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.
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