Book Description

Excerpt from Anzengruber's Portrayal of Character: A Dissertation A great part of each writer's real worth rests in his ability to represent the truths of reality. The test of the poet, 1n the broader sense of the word, his most valid claim! To have his name remembered by posterity, rests in his power to re ect through his characters the nature of the human soul. The deep philosophical truths which his characters utter need not make them worthy of attention. According to the degree in which they represent the funda mental characteristics of the human kind, do they have a right to exist. The specific environment in which the author has placed his characters, and the people with whom they are brought in contact, and by whom they are in uenced, may be foreign to the one, who, years, yes, generations after wards, studies them. Yet, if they represent in their strug gles the innate, eternal, strivings of the human soul, with its failures and successes; if they seem to us like living men and women with all of the human emotions and passions, they are worthy-of, and fruitful for, study. The important point is that these characters should be in harmony with their surroundings, and that their activities should be those true to such an environment. It has been those very qualities which have made all peoples interested in Shakespeare's tempted Brutus; in Victor Hugo's sorely tried Jean Valjean; and in Goethe's restless Faust. Each is a character entirely different from the other in his aspirations, in his trials, and in his general environment; but each represents to us a genuine human being with his constantly changing yet ever constant problems. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."