the poet's creative
intelligence." [It is evident that Mr. Archer, in saying "real women,"
means what is more precisely denoted by the words "actual women."]
Such a compliment is also paid instinctively to every master of the
art of fiction; and the reason is not hard to understand. If the
general laws of life which the novelist has thought out be true laws,
and if his imaginative embodiment of them be at all points thoroughly
consistent, his characters will be true men and women in the highest
sense. They will not be actual, but they will be real. The great
characters of fiction--Sir Willoughby Patterne, Tito Melema,
D'Artagnan, Pere Grandet, Rosalind, Tartufe, Hamlet, Ulysses--embody
truths of human life that have been arrived at only after thorough
observation of facts and patient induction from them. Cervantes must
have observed a multitude of dreamers before he learned the truth of
the idealist's character which he has expressed in Don Quixote. The
great people of fiction are typical of large classes of mankind. They
live more truly than do you and I, because they are made of us and of
many men beside. 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.

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