When history tells us that Napoleon did a certain thing, it is the work of each of us, in trying to bring history home to ourselves, to amplify in our imagination what the history-book gives us, and to _see_ Napoleon doing the action. It is all very well to be told that a certain event took place, but the past strikes home in our minds with immeasurably greater power if we can see it happening and can catch it as a picture; and this is what we try to do for ourselves when we read a history-book. The important thing is to see the past, and not simply to hear somebody describe it. It is not enough to read of a certain event; we must be there, watching--we must fix it into a picture for ourselves, we must recapture the particular moment. History does not do this for us; just the thing that it cannot do is to catch the moment precisely; so we do this for ourselves; we complete history in our supposition. Every man who has an idea of the woman Mary Queen of Scots, or who can catch glimpses of what happened at Waterloo, has added to history something from his own imagination, and has filled in the lines for himself. The past as it exists for all of us, the world of the past in our minds, is history synthesised by the imagination, and fixed into a picture by something that mounts to fiction. For history fails when a certain situation is to be recovered, or a definite combination of circumstances is to be seized upon, or a particular moment is to be caught. And yet it is a cold and bloodless thing if these things cannot be achieved, and the life of the past is not in any way resurrected without them. The chart must be turned into a picture, if history is to be a recovery of the life of the past and not a mere post-mortem examination. The imagination of the historian does this for him; the most musty of parchments holds for him a story and speaks to a world that exists in his mind; but everybody is not a historian; so historical fiction does the work for all the world; it fuses the past into a picture, and makes it live.