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