"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 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