the story of Sir Robert Redgauntlet and his son Sir John. Wangell, Hilda, in Ibsen's drama, The Master-Builder (1892), a young girl who tempts Solness, the sexagenarian hero, into a passion that eventually destroys him. She may be taken as a symbol of youth arriving too late within the circle which age has trodden for its steps to walk in, and luring it too rashly by the mirage of happiness into paths no longer within its physical and moral capacity. a Ward, Artemus, the genial showman," a distinct personality and not mere pseudonym, invented by Charles Farrar Browne as the pretended author of his works. He is presented to us as a shrewd, course, grasping Yankee, full of humor, both conscious and unconscious, utterly irreverent and always at his ease. With his " wax figgurs and his kangaroo, a amoozin little cuss,' he passes from State to State and even from America to Europe. He is denounced as "a man of sin" by the Shaker elder; is entertained by the Mormons; is greeted effusively by the Women's Rights females; interviews President Lincoln, beset by "orifice seekers coming down the chimney," and later Albert Edward and Prince Napoleon; listens unconcernedly to Union orators; has his show confiscated by the screaming eagle of the Confederacy; and escapes home to Betsy Jane, the partner of his joys and sorrows, whose relations he is avowedly willing to sacrifice on the altar of his country. There was an American general in the Revolutionary army named Artemas Ward, but he had nothing in common with the showman save his name. This showman, Artemus, is one of the solidest figures in the gallery of American fiction. To the public for whom Browne wrote he is still a much more real person than is Charles Farrar Browne himself. Certainly there could not be a contrast greater than that between the blatant, vulgar, impudent old buffoon of the book and the quiet, delicate, pensive, sensitivelooking young gentleman of the lecture platform. And yet before he had been speaking five minutes you could understand how and why the creator of Artemus was Ware his creator.-JULIAN HAWTHORNE and LEONARD LEMON: American Literature (1891). Ward, Rev. John, hero of a novel by Mrs. Margaret C. Deland (1888). A logical Calvinist who believes in all that that term implies and preaches with conviction its sternest doctrines,-election, reprobation, and eternal punishment. His wife, née Helen Jaffrey, niece of an easy-going liberal Episcopal, cherishes broad modern views which continually clash with his. The congregation side with the minister, and the domestic circle suffers accordingly. Any real Calvinist is at this hour rare; one who accepts the full consequences of his faith always has been. John Ward believed in the damnation of the heathen, and more, in the damnation of all who disbelieved in damnation-of all who, to quote one of his elders, were not "grounded on hell." This is also the belief of thousands of to-day, who yet eat, drink, and are merry. John Ward believed, suffered, crucified himself, and fell a martyr to his faith at his own hands, in a fashion logical, but hardly natural.-N. Y. Nation. Wardle, Mr. (of Manor Farm, Dingley Dell), in Dickens's Pickwick Papers, friend of Mr. Pickwick and his companions; a stout, hearty, honest old gentleman, who is most happy when he is making others the same. Wardle, Miss Rachael, sister of the above; a spinster of doubtful age, with dignity in her air, majesty in her eye, and touch-me-not-ishness in her walk. The too susceptible" Mr. Tupman, falling in love with her, is circumvented by the adroit Mr. Jingle, who elopes with her, but is pursued, overtaken, and induced to relinquish his prize in consideration of a check for a hundred and twenty pounds. Ware, Thereon, hero of Harold Frederic's novel, The Damnation of Thereon Ware (1896). A young Methodist minister in the town of Octavius (identified as Elmira, N. Y.), a married man, detesting "Popery,' he has all his views disturbed and distorted by association with one Father Forbes, greatly his superior in learning and intelligence, who shakes his belief in Protestantism without inculcating faith in any other form of Christianity. He falls in love with a Roman Catholic girl, Celia Madden, a great friend of Father Forbes, who toys with him for her own amusement and then throws him over. Maddened with pique, remorse, and shame, he goes on a protracted spree, and is saved by a couple of shrewd sophisticated Methodists, who persuade him to abandon the ministry and go into business. Waring, titular hero of a poem by Robert Browning, who is identified with Alfred Domett, the poet. Waring is a young man living a secluded life in London. To the world his manners have the reserve of intense pride, but to his few intimates he freely