and be heard no more until a half hour past his suppertime, but I had made a mistake.  Today he was in a talkative mood, and knowing that work was impossible, I devoted the next half hour to listening to a dissertation on the general perverseness of human nature, and to an elaborate description of my friend Pitkin’s scheme for endowing a rival institution with a hundred million, and making things so cheap and attractive that our university would have to go out of business.  When Pitkin reached this point, I knew that I could safely ask the special reason of his anger and that, having answered, he would settle down to his regular work.  I gently insinuated that I was still ignorant of the matter, and received the reply quite in keeping with Pitkin’s nature, “I bet on Harvard and won.”

EXERCISES

1.  Read one of Dickens’s books and bring to class selections that will show how Dickens portrays character by use of action.

2.  What kind of man is Silas Marner?  What leads you to think as you do?

3.  Select three persons from Ivanhoe and state your opinion of their character.

4.  Notice the relative importance of plot and character in three magazine stories.

5.  Select some person from a magazine story.  Tell the class what makes you form the estimate of his character that you do.  To what extent does the descriptive matter help you determine his character?

+Theme LXXX.+—­Write a character sketch or a story which shows character by means of action.

Suggested subjects:—­
  1.  The girl from Texas.
  2.  The Chinese cook.
  3.  Taking care of the baby.
  4.  Nathan’s temptation.
  5.  The small boy’s triumph.
  6.  A village character.
  7.  The meanest man I ever knew.

(Consider the development of the plot.  To what extent have you shown character by action?  Can you make the impression of character stronger by adding some description?)

+150.  History and Biography.+—­Historical and biographical narratives may be highly entertaining and at the same time furnish us with much valuable information.  Such writings often contain much that is not pure narration.  A historian may set forth merely the program of events, but most histories contain besides a large amount of description and explanation.  Frequently, too, all of this is but the basis of either a direct or an implied argument.  Likewise a biographer may be chiefly concerned with the acts of a man, but he usually finds that the introduction of description and explanation aids him in making clear the life purpose of the man about whom he writes.  In shorter histories and biographies, the expository and descriptive matter often displaces the narrative matter to such an extent that the story ceases to be interesting.