Paint in only the high lights

Paint in only the high lights

Paint in only the 'high lights'; that is:

a. Never employ a commonplace or merely accurate incident or other detail, if an unusual or acutely characteristic one can be found to depict the same trait equally well.

b. Never qualify of elaborate a trait or episode, merely for the sake of preserving the effect of the character's full reality.

2. The rule of 'high lights' puts the beginner to his severest test. He usually has trouble distinguishing it from the rule of dramatic economy; and, having overcome this difficulty, he encounters still greater ones in practicing the rule. For this, I fear, critics and their text-books are largely to blame, in that they have stressed overmuch the virtues of briefness and simplicity. George Henry Lewes, for instance, makes these the first two of what he calls the five virtues of narrative fiction; 2 Frank Norris urges the young writer to contemplate the wonderful brevity of the Bible `stories'; a and Esenwein

1 Cf. above, on the nature of intensity.

2 Principles of Success in Literature. a The Responsibilities of the Novelist.

assures him rather vaguely that 'compression must

pervade the whole plot. " Did these (and other) writers elsewhere call attention sharply to the nature and tech

nique of significant characterization, all might be well.

But they do not. The result is that the learner readily imagines he is delineating character successfully if he

says the fewest possible things about his hero, or if, following Esenwein, he "seizes upon a salient characteristic and makes it stand for the whole, leaving the reader to fill in the details from imagination. "

a. Unfortunately, 'high lights' may usually be rendered with great brevity and simple speech; and so people, misled by externals, fail to distinguish them from these, their incidental forms of expression. It is easy to show,

though, that it is neither brevity nor simplicity of action which brings out character.

Let us suppose that we are to depict the truthfulness of Georgie Washington. We write as follows at the crucial situation:

Mrs. Washington thrust her stately head out of the kitchen window and gazed thoughtfully at her son: "Georgie!" she asked, "have you given the cat her cream yet?" Georgie, in the very act of pouring the thick fluid into Tabby's saucer, looked his mother straight in the eye and answered without a quaver: "Yes, mother! I cannot tell a lie! I have fed the cat. "

It is greatly to be feared that historians would not accept this as overwhelming proof that Georgie was constitutionally above all prevarication. And yet, he did

tell the truth, didn't he? You observe his veracity in action, don't you? It is simple, brief, and swift, too,

isn't it? It therefore possesses the virtues which the literary authorities call for. Evidently, then, these

virtues do not fill the bill. And we see what they lack, the very instant we contrast the above effusion with the classical narrative:

"George!" his father sternly demanded, as he contemplated the prone ruin of his favorite cherry tree, "who chopped this down?"

"Father!" spoke up George firmly and without hesitation, "I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet. "

Now the youth tells the truth under circumstances which make a white lie much more comfortable and easy. A dilemma confronts him; either he must sacrifice the temporary well-being of certain peripheral nerves or else he must offer up a moral ideal on the altar of hedonism. And his conduct in this crisis shows what manner of lad he is. His character is intelligible and open to our sympathy. Thus the narrative fulfills the first two rules of integration. But the third rule remains to be obeyed. The 'high lights' have not been turned on. The story could scarcely be delivered with intensely dramatic effect. Telling the painful, perilous truth to an angry father reveals a genuine love of truth, but it does not force us to believe that Georgie is the incarnation of probity. It is not inconceivable, we fear, that even such an exemplary youth might swerve from accuracy, for a consideration—say fifty dollars. In other words, the crisis over the cherry tree, genuine and earnest though it is, lacks the gravity necessary to show the hero to be through-and through truthful. To sketch such a crisis would be to turn on the high lights of dramatic narrative. We should have to see the hero in some desperate predicament, where truth telling would jeopardize his dearest, deepest wish or his whole future. And he should clearly sense this danger, tremble before it, and yet tell the truth.

Let us put the matter in another way. It is not

enough to show a character doing something consistent with that trait which you seek to exhibit. The merely consistent deed does not persuade. And the reason for this lies underneath art; it is embedded in the nature of things. The merely consistent act, of itself, is logically incapable of proving character. Logically, I say. And it can be demonstrated, thus:

The truthful man always tells the truth even to his own injury.

Georgie once told the truth and thereby injured himself.

Conclusion: None.

You see now, I trust, why a random consistent deed is unconvincing. Once is not always. Therefore, in order that we may be persuaded that he will always

do so, we must witness him telling the truth under circumstances which make the same habit easy and natural for him under all other circumstances. If a man tells the truth when doing so costs him a dollar loss, he may not do so when it costs him a hundred. But if he does it when it costs him a hundred, we are sure that he will do it when it costs him only a dollar. This is no subtle aesthetic principle peculiar to artistic technique. It is plain common sense, as most other principles will turn out to be, once we have carefully analyzed them.

Finally, the necessity for ' high lights' is strengthened by the fact that the quality of the information we have about a person tends to penetrate and fuse with the image of the person which we build up out of this information.

If we know only petty facts about a man, the man is in danger of appearing petty to us, even though the facts do not imply such a character. For instance, were you to say that Roosevelt's teeth gleam as large and as numerously as the tombstones of his political enemies, your hearers would never quite rid themselves of this description. And whoever learned only such trifles would frame a picture of an insignificant, ridiculous, or contemptible person.

In this, once more, there is nothing strange. We judge people in the light of what we know about them. That is the whole secret, the only secret. It is because of this alone that one may damn with faint praise. It is because of this alone that the bravest and noblest may easily be made to seem ordinary and even despicable not by lies but by small truths. Washington flirted scandalously with servant girls, Lincoln was at times foul-mouthed, Thomas Aquinas was a glutton; and so, by citing such facts, it is easy for any shallow iconoclast to make his dupes believe these great men were of the commonest clay. And this possibility becomes a peril to the literary artist who thinks only of accuracy and consistent character drawing.

The artistic material is that which persuades; and the persuasive is not the merely true or consistent, but rather the acutely characteristic, namely that which unequivocally reveals a nature which can be counted on to be constant under all circumstances. The discovery of such decisive marks is almost a science by itself, a science moreover in which few are versed. Do you know what is the sure test of a coward? Or of a spoiled child? Or of a dreamer? Or of a hypocrite? Or of a cruel man? Or of a flirt? Or of a saint? Can you describe a situation in which anyone of these characters discloses itself past all misunderstanding? If so, you can write a powerful story.

b. The second rule of 'high lights' is little more than a corollary of the first. Young writers are steeped in the superstition that, for reality's sake, they must explain who the hero's grandparents were, how he came to live in the town, why he went to work in the shirt factory,

where he first met his beloved, and all the other incidents prior to the climax. The sufficient answer to this misbelief has been given: most of those episodes are petty, in comparison with thee plot, and hence, if told, will inevitably dilute the latter wofully; and, secondly, they are not characteristic of any trait that develops in the plot, and hence do not persuade the reader of anything in particular.