A fundamental conception of the sentimental school, in its analysis of "sensibility," was the rapid response of the body to the easily agitated soul. Many of the heroes as well as heroines of the period might have said, with a character of Karamzin, "I am a mere mortal, the slave of sensibility;" or quoted sympathetically this longer exposition from Brooke's Juliet Grenville:

“O madam, what kind of a frame is this frame of our mortality? We die with pain; we die with pleasure; we can bear nothing in excess. We turn away from things indifferent . . . and yet, when our sensations rise to a certain pitch, the degree becomes quite insufferable, whatever its nature may be. Imagination, like an executioner of the pitiless Inquisition, keeps his rack ever in readiness; he stretches us thereon at pleasure, and strains the cords, and we lie panting and expiring beneath the tension." In the same novel, the heroine is one day discovered, at the age of five, with her doll undressed: "The moment that we entered, you started, as greatly alarmed; and your face, neck, and bosom were instantly covered with scarlet, in your dread that the men should see the nakedness of your baby." When such heroines arrive at maturity, they prefer drowning to a rescue which demands disrobing.

Recent naturalism has often become biological or even "animalistic" in its view of the relations of body and soul. It has analyzed the physiological elements of all kinds of sensation, the muscular and nervous aspects of thirst, starvation, mutilation, and the death agony. It has elaborated the physiological psychology of "love," degeneracy, religious frenzy, insanity, and many other forms of abnormal consciousness. It has described with gusto, also, the merely animal joy of robust," red-blooded" vitality. Naturalism of this type is characteristic of Zola, d'Annunzio, the Goncourt brothers, Dostoyevsky; in somewhat less degree of Tolstoi, Björnson, in his later work, and Hardy. It has relatively little place in American fiction.

In George Eliot there are many touches of this kind, but she is never primarily a physiologist. The physical effects of grief are shown in Adam Bede, and the approaching motherhood of Hetty Sorrel is described partly in the spirit of physiological psychology, but with the emphasis clearly on the moral experience. In Silas Marner, the catalepsy of the hero is rather obscurely treated, on its physical side; and the love relations of Eppie and Aaron, Godfrey and Nancy, Godfrey and Molly even, are given a very slight basis in the flesh.

97. Pure Psychology. — The types of character given in Section 87 may suggest deeper study of the individual soul. The consciousness of a character may be considered under such forms as imagination, memory, observation, generalization, sensation, emotion, volition, etc. Its subject, so to speak, may be the individual himself, sex, age, occupation, nationality, race; or the wider conceptions suggested by such phrases as "cosmic emotion" and Weltschmerz.

The consciousness of nationality is very strong in the characters of Westward Ho! and Soll und Haben; it is hardly recognizable in the villagers of Silas Marner. Balzac analyzes the specialized consciousness of the Parisian in many characters.

If by religious consciousness one means the sense of the existence of God, it is distinct in Dolly Winthrop, dim and uncertain in Silas Marner; practically latent in Elizabeth Bennet, and not even suggested in Queen Esther.

In the direct portrayal of self-consciousness proper, the novel departs widely from life. In actual experience, one can acquire only a vague and fragmentary acquaintance with the inner life of any other being. The novelist may of course transfer his own experience to his character, with such modification as imagination permits; or he may content himself with the typical. Inference, analogy, generalization, dramatic power, and human sympathy may vastly enlarge his insight into individuality; but no author

can solve the mystery of the individual. In the case of historical characters, the novelist may to some extent utilize their own records of experience; but these are imperfect and liable to misinterpretation.

He is scien

tific, in a true sense, only when he presents the typical.

The novelist may explore the region of the "sub-conscious"; or the mysteries of child, animal, and supernatural consciousness; but these belong, for the most part, to the odds and ends of characterization. In describing the mental life of supernatural beings, anthropomorphism is inevitable. One may perhaps conceive other forms of thought and feeling than the human, in the abstract; but if the attempt is made to embody them in the concrete, they tend to be transformed into the familiar shapes of our present "type of consciousness."

