. They have the large reality of general
ideas, which is a truer thing than the actuality of facts. This is why
we know them and think of them as real people--old acquaintances whom
we knew (perhaps) before we were born, when (as is conceivable) we
lived with them in Plato's Realm of Ideas. In France, instead of
calling a man a miser, they call him an Harpagon. We know Rosalind as
we know our sweetest summer love; Hamlet is our elder brother, and
understands our own wavering and faltering.

=Fiction and History.=--Instinctively also we regard the great people
of fiction as more real than many of the actual people of a bygone age
whose deeds are chronicled in dusty histories. To a modern mind, if
you conjure with the name of Marcus Brutus, you will start the spirit
of Shakespeare's fictitious patriot, not of the actual Brutus, of a
very different nature, whose doings are dimly reported by the
chroniclers of Rome. The Richelieu of Dumas pere may bear but slight
resemblance to the actual founder of the French Academy; but he lives
for us more really than the Richelieu of many histories. We know
Hamlet even better than we know Henri-Frederic Amiel, who in many ways
was like him; even though Amiel has reported himself more thoroughly
than almost any other actual man. We may go a step further and declare
that the actual people of any age can live in the memory of after ages
only when the facts of their characters and their careers have been
transmuted into a sort of fiction by the minds of creative historians.
Actually, in 1815, there was but one Napoleon; now there are as many
Napoleons as there are biographies and histories of him. He has been
recreated in one way by one author, in another by another; and you may
take your choice. You may accept the Julius Caesar of Mr. Bernard Shaw,
or the Julius Caesar of Thomas De Quincey. The first is frankly
fiction; and the second, not so frankly, is fiction also--just as far
from actuality as Shakespeare's adaptation of Plutarch's portraiture.

=Fiction and Biography.=--One of the most vivid illustrations of how a
great creative mind, honestly seeking to discover, to understand, and
to express the truth concerning actual characters of the past,
necessarily makes fiction of those characters, is given by Thomas
Carlyle in his "Heroes and Hero-Worship." Here, in Carlyle's method of
procedure, it is easy to discern that threefold process of creation
which is undergone by the fiction-mak