CHARACTERS THAT LIVE.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 793, 16 April 1910, Page 9

CHARACTERS THAT LIVE.

4 In' a remote province of the literary world the question is being agitated: Why it is that since mid-Victoriau times cliaracters in iiction have not seized upon the popular imagination as they did when Thackeray ancl Dickens were in the field? One writer "denies the fact," and exemplifies his denial by quoting John Silver, Alan Breck Stewart, and Toss. Even if, however, ho v/ero to add the composite Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to his list, tho general proposition-would be true, that although every reader carries in ,his memory a gallery • of. portraits 'of persons taken from tho fiction of later Victorian and sub-Victorian times,' yet few 'characters in fiction have captured the mind of tlio whole reading world as the creations. of the earlier masters did. Ono reason-may be that readers nowadays are more careless than their precursors. They read not multum, but multa. There •are. so niany books to be got through, that a' fresh novel is begun before the impressions mado by, its pretime to establish themselves firmly in* the memory. Another may be—although one throws it out as a suggestion rather.'than enunciates it as a settled conclusion —that tho analytic method of exhibiting characters in fiction as practised by some writers does not fix them in the memory as tlio more primitive method did. It ought indeed to make them more vivid, because if, the process by which a character is exhibited from without inward enables us at last to know them as wo know other people, tho other and inverse process 'by whicli ; .they are exhibited from _ without, inward enables us to know him...as wo know ourselves. Nevertheless-it is by. something outward that we; remember the men and women whom we have met in the world of fiction. We.remember Beauchamp at ! the moment when that terrible pallor, is in his face which the doctor erroneously attributed to his vegetarianism,' and we remomb'or that rare old character the Countess of Drum by her use of' the word "ojus," while Parson Adams is the ; inost memorable character in English, fiction just because there are .so many of such external things—characteristic 'conversations; characteristic situations, characteristic incidents—to . remember, him ' by.;', Writers, :accordingly, who are too sparing of . sucli. details deny;the average reader 'the very tentacles'by which alone he can attach 'their characters'. to his recollection.— "Manchester Guardian.". ... ....