Chapter VI of Silas Marner. While these conditions do not necessarily imply group-consciousness, they are likely to arouse and intensify it. Such a group may be treated as a spatial picture, with a descriptive interest in its physical form; or as a moral unity, with the emphasis on social psychology. There is sometimes an imaginative, even symbolical tendency to consider the entire group as one person, as in the treatment of city mobs or armies by such modern novelists as Hugo, Balzac, and Zola.

Other groups, such as all the whites or all the Indians in The Last of the Mohicans, are based on common qualities rather than common time and place; and in many cases a clear sense of group-unity may exist only in the mind of author or reader.

A group may be composed of a definite number of persons (symbolized by G-4, G-5, etc.) or of an indefinite number (G-n). Indefinite groups of a large number of persons-masses are characteristic of epic quality, and are almost necessary to give a large social background in historical fiction.

In The Plague Year there are masses of servants, surgeons, aldermen, nurses, refugees, etc. In I Promessi Sposi there are more objective, ensemble groups of soldiers, worshippers, the plague-stricken, etc. In very many of the Waverley Novels, indeterminate groups, — such as archers, knights, Highlanders, gypsies, crusaders, more significant as masses than as composed of individuals, increase the epic breadth and dignity of the social picture.

79. Successive Groups. The scheme suggested in Section 77 will furnish starting-points for a more careful study of the groups in individual episodes, scenes, events, and incidents. On this basis, characters may be described as episodic (semi-episodic) and persistent; the episodic being more accurately noted as initial, central (climactic),

final (catastrophic), etc. Even in the loosest types of plot there are nearly always one or more persistent characters. Aside from such unifying persons, in the episodic plot, in autobiographical fictions, and adventure and picaresque forms in general, the group at any stage of the action may be almost independent of the others. In all types of novel, well-marked episodic groups are common. Such groups

are especially clear in intercalated narrative; a frequent structural form in most early romance, in Cervantes, Le Sage, Fielding, Smollett and their disciples. The narrator of these intercalations himself is sometimes an episodic character; in closer economy, persistent.

In Robinson Crusoe, even Friday is only an episodic (central) character. There are quite independent groups in Brazil, Madagascar, Asia, as well as on the island. In Silas Marner, the most important independent groups are found in the initial Lantern Yard episode, and in Chapters VI-VII. None of the characters in these two groups have an important appearance elsewhere, except Macey, a semi-persistent character, and the hero himself. Eppie is a central-final character. In Pride and Prejudice, Colonel Fitzwilliam is one of the few distinctly episodic persons of any importance. He partly determines the general complexion of the group at Hunsford.

The initial, climactic, and catastrophic groups are obviously of great value in the study of the plot, and they are frequently very clearly defined. They are rarely of exact identity, even in economic plots. In general tendency, climactic groups are psychological, concentrating the attention on a relatively small number of individuals and their inner life; catastrophic groups are often broader, gathering together all the principal characters of the plot, and leaving a general impression of social atmosphere. These tendencies are fairly well exemplified in Silas Marner and Pride and Prejudice. There are many exceptions; some notable tragic effects being gained by leaving the reader

in the presence of isolated individuality at the close of the ! plot.

A somewhat artificial catastrophic ensemble of an old-fashioned type is found in the Sir Roger de Coverley papers. The introduction of new characters near the conclusion may often have a specific æsthetic effect. In the Shakespearian tragedy, this method gives a sense of relief, and suggests the continuous vigor of social life in the face of many individual calamities. In the last twenty-five pages of The Plague Year, Defoe introduces nine new individuals, but they are not important as individuals the populace of the city of London is the real catastrophic

hero.

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80. Foreground, Middleground, and Background Characters. The terms "foreground," "middleground," and 'background," borrowed from the spatial art of painting, apply to plot-literature only by way of a somewhat loose analogy. A foreground character is one that has relatively a great intensity, complexity, or variety of meaning, and as a result seems most immediately before the reader. There is perhaps no single technical test to determine the position of a character in the general perspective of values. foreground characters are usually given considerable speech, in the novel; but in Pride and Prejudice, Miss Darcy, without recorded utterance, is far more important than “a young Lucas," or Mrs. Hill, who are incidentally quoted. In a sense, the catastrophe is the foreground of a novel, so far as a single reading is concerned. The conclusion is the emphatic position, the one with the most warmth, immediacy, as the reader leaves the composition. According to the theory of Poe, the author's conception of a plot should originate with the catastrophe, which should then determine the whole perspective.

In a painting, the human figures may be concentrated in any one of the three positions, the other two being occu

In certain types of so

pied by works of nature or of art. called short stories, nature, or an abstract idea, or a lyrical mood, rather than a character, may in effect dominate the foreground. In the romance of action, it may be events rather than persons that come nearest to the reader. In the representative novel, the foreground is given to highly individualized characters, the background to groups or to individuals whose significance lies in their group relations. In the distinctively social novel, including some historical fictions, novels of manners, and novels of social psychology, the artist may devote even the foreground to the portrayal of groups. In The Plague Year, though written in a persistent first-person form, probably to most readers the mass of London inhabitants is more immediate, complex, and intense than the fictitious writer.

In all plot-literature, the richness and stability of the illusion depend to a considerable extent on a gradual shading in the value of the characters on a complex variety in the degrees of intimacy established between them and the reader. In our actual experience, of the extended scope which the novel imitates, there are persons of every grade of actuality, from the friend more real than self to the mere nominis umbra.

In Silas Marner, the hero himself is clearly the chief foreground character; Godfrey and Eppie being others, though the last is not even suggested until the climactic chapter. Mrs. Winthrop and Nancy are among the middleground figures, while in the remote background are the boys and girls of Raveloe, the factory hands of Lantern Yard, Jinny Oates, the pedler, and many other individuals.

81. Central Characters. A character or characters may be central mainly as a matter of plot-function, their service being to unify all the incidents of the action; or central in a deeper psychological or sociological manner, their value

Of

determining that of all other individuals and groups. course the two functions may be combined; and in either, the degrees of centrality are various.

Clear examples of a single central character are often found in autobiographical fictions; as in Robinson Crusoe, The Vicar of Wakefield, and David Copperfield. In Paul and Virginia, the first-person form serves mainly as an enveloping frame; in The Plague Year the firstperson narrator aids in unifying the rather diffuse incidents of the action, and gives greater force to the individuality of the other characters. The title often suggests a single central character with sufficient accuracy, as in The Man of Feeling, Tom Jones, Eugénie Grandet; but in other cases, the "hero" in a traditional sense does not appear in the title rôle. In The Antiquary, while Oldenbuck is near the focus of interest, Lovell corresponds more nearly to the conventional hero. A central character may be so conceived and presented that his significance lies rather in typical than in individual qualities. Lermontoff writes of his Contemporary Hero, 'My hero is the portrait of a generation, not of an individual.' This statement is almost equally true of some of the chief characters of Turgenieff.

Two central characters may be given approximately the same degree of value by the method of contrast, as in Master and Man or Sense and Sensibility. In the lovestory of novelistic or dramatic form, the hero and heroine are sometimes of equal value; sometimes one or the other definitely predominates. In Jane Austen the heroine is always more central than the hero; and this is clearly the case in As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet.

In not a few notable fictions, as suggested in the preceding section, a group rather than individuals as such, is in all but a technical sense, the real center of value. All in all, the lovers of I Promessi Sposi are less significant in the mind of author and reader than the masses of ecclesiastical, martial, and municipal figures. Bulwer Lytton's son says