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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: material interest, is not to enrich but to stultify your tale. The
stupid reader will only be offended, and the clever reader lose the
scent.
The novel of character has this difference from all others: that it
requires no coherency of plot, and for this reason, as in the case
of GIL BLAS, it is sometimes called the novel of adventure. It
turns on the humours of the persons represented; these are, to be
sure, embodied in incidents, but the incidents themselves, being
tributary, need not march in a progression; and the characters may
be statically shown. As they enter, so they may go out; they must
be consistent, but they need not grow. Here Mr. James will
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