HOW A NOVELIST WORKS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21406, 6 August 1931, Page 14

HOW A NOVELIST WORKS

CREATING CHARACTERS MR GALSWORTHY EXPLAINS. (From Otjb Own Gobreskjndent.) LONDON, May. 29. Delivering the Romanes Lecture in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford last week, Mr John Galsworthy revealed how. the characters in his novels come into being. “ I sink into my morning chair, ho said, “a blotter on my knee, the last words or deed of some character in ink before my eyes, a pen in my hand, a pipe in my mouth, and nothing in my head. I sit. I don’t intend; I don’t expect; I don’t even hope. I read over the last pages. “ Gradually my mind seems to leave the chair, and be. where my character is acting or speaking, leg raised, waiting to come doivn, lips opened ready to say something. Suddenly, my pen jots down a movement or remark, another, another, and goes on doing this, haltingly, perhaps, for an hour or two. “When the result is read through it surprises one by seeming to come out of what went before, and by ministering to some sort of possible future. Those pages, adding tissue to, character, have been supplied from the store-cupboard of the subconscious, in response to the appeal ot one’s conscious directive sense, and in service to the saving grace of one’s theme, using that word in its widest sense.” CHARACTERS WHICH LIVE. Arguing that few novels outlive their own ' generation, Mr Galsworthy stated that the few novels of olcj time to which we still turn with gusto are almost always those in which a character or characters have outlived their period. How far would Thackeray be known to-day but for Becky Sharp, Major Pendennia, Colonel •Newcome, Esmond Beatrice, or Barry Lyndon? With Dickens, he said, we associate practically nothing but a galleyful of strangely living creatures; George Eliot retains precarious foothold through her children, Silas Marner, Adam Bede, and Hetty; and it is the character creations of Jane Austen that still keep her memory fresh despite her unending parochialism. When his task is finished it is always comforting to a novelist, Mr Galsworthy said, to know that by the creation of character he contributes to the organic growth of human ethics. “ If. indeed, a novelist has any use in the world, apart from affording entertainment, it is through the revealing power of his created characters.” If one had to give the palm to a single factor in the creation of character it would, in Mr Galsworthy’s opinion, go to sly, dry humour, the sort of humour which produced the Don and Sancbd, Falstaff, Major Pendennis, Becky Sharp, Sam W T eller, and Micawber.