ure
men and women. Similarly, it is not an adverse criticism of certain
Continental novelists to say that their characters are decidedly unfit
companions for adolescent girls. Our judgment of the characters in a
novel should be conditioned always by our sense of the sort of readers
to whom the novel is addressed. Mr. Henry James, in his later years,
has written for the super-civilized; and his characters should
be judged by different standards than the pirates of "Treasure
Island,"--a story which was written for boys, both young and old. One
reader may be bored by pirates, another by super-subtle cosmopolitans;
and each reader has the privilege of avoiding the society of the
characters that weary him.

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?

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.