To be sure, our daily contact with the bodies of our friends and
associates gives to this thought something of the pungency of
self-knowledge; yet in absence, they live for us, as the characters
in a novel, only in our thought. And the majority of the people,
personally unknown to us, who make up our larger social world--and for
most of us this includes the great ones who are such potent factors
in determining it--are real to us in the same way that Diana or Esmond
are real. All historical figures belong to this world of imagination.
Our friends too, as they pass out of our lives or die, and we ourselves
eventually, will sink into it.
Our interest in the fictional world of the writer is, moreover,
essentially the same as our interest in the real world. Its persons
arouse in us the same emotions of admiration, love, or dislike. They
satisfy the same need for social stimulation, the same curiosity about
life. Just as we have certain instincts and habits of movement that
make us restless when they are not satisfied, and afford us a wild joy
in walking and running when we are released from confinement, so we
have certain instincts and habits of feeling towards persons which
demand objects and produce joy when companions are found. An unsatisfied
or superabundant sociability lies back of our love of fiction. We read
because we are lonely or because our fellow men have become trite and
fail to stimulate us sufficiently. If our fellows were not so reticent,
if they would talk to us and tell us their stories with the freedom
and the brightness of a Stevenson, or if their lives were so fresh and
vivid that we never found them dull, perhaps we should not read at
all.
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