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."

"I don't know; surely it does, sometimes," said Parry, "for instance,
there's the realistic novel!"

"Oh, that!" cried Ellis. "That's the most ideal of all--only it's apt
to be such bad idealism!"

"Anyhow," said Bartlett, "in so far as it is real, it's not Art, in
the sense, in which we have been using the word."

I began to be afraid that we should drift away into a discussion of
realism in Art. So, to recall the conversation to the point at issue,
I turned to Bartlett, and said:

"Your criticism seems to me to be fair enough as far as it goes. You
say that the world of Art is a world by itself; that side by side of
it, and unaffected by it, moves the world of what you call real life.
And that whatever be the relation between the two worlds, whether
we are to say that the one imitates the other, or interprets it, or
idealizes it, it does not, in any case, set it aside. Art is a refuge
from life, not a substitute for it; a little blessed island in the
howling sea of fact. Its Good is thus only a partial Good; whereas the
true Good, I suppose, would be somehow universal."

"Still," said Leslie, "as far as it goes it is a Good without
blemish."

"I am not so sure," I said, "even of that. I am inclined to think that
Bartlett's criticism, if we squeeze it tight, will yield us more than
we have yet got out of it--perhaps even more than he knows is in it"

"You don't mean to say," cried Bartlett, "that you are c