CHARACTER, in epic and dramatic poetry, that which is peculiar in the manners of any person, and distinguishes him from all others.
The poetical character, says Mr. Boffin, is not properly any particular virtue or quality, but a composition of several which are mixed together, in a different degree, according to the necessity of the fable and the unity of the action: there must be one, however, to reign over all the rest; and this must be found, in some degree, in every part. The first quality in Achilles, is wrath; in Ulysses, dissimulation; and in Æneas, mildness: but as these characters cannot be alone, they must be accompanied with others to embellish them, as far as they are capable, either by hiding their defects, as in the anger of Achilles, which is palliated by extraordinary valour; or by making them center in some solid virtue, as in Ulysses, whose dissimulation makes a part of his prudence; and in Æneas, whose mildness is employed in a submission to the will of the gods. In the making up of which union, it is to be observed, the poets have joined together such qualities as are by nature the most compatible; valour with anger, piety with mildness, and prudence with dissimulation. The fable requires a prudence in Ulysses, and piety in Æneas; in this, therefore, the poets were not left to their choice: but Homer might have made Achilles a coward without abating any thing from the justness of his fable: so that it was the necessity of adorning his character that obliged him to make him valiant: the character, then, of a hero in the epic poem, is compounded of three sorts of qualities; the first essential to the fable; the second, embellishments of the first; and valour, which sustains the other two, makes the third.
Unity of character is as necessary as the unity of the fable. For this purpose a person should be the same from the beginning to the end: not that he is always to betray the same sentiments, or one passion; but that he should never speak nor act inconsistently with his fundamental character. For instance, the weak may sometimes fall into a warmth, and the breast of the passionate be calm, a change which often introduces in the drama a very affecting variety; but if the natural disposition of the former was to be represented as boisterous, and that of the latter mild and soft, they would both act out of character, and contradict their persons.
True characters are such as we truly and really see in men, or may exist without any contradiction to
R r nature:
Character. nature: no man questions but there have been men as generous and as good as Aeneas, as passionate and as violent as Achilles, as prudent and wise as Ulysses, as impious and atheistical as Mezentius, and as amorous and passionate as Dido; all these characters, therefore, are true, and nothing but just imitations of nature. On the contrary, a character is false when an author so feigns it, that one can see nothing like it in the order of nature wherein he designs it shall stand: these characters should be wholly excluded from a poem, because, transgressing the bounds of probability and reason, they meet with no belief from the readers; they are fictions of the poet's brain, not imitations of nature; and yet all poetry consists in an imitation of nature.