“No,” he replied, “aesthetically.  I mean, that we have a direct perception that nothing in the work could be omitted or altered without destroying the whole.  This, at any rate, is the ideal; and it holds, more or less, in proportion as the work is more or less perfect.  Everyone, I suppose, who understands these things would agree to that.”

No one seemed inclined to dispute the statement; certainly I was not, myself; so I answered, “No doubt what you say is true of works of Art; but will your contention be that it is also true of Good in general?”

“Yes,” he said, “I think so, in so far at least as Good is to be conceived as comprising a number of elements.  For no one, I suppose, would imagine that such elements might be thrown together haphazard and yet constitute a good whole.”

“I suppose not,” I agreed, “and, if you are right, what we seem to have arrived at is this:  among the works which man creates in his quest of the Good, there is one class, that of works of Art, which, in the first place, may be said, in a sense, to be not precarious, seeing that by their form, through which they are Art, they are set above the flux of time, though by their matter, we admit, they are bound to it And, in the second place, the Good which they have, they have by virtue of their essence; Good is their substance, not an accident of their changing relations.  And, lastly, being complex wholes, the parts of which they are composed are bound together in necessary connection.  These characteristics, at any rate, we have discovered in works of Art:  and no doubt many more might be discoverable.  But now, let us turn to the other side, and consider the defects in which this class of Goods is involved.”

“Ah!” cried Bartlett, “when you come to that, I have something to say.”

“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!”