se, in actual life,
certain people of unusual magnitude who justify Emerson's title of
"Representative Men." Benjamin Franklin, for example, is such a man.
He is the only actual person entirely typical of eighteenth-century
America; and that is the main reason why, as an exhibition of
character, his autobiography is just as profitable a book as the
master-works of fiction. But men so representative are rare in actual
life; and the chief business of fiction is therefore to supply them.

=Individual Traits.=--It is mainly by supplying this need for
representative men and women that the novelist can make his characters
worth the while of every reader. But after he has made them
quintessential of a class, he must be careful also to individualize
them. Unless he endows them with certain personal traits that
distinguish them from all other representatives or members of their
class, whether actual or fictitious, he will fail to invest them with
the illusion of reality. Every great character of fiction must
exhibit, therefore, an intimate combination of typical and individual
traits. It is through being typical that the character is true; it is
through being individual that the character is convincing.

=The Defect of Allegory.=--The reason why most allegorical figures
are ineffective is that, although they are typical, they are not at
the same time individual. They are abstractly representative of a
class; but they are not concretely distinguishable from other
representatives or members of the class. We know them, therefore,
not as persons but merely as ideas. We feel very little human
interest nowadays in reading over the old morality plays, whose
characters are merely allegorical abstractions. But in criticising
them we must remember that they were designed not so much to be read
as to be performed upon the stage; and that the actors who represented
their abstract and merely typical characters must necessarily have
endowed them with concreteness and with individuality. Though a
character in one of these allegorical plays might be called
"Everyman," it was one particular man who walked and talked upon the
boards; and he evoked sympathy not so much for the type as for the
individual. But allegory written to be read is less likely to
produce the illusion of reality; and it is only when allegorical
characters are virtually conceived as individuals, instead of mere
abstractions, that they touch the heart. Christian, in Bunyan's