222 Metaphors for character

The typical Brontë character is, indeed, a kind of monster.

He is so intent on the development of the windings and unwindings of his story that the characters become mere puppets, originated and controlled by the needs of the plot.

Is there any one who would confess that character and intelligence are now a helpless minority in this nation?

The private character of the individual, his personal appearance, and rank in society, are the circumstances which generally interest the public most immediately upon his decease.

He will soon convince himself that Species have no more definite and real existence in Nature than all the other divisions of the Animal Kingdom, and that every animal is the representative of its Branch, Class, Order, Family, and Genus as much as of its Species, Specific characters are only those determining size, proportion, color, habits, and relations to surrounding circumstances and external objects.

Character is not all pure reason.

Perhaps his best-known characters are the privates Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, whom we meet in such tales of mingled comedy and tragedy as With the Main Guard (1888), On Greenhow Hill (1891), The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney (1891), The Courting of Dinah Shadd (1981).

The leading character in this story is, of course, Old Goriot, and the passion which dominates him is that of paternity.

It is not required by the law, that the general character of a criminal, but that the particular evidence of the crime with which he stands charged, should be examined; nor is his character ever mentioned but by his own choice.

That the character of Görgei, whom our generals never accused of treacherous designs, was a mystery: nay, the patriotic General Perczel, who proclaimed loudly Görgei's treachery from the very beginning, had the satisfaction to be laughed at and hooted down.

To sum up these relations of the viscera, the endocrines, the unconscious and the mind, it may be stated as a far-reaching generality for the understanding of human life: that character and conduct are expressions of the streams of energy arising in the vegetative apparatus, primarily endocrine determined at birth, and secondarily experience determined after the organism has learned to react as a whole, as consciousness.

To those who have read the narrative of James Williams I need only say, that the character of young Larrimore's wife is an exact description of this female tyrant, whose countenance was ever dressed in smiles when in the presence of strangers, but whose heart was as the nether millstone toward her slaves.

These last characters are also criteria of degrees of reality, and consequently of degrees of self-realisation.

The chief characters in the story are a boy and a girl, inheritors of a vast fortune, whose parents are dead, and who have been left in the guardianship of a large Trust Company.

The essential character of vegetable life is the exhalation of oxygen, which is effected through the agency of light.

The character of Mr. Forester was, in many respects, the reverse of that of my master.

Its characters are a race of manly husbandmen, heroic without ceasing to be homely, poetical without ceasing to be genuine.

Character is the result of two things, mental attitude, and the way we spend our time.

This character is perhaps commoner than philosophers suppose.

In several other pieces, more ancient than the earliest of Shakespeare's, provincial characters are introducedSteevens.

In my first hasty reading of the play I took the long double "s" to be a double "f": the character is "La Busse." Mr. C.H. Herford, to whom I showed the MS., writes as follows:

The most difficult character in history to treat critically, and the easiest to treat rhetorically, perhaps, is Oliver Cromwell; after two centuries and more he is still a puzzle: his name, like that of Napoleon, is a doubt.

But in the Confession the character of the author himself is completely revealedhis piety, his zeal, his self-sacrifice, his courage in face of every danger and every trial.

On the whole the characters are more life-like presentations of humanity than those of "Headlong Hall."

The stories may be divided into two groups, the animal stories in which the principal characters are animals, for the most part denizens of the jungles, and the stories which deal with a settled state of Society with Rajas, priests and members of the different Hindu castes following their usual occupations.

222 Metaphors for  character