IVIV (12): 195-197

[alice wellintown]

> After all as Keith says it's fiction and fiction needs conflict if not  between  characters then between ideas.

> P

THERE are some unworldly types of character which the world is able to
estimate. It recognises certain moral types, or categories, and
regards whatever falls within them as having a right to exist. The
saint, the artist, even the speculative thinker, out of the world's
order as they are, yet work, so far as they work at all, in and by
means of the main current of the world's energy. Often it gives them
late, or scanty, or mistaken acknowledgment; still it has room for
them in its scheme of life, a place made ready for them in its
affections. It is also patient of doctrinaires of every degree of
littleness. As if dimly conscious of some great sickness and weariness
of heart in itself, it turns readily to those who theorise about its
unsoundness. To constitute one of these categories, or types, a
breadth and generality of character is required. There is another type
of character, which is not broad and general, rare, precious above all
to the artist, a character which seems to have been the supreme moral
charm in the Beatrice of the Commedia. It does not take the eye by
breadth of colour; rather it is that fine edge of light, where the
elements of our moral nature refine themselves to the burning point.
It crosses rather than follows the main current of the world's life.
The world has no sense fine enough for those evanescent shades, which
fill up the blanks between contrasted types of character--delicate
provision in the organisation of the moral world for the transmission
to every part of it of the life quickened at single points! For this
nature there is no place ready in its affections. This colourless,
unclassified purity of life it can neither use for its service, nor
contemplate as an ideal.