns over Hamlet as over the antique Orestes, over Lear as over (EDIPUS AT COLONUS, and even Timon; in the comedies he excites the passions of Holofernes and of the young Ferdinand. Do we 274 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS not recognize MERCURY in Maria and in Puck; then, degraded by a mingling with Juno, in Ther- sites and lago? Of JUPITERS Shakespeare pre- sents few save in the far-away Julius Caesar, Timon (in the beginning) or Oberon; I willingly conclude that he lacked interpreters rather than models. It is not thus with CERES; his actor represented these when female characters (such as the MERRY WIVES, Juliet's nurse, the hos- tesses, etc.) as when males: Falstaff, Sir Toby and the buffoons like Falconbridge or the Fool in LEAR. It is curious that the comic VULCAN everywhere most numerous appears on the Shakespearean stage only in Menelaus in^ TROILUS, while the "devoted" type is present in Pauline, Gloster and Pisanio. His MARS actors could play the women (Katherine THE SHREW) as well as the savage hired murderers of KING JOHN, MACBETH, etc., or the boasters like Parole or Ajax. But the DIANA of the troupe must have been indeed poetic to incarnate Juliet, Desdemona and Ophelia! In Plautus, likewise actor as well as author, VESTA bears the names of Eunomia, Myrrhine and Peristrate, and, in the masculine, Eutycus and Sagaristion; JUNO only that of Antiphon; NEPTUNE that of Euclion on the one hand, and, in the darker roles, the names of Cappadox, Dordale, Lycus, Ballion or Labrax. MINERVA PERSPECTIVE IN MATTERS OP PSYCHOLOGY 276 furnishes little but Simia and the little Pegnion; VENUS, the Bacchis, Gymnasia, Erotia, Pasi- compsa, Philocomasia, Philematia, Delphium, Lemniselene, Adelphasia, Thais, etc. APOLLO brings the passionate lovers: Agorastocles, Cali- dore, Lysiteles, Pleusidippides, Diabolus, Argy- rippes, Stratippocles and Charinus; he gives, too, beside the pedants, his famous Cooks of THE MERCHANT, CASINA, PSEUDOLUS and the AULARIA. MERCURY is incarnated in the traitor Stalagme and in Geta, Sophoclidiscus, Chrysale, Chalinus, Lampadion, Toxile, Milphion and all the cunning slaves. An actor of JUPITERS seems to have been lacking in the company, for the good-nature of Hegion, of Lysimachus, of Peri- plectomenes relates them rather to some CERES actor already charged with Calliphon, Micion, Philton, Callicles, and various joyous roles in the Masques. His VULCAN interpreted the slaves, simple and limited, such as Syra, Crocotia, or Gripus, Parmenion, Trachalion, Stratilax, Tyn- darus, Messenion, Grumion, Simon, Demones, Charmide and Chorion, even the Dotards derived from the imbecile Etruscan Papus: Theuropides, Periphanes, etc. His MARS played Cleomachus, Antemonides and THE BRAGGART SOLDIER. He must have had two DIANAS among his interpreters, to present Philenia, the daughter of Saturion, Thelestis, Silenia, the unfortunate Philippa, and 276 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS Panegyris, conjointly with Pinacis and Ptole- mocratia or the timid Phedrome. Again we have the 12 gods, under their quad- ruple hypostasis masculine and feminine, tragic and laughable in the novels of Balzac, for example. His Crevel, a conceited ninny, mayor of a Pari- sian ARONDISSEMENT, his notary Lupin, his Phileas Beauvisage; the haughty Delphine de Nucingen, the elder Madame de Portenduere, the respectable Marquis d'Esgrignon, the first Madame Matifat, the beneficent and venerable Madame de la Chanterie; his numerous Maecenases (Anselme Popinot, the Marquis di Negro, the Due de Ver- neuil, etc.) do they not proceed from the lofty and protecting Jupiter? His prodigal and vicious Marquis de Salleneuve, the Marquis de Rouvre, Savinien de Portendudre, Georges Marest, Diard the gamester, Plissoud the toper, the gay Mes- dames Vermut and Fontanien, Palferine (on one side at least), the careless Merle, Oscar Husson and Vatel, his drunkards (Chardin senior, Ver- michel, the lazy Cantinet), the glutton Bargeton, the more delicate Montriveau and Montpersan or the abbe Gondrand, the egoist Vicomte de Beauseant, even the gross Agathe Picquetard or the vulgar Ursule in CESAR BlROTTEAU, do not all these recall our CERES type? PERSPECTIVE IN MATTERS OF PSYCHOLOGY 277 I need not continue. But the HUMAN COMEDY furnishes a world in itself. It has supplied examples for almost all the important subdivisions of our Classification, and it leaves nothing to be desired but the perfecting of some few among these examples. The richness of this work is truly unique. Beside Balzac, how many illustrious authors show an astonishing poverty in their creations! When one of the 12 principal ARfiTES is found to be altogether missing, the case becomes serious. The antique Olympus perished, as I have inti- mated, through failure to achieve a chastely sentimental Diana, for the new faith succeeded in entering through that breach. The same lacuna, symmetrically, must have existed at heart in each of the great gods, whence their increasing corruption and insensibility, in the name of which the men from the East attacked them upon their altars and in the hearts of their fol- lowers, whom they recalled to the complete and primitive Ideal. Everywhere this law asserts itself: to the absence or inferior development of a character- type, of a "god," of a line important to the equi- librium of the human total, there corresponds a similar absence or inferior development of