The Biographer's Tale (29 page)

I suspect that much of what we stigmatise as irresolution is due to our Self being by no means one and indivisible, and that we do not care to sacrifice the Self of the moment for a different one. There are, I believe,
cases in which we are wrong to reproach ourselves sternly, saying, “The last week was not spent in the way you now wish it had been,” because the Self was not the same throughout. There is room for applying the greatest happiness of the greatest number, the particular Self at the moment of making retrospect being not the only one to be considered.

We as yet understand nothing of the way in which our conscious selves are related to the separate lives of the billions of cells of which the body of each of us is composed. We only know that the cells form a vast nation, some members of which are always dying and others growing to supply their places and that the continual sequence of these multitudes of little lives has its outcome in the larger and conscious life of the man as a whole. Our part in the universe may possibly in some distant way be analogous to that of the cells in an organised body, and our personalities may be the transient but essential elements of an immortal and cosmic mind.

Their creed, or rather, I should say, their superstition—for it has not yet crystallised into a dogmatic creed, is that living beings, and pre-eminently mankind, are the only executive agents of whom we have any certain knowledge. They look upon life at large, as probably a huge organisation in which every separative living
thing plays an unconscious part, much as the separate cells do in a living person. Whether the following views were self-born or partly borrowed I do not know, but the people of Kantsaywhere have the strong belief that the spirits of all the beings who have ever lived are round about, and regard all their actions. They watch the doings of men with eagerness, grieving when their actions are harmful to humanity, and rejoicing when they are helpful. It is a kind of grandiose personification of what we call conscience into a variety of composite portraits. I expect that the many visionaries among them—for there are visionaries in all races—actually see with more or less distinctness the beseeching or the furious figures of these imaginary spirits, either as individuals or as composites. There seems to be some confusion between the family, the racial, and the universal clouds of spirit-watchers. They are supposed to co-exist separately and yet may merge into one or many different wholes. There is also much difference of opinion as to the power of these spirits, some think them only sympathetic, others assign the faculty to them of inspiring ideas in men, others again accredit them with occasional physical powers. Everyone here feels that they themselves will, after their life is over, join the spirit legion, and they look forward with eager hope that their descendants will then do what will be agreeable and not hateful to them. I have heard some who likened life to the narrow crest of the line of breakers of a never-resting and infinite ocean, eating slowly and everlastingly into the opposing shore of an infinite
and inert continent. But that metaphor does not help me much, beyond picturing what in their view is the smallness of actual life with the much larger amount of elements of potential life.

Dear Emma's gravestone is not even yet put up … I send you a photo of the inscription which you will like to keep, all the more for having helped in drawing up the words. The Galtonias at either side are utter failures. The artist has no excuse, for he was supplied with many drawings; but accuracy is not the strong point of artists. They think as much of shadows as of substances, and a bandbox casts as black a shadow as a block of granite. (That metaphor might be worked up!) … The last rose of summer—the last rat of the year! You will have to keep and pet him or her. But the large probable families of rats are appalling. I heard that all the hives full of Ligurian bees in England, for many years, were descended from a single queen bee, sent by post to England from the Riviera. Is it possible?

Card no. 79 [Henrik Jaeger,
Dagbladet
, 27 Feb. 1891—my added ref. PGN.] [Review of opening of
Hedda Gabler
]

“The applause weakened as the play progressed … Ibsen has treated the psychological conflicts portrayed here as Pasteur and Koch treat bacteria.”

And Georg Göthe in
Ny Svenske Tidskrift:
“No dramatic talent can make a character as obscurely complex
as Hedda Gabler really clear and dramatically consistent.”

Card no. 113 [Georg Brandes to Professor C. J.
Salomonsen, Dresden, 1874. PGN.] [Salomonsen a biologist. PGN.]