opens his heart, avowing his wild aspirations and his confident belief in his ability to realise them. His boasting is tempered with so much good nature that his friends do not scruple to let him see how ridiculous they deem the contrast between his abilities and his astounding claims. He does not appear to be wounded, yet one night he disappears without a word of farewell. Browning's poem begins: Since he gave us all the slip, Any longer, London-town?" Warner, in Bulwer Lytton's romance, The Last of the Barons, a reputed magician in league with Satan, but really a scientific pioneer who invents an embryo steam-engine. The author looked upon this as one of his finest conceptions; Warner's daughter Sybil was another of his favorites. Warren, Mrs., titular heroine of G. B. Shaw's comedy, Mrs. Warren's Profession, is in plain words the keeper of a house of prostitution, who defends her métier with cutting sarcasm on modern hypocrisy. Instead of maintaining an association in the imagination of the spectators between prostitution and fashionable beauty, luxury and refinement, as do La Dame aux Came Warrington lias, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Iris Zaza, and countless other plays, Mrs. Warren's Profession exhibits the life of the courtesan in all its arid actuality, and inculcates a lesson of the sternest morality. ARCHIBALD HENDERSON: George Bernard Shaw, p. 304. The play of Mrs. Warren's Profession is concerned with a coarse mother and a cold daughter; the mother drives the ordinary and dirty trade of harlotry; the daughter does not know until the end the atrocious origin of all her own comfort and refinement. freezes up into an iceberg of contempt; The daughter, when the discovery is made, which is indeed a very womanly thing to do. The mother explodes into pulverizing cynicism and practicality, which is also very womanly. The dialogue is drastic and sweeping; the daughter says the trade is loathsome; the mother answers that she loathes it herself; that every healthy person does loathe the trade by which she lives.G. K. CHESTERTON: George Bernard Shaw, p. 132. Warren, Vivie, in George Bernard Shaw's comedy, Mrs. Warren's Profession, is the dramatist's conception of a real modern lady of the governing classes-not the sort of thing that theatrical and critical authorities imagine such a lady to be." professed himself astonished at William Archer's charge (Daily News, June 21, 1902) that Vivie was simply Shaw in petticoats. He Warwick was vaguely drawn in that character. There was also a little likeness to his friend Edward Fitzgerald, who always lived a very solitary life." (See Lippincott's Magazine.) 379 One may appeal, however, from Thackeray's daughter to Thackeray himself: When Pendennis was published, he sent a copy to one of his intimate friends, George Moreland Crawford, Paris correspondent of the London Daily News, who had nursed the novelist through the long and dangerous illness which had nearly interrupted Pendennis forever. The copy was accompanied by the following letter: You will find much to remind you of old talks and faces-of William John O'Connell, Jack Sheehan, and Andrew Archdecne. There is something of you in Warrington, but he is not fit to hold a candle to you, for, taking you all around, you are the most genuine fellow that ever strayed from a better world into this. You don't smoke, and he is a consumed smoker of tobacco. Bordeaux and port were your favorites at the "Deanery and the "Garrick," and War, is always guzzling beer. But he has your honesty, and, like you, could not posture if he tried. You have a strong affinity for the Irish. May you some day find an Irish girl to lead you to matrimony! There's no such good wife as a daughter of Erin. Warrington, therefore, seems to have owed his being to the novelist's acquaintance with Crawford, although there is undoubtedly (and possibly unconsciously) much of Thackeray himself in it,-more, perhaps, than in the character of Pendennis. Waverley about her a brilliant circle of friends. In her personality and her career she is evidently a reminiscence of Lady Caroline Norton, Sheridan's granddaughter, famous for her beauty, her wit, and her independence of conventional opinion. To construct a character which would fit the known facts; to create a woman dazzling by the brilliancy of her personality, and liable by the very force of the qualities which raised her above the crowd to commit indiscretions unpardonable by the world, faculty, and the result is a singularly vivid was a congenial exercise to his inventive conception, worked out with great literary power. It is to be doubted whether even a poet is a more difficult character for fiction than a witty woman of the world; and amongst all his intellectual and literary accomplished one more striking than in feats Mr. Meredith has perhaps never making us feel that his Diana justified her reputation. He has made her move and speak before us as a living woman, dowered with exceptional gifts of "blood and brains." Of the two the brains "have it" decidedly. She is too much like Charles II in the contrast between her sayings and doings. The latter are almost invariably foolish.