some- thing answering to that "line of ARfiTB" in all 278 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS other characters, since, at a certain depth, there should be found in each the conception of the complete man. Thus the absence of the JUPITER type in Plautus, of the CERES type in Corneille, of the MINERVA type in Zola explains why, in each of their crea- tions, some one spot gives forth a hollow sound and shows a puffed and exaggerated aspect, the mask, in reality, of a vacancy. Ill VACANCIES TO BE FILLED How should the author have proceeded to fill these? We have already seen. He would have had only to complete his series of characters; he would thus have studied man complete, not forgetting one of his essential organs, one of his possible general "attitudes," which is to say one of the characters called individual because this attitude is therein habitually accentuated, and shows always this ARfiTE. The shrouding of this or that ARfiTE in shadow should never be a complete suppression. The writer, if he wishes to make his work harmonious and true, a chorus of the divine types, should no more mutilate his study of life, of man com- plete, or that of a "special character" when he detaches it, than the great artist forgets the existence of aspects painted by his predecessors, PERSPECTIVE IN MATTERS OF PSYCHOLOGY 279 although the style of his own work may be novel and revolutionary. The total subsists, although the parts emphasized may not be the same. It is the imitators, the mediocrities, the sec- tarians who, in literature as in art and else- where fail to distinguish, in the shadows where they lurk, the parts not clearly in evidence, who forget or deny these, who despise or pretend to abolish them. Thus the work they produce is but that of a school, a party, a fashion or a sect. They pre- sent, instead of a profile in relief, a mere flat silhouette; instead of a face, a mask; instead of a human being, divinely supple, but a puppet of limited and mechanical gestures. The style of the Masters, I repeat once more, has nothing in common with these caricatures and partial characters. They suppress nothing, even in their boldest condensations of the eternal Proportions of the soul. They know that the soul in this respect differing from the body, and armed, we might say, for infinite life has but one form, and that form complete, a veritable image of the Divine. These sublime Proportions the Masters put, with all the art whose principal secrets I have just revealed, in a new "Perspective," new 280 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS because the point of view of these Masters is new, and because the attitude given by them to their models is also new. Far from diminishing or mutilating individuality, they each time unveil and bring into light, supported by the organism in its entirety, some hitherto unknown side. Of these mysteries, nevertheless, 369 remain to be revealed. Conclusion The 369 unused types which we have discovered in the course of this classification represent unex- plored regions in the soul of each one of us. Open, ing these regions in the individual as in Humanity, we complete the geography of the Soul. We maintain nevertheless, like parallels of latitude and longitude, its Duodenary Proportions. These we have found in all life, in everything which, like ourselves, is Rhythm. We see them everywhere in art and in poetry: epic (Song of Izdhubal, Homeric Poems, ^Eneid, etc.) or tragic (in China, Rome, France, etc.) of all ages, in the cadences of all known verse-forms, as well as in the movements of history (comparative heredity, law of four-century periods) and in theogonies. We have just re-encountered them enclosed by the indispensable lines with which a La Bruydre, a St. Bernard, a Seneca or a Theophrastus encircle their figurines; we have found them as unmis- takably in the silhouettes of dramatic or literary heroes ; we have followed the pencils of the Masters putting them into Perspective. An entire volume would be necessary to follow the application of this Perspective by each one 282 THE ART OF INVENTING CHARACTERS of them. But I have fulfilled the triple promise made at the beginning of this book: 1st, to reduce each Character to elements whose combinations suffice (the systems hereto- fore contradictory being reconciled) to recon- stitute the most complex personality; 2nd, to classify methodically all the figures of history, legend and poetry, taken from the most widely separated countries and centuries, in groups less and less dense, which is to say more and more closely approaching individuality; 3rd, to count and measure exactly the lacunae in our literary creations or psychological obser- vations, and to fill them with an equal number of characters, whose proportions, according to promise, I have likewise sketched. And while we have seen issuing from this patient labor several future structures already well begun, those of Comparative Heredity, the Rhythms of History, the mathematical laws of narrative and dramatic Composition, a theory of Compara- tive Literature, Comparative Biography, modern- ized Rhetoric, Universal Versification, we have had the certainty of building, for the first time, a veritable "New Science," whose rules are not sentimental but definite and exact: the SCIENCE OF THE HUMAN HEART. University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. . a 1995 OCT ACS fe 1998 A 000 035 614 7