Robert Louis Stevenson: “A Humble Remonstrance.”
Bliss Perry: “A Study of Prose Fiction”––Chapter VI, on “The Plot.”
O. Henry: “Roads of Destiny.”––The plotting of this story illustrates in practice most of the important points expounded in this chapter.
CHAPTER V
CHARACTERS
Characters Should Be Worth Knowing––The Personal Equation of the Audience––The Universal Appeal of Great Fictitious Characters––Typical Traits––Individual Traits––The Defect of Allegory––The Defect of Caricature––Static and Kinetic Characters––Direct and Indirect Delineation––Subdivisions of Both Methods––I. Direct Delineation: 1. By Exposition; 2. By Description; [Gradual Portrayal]; 3. By Psychological Analysis; 4. By Reports from other Characters––II. Indirect Delineation: 1. By Speech; 2. By Action; 3. By Effect on other Characters; 4. By Environment.
Characters Should Be Worth Knowing.––Before we proceed to study the technical methods of delineating characters, we must ask ourselves what constitutes a character worth delineating. A novelist is, to speak figuratively, the social sponsor for his own fictitious characters; and he is guilty of a social indiscretion, as it were, if he asks his readers to meet fictitious people whom it is neither of value nor of interest to know. Since he aims to make his readers intimate with his characters, he must first of all be careful that his characters are worth knowing intimately. Most of us, in actual life, are accustomed to distinguish people who are worth our while from people who are not; and those of us who live advisedly are accustomed to shield ourselves from people who cannot, by the mere fact of what they are, repay us for the expenditure of time and energy we should have to make to get to know them. And whenever a friend of ours asks us deliberately to meet another friend of his, we take it for granted that our friend has reasons for believing that the acquaintanceship will be of benefit or of 78 interest to both. Now the novelist stands in the position of a friend who asks us to meet certain people whom he knows; and he runs the risk of our losing faith in his judgment unless we find his people worth our while. By the mere fact that we bother to read a novel, thus expending time which might otherwise be passed in company with actual people, we are going out of our way to meet the characters to whom the novelist wishes to introduce us. He therefore owes us an assurance that they shall be even more worth our while than the average actual person. This is not to say that they should necessarily be better; they may, of course, be worse: but they should be more clearly significant of certain interesting elements of human nature, more thoroughly representative of certain phases of human life which it is well for us to learn and know.
The Personal Equation of the Audience.––In deciding on the sort of characters that will be worth his readers’ while, the novelist must of course be influenced by the nature of the audience he is writing for. The characters of “Little Women” may be worth the while of children; and it is not an adverse criticism of Louisa M. Alcott to say that they are not worth the while of mature men and women. Similarly, it is not an adverse criticism of certain Continental novelists to say that their characters are decidedly unfit companions for adolescent girls. Our judgment of the characters in a novel should be conditioned always by our sense of the sort of readers to whom the novel is addressed. Henry James, in his later years, wrote usually for the super-civilized; and his characters should be judged by different standards than the pirates of “Treasure Island,”––a story which was written for boys, both young and old. One reader may be bored by pirates, another by super-subtle cosmopolitans; and each reader has the privilege of 79 avoiding the society of the characters that weary him.