A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings | Page 2

the Vices of Men, without making them conceive any Aversion for the Satirist.
It is Gally's concept of the character as an art-form, however, which is most interesting to the modern scholar. Gally breaks sharply with earlier character-writers like Overbury who, he thinks, have departed from the Theophrastan method. Their work for the most part reflects corrupted taste:
A continued Affectation of far-fetched and quaint Simile's, which runs thro' almost all these Characters, makes 'em appear like so many Pieces of mere Grotesque; and the Reader must not expect to find Persons describ'd as they really are, but rather according to what they are thought to be like.
And Gally attacks one of the favorite devices of the seventeenth-century character:
An Author, in this Kind, must not dwell too long upon one Idea; As soon as the masterly Stroke is given, he must immediately pass on to another Idea.... For if, after the masterly Stroke is given, the Author shou'd, in a paraphrastical Manner, still insist upon the same Idea, the Work will immediately flag, the Character grow languid, and the Person characteris'd will insensibly vanish from the Eyes of the Reader.
One has only to read a character like Butler's "A Flatterer" to appreciate Gally's point. The Theophrastan method had been to describe a character operatively--that is, through the use of concrete dramatic incident illustrating the particular vice. The seventeenth-century character is too often merely a showcase for the writer's wit. One frequently finds a succession of ingenious metaphors, each redefining from a slightly different angle a type's master-passion, but blurring rather than sharpening the likeness.
Gally insists that the style of the character be plain and easy, "without any of those Points and Turns, which convey to the Mind nothing but a low and false Wit." The piece should not be tediously rambling, but compact. It must have perfect unity of structure: each sentence should add a significant detail to the portrait. The manner ought to be lively, the language pure and unaffected.
As for the character-writer's materials, they are "Human Nature, in its various Forms and Affections." Each character should focus on a single vice or virtue, yet since "the Heart of Man is frequently actuated by more Passions than one," subsidiary traits ought to be included to round out the portrait (e.g., the covetous man may also be impudent, the impudent man generous). Budgell had expressed a similar conception. A character, he wrote, "may be compared to a Looking-glass that is placed to catch a particular Object; but cannot represent that Object in its full Light, without giving us a little Landskip of every thing else that lies about it."[4] By Gally's time writers like Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and La Bruyère had done much to show the complex and paradoxical nature of human behaviour. Gally, who praises La Rochefoucauld as the one modern as well equipped as Theophrastus to compose characters, reacts with his age against the stale types which both comedy and the character had been retailing ad nauseam. Human nature, says Gally, is full of subtle shadings and agreeable variations which the character ought to exploit. He quotes Temple to the effect that England is richer than any other nation in "original Humours" and wonders that no one has yet attempted a comprehensive portrait-gallery of English personality. Those writers who have come closest to Gally's idea of how "humour" ought to be handled are the "great Authors" of the Tatlers and Spectators, with their "interspers'd Characters of Men and Manners compleatly drawn to the Life."
In admiring the Roger de Coverley sketches, Gally typifies the increasingly tolerant attitude of the Augustans toward eccentric behavior.[5] Like Sterne and Fielding he is delighted by people whose idiosyncracies are harmless and appealing. As for the harsh satiric animus of a character-writer like Butler, it is totally alien to Gally, who would chide good-naturedly, so as "not to seem to make any Attacks upon the Province of Self-Love" in the reader. "Each Man," he writes, "contains a little World within himself, and every Heart is a new World." The writer should understand and appreciate, not ridicule, an individual's uniqueness.
Of course, the character as Theophrastus wrote it described the type, not the particular person. Gally, who sets up Theophrastus as his model, apparently fails to realize that a "humourist" like Sir Roger verges on individuality. Indeed, while discussing the need for writers to study their own and other men's passions, he emphasizes that "without a Knowledge of these Things, 'twill be impossible ever to draw a Character so to the Life, as that it shall hit one Person, and him only." Here Gally might well be talking of the Clarendon kind of portrait. If a character is "one Person, and him only," he is no longer a type, but somebody peculiarly himself.
Gally, then, is not as Theophrastan