. 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.

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.

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 f