Few men achieve or experience on a great scale; but these few are typical, and are, therefore, transcendent in interest.

The average commonplace man fills great space in contemporary history, as in the history of all times, and his character and career are well worth the closest study and the finest art of the writer; but the average man, who never achieves greatly, and to whom no striking or dramatic experience comes, has all the possibilities of action and suffering in his nature, and is profoundly interested in these more impressive aspects of life.

Truth to fact is essential to all sound art, but absolute veracity involves the whole truth,--the truth of the exceptional as well as of the average experience; the truth of the imagination as well as of observation.
The hero and the wanderer are still, and always will be, the great human types; and they are, therefore, the types which will continue to dominate fiction; disappearing at times from the stage which they may have occupied too exclusively, but always reappearing in due season,--the hero in the novel of romance, the wanderer in the novel of adventure.

These figures are as constant in fiction as they were in mythology; from the days of the earliest Greek and Oriental stories to these days of Stevenson and Barrie, they have never lost their hold on the imagination of the race.

When the sense of reality was feeble, these figures became fantastic, and even ridiculous; but this false art was the product of an unregulated, not of an illegitimate, exercise of the imagination; and while "Don Quixote" destroyed the old romance of chivalry, it left the instinct which produced that romance untouched.