ders
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 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, anot