-Saturday Review, March 21, 1885. Waters, Esther, heroine and title of a novel (1894) by George Moore. The daughter of a drunkard who neglects his wife, Esther becomes scullery maid in the household of a horse-racing squire, is seduced by a fellow-servant, William Latch, but, pricked by conscience, refuses all proffers of assistance when a son is born, and endures terrible privations to remain respectable and bring up her boy in the right path. Eventually she marries her seducer, now a bookmaker, who keeps a low public house. Untaught, untrained and weakly emotional, she yet remains true to her religious principles, even when circumstances are most unfavorable, and in the end she feels that she has had her own sufficient reward in bringing her son up to man's estate. Warwick, Diana, heroine of George Meredith's novel, Diana of the Crossways (1885). An Irish girl of good family, of unusual wit, beauty, and fascination, but exuberant, incoherent, unequal, she makes an unfortunate marriage with Warwick. The uncongenial husband, knowing that he is neither loved nor respected, grows antagonistic, then jealous, and, finding suspicious circumstances in her intimacy with Lord Dannisburg, sues for a divorce. He fails to prove his case. Diana, legally a wife but separated from her husband, main-agility; tains herself by her pen, keeps up a charming little house, and draws Waverley, Captain Edward, titular hero of Scott's historical romance, Waverley, or 'Tis Sixty Years Since (1814). He was tall and athletic; "his person promised firmness and 'his blue eye seemed of that kind which melted in love and which kindled in war; " he was handy at 380 One of the most living and laughing things that her maker has made. I do not know any stronger way of stating the beauty of the character than by saying that it was written specially for Ellen Terry, and that it is, with Beatrice, one of the very few characters in which the dramatist can claim some part of her triumph.-G. K. CHESTERTON: George Bernard Shaw. Combining, as she does, the temperament of Ellen Terry with the genial esprit of Bernard Shaw, Lady Cicely is a thoroughly delightful and unique type of the eternal feminine.-ARCHIBALD HENDERSON: George Bernard Shaw, p. 324. one Wegg, Silas, in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), a legged rascal who ekes out a living by keeping a stand in Cavendish Square, where he sells fruit, gingerbread, and ballads. Mr. Boffin, in sheer kindness of heart, hires him for two hours every evening to read to him. The rascally Wegg pries around the premises, and, having found a Harmon will of later date than that under which Boffin had taken the Harmon estate, hoped to blackmail Boffin, but was checkmated by the production of a still later will. Weller Weller, Samuel (better known as Sam; called Samivel by his father), in Dickens's Pickwick Papers, an embodiment of London low life in its kindliest and most entertaining form. He is introduced as the Boots in the White Hart Inn, where his high spirits and his unfailing humor so attract Mr. Pickwick that he engages him as valet. Thereafter Sam is a devoted attendant, who remains faithful in every adversity, even sharing his master's imprisonment in the Fleet by having himself arrested for debt. Sam Weller may have flashed upon Dickens in memory of Sam Vale, an actor familiar to him in boyhood. Vale was the Simon Spatterdash of a musical farce, The Boarding House, revived in 1822, whose conversation is interlarded with comparisons like, “Come on, as the man said to his tight boot." From the stage Sam Vale carried this trick of speech into private life, and, being a man with a great reputation for humor, both on and off the stage, the latest Sam Valerism would circulate from mouth to mouth. For the rest the name Weller was familiar to Dickens; his mother had a maid called Mary Weller, apothesized in Pickwick as Mary the pretty housemaid, to whom Sam writes his famous valentine. Sam Weller is a monster; monstrous and impossible in two ways: first from within, by the law of his own being, which would not permit such a development as must have produced the creature Dickens has shown us; next from without, the conditions of life would restrain and repress such development, even if the germ of it existed. Yet, monster as he is, how real he seems! he is a living monster; we know him. Sam Weller lives in our memories, a creature of flesh and blood more real than half our acquaintances."