The man sits there producing very little, unable to draw intellectual nourishment from the world around him because he lacks the organs to do so, and is rigidly set in all kinds of prejudices and eccentricities. He has a sure eye for only one thing, namely the prejudices of his homeland, everything that is obsolete in Norway and Denmark; but the lack of any systematic education makes him desperately limited. Fancy—he seriously believes in a time when “the intelligent minority” in these countries “will be forced to enlist the aid of chemistry and medicine in poisoning the proletariat” to save themselves from being politically overwhelmed by the majority. And this universal poisoning is what he wants. The Germans, too, amongst whom he has lived for so long (without getting to know a single intelligent one and without reading more than one or two books a year—literally), the Germans too he knows very incompletely, and his acquaintance with one or two crazy Catholics has led him to throw in his sympathy with the Catholic faction, the while he calls himself a Freethinker. In short he is lost in an endless chaos of characterlessness.

Eleven cocks from France, four Spanish stallions …

A kind of ram from Switzerland … and of course

A herd of German wild pigs, almost tamed.

Where personality is lacking,

Where there is neither hatred, indignation,

Nor joy, no beat of pulse nor flush of blood,

Glory is but a dry rattle of bones.

Who has not seen Juno in his mind's eye

Pale in her wrath as she surprised her lord?…

But the Egyptian gods were otherwise.

Static, they never, like the gods of Greece

And men, sinned, groped, and raised themselves from sin.

And so this culture, from millennia old

Lies like a bloodless mummy in a crypt.

Although philosophers may have written to show the impossibility of our discovering what goes on in the minds of others, I maintain an opposite opinion. I do not see why the report of a person on his own mind should not be as intelligible and trustworthy as that of a traveller upon a new country, whose landscapes and inhabitants are of a different type to any which we ourselves have seen. It appears to me that inquiry into the mental constitution of other people is a most fertile field for exploration, especially as there is much in the facts adduced here, as well as elsewhere, to show that original differences in mental constitution are permanent, being little modified by the accident of education, and that they are strongly hereditary.

Before I write one word, I must know the character through and through, I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul. I always proceed from the individual; the stage setting, the dramatic ensemble, all of this comes naturally and causes me no worry, as soon as I am certain of the individual in every aspect of his humanity. But I have to have his exterior in mind also, down to the last button, how he stands and walks, how he bears himself, what his voice sounds like. Then I do not let him go until his fate is fulfilled.

As a rule I make 3 drafts of my plays, which differ greatly from each other—in characterisation, not in plot. When I approach the first working-out of my material, it is as though I knew my characters from a railway-journey; one has made a preliminary acquaintance, one has chatted about this and that. At the next draft I already see everything much more clearly, and I know the people roughly as one would after a month spent with them at a spa; I have discovered the fundamentals of their characters and their little peculiarities; but I may still be wrong about certain essentials. Finally, in the last draft, I have reached the limit of my knowledge; I know my characters from close and long
acquaintance—they are my intimate friends, who will no longer disappoint me; as I see them now I shall always see them.

The points I have endeavoured to impress are chiefly these. First, that character ought to be measured by carefully recorded acts, representative of conduct. An ordinary generalisation is nothing more than a muddle of vague memories of mixed observations. It is an easy vice to generalise. We want lists of facts, every one of which may be separately verified, valued and revalued, and the whole accurately summed. It is the statistics of each man's conduct in small, everyday affairs, that will probably be found to give the simplest and most precise measure of his character. The other chief point that I wish to impress is, that a practice of deliberately and methodically testing the character of others and of ourselves is not wholly fanciful, but deserves consideration and experiment.

[This is from Galton's essay, “Measurement of Character.” PGN]

BUTTON MOULDER:
The Master, you see, is a thrifty man.

He never rejects as worthless anything

Which He can use again as raw material.

Now you were meant to be a shining button

On the waistcoat of the world. But your loop broke.

So you must be thrown into the rubbish bin

And go from there back into the great pool.

PEER:
You don't intend to melt me down with other dead men?

BUTTON MOULDER:
That is precisely what I intend.

We've done it, you know, with a number of people.

At the Royal Mint they do the same with coins

That have got so worn you can't see the face on them.

PEER:
But this is the most sordid parsimony!

Oh, come on, be a sport and let me go!

A button without a loop, a worn-out shilling

What are they to a man in your Master's position?

BUTTON MOULDER:
Oh, as long as a man has some soul left

He's always worth a little as scrap.