“The secret of the character-drawing of the great masters seems to be this: while moulding the character from broad general elements, from universal types of humanity, they are able to delude the reader’s imagination into mistaking the picture for real portraiture, and this they achieve by making the portrait seem to be drawn from particular and peculiar traits instead of from generalities, and especially by hiding away all purposes—æsthetic, ethic, or political.
One great virtue of the great masters is their winsome softness of touch in character drawing. We are not fond of comparing literary work with pictorial art, but between the work of the novelist and the work of the portrait painter there does seem a true analogy as regards the hardness and softness of touch in the drawing of characters. In landscape painting that hardness which the general public love is a fault; but in portrait painting so important is it to avoid hardness that unless the picture seems to have been blown upon the canvas, as in the best work of Gainsborough, rather than to have been laid upon it by the brush, the painter has not achieved a perfect success. In the imaginative literature of England the two great masters of this softness of touch in portraiture are Addison and Sterne. Three or four hardly-drawn lines in Sir Roger or the two Shandys, or Corporal Trim, would have ruined the portraits so completely that they would never have come down to us. Close upon Addison comes Scott, in whose vast gallery almost every portrait is painted with a Gainsborough softness. Scarcely one is limned with those hard lines which are too often apt to mar the glorious work of Dickens. After Scott comes Thackeray or Fielding, unless it be Mrs. Gaskell. We are not in this article dealing with, or even alluding to, contemporary writers, or we might easily say what novelists follow Mrs. Gaskell.”
Read in the light of these remarks the characters in ‘Aylwin’ become still more interesting to the critic. Observe how soft is the touch of the writer compared with that of a novelist of real though eccentric genius, Charles Reade. Now and again in Reade’s portraits we get softness, as in the painting of the delightful Mrs. Dodd and her daughter, but it is very rare. The contrast between him and Mr. Watts-Dunton in this regard is most conspicuously seen in their treatment of members of what are called the upper classes. No doubt Reade does occasionally catch (what Charles Dickens never catches) that unconscious accent of high breeding which Thackeray, with all his yearning to catch it, scarcely ever could catch, save perhaps, in such a character as Lord Kew, but which Disraeli catches perfectly in St. Aldegonde.