In general, the novel has been occupied with the more intense experiences of the soul; though realism has given attention to the more ordinary mental history of domestic, professional, and political life. Abnormal psychology may be approached with the romantic craving for the strange and mysterious; or in an ethical spirit, as in Hawthorne; or in a somewhat scientific spirit, interested in the light thrown on more universal experience, as to some degree in Poe and Balzac. The tendency of such characterization is toward physiological psychology, for obvious reasons.

98. Identity, Individuality, and Type. - The Bertillon and similar methods of identifying criminals emphasize the unique form of every human body. The early novelists made frequent use of such distinguishing details as birthmarks, scars, moles, etc. In fictitious literature, confused physical identity-sometimes due to bodily resemblance, as in the Comedy of Errors; more commonly to disguise by costume - may be a rich source of comic or tragic

effect. Confused moral identity is capable of large ethical and psychological value, as in the Induction to the Taming of the Shrew.

Double consciousness has been mentioned in Section 87. Compare Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Poe's William Wilson, Aldrich's Queen of Sheba, etc. Triple consciousness, studied at some length in James' Principles of Psychology, has received little or no attention in the novel as yet.

In physical and moral history each individual is easily identified, if the details are noted. No two individuals can occupy the same place at the same time; nor do they ever have the same sequence of emotions or thoughts. Every character in all fiction is perfectly distinct from every other, though the distinction may not always merit study.

Moral individuality, in any important artistic sense, is of course a much deeper matter. Its problem, stated philosophically, but in a form applicable to the art of the novelist, is given thus in Royce's Conception of Immortality:

"Individuality is something that we demand of our world, but that, in this present realm of experience, we never find. It is the object of our purposes, but not now of our attainment; of our intentions, but not of their present fulfilment; of our will, but not of our sense nor yet of our abstract thought; of our rational appreciation, but not of our description; of our love, but not of our verbal confession. We pursue it with the instruments of a thought and of an art that can define only types, and of a form of experience that can show us only instances and generalities. The unique eludes us, yet we remain faithful to the ideal of it, and in spite of sense and of our merely abstract thinking, it becomes for us the most real thing in the actual world, although for us it is the elusive goal of an infinite quest."

Many of the methods of characterization noted in the preceding sections may be used either for individualizing or typifying. Certain social and psychological types will

be suggested by the previous grouping of the dramatis personæ. Excellent examples of fairly pure types are found in the "characters" of Overbury and La Bruyère. Recent study of the development of fiction has given some attention to their influence on the novel.

Burlesque often throws light on character types. In this and other forms of imitation or conscious contrast, acquaintance with the original conceptions is essential. Don Quixote must be compared with the knights in serious romance of chivalry; Joseph Andrews with Pamela ; Jacopo Ortis with Werther; Marianne Dashwood with such heroines as the one noted in Section 96. Occasionally serious and burlesque treatment of the same type occur in a single composition; for example, the pastoral type in As You Like It, and Sidney's Arcadia. A character at first quite original for fiction often tends to pass rapidly into conventional type, like the fierce hero of Jane Eyre, or the sceptical sufferer in Robert Elsmere.

Specific knowledge of history is of course necessary to understand fully many of the character types in fiction. It is impossible to interpret Turgenieff and other modern Russian novelists rightly without some acquaintance with Russian social movements. Carlyle's Chartism may be of value in the study of Kingsley's Yeast and Alton Locke.

Single characters often represent quite distinctly several minor and major types. Silas Marner is a type of the English weavers of his period; of all human beings morally exiled by the treachery of their fellows; of all souls experiencing a tragic separation between their present and their past.

The general value of allegorical and symbolical characters was suggested in Section 85. The allegorical interest may be very vague, as in Robinson Crusoe; more definite, as in Wilhelm Meister; or approaching "isomorphic value, as in Pilgrim's Progress. Double allegory, after