Stereotypes & palmistry, physiognomy, phrenology, psychology

[Henry Secularpeturbations]

>From Melville's The Confidence-Man

 CHAPTER XIV: WORTH THE CONSIDERATION OF THOSE TO WHOM
IT MAY PROVE WORTH CONSIDERING. 
    To some, it may raise a degree of surprise that
one so full of confidence, as the merchant has
throughout shown himself, up to the moment of his late
sudden impulsiveness, should, in that instance, have
betrayed such a depth of discontent. He may be thought
inconsistent, and even so he is. But for this, is the
author to be blamed ? True, it may be urged that there
is nothing a writer of fiction should more carefully
see to, as there is nothing a sensible reader will
more carefully look for, than that, in the depiction
of any character, its consistency should be preserved.
But this, though at first blush, seeming reasonable
enough, may, upon a closer view, prove not so much so.
For how does it couple with another requirement --
equally insisted upon, perhaps -- that, while to all
fiction is allowed some play of invention, yet,
fiction based on fact should never be contradictory to
it; and is it not a fact, that, in real life, a
consistent character is a rara avis ? Which being so,
the distaste of readers to the contrary sort in books,
can hardly arise from any sense of their untrueness.
It may rather be from perplexity as to understanding
them. But if the acutest sage be often at his wits'
ends to understand living character, shall those who
are not sages expect to run and read character in
those mere phantoms which flit along a page, like
shadows along a wall?

That fiction, where every character can, by reason of
its consistency, be comprehended at a glance,
either exhibits but sections of character, making them
appear for wholes, or else is very untrue to reality;
while, on the other hand, that author who draws a
character, even though to common view
incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and,
at different periods, as much at variance with itself
as the butterfly is with the caterpillar into which it
changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but
faithful to facts. 
   If season be judge, no writer has produced such
inconsistent characters as nature herself has. It must
call for no small sagacity in a reader unerringly to
discriminate in a novel between the inconsistencies of
conception and those of life as elsewhere. Experience
is the only guide here; but as no one man can be
coextensive with what is, it may be unwise in every
case to rest upon it. When the duck-billed beaver of
Australia was first brought stuffed to England, the
naturalists, appealing to their classifications,
maintained that there was, in reality, no such
creature; the bill in the specimen must needs be, in
some way, artificially stuck on. 
   But let nature, to the perplexity of the
naturalists, produce her duck-billed beavers as she
may, lesser authors, some may bold, have no business
to be perplexing readers with duck-billed
characters. Always, they should represent human nature
not in obscurity, but transparency, which, indeed, is
the practice with most novelists, and is, perhaps, in
certain cases, someway felt to be a kind of honor
rendered by them to their kind. But whether it involve
honor or otherwise might be mooted, considering that,
if these waters of human nature can be so readily seen
through, it may be either that they are very pure or
very shallow. Upon the whole, it might rather be
thought, that he, who, in view of its inconsistencies,
says of human nature the same that, in view of its
contrasts, is said of the divine nature, that it is
past finding out, thereby evinces a better
appreciation of it than he who,
by always representing it in a clear light, leaves it
to be inferred that he clearly knows all about it.  
   But though there is a prejudice against
inconsistent characters in books, yet the prejudice
bears the other way, when what seemed at first their
consistency, afterwards, by the skill of the writer,
turns
out to be their good keeping. The great masters excel
in nothing so much as in this very particular.
They challenge astonishment at the tangled web of some
character, and then raise admiration still greater at
their satisfactory unraveling of it; in this way
throwing open, sometimes to the understanding even of
school misses, the last complications of that spirit
which is affirmed  by its Creator to be fearfully and
wonderfully made.
 At least, something like this is claimed for certain
psychological novelists; nor will the claim be here
disputed. Yet, as touching this point, it may prove
suggestive, that all those sallies of ingenuity,
having for their end the revelation of human nature on
fixed principles, have, by the best judges, been
excluded with contempt from the ranks of the sciences
-- palmistry, physiognomy, phrenology, psychology.
Likewise, the fact, that in all ages such conflicting
views have, by the most eminent minds, been taken of
mankind, would, as with other topics, seem some
presumption of a pretty general and pretty thorough
ignorance of it. Which may appear the less improbable
if it be considered that, after poring over the best
novels professing to portray human nature, the
studious youth will still run risk of being too often
at fault upon actually entering the world; whereas,
had he been furnished with a true delineation, it
ought to fare with him something as with a stranger
entering, map in hand, Boston town; the streets may be
very crooked, he may often pause; but, thanks to his
true map, he
does not hopelessly lose his way. Nor, to this
comparison, can it be an adequate objection, that the
twistings of the town are always the same, and those
of human nature subject to variation. The grand
points of human nature are the same to-day they were a
thousand years ago. The only variability in them is in
expression, not in feature. 
   But as, in spite of seeming discouragement, some
mathematicians are yet in hopes of hitting upon an
exact method of determining the longitude, the more
earnest psychologists may, in the face of previous
failures, still cherish expectations with regard
to some mode of infallibly discovering the heart of
man. 
   But enough has been said by way of apology for
whatever may have seemed amiss or obscure in the
character of the merchant; so nothing remains but to
turn to our comedy, or, rather, to pass from
the comedy of thought to that of action.


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