Mr. Twelvemough sat looking as modest as he could under the praise, and one of the ladies said that in a novel she had lately read there was a description of a surgical operation that made her feel as if she had been present at a clinic. Then the author said that he had read that passage, too, and found it extremely well done. It was fascinating, but it was not art.
The painter asked, Why was it not art?
The author answered, Well, if such a thing as that was art, then anything that a man chose to do in a work of imagination was art.
“Precisely,” said the painter—“art is choice.”
“On that ground,” the banker interposed, “you could say that political economy was a fit subject for art, if an artist chose to treat it.”
“It would have its difficulties,” the painter admitted, “but there are certain phases of political economy, dramatic moments, human moments, which might be very fitly treated in art. For instance, who would object to Mr. Twelvemough's describing an eviction from an East Side tenement-house on a cold winter night, with the mother and her children huddled about the fire the father had kindled with pieces of the household furniture?”
“I should object very much, for one,” said the lady who had objected to the account of the surgical operation. “It would be too creepy. Art should give pleasure.”
“Then you think a tragedy is not art?” asked the painter.
“I think that these harrowing subjects are brought in altogether too much,” said the lady. “There are enough of them in real life, without filling all the novels with them. It's terrible the number of beggars you meet on the street, this winter. Do you want to meet them in Mr. Twelvemough's novels, too?”
“Well, it wouldn't cost me any money there. I shouldn't have to give.”