hear Shylock: "Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, appetites, passions? fed with the same food, hurt
with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same
means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian
is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh?
if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge?" Rank and race are accidents; the essential thing is that the
type be highly human, let the means of giving it this intensity and
richness be what they may.

It is true that the type may seem defective in the point that it is at
best but a fragment of humanity, an abstraction or a combination of
abstracted qualities. There was never such an athlete as our Greek
sculptor's, never a pagan god nor Virgin Mother, nor a hero equal to
Homer's thought, so beautiful, brave, and courteous, so terrible to his
foe, so loving to his friend. And yet is it not thus that life is known
to us actually? does not this typical rendering of character fall in
with the natural habit of life? What man, what friend, is known to us
except by fragments of his spirit? Only one life, our own, is known to
us as a continuous existence. Just as when we see an orange, we supply
the further side and think of it as round, so with men we supply from
ourselves the unseen side that makes the man completely and continuously
human. Moreover, it is a matter of common experience that men, we
ourselves, may live only in one part, and the best, of our nature at one
moment, and yet for the moment be absorbed in that activity both in
consciousness and energy; for that moment we are only living so; now, if
a character were shown to us only in the moments in which he was living
so, at his best and in his characteristic state as the soldier, the
priest, the lover, then the ideal abstraction of literature would not
differ from the actuality of our experience. In this selfsame way we