the great characterizes, like Shakespeare, do, is simply to
elaborate and develope (perhaps far beyond the necessities of the
plot) the suggestion of human individuality which that plot
contains. It is as if, having drawn from daily observation some
knowledge of the tempers of our friends, we represented them
saying and doing all manner of ultra-characteristic things, and in
an occasional soliloquy laying bare, even more clearly than by any
possible action, that character which their observed behaviour had
led us to impute to them. This is an ingenious and fascinating
invention, and delights us with the clear discovery of a hidden
personality; but the serious and equable development of a plot has
a more stable worth in its greater similarity to life, which allows us
to see other men's minds through the medium of events, and not
events through the medium of other men's minds.

_Character as an aesthetic form._

Sec. 45. We have just come upon one of the unities most coveted in
our literature, and most valued by us when attained, -- the portrait,
the individuality, the character. The construction of a plot we call
invention, but that of a character we dignify with the name of
creation. It may therefore not be amiss, in finishing our discussion
of form, to devote a few pages to the psychology of character-drawing.
How does the unity we call a character arise, how is it described, and
what is the basis of its effect?

We may set it down at once as evident that we have here a case of
the type: the similarities of various persons are amalgamated, their
differences cancelled, and in the resulting percept those traits
emphasized which have particularly pleased or interested us. This,
in the abstract, may serve for a description of the origin of an idea
of character quite as well as of an idea of physical form. But the
different nature of the material -- the fact that a character is not a
presentation to sense, but a rationalistic synthesis of successive
acts and feelings, not combinable into any image -- makes such a
description much more unsatisfying in this case than in that
of material forms. We cannot understand exactly how these
summations and cancellings take place when we are not dealing
with a visible object. And we may even feel that there is a
wholeness and inwardness about the development of certain ideal
characters, that makes such a treatment of them fundamentally
false and artificial. The subjective element,