Come back to my books!"

And in the old ideal platonic sense it _is_ the true reality, this
reproduction of life through the creative energy of the imagination.

The whole business of novel writing lies in two things; in the
creating of exciting situations and imaginatively suggestive
characters--and in making these situations and characters _seem
real._

They need not be dragged directly forth from personal experiences.
One grows to resent the modern tendency to reduce everything to
autobiographical reminiscence. These histories of free-thinking
young men breaking loose from their father's authority and running
amuck among Paris studios and Leicester Square actresses become
tedious and banal after a time. Such sordid piling up of meticulous
detail, drawn so obviously from the writer's own adventures, throws
a kind of grey dust over one's interest in the narrative.

One's feeling simply is that it is all right and all true; that just in
this casual chaotic sort of way the impact of life has struck oneself as
one drifted along. But there is no more in it than a clever sort of
intellectual photography, no more in it than a more or less moralised
version of the ordinary facts of an average person's life-story.

One is tempted to feel that, after all, there is a certain underlying
justification for the man in the street's objection to this kind of
so-called "realism." We have a right after all to demand of art
something more than a clever reproduction of the experiences we
have undergone. We have a right to demand something creative,
something exceptional, something imaginative, something that lifts
us out of ourselves and our ordinary environments, something that
has _deep holes_ in it that go down into unfathomable mystery,
something that has vistas, horizons, large and noble perspectives,
breadth, sweep, and scope.

The truth is that these grey psychological histories of typical young
persons, drearily revolting against dreary conventions, are, in a deep
and inherent sense, false to the mystery of life.

One feels certain that even the clever people who write them have
moods and impulses far more vivid and thrilling, far more abnormal
and bizarre, than they have the audacity to put into their work. A
sort of perverted Puritanism restrains them. They have the diseased
conscience of modern art, and they think that nothing can be true
which is not draggle-tailed and nothing can be real which is not
petty and unsti