But the relation of dry facts in newspapers, however tinged
with journalistic colour, helps very little to enter such other life. The
entrance has to be by the door of the imagination, and the journalist is
rarely able to open it for us. But there is a genius who can open it. The
author who can write fiction of the right sort can do it; his is the gift
of seeing inner realities, and of showing them to those who cannot see
them for themselves. Sharing the imaginative vision of the story-writer,
we can truly follow out many other roads of life than our own. The girl on
a lone country farm is made to understand how a girl in a city
sweating-den feels and lives; the London exquisite realises the life of a
Californian ranchman; royalty and tenement dwellers become acquainted,
through the power of the imagination working on experience shown in the
light of a human basis common to both. Fiction supplies an element of
culture,--that of the sympathies, which is invaluable. And the beginnings
of this culture, this widening and clearing of the avenues of human
sympathy, are especially easily made with children in the nature story.
When you begin, "There was once a little furry rabbit,"[1] the child's
curiosity is awakened by the very fact that the rabbit is not a child,
but something of a different species altogether.
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