"Well," I said, "what is it? We shall be glad of any help."
"It can be summed up," he replied, "in a single word. Whatever may be the merits of a work of Art—and they may be all that you say—it has this one grand defect—it isn't real!"
"Real!" cried Leslie. "What is real? The word's the plague of my life! People use it as if they meant something by it, something very tremendous and august, and when you press them they never know what it is. They talk of 'real life'—real life! what is it? As if one life wasn't as real as another!"
"Oh, as to real life," said Ellis, "I can tell you what that is. Real life is the shady side of life."
"Nonsense," said Parry, "real life is the life of men of the world."
"Or," retorted Ellis, "more generally, it is the life of the person speaking, as opposed to that of the person to whom he speaks."
"Well, but," I interposed, "it is not 'real life' that is our present concern, but Bartlett's meaning when he used the word 'real.' In what sense is Art not real?"
"Why," he replied, "by your own confession Art is something ideal. It is beautiful, it is good, it is lifted above chance and change; its connection with matter, that is to say with reality, is a kind of flaw, an indecency from which we discreetly turn our eyes. The real world is nothing of all this; on the contrary, it is ugly, brutal, material, coarse, and bad as bad can be!"
"I don't see that it is at all!" cried Leslie, "and, even if it were, you have no right to assume that that is the reality of it. How do you know that its reality doesn't consist precisely in the Ideal, as all poets and philosophers have thought? And, in that case, Art would be more real than what you would call Reality, because it would represent the essence of the world, the thing it would like to be if it could, and is, so far as it can. That was Aristotle's view, anyhow."
"Then all I can say is," replied Bartlett, "that I don't agree with Aristotle! Anyhow, even if Art represents what the world would like to be, it certainly doesn't represent what it is."