“Blair was three years old before, under the long atrophy of grief, Sarah Maitland’s maternal instinct began to stir. When it did, she was chilled by the boy’s shrinking from her as if from a stranger; she was chilled, too, by another sort of repulsion, which with the hideous candor of childhood he made no effort to conceal. One of his first expressions of opinion had been contained in the single word ‘uggy,’ accompanied by a finger pointed at his mother. Whenever she sneezed--and she was one of those people who cannot, or do not, moderate a sneeze--Blair had a nervous paroxysm. He would jump at the unexpected sound, then burst into furious tears. When she tried to draw his head down upon her scratchy black alpaca breast, he would say violently, ‘No, no! No, no!’ at which she would push him roughly from her knee and fall into hurt silence.... She took Blair’s little chin in her hand--a big, beautiful, powerful hand, with broken and blackened nails--and turning his wincing face up, rubbed her cheek roughly against his. ‘Get over your airs!’ she said.” It is, we repeat, exactly like living next door to the family and, with the procession of the years, collecting innumerable little incidents and observed facts all piecing accurately together. It is not fiction at all, it is biography, the best and brightest and most instructive kind of biography. What is the difference between fiction and biography? Principally it consists only in this, that in the case of the life of an actual man the biographer is under no necessity of explaining or reconciling his apparent contradictions. We know the man lived and that he was capable of those contradictions. If the biographer can reconcile or explain them, offering an acceptable and plausible theory to account for them, very well; we are grateful. But it is not imperative that he should do so; what is imperative is that he should set down a faithful record of the contradictions themselves; for we can then, having the evidence before us, frame our own theories to account for them. In writing fiction or fictional biography the author’s main struggle is for plausibility. If his character does perplexing and contradictory things the author feels that he must make them entirely understandable or we will not accept the character--and in this he is generally right. Human nature is human nature; what we take at the hands of life we are forced to take and make the best of; but we won’t take the same things from a novel because we aren’t compelled to. We insist that the novelist make everything clear and under this great compulsion the novelist is always working. The result is not always happy. Compulsions, however desirable in general, remain laws of force. Compulsory education--compulsory fiction; there are cases where both work badly, where both do serious ill.