go straight to our hearts: and all so
charmingly described that these Essays have delighted all who have read
them since they first began to appear on the breakfast-tables of the
polite world in Queen Anne's day.

"Addison's" Sir Roger we have called him, and be sure that honest Dick
Steele, even if he drew the first outlines of the figure, would not bear
us a grudge for so doing. Whoever first thought of Sir Roger, and however
many little touches may have been added by other hands, he remains
Addison's creation: and furthermore it does not matter a snap of the
fingers whether any actual person served as the model from which the
picture was taken. Of all the bootless quests that literary criticism can
undertake, this search for "the original" is the least valuable. The
artist's mind is a crucible which transmutes and re-creates: to vary the
metaphor, the marble springs to life under the workman's hands: we can
almost see it happening in these Essays: and we know how often enough a
writer finds his own creation kicking over the traces, as it were, and
becoming almost independent of his volition. There is no original for Sir
Roger or Falstaff or Mr. Micawber: they may not have sprung Athena-like
fully armed out of the author's head, and they may have been suggested by
some one he had in mind. But once created they came into a full-blooded
life with personalities entirely of their own.

A vastly more useful quest, one in fact of absorbing interest, is the
attempt to follow the artist's method, to trace the devices which he
adopts to bring to our notice all those various traits by which we judge
of character. The prose writer has this much advantage over the
playwright, that he can represent his _dramatis personae_ in a greater
number of different situations, and furthermore can criticise them and
draw our special attention to what he wishes to have stressed: he can
even say that such and such thoughts and motives are in their minds. Not
so the dramatist: his space is limited and he is cribbed, cabined, and
confined by having to give a convincing imitation of real life, where we
cannot tell what is going on in the minds of even our most intimate
friends. Thus the audience is often left uncertain of the purport of what
it sees and hears: the ugly and inartistic convention of the aside must
be used very sparingly if the play is to ring true; and so it is that we
shall find voluminous discussions on the subject, for instance,