II
Art and literature are realities in themselves. The depicting of an event enshrines it as a thing of beauty; the event itself may be dull. We meet Falstaffs in real life and waste no time on them; put into a play by a master, Falstaff gives us an artistic thrill. How many of the people who enjoy Dickens' novels about humble people would be interested in them in real life? Dickens's magic pen makes us receive a sensation reading about them that they cannot give us themselves. It is the artist's personality and art that count.
Gissing and Flaubert wrote about ordinary people but they themselves were intellectual aristocrats; they had nothing in common with the people they wrote about (except with those who were disguised portraits of themselves). In fact, they despised them; they personally were recluses and merely sympathised with and were interested in the people they wrote about as subjects for art. If we had met Madame Bovary personally and heard her tale from her own mouth, the effect upon us would be small compared to that of the novel.
The domestic troubles of our next door neighbours may be a bore to us. We may not care to meet the people personally, but a great novel or play describing the matrimonial difficulties of fictitious characters gives us a distinct artistic thrill. The sorrows of people who lived centuries ago move us more than those of people we know, because of the magic power of art.
Those who from time immemorial called art magical were right. Many people who disparage art and literature say to the writer and the reader that they should enter the whirlpool of life, and live themselves. No advice could be more foolhardy. To read beautiful books about other people's lives is itself a high form of life, a life that only art can furnish. It also has its advantages, when we think of the characters in literature whom we enjoy reading about and yet would never care to meet. Who would really want to meet Becky Sharp or Pecksniff?
That artistic pleasure we get, mingled with actual pain on account of the sorrows of poets, is to us a decided part of our lives. The fact that we are brought into contact with a beautiful series of lines voicing human grief in such a manner that both our human and æsthetic emotions are aroused, is a privileged pleasure that only those who can enjoy poetry may derive.
It does not follow, however, that a man must confine himself solely to the artistic or intellectual life. To know of love only through books and not through experience is not to have lived a full life. To read the views of Aristotle on friendship and never to have had any real friendships is also but leading an incomplete life.
Literature is real and to read and write it is to live.