Читать книгу The King Who was a King. The Book of a Film - H. G. Wells - Страница 7

We have now given the reasons for making the hero and heroine in the story-argument of this film grave, abstract, quintessential and symbolical. For the antagonisms they face this is not nearly so necessary. It is just because the mind has to be left free to consider the complex of forces that make for war and keep it alive in the world, that these tremendous simplifications on our side have been made. For that we have resisted the temptation to make our hero "sympathetic" by, for example, giving him funny feet or a fascinated devotion to our heroine's crisp naiveté. The adverse forces, however, we suppose to be working through the weaknesses and intricacy of human nature and the errors in and distortions of human tradition. Our thesis is not that war is a simple thing but a muddle, an Augean stable to be cleaned up. The rest of our cast therefore can be a multitude of highly individualized figures, all with good and bad in them—all, so to speak, with souls to be saved.

Yet something is common to them all and holds them all together so that they are not an aimless miscellany. They are all susceptible to war suggestion. There is that in them which responds to war suggestion, a complex of fear, suspicion, self-assertion, gregarious assertion, xenophobia, pugnacity and subtler correlatives. War possibility is due not merely to ignoble strains in them. Brotherhood, loyalty, love of the near and intimate and fear for its security, the impulse to give oneself, may be played upon also to bring them into the bloody work. We have to show them under that complex of good and evil dispositions, and we have to show them diversely and humanly, so that the audience may find material for self-identification on that side also of the argument. But taken altogether we allege that there is an evil disposition inspiring that diverse antagonist mass. Against man the maker, man the hater, man the enemy of man, pits himself, more primordial, narrower, intenser.

Suppose we take a leaf from the book of the medieval moralist, who went so frankly outside his proper Christian theology to hypothesize a devil. Suppose we make an antagonist to our hero, a spirit of jealousy and narrow aggression flitting through our film, inspiring this man, taking possession of that, sowing the tares, blighting the harvest. What sort of figure will he be? I conceive of him as something quite unlike that dithering devil Mephistopheles, who played so large a part in the moral symbolism of the nineteenth century. He will be much more an upstanding figure, more of a combatant and nothing of a mocker. Both he and the hero are fighters; the difference is that he is dark, narrow and destructive, while the hero fights to create. It will be false to refuse him a dark splendour, a beauty of his own. Neither is passive. They are kindred in that, and so we must admit a sort of likeness between the two, a cousinship. He hates. Through the ages he has been the inveterate enemy of the broad purpose and the distant aim, and the pitiless exploiter of that mingling of love and timidity in us which makes us all apologists and defenders of the accustomed and the limited.

So out of the proposition implicit in that original title of ours, The Peace of the World, we evolve the characteristics of our protagonists and antagonist. Quite after the most respected traditions of the movies, we drop our original title, and substitute, The King who was a King. We have now to develop the concrete story of King Everyman, the Princess and his Cousin the Destroyer, keeping in mind continually the great arguments they sustain.