The Universal Appeal of Great Fictitious Characters.––But the very greatest characters of fiction are worth everybody’s while; and surely the masters need have felt no hesitancy in asking any one to meet Sancho Panza, Robinson Crusoe, Henry Esmond, Jean Valjean, or Terence Mulvaney. In fact, the most amazing thing about a great fictitious figure is the multitude of very different people that the character is capable of interesting. Many times we willingly absent ourselves from actual society to pass an evening in the company of a fictitious personage of a class with which we never associate in actual life. Perhaps in the actual world we would never bother to converse with illiterate provincial people; and yet we may not feel it a waste of time and energy to meet them in the pages of “Middlemarch.” For my own part, I have always, in actual life, avoided meeting the sort of people that appear in Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair”; and yet I find it not only interesting but profitable to associate with them through the entire extent of a rather lengthy novel. Why is it that a reader, who, although he has crossed the ocean many times, has never cared to enter the engine-room of a liner, is yet willing enough to meet on intimate terms Mr. Kipling’s engineer, Mac Andrew? And why is it that ladies who, in actual society, are fastidious of their acquaintanceship, should yet associate throughout a novel with the Sapho of Daudet? What is the reason why these fictitious characters should seem, for nearly every reader, more worth while than the very same sort of people in actual life?
Typical Traits.––The reason is that great fictitious characters are typical of their class, to an extent rarely to be noticed in any actual member of the class they typify. They “contain multitudes,” to borrow Whitman’s 80 phrase. All idealistic visionaries are typified in Don Quixote, all misers in Harpagon, all hypocrites in Tartufe, all egoists in Sir Willoughby Patterne, all clever, tricksy women in Becky Sharp, all sentimentalists in Barrie’s Tommy. But the average actual man is not of sufficient magnitude to contain a multitude of others; he is comparatively lacking in typical traits; he is not, to such a great extent, illustrative of life, because only in a small measure is he representative of his class. There are, of course, in actual life, certain people of unusual magnitude who justify Emerson’s title of “Representative Men.” Benjamin Franklin, for example, is such a man. He is the only actual person entirely typical of eighteenth-century America; and that is the main reason why, as an exhibition of character, his autobiography is just as profitable a book as the master-works of fiction. But men so representative are rare in actual life; and the chief business of fiction is therefore to supply them.
Individual Traits.––It is mainly by supplying this need for representative men and women that the novelist can make his characters worth the while of every reader. But after he has made them quintessential of a class, he must be careful also to individualize them. Unless he endows them with certain personal traits that distinguish them from all other representatives or members of their class, whether actual or fictitious, he will fail to invest them with the illusion of reality. Every great character of fiction must exhibit, therefore, an intimate combination of typical and individual traits. It is through being typical that the character is true; it is through being individual that the character is convincing.
The Defect of Allegory.––The reason why most allegorical figures are ineffective is that, although they are typical, they are not at the same time individual. They are abstractly representative of a class; but they are not 81 concretely distinguishable from other representatives or members of the class. We know them, therefore, not as persons but merely as ideas. We feel very little human interest nowadays in reading over the old morality plays, whose characters are merely allegorical abstractions. But in criticising them we must remember that they were designed not so much to be read as to be performed upon the stage; and that the actors who represented their abstract and merely typical characters must necessarily have endowed them with concreteness and with individuality. Though a character in one of these allegorical plays might be called “Everyman,” it was one particular man who walked and talked upon the boards; and he evoked sympathy not so much for the type as for the individual. But allegory written to be read is less likely to produce the illusion of reality; and it is only when allegorical characters are virtually conceived as individuals, instead of mere abstractions, that they touch the heart. Christian, in Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” is so conceived. He is entirely representative of seventeenth-century Christianity; in a sense he is all men of Bunyan’s time and Bunyan’s religion; but he is also one man and one only, and we could never in our thought confuse him with any other character in or out of fiction.
