he great characters of poetry -- a Hamlet, a
Don Quixote, an Achilles -- are no averages, they are not even a
collection of salient traits common to certain classes of men. They
seem to be persons; that is, their actions and words seem to spring
from the inward nature of an individual soul. Goethe is reported to
have said that he conceived the character of his Gretchen entirely
without observation of originals. And, indeed, he would probably
not have found any. His creation rather is the original to which we
may occasionally think we see some likeness in real maidens. It is
the fiction here that is the standard of naturalness. And on this, as
on so many occasions, we may repeat the saying that poetry is
truer than history. Perhaps no actual maid ever spoke and acted so
naturally as this imaginary one.

If we think there is any paradox in these assertions, we should
reflect that the standard of naturalness, individuality, and truth is in
us. A real person seems to us to have character and consistency
when his behaviour is such as to impress a definite and simple
image upon our mind. In themselves, if we could count all their
undiscovered springs of action, all men have character and
consistency alike: all are equally fit to be types. But their
characters are not equally intelligible to us, their behaviour is not
equally deducible, and their motives not equally appreciable.
Those who appeal most to us, either in themselves or by the
emphasis they borrow from their similarity to other individuals, are
those we remember and regard as the centres around which
variations oscillate. These men are natural: all others are more or
less eccentric.

_Ideal characters._

Sec. 46. The standard of naturalness being thus subjective, and
determined by the laws of our imagination, we can understand why
a spontaneous creation of the mind can be more striking and living
than any reality, or any abstraction from realities. The artist can
invent a form which, by its adaptation to the imagination, lodges
there, and becomes a point of reference for all observations, and a
standard of naturalness and beauty. A type may be introduced to
the mind suddenly, by the chance presentation of a form that by its
intrinsic impressiveness and imaginative coherence, acquires that
pre-eminence which custom, or the mutual reinforcement of
converging experiences, ordinarily gives to empirical percepts.

This method of originating types is what we ordinar