the spontaneous
expression of our own passion and will, here counts for so much,
that the creation of an ideal character becomes a new and peculiar
problem.

There is, however, a way of conceiving and delineating character
which still bears a close resemblance to the process by which the
imagination produces the type of any physical species. We may
gather, for instance, about the nucleus of a word, designating some
human condition or occupation, a number of detached observations.
We may keep a note-book in our memory, or even in our pocket,
with studious observations of the language, manners, dress, gesture,
and history of the people _we_ meet, classifying our statistics
under such heads as innkeepers, soldiers, housemaids, governesses,
adventuresses, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Americans, actors,
priests, and professors. And then, when occasion offers, to describe,
or to put into a book or a play, any one of these types, all we have
to do is to look over our notes, to select according to the needs of
the moment, and if we are skilful in reproduction, to obtain by that
means a life-like image of the sort of person we wish to represent.

This process, which novelists and playwrights may go through
deliberately, we all carry on involuntarily. At every moment
experience is leaving in our minds some trait, some expression,
some image, which will remain there attached to the name of a
person, a class, or a nationality. Our likes and dislikes, our
summary judgments on whole categories of men, are nothing but
the distinct survival of some such impression. These traits have
vivacity. If the picture they draw is one-sided and inadequate, the
sensation they recall may be vivid, and suggestive of many other
aspects of the thing. Thus the epithets in Homer, although they are
often far from describing the essence of the object -- glankopis Athena
enkeides Achaioi -- seem to recall a sensation, and to give
vitality to the narrative. By bringing you, through one sense, into
the presence of the object, they give you that same hint of further
discovery, that same expectation of experience, which we have at
the sight of whatever we call real.

The graphic power of this method of observation and aggregation
of characteristic traits is thus seen to be great. But it is not by this
method that the most famous or most living characters have been
conceived. This method gives the average, or at most the salient,
points of the type, but t