-RICHARD GRANT WHITE, in St. James's Magazine, August, 1870. Sam Weller corresponds to no reality. The Londoner born and bred is apt to be the dryest and most uninteresting of beings. All things lost for him the gloss of novelty when he was fifteen years old. He would suit the museum of a nil admirari philosopher, as a specimen, shrivelled and adust, of the ultimate result of his principle. But Dickens collected more jokes than all the cabmen in the whole treasure upon Sam.-PETER London would utter in a year, and bestowed BAYNE. Weller, Tony, in Pickwick Papers, of Coningsby. It is said that, when the father of Samuel, a coachman of Croker was dead, a mutual friend told the long-extinct type which drove Thackeray how Croker had begged stages between London and the subur- his wife to seek out some homeless ban towns. Tony's provincial end boys to stay with them from Saturwas Dorking. He wore a broad-day till Monday. They will destroy brimmed hat, top-boots, a great-coat your flower-beds and upset my inkof many capes, and a multitude of stands, but we can help them more waistcoats. Doubtless Dickens found than they can hurt us.' Thackeray the original in real life, but his imagi- choked, and called upon Mrs. Croker nation may have been stimulated by and assured her he would never speak Washington Irving's description of ill of her husband again.-Louis the type. MELVILLE: Prototypes of Some of Thackeray's Characters. Werner, the name assumed by Kruitzner, Count of Siegendorf, hero of Byron's tragedy, Werner, or the Inheritance (1822). Byron avowedly took his plot from Kruitzner, or the German's Tale, in the Canterbury Tales (vol. 1), by the Misses Lee. Harriet Lee, the younger of sisters, was sole author of Kruitzner. Disowned by his father because he has married beneath him, Kruitzner, in a moment of desperation, steals a rouleau of gold from the usurping heir, Stralenheim. He confesses to his He has commonly a broad, full face, curiously mottled with red, as if the blood had been forced by hard feeding into every vessel of the skin; he is swelled into jolly dimensions by frequent potations of malt liquors, and his bulk is still further increased by a multiplicity of coats in which he is buried like a cauliflower, the upper one reaching to his heels. He wears a broadbrimmed, low-crowned hat; a huge roll of colored handkerchiefs around his neck, knowingly knotted and tucked in at the bosom; and has in summertime a large bouquet of flowers in his button-hole, the present, most probably, of some enamoured country lass. His waistcoat is commonly of some bright color, striped, and his smallclothes extend far below the knees to meet a pair of jockey boots which reach about half-way up his legs.-IRVING: The Sketch-wife and his son Ulric, but urges in book, The Stage-Coach. the extenuation of his crime that he might have slain the enemy who stood between him and his own. The confession and its plea have an odd issue. Ulric, apparently aghast at his father's guilt, is really spurred on to the greater guilt which his father had avoided. Accident reveals the truth after Kruitzner has regained his ancestral estates, and when Ulric is on the point of marrying the daughter of the dead Siegendorf. Ulric disappears with his father's curse. curtain descends upon a deathstricken family. Wemmick, in Dickens's novel, Great Expectations (1860), cashier to Mr. Jaggers. In the office he is hard, business like, unimaginative. At home he is all imagination. With his own hands he had transformed his little wooden house, which he calls the Castle, into the semblance of a miniature fort. It has a real flagstaff. A plank crossing a ditch four feet wide and two deep represents the drawbridge. Here he lives with his octogenarian father, whom he calls the Aged, and whose daily delight is to fire off the nine o'clock signal gun, Werther, hero of a novel, The mounted in a separate fortress made Sorrows of Werther (1774), by Wolfof lattice-work. There is an evident gang Goethe. He is a young German reminiscence here of Smollett's Com-student, morbid, over-sensitive, poetimodore Trunnion. Wenham, in Thackeray's novel, Vanity Fair, the Marquis of Steyne's managing man. A mean, despicable creature, he is plausibly believed to have been drawn from the managing man of the third Marquis of Hertford, John Wilson Croker, the Rigby (q.v.) The cal, artistic, who retires into the country for rest and solace. He finds both in his new surroundings. Everything interests him, the children who play around him, the old women who wait upon him, the simple life of his neighbors. He meets Charlotte, wife of his friend Albert. Liking blazes |