e 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