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In the Spanish drama, for example, custom, loyalty, honor, and religion are as imperative and as inevitable as doom. In the Antigone, on the other hand, the crisis lies in the character of the protagonist. In this sense it is modern, and is the first example of true character-painting in tragedy.
This is why on a previous occasion, when speaking of the way in which thoughts are interjected into drama by the Greek dramatists, we said that really and truly no man can paint another, but only himself, and what we call character-painting is at the best but a poor mixing of painter and painted—a third something between these two, just as what we call colour and sound are born of the play of undulation upon organism.
In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona" his painting of manners was suffused by a tenderness and ideal beauty which formed an effective protest against the hard though vigorous character-painting which the first success of Ben Jonson in "Every Man in his Humour" brought at the time into fashion. But quick on these lighter comedies followed two in which his genius started fully into life.
The underpart of Boswell's face is of a low, almost brutish character. This is character-painting with a vengeance. Portrait of a Scotch laird by the son of a Scotch peasant. Carlyle's Boswell is to me the very man. If so, Carlyle's paradox seems as great as Macaulay's, for though Carlyle does not call Boswell a great fool in plain set terms, he goes very near it.
No face was capable of showing greater tenderness; none could assume a more forbidding expression of anger and contempt. The Sargent portrait, a masterpiece of vivid character-painting, is a remarkable revelation of the complex nature of its subject.
'Full of quaint and delightful studies of character. Bristol Mercury. MRS. OLIPHANT. SIR ROBERT'S FORTUNE. By MRS. OLIPHANT. Crown 8vo. 6s. 'Full of her own peculiar charm of style and simple, subtle character-painting comes her new gift, the delightful story before us.
He pub. in 1854 Institutes of Metaphysics, and ed. the coll. works of his father-in-law, Prof. Novelist, dau. of James F., one of the principal clerks of the Court of Session, in which office he was the colleague of Sir Walter Scott. Miss F. wrote three excellent novels, Marriage , The Inheritance , and Destiny , all characterised by racy humour and acute character-painting.
The most charming part of the character-painting is where the shrewish Lynette, as her estimate of the scullion-knight gradually rises in view of his mighty deeds, evinces her kindlier mood, not directly in speech, but by catches of love-songs breaking out of the midst of her scornful gibes: this is a very subtle and suitable and poetical way of eliciting the under-workings of the damsel's mind, and it is continued through five or six pages in an interrupted carol, until at last the maiden, wholly won, bids him ride by her side, and finishes her lay: O trefoil, sparkling on the rainy plain, O rainbow, with three colors after rain, Shine sweetly: thrice my love hath smiled on me.
His great strength is in character-painting, in which he is almost unrivalled. The History was followed by a supplementary History of the Civil War in Ireland . C. also wrote an autobiography, The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon , a reply to the Leviathan of Hobbes, and An Essay on the Active and Contemplative Life, in which the superiority of the former is maintained. C. d. at Rouen.
In the former, those most repelled by the revolutionary doctrines flashing out here and there, will yet be struck and interested by the masterly piece of character-painting that makes of the novel a success. The utmost fanaticism for the ideas ventilated in the Compagnon du Tour de France can reconcile no reader to the dullness and unreality of the story which make of it a failure.
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