o be able to deal
