Another advantage of fiction as compared with history is its
completeness. The knowledge which we possess of the lives of others
is the veriest fragment. We know, of course, our own lives best; but
even of these, unless we are at the end of our years, we do not know
the outcome. We know next well the life of an intimate--wife, child,
sweetheart, friend--yet not all of that; there is much he will not
tell us and much else which we cannot observe; for even he dwells with
us for a brief time only, and then is gone. Of other people, we can
know still less; we can observe something, we can get more from hearsay;
but that is a chaos of impressions; the larger part is inference and
construction, a work of the imagination, which may or may not be true.
Even the biography, carefully made from all available data in the way
of personal recollections, letters, and diaries, although it may
approach to wholeness, remains, nevertheless, very largely a
construction, a work of literary fiction. The autobiography comes still
closer; yet, since it is designed for a public which cannot be expected
to view it in a solidly detached fashion, it suffers from the reticence
which inevitably intrudes to suppress. In fiction alone, none except
artistic motives need intervene to bid silence.
However, although fiction be a purely ideal world of imagined life,
it is essentially the same as the real social world. For that world
is also imaginary. We have direct experience of our own lives alone;
the lives of others can exist for us only in our thought about them.
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