Re: intelligence of the author vs. intelligence of the characters

--- Brooks Bradley Lambert-Sluder <blambert@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> I think that intelligence, like most characteristics, needn't be a trait
> of the author for it to be depicted well, simply a trait that has been
> studied. A woman who is 5'4" tall can still draw a character who is a
> 6'6" man, simply by studying the way he enters a room and ducks, or the
> way he moves his seat way back when he gets into a new car.

Indeed. Actually, Henry James once wrote a very fine essay called "The
Art of Fiction," in which he explored this phenomenon at length. I was
lucky enough to find it on a website, so while I shall only reproduce the
pertinent paragraph of said essay, anyone who's interested can read it in
its entirety at http://www.mantex.co.uk/ou/aa810/james-05.htm .

"It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative
much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius-it takes to itself
the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into
revelations. The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel
upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to
declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military.
Greater miracles have been seen than that, imagination assisting, she
should speak the truth about some of these gentlemen. I remember an
English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much
commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales
of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been
asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been
congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted
in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open
door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants
were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it
lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her
impression, and she evolved her type. She knew what youth was, and what
Protestantism; she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be
French; so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and
produced a reality. Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty
which when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a
much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place
in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace
the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the
condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on
your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may
almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in
town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience
consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience,
just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe.
Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience,
and experience only,' I should feel that this was a rather tantalising
monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the
people on whom nothing is lost!'"

This essay made a strong and lasting impression on me the first time I
read it, and in my rereading, I found that impression was not false.
Unfortunately, the person who put it up on his website neglected to put in
line breaks, but one can probably find it rather easily in any American
Literature anthology that contains the late nineteenth century.

Regards,
Cecilia.

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Received on Tue Aug 27 02:17:05 2002