to state our experience so that it is the experience of other people too. If we portray characters as better than in actual life, there is no great difficulty in making them seem universal; for it is a radical gift in human conceit to fancy that anything admirable or desirable has a possible connection with ourselves. If we do not at first discover what there is in common between Romeo or Lincoln or Achilles or General Lee and ourselves, yet if we admire them we shall find the resemblance, or try to create it. This is the power of great imaginative art, that the admirable things in it generate a kind of universal emulation, and the story or statue which has been said to imitate nature succeeds at last in persuading men and women quite naturally to imitate it. The power of a great book over human conduct, even its influence at last upon what might seem instinctive conduct, is immeasurable. In the troubadour art of love before Dante’s time, a true lover was taught to turn pale at sight of his lady, and at the unexpected sight of her to faint; Dante loved that literature, and he grew pale and fainted by second nature—just as women once learned to blush at certain things, and afterward learned not to blush. How many lives were affected, for good or evil, throughout Europe and America, by the alluring power of Byron’s heroes and heroines? The poet, then, who represents character as better than actual life, as possessing, that is, something that we desire but have not, has already made his hero universal, and must some day accept the responsibility of having dedicated his readers to that general ideal. We may question Byron on moral grounds by asserting that his hero, after whom so many lives were patterned, was really not deserving of any imitation; just as an Oriental reformer from India might tell us that the traffic and travel of which our architecture is an expression are both of them trivial enterprises, mere distractions from the contemplative ends of life. But such criticism lies outside of art. To understand the discipline which art imposes on us it is enough to observe the kind of character which does make an ideal effective in literature, and the kind that precipitates us into satire.