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and prominent figures of the American Revolution in The Spy. The Cloister and the Hearth is crowded with minor characters that give us a vivid picture of life in the Middle Ages.

Still again subordinate characters are used because the scene requires a crowded stage, as in the party at the Red House in Silas Marner. We do not again meet Mrs. Crackenthorpe,

Subordinate characters to suggest numbers

"a small blinking woman, who fidgetted incessantly with her lace, ribbons, and gold chain, turning her head about and making subdued noises, very much like a guinea-pig that twitches its nose and soliloquizes in all company indiscriminately";

or Mrs. Kimble,

"the Squire's sister, as well as the doctor's wife-a double dignity, with which her diameter was in direct proportion";

or the two Miss Gunns,

"the wine merchant's daughters from Lytherly, dressed in the height of fashion, with the tightest skirts and the shortest waists, and gazed at by Miss Ladbrook (of the old Pastures) with a shyness not unsustained by inward criticism,"

but we need them to give reality to the scene.

characters to

Subordinate characters are also used to throw light on Subordinate the principal characters through contrast or comment. Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre with her

throw light on principal char

acters

"sloping shoulders, graceful neck, dark eyes, and black ringlets," with her high features, her satirical laugh, and her " arched and haughty lip," is a mere foil to plain little Jane, who has charms denied to many a more beautiful heroine. In Vanity Fair many characters are brought in contact with Becky Sharp just to display her cleverness and unscrupulousness,

In Lorna Doone minor characters sing John Ridd's praises; he cannot be expected to do it himself.

It is not usually considered careful artistry to allow subordinate characters to intrude upon our interest in the main characters. Such intrusion is, however, by Undue interest

in subordinate characters

no means uncommon. The reader sometimes grows impatient over the author's elaboration of a minor character. In Dickens, however, we forgive the intrusion of the minor characters because they are such inimitable creations.

Number and Range of Characters

acters

The number and range of characters is an indication of the author's breadth of sympathy and his power to fill his imaginary world with widely diverse creatures. Number and Some great novels have a limited range of range of charcharacters. Usually such novels are devoted to a profound study of three or four characters and their relationships with one another. The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun are good examples of this type. In The Scarlet Letter the interest centers in four essential characters with the stern Puritan community as background for the spiritual tragedy of their lives. In The Marble Faun the economy of characters is fundamentally similar, but carried out less sucessfully. On the other hand David Copperfield is crowded with people; and an astonishing number of them-David, Uriah Heap, the Micawbers, Betsy Trotwood, little Emily, Traddles, the Pegottys, Mrs. Gummidge, Mr. Dick, Barkisare unforgettable. Scott, too, crowds his canvas with people from all walks of life, though they are often more picturesque than profound. It is always interesting to note whether a book contains many or few characters, whether they come from limited or varied walks of life, whether one type is

as successfully developed as another-in short, what the range and depth of the author's power of characterization is.

Static and Kinetic Characters

Characters in a story either remain fundamentally unchanged or show change and growth as the

Static and

kinetic char

acters

story proceeds. Those that do not change

are called static; those that do, kinetic.

Characters that

ment

A novel usually takes its characters over a critical period of their lives and tries to show the effect that the circumstances of the story have upon them. In a show develop novel, therefore, the principal characters are usually of the kinetic type, and only the subordinate ones static. A novel which delves deeply into the changes that time and circumstances bring about in a man's mind and heart is often called a psychological novel. George Eliot's Romola, for instance, is such a story, as is also Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Such a study of changing or developing character was one of the chief interests of Thackeray. We feel that Beatrix Esmond, Becky Sharp, George, Amelia, and Dobbin, in fact all the principal characters in Thackeray, develop in a certain inevitable direction, that their thoughts and habits are forming the hard mold in which their characters will ultimately be cast. Again in The Rise of Silas Lapham we watch the hero grow in moral strength as his fortunes decline; in The Mill on the Floss we watch Maggie and Tom from the time they are little children to their final tragic end, and we feel that each step in their development is the logical outcome of those that have preceded it; in Sentimental Tommy we follow Tommy along his precocious, sensitive, self-centered, imaginative path of life through childhood and boyhood, his every act and thought and word what his past career has led

us to expect. These characters are all kinetic; they develop, though they do not necessarily undergo violent changes.

Romantic fiction, however, usually, but not always, takes a type figure and endows him with certain striking qualities without seeking to change or develop those Static charqualities in detail as the story proceeds. In acters The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan is perhaps a bit sadder and wiser from experience at the end, but he is in the main the same impetuous, courageous, gallant, arrogant, selfish young man that he was at the beginning. John Ridd is just as boyish and strong and wholesome, and Lorna as sweet and true at the end of Lorna Doone as they were in the beginning, although both have grown up in the meantime. In The House of the Seven Gables the Judge is the same rather heavy villain all through the book. In The Talisman Sir Kenneth's character undergoes no subtle change, nor does Bois Guilbert's in Ivanhoe, or the Master's in The Master of Ballantrae. This is because a romance is interested in characters as they are rather than as they may develop. A romance is not usually psychological; its characters are thus usually static rather than kinetic.

Sometimes romantic characters are so exaggerated that they become caricatures, easily recognizable by a few outstanding traits or expressions, like the promi- Characters that nent figures in a cartoon. Dickens is a master are caricatures of caricatures; almost everything said or done by his inimitable characters is exaggerated. We recognize them by their peculiar mannerisms, their startling clothes, their remarkable physiognomies, and their constantly repeated expressions. The strange creatures that live in David Copperfield are easily identified by their pet phrases: "I never will desert Mr. Micawber"; "Janet, Donkeys!"; "Barkis is willin""; "Generally speaking, I don't like boys"; "Waiting for something to turn up"; "lone lorn creetur." But

the Micawbers, Sairy Gamps, Uriah Heeps, Bill Sykes's, and Rosa Dartles of this delightful sort of fiction, immortal though they be, must not for a moment be thought of as real people from real life. Real they are in the sense that they are astonishingly vivid, but human beings they are not. Uriah Heep is an everlasting type of false humility, Bill Caricatures not Sykes has come to be a synonym for brutal really portraits criminality, but in real life there are no such exaggerated types. Human nature is too complex to produce unadulterated types. Modern novelists are inclined to present human nature in all its complexity rather than with the engaging simplicity of Dickens and Scott.

of human nature

INTERACTION OF PLOT, SETTING, AND CHARACTER

Influence of the plot on the characters

Character is often influenced by plot and setting. When a character acts as he does because the plot demands it of him instead of because it is the natural course for him to take, we say that he is unduly influenced by the plot. Silas Marner's cataleptic fit and Molly Farren's overdose of laudanum are a bit too opportune to be perfectly natural; their occurrence at this particular time is demanded by the plot. If they did not act in this way at this time, the story could not go on. All that the author can do in such a case is to make the actions seem consistent with the nature of the character, as George Eliot does satisfactorily. If, however, a character is made to do violently inconsistent or unnatural things demanded of him by the exigencies of the plot, the story ceases to be a sincere and faithful picture of life.] It is natural

Molding the characters to fit the plot

that Maisie should desert the blind artist in The Light that Failed, because she is a selfish, shallow girl; to have changed her nature inconsistently at the last moment to secure a happy ending would have spoiled the book. On the other hand, the con

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