it is a matter for the curious to examine (but not the wisest will determine it) why people in books are so extraordinarily different from real people. you might imagine that the people in biographies at least would be more or less like human beings—but they never are. a man may say that the reason of this is that biography to-day is always a sort of modern, pale, conventional, and hypocritical affair—that the biographer dare not print nine-tenths of his material under our modern tyranny of suppression, and that he has necessarily to make a puppet of his man. but there are others besides modern biographies, and it is true of them all that the people inside are not human. you have biographies of politicians acting upon principle; biographies of men who have accumulated vast fortunes without a hint of their main passion; biographies of men of lineage in which you are given to understand that their distinction was due to some individual worth and force. biographies of the frankest and most brutal periods, biographies of men long dead, biographies written by enemies, all have this in common, that the person inside the book does not go on like a human being.[pg 38] autobiographies give one a better chance, but even there, though you get something much more vivid, you never get a real man. it seems as though the writing of an autobiography or confession always went with a twist, either morbid or megalomaniac. take the very best one of all, rousseau's; it can be proved, and research has proved it, that he is perpetually maligning himself. as for st. augustine's (oh, how dull!) he tells us so little, and his purpose is so far from being autobiographical that it does not come under the same criticism; and as for borrow, those who have read him assure me that he is perpetually performing marvellous feats of intelligence and courage to which there is no witness at all but himself. hagiographers are appalling. they do not attempt to present a living figure, though i will make an exception for one account of the death of st. thomas of canterbury; i forget which, but it is full of realities. your stock hagiographer, as, for instance, he of the carolingian period, postulates three things: the noble birth of his hero, his boldly standing up to somebody else (usually a layman), and his performing a number of actions precisely similar to those which others of the type have performed; it is almost mechanical; it is like the leader in a party newspaper describing a party speech by a party man.
people in histories also are not human beings. the moment you try to make them human in writing your history a demon enters and makes you make a[pg 39] great quantity of little mistakes. for instance, you are writing about a man with one eye, and you are determined to make him human; you find out all you can about that eye, whether the other one was of glass, or was just left screwed up in the old-fashioned style. you get right about the date of the time when he lost his eye, the effect which his one eye had on other people, and all the rest of it. you make the man live again before you, and the moment you begin writing about him you will make his left eye his right eye. it is the knowledge of this, and the fear of the powerful demon who works it, that makes historians shun the human being and stuff their books full of ghosts paler than any that wander by acheron.
this is especially true of historians of war. the people they write about occupy "strategic" points (a phrase which is blankly meaningless to the writer as to the reader), they "grasp" the situation at a glance, they "master detail," they are (when the author is against them), "in spite of all their faults, not devoid of physical courage," or (if the author is in favour of them) "acting with that quiet decision which is characteristic of them" (and of bad actors in problem plays, too, by the way), but they never live.
now and then you get flashes; the eyes glance, the tones take on reality, there is a human voice and gesture, but it dies again. perhaps the most vivid and most fascinating of such histories in our tongue[pg 40] is napier's. you will continually find such flashes in it—but they are not permanently connected. it is odd that the most living of histories are the exceedingly simple and bald relations set down under primitive conditions of society when a man merely desired to chronicle dates and facts. how it is so no one can tell, but a plain statement of some not very interesting thing with just a verb and a substantive will do the trick. for instance, where eginhard says of charlemagne that everything about him was virile "except his voice, which was high," or again, where fulcher of chartres (i think it is) says of a spy on the crusading march that he was "short in the nose and in every virtue." but even the early historians build up no continuously living figure.
