ters who are the more
important contributors to the action, and the fulness of elaboration for
its heroes. Many expedients may lend their aid to the higher degrees of
distinctiveness. Much is gained by a significant introduction of hero or
heroine--thus Antigone is dragged in by the watchman, Gloucester enters
alone upon the scene, Volpone is discovered in adoration of his golden
saint. Nothing marks character more clearly than the use of contrast--as
of Othello with Iago, of Ottavio with Max Piccolomini, of Joseph with
Charles Surface. Nor is direct antithesis the only effective kind of
contrast; Cassius is a foil to Brutus, and Leonora to her namesake the
Princess. But, besides impressing the imagination as a conception
distinct in itself, each character must maintain a consistency between
its conduct in the action and the features it has established as its
own. This consistency does not imply uniformity; for, as Aristotle
observes, there are characters which, to be represented with uniformity,
must be presented as uniformly un-uniform. Of such consistently complex
characters the great critic cites no instances, nor indeed are they of
frequent occurrence in Greek tragedy; in the modern drama Hamlet is
their unrivalled exemplar; and Weislingen in Goethe's _Gotz_, and
Alceste in the _Misanthrope_, may be mentioned as other illustrations in
dramas differing widely from one another. The list might be enlarged
almost indefinitely from the gallery of female characters, in view of
the greater pliability and more habitual dependence of the nature of
women. It should be added that those dramatic literatures which freely
admit of a mixture of the serious with the comic element thereby
enormously increase the opportunities of varied characterization. The
difficulty of the task at the same time enhances the effect resulting
from its satisfactory accomplishment; and, if the conception of a
character is found to meet a variety of tests resembling that which life
has at hand for every man, its naturalness, as we term it, becomes more
obvious to the imagination. "Naturalness" is only another word for what
Aristotle terms "propriety"; the artificial rules by which usage has at
times sought to define particular species of character are in their
origin only a convenience of the theatre, though they have largely
helped to conventionalize dramatic characterization. Lastly, a character
should be directly effective with regard to the dramatic