A word on the general conditions of a presentation of character in comedy. For one thing, dramatic construction, as compared with that of prose fiction, has certain obvious limits set to the delineation of character. The art is too wise to attempt a full presentment of so complex a group of traits as we find in a developed individuality. It illustrates, however, degrees of fulness in the presentation of personality, and the finer art of drama may produce its impression of a concrete person very much as a skilful painter does within the limits of a rough sketch by a few master strokes. Yet without the actor’s visible embodiment of the part, the full impression of a concrete individual would be difficult within the limits of dramatic construction. In the case of comedy, moreover, there is another reason for the limitation of the art of developing individual character. The superlative æsthetic value of the ludicrous aspect of character imposes on the writer an unusual degree of simplification, of something like a reduction of the concrete personality to an abstraction. The comic entertainment afforded by the presentation, say, of a swelling vanity, springs from our keeping the mental eye fixed in merry expectation of the coming developments of the laughable trait. If, then, only this core of the character, as the mood of the spectator estimates it, is clearly presented and sufficiently illustrated, {359} both in its immediate manifestations and in its effects on the rest of the man, a very shadowy reinstatement of this remainder will suffice. This conclusion seems clearly borne out by the common way of speaking of the great comic figures as “types”; for to view a character as typical means that we are interested in the person, less as a particular individual, than as an example of a certain sort of person. The common practice of writers of comedy, ancient and modern, of marking their characters by appropriate names, the Braggadocio, the Miser, the Misanthrope, and so forth, shows that authors recognise this typical function.