her by super-subtle cosmopolitans; and each
reader has the privilege of avoiding the society of the characters
that weary him.

=The Universal Appeal of Great Fictitious Characters.=--But the very
greatest characters of fiction are worth everybody's while; and surely
the masters need have felt no hesitancy in asking any one to meet
Sancho Panza, Robinson Crusoe, Henry Esmond, Jean Valjean, or Terence
Mulvaney. In fact, the most amazing thing about a great fictitious
figure is the multitude of very different people that the character is
capable of interesting. Many times we willingly absent ourselves from
actual society to pass an evening in the company of a fictitious
personage of a class with which we never associate in actual life.
Perhaps in the actual world we would never bother to converse with
illiterate provincial people; and yet we may not feel it a waste of
time and energy to meet them in the pages of "Middlemarch." For my own
part, I have always, in actual life, avoided meeting the sort of
people that appear in Thackeray's "Vanity Fair"; and yet I find it not
only interesting but profitable to associate with them through the
entire extent of a rather lengthy novel. Why is it that a reader, who,
although he has crossed the ocean many times, has never cared to enter
the engine-room of a liner, is yet willing enough to meet on intimate
terms Mr. Kipling's engineer, Mac Andrew? And why is it that ladies
who, in actual society, are fastidious of their acquaintanceship,
should yet associate throughout a novel with the Sapho of Daudet? What
is the reason why these fictitious characters should seem, for nearly
every reader, more worth while than the very same sort of people in
actual life?

=Typical Traits.=--The reason is that great fictitious characters are
typical of their class, to an extent rarely to be noticed in any
actual member of the class they typify. They "contain multitudes," to
borrow Whitman's phrase. All idealistic visionaries are typified in
Don Quixote, all misers in Harpagon, all hypocrites in Tartufe, all
egoists in Sir Willoughby Patterne, all clever, tricksy women in Becky
Sharp, all sentimentalists in Barrie's Tommy. But the average actual
man is not of sufficient magnitude to contain a multitude of others;
he is comparatively lacking in typical traits; he is not, to such a
great extent, illustrative of life, because only in a small measure is
he representative of his class. There are, of cour