Yet this is surely the highest
privilege of art--to take us behind and beneath those surfaces of things
which are apparent to the detective and the reporter, the juryman and
the judge.
Have we not here, then, the distinction between character-drawing and
psychology? Character-drawing is the presentment of human nature in its
commonly-recognized, understood, and accepted aspects; psychology is, as
it were, the exploration of character, the bringing of hitherto
unsurveyed tracts within the circle of our knowledge and comprehension.
In other words, character-drawing is synthetic, psychology analytic.
This does not mean that the one is necessarily inferior to the other.
Some of the greatest masterpieces of creative art have been achieved by
the synthesis of known elements. Falstaff, for example--there is no more
brilliant or more living character in all fiction; yet it is impossible
to say that Shakespeare has here taken us into previously unplumbed
depths of human nature, as he has in Hamlet, or in Lear.
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