The Defect of Caricature.––But just as a character may be ineffective through being merely typical, so also a character may be unsignificant through being merely individual. The minor figures in Ben Jonson’s Comedies of Humours are mere personifications of exaggerated individual traits. They are caricatures rather than characters. Dickens frequently commits the error of exhibiting figures devoid of representative traits. Tommy Traddles is sharply individualized by the fact that his hair is always standing on end; but he exhibits no essential truth of human nature. Barkis, who is always 82 willin’, and Micawber, who is always waiting for something to turn up, are emphatically distinguished from everybody else in or out of fiction; but they lack the large reality of representative characters. They are individualities instead of individuals. They do not exhibit an agglomeration of many different but consistent traits rendered unified and single by a dominant and informing characteristic, such as ambition in Macbeth, senility in Lear, or irresoluteness in Hamlet. A great fictitious character must be at once generic and specific; it must give concrete expression to an abstract idea; it must be an individualized representation of the typical qualities of a class. It is only figures of this sort that are finally worth while in fiction,––more worth the reader’s while than the average actual man.
Static and Kinetic Characters.––But there is yet another reason why it is often more valuable for the reader to meet fictitious characters than to meet people of the same class in actual life; and this reason is that during the day or two it takes to read a novel he may review the most significant events of many years, and thus get to know a fictitious character more completely in a brief space of time than he could get to know him, if the character were actual, in several years of continuous acquaintanceship. We meet two sorts of characters in the pages of the novelists,––characters which may be called static, and characters which may be called kinetic. The first remain unchanged throughout the course of the story: the second grow up or down, as the case may be, through the influence of circumstances, of their own wills, or of the wills of other people. The recurrent characters of Mr. Kipling’s early tales, such as Mrs. Hauksbee, Strickland, Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, are static figures. Although they do different things in different stories, their characters remain always 83 the same. But Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are kinetic figures; they grow and change throughout the novel; they are, each in his own way, bigger and wiser people when we leave them than they were when first we met them. To show a character developing under stress or ripening easily beneath beneficent influences is one of the greatest possibilities of fiction. And to exhibit the gradual disintegration of a character, as George Eliot does in the case of Tito Melema, is to teach us more of the tragedy of life than we might learn in many years of actual experience.
Direct and Indirect Delineation.––Only after the process of creation is completed, and a character stands living in the mind of the novelist, need he consider the various technical expedients which may be employed to make the reader conscious of the character as a personal presence. These technical expedients are many; but they may all be grouped as phases of one or the other of two contrasted methods of delineating character, which may be called, for convenience, direct and indirect. According to the first method, traits of character are conveyed directly to the reader through some sort of statement by the writer of the story: according to the second method, characteristics are conveyed indirectly to the reader through a necessary inference, on his part, from the narrative itself. In employing the first, or direct, method, the author (either in his own person or in that of some character which he assumes) stands between the reader and the character he is portraying, in the attitude, more or less frankly confessed, of showman or expositor. In employing the second, or indirect, method, the author seeks to obliterate himself as much as possible from the reader’s consciousness; and having brought the reader face to face with the character he desires to portray, leaves the reader to make his own acquaintance 84 with the character. The indirect method is of course more difficult, and, when successfully employed, is more artistic, than the direct method. But seldom is either used to the exclusion of the other; and it would be possible to illustrate by successive quotations from any first-rate novel, like “The Egoist” for example, how the same characteristics are portrayed first by the one and then by the other method.
Subdivisions of Both Methods.––Each of the two methods shows itself in many different phases. There are several distinct ways of delineating character directly, and also several distinct means of indirect delineation. It is perhaps serviceable for the purposes of study to distinguish them somewhat sharply one from another; but it must always be remembered that the masters of fiction usually employ a commingling of them all, without conscious awareness of any critical distinction between them. Bearing this ever in mind, let us venture on a critical examination of some of the most frequently recurrent phases, first, of the direct, and secondly, of the indirect, method.
I. Direct Delineation: 1. By Exposition.––The most obvious, and at the same time the most elementary, means of direct portrayal is by a deliberate expository statement of the leading traits of the character to be portrayed. Thus, at the outset of “The Vicar of Wakefield,” the author, writing in the person of the Vicar, thus expounds the traits of Mrs. Primrose:––
“I was ever of opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population. From this motive, I had scarce taken orders a year before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife as she did her wedding-gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well. To do 85 her justice, she was a good-natured notable woman; and as for breeding, there were few country ladies who could show more. She could read any English book without much spelling; but for pickling, preserving, and cookery, none could excel her. She prided herself also upon being an excellent contriver in housekeeping; though I could never find that we grew richer with all her contrivances.”