would not differ from the actuality of our experience.  In this selfsame way we habitually build for ourselves ideal characters out of dead and living men, by dwelling on that part of their career which we most admire or love as showing their characteristic selves.  Napoleon is the conqueror, St. Francis the priest, Washington the great citizen, only by this method.  They are not thereby de-humanized; neither do the ideal types of imagination fail of humanization because they are thus fragmentarily, but consistently, presented.

The type must make this human appeal under all circumstances.  Its whole meaning and virtue lie in what it contains of our common humanity, in the clearness and brilliancy with which it interprets the man in us, in the force with which it identifies us with human nature.  If it is separated from us by a too high royalty or a too base villany, it loses intelligibility, it forfeits sympathy, it becomes more and more an object of simple curiosity, and removes into the region of the unknown.  Even if the type passes into the supernatural, into fairyland or the angelic or demoniac world, it must not leave humanity behind.  These spheres are in fact fragments of humanity itself, projections of its sense of wonder, its goodness, and its evil, in extreme abstraction though concretely felt.  Fairy, angel, and devil cease to be conceivable except as they are human in trait, however the conditions of their nature may be fancied; for we have no other materials to build with save those of our life on earth, though we may combine them in ways not justified by reason.  In so far as these worlds are in the limits of rational imagination, they are derived from humanity, partial interpretations of some of its moods, portions of itself; and the beings who inhabit them are impaired for the purposes of art in the degree to which their abstract nature is felt as stripping them of complete humanity.  For this reason in dealing with such simple types, being natures all of one strain, it has been found best in practice to import into them individually some quality widely common to men in addition to that limited quality they possess by their conception.  Some touch of weakness in an angel, some touch of pity in a devil, some unmerited misfortune in an Ariel, bring them home to our bosoms; just as the frailty of the hero, however great he be, humanizes him at a stroke.  Thus these abstract fragments also are reunited with humanity, with the whole of life in ourselves.

Types, then, whether simple or complex, whether apparently physical or purely spiritual, whether given fragmentary or as wholes of personality, express human character in its essential traits.  They may be narrow or broad generalizations; but if to know ourselves be our aim, those types, which show man his common and enduring nature, are the most valuable, and rank first in importance; in proportion as they are specialized, they are less widely interpretative; in proportion