they stand for that
which is potential as well as for that which is actual in human
experience. Few men achieve or experience on a great scale; but these
few are typical, and are, therefore, transcendent in interest. The
average commonplace man fills great space in contemporary history, as
in the history of all times, and his character and career are well
worth the closest study and the finest art of the writer; but the
average man, who never achieves greatly, and to whom no striking or
dramatic experience comes, has all the possibilities of action and
suffering in his nature, and is profoundly interested in these more
impressive aspects of life. Truth to fact is essential to all sound
art, but absolute veracity involves the whole truth,--the truth of the
exceptional as well as of the average experience; the truth of the
imagination as well as of observation.

The hero and the wanderer are still, and always will be, the great
human types; and they are, therefore, the types which will continue to
dominate fiction; disappearing at times from the stage which they may
have occupied too exclusively, but always reappearing in due
season,--the hero in the novel of romance, the wanderer in the novel
of adventure. These figures are as constant in fiction as they were in
mythology; from the days of the earliest Greek and Oriental stories to
these days of Stevenson and Barrie, they have never lost their hold on
the imagination of the race. When the sense of reality was feeble,
these figures became fantastic, and even ridiculous; but this false
art was the product of an unregulated, not of an illegitimate,
exercise of the imagination; and while "Don Quixote" destroyed the old
romance of chivalry, it left the instinct which produced that romance
untouched. As the sense of reality becomes more exacting and more
general, the action of the imagination is more carefully regulated;
but it is not diminished, either in volume or in potency. Men have not
lost the power of individual action because society has become so
highly developed, and the multiplication of the police has not
materially reduced the tragic possibilities of life. There is more
accurate and more extensive knowledge of environment than ever before
in the history of the race, but temperament, impulse, and passion
remain as powerful as they were in primitive men; and tragedy finds
its materials in temperament, impulse, and passion, much more
frequently than in objective co