when it comes to novelists the matter is notorious. the people in novels not only do not go on like real people, but they do things sometimes physically, always morally, impossible to real people. i have often wished to know a professional novelist in order to ask him why his people went on like that. to take quite small points. a lover and his lady in a novel will often hunt the fox. so far so good. there is nothing impossible about that. when they have done running after the animal they go home together, and their horses walk side by side. how is that done? except horses in cavalry regiments or in circuses, or horses constrained and tied by leather thongs in front of wheeled vehicles, when were two horses ever seen that walked the same[pg 41] pace side by side? the novelist may say that it is necessary to the convention of his novel. it would spoil a love scene if he showed one of the two horses dragging further and further behind the other (as one of them always does), and then having to canter or trot every three minutes to catch up his neighbour, and it would also spoil his love scene if he made one of the horses walking slowly and the other dancing, which in real life is one of the ways in which people attempt to keep two horses abreast. but there are many things in your novel which have no such excuse, and which are equally out of nature. for instance, people sit down suddenly and write enormous cheques at a moment's notice. now even the richest man cannot do that. he has his money invested, he does not waste it by letting it lie idle in gigantic balances of a current account. then again, the things they do with their mouths. "'no,' she laughed." how on earth could that be done? if you try to laugh and say "no" at the same time it sounds like neighing—yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. if they did it in real life they would be locked up. another thing that people do in novels on all sides is to make immensely long speeches. sometimes the whole of the author's views upon some big matter, like the fate of the soul for instance, comes pouring out in a solid page and a half of spoken stuff. in real life the only people who do this are politicians, and even they only do it on stated and ritual occasions; they do not do it[pg 42] in private houses. sometimes they try, but they are interrupted.
yet again, consider the vast number of titles which people have in novels. i cannot call to mind one single novel without a title—i mean no novel of the modern kind. of course there must be such, but they are certainly rare. now in real life things are not thus. all the ordinary people of this country go about day after day without meeting lords and ladies, but in novels something like half the characters come in quite casually with titles, and i have been told that it is a matter of professional pride with some novelists to be able to get the complicated system of english titles exactly right, and that they will even fabricate difficult problems for the pleasure of solving them, as do men who play chess. they will take the younger son of an earl, make him a colonial cabinet minister, and then triumphantly settle for you which of the two "honourables" he is; or again, they will marry the heiress of a marquisate inheritable in the female line to the eldest son of a man who comes into a barony later on in the book—and get it absolute. but people in real life do not care much about these things.
conversely, a very large number of things that do happen in real life and are interesting never seem to get into novels. for instance, repetitions. your hero will fall off a horse and break something, but he does not do it twenty times as he would if he were a[pg 43] living being. a man comes late to dinner, but he is not always coming late to dinner as he would if he were human: and, what is worse, a score of highly interesting real types never get between covers at all.
take, for instance, that immoderately common type, among the most common of god's creatures, which i will call "the silent fool," the man who hardly ever talks, and when he does says something so overwhelmingly silly that one remembers it all one's life. i can recollect but one silent fool in modern letters, but he comes in a book which is one of the half-dozen immortal achievements of our time, a book like a decisive battle, or like the statue of john the baptist at south kensington, a glory for us all. i mean the diary of a nobody. in that you will find the silent mr. padge, who says "that's right"—and nothing more.
one might go on for ever piling up instances of this divorce between the supposed pictures of our modern life and the truths of it. i will end with what is to me, perhaps, the most glaring of all: the attitude of fiction towards what is called "success." no matter who the author is, no matter what his knowledge of the world, he simply cannot draw "successful men" as they are, that is, in a diversity as great as any to be discovered in the human race. men who have "got on," that is, who are at once well to do and well known, are as different as men with the toothache or as men with warts on their chins.[pg 44] some are kind, some brutal, some clever, some stupid, some got their money by luck, some by inheritance, some by theft, some few by being able to make or do something better than their fellows, but at any rate in real life, when you are about to meet someone who is known to you as "successful," you never have the slightest idea what you are going to meet, your last experience of the sort is no guide to the next, and the "successful" chap may turn out to be anything at all. but in novels your wealthy and well-known man is invariably powerful in character. it never fails. he may be good or bad, english or foreign, young or old, but he always has in him something of what you see in a very good sergeant-major at a few shillings a week, an experienced head master at a few hundreds a year, or a capable engineer on a passenger ship. he displays qualities which have no more to do with what is called "success" now-a-days than red hair or brown boots have. in a word, your successful man is a type in the novel. in real life he is not a type at all—he is any one. and another thing you never get in a novel is a well-mannered man or a bad-mannered man. i cannot recollect one character who interrupts at the top of his voice, nor one who joins the conversation of others in an easy way.... but suppose one filled a novel with real people, what escape would there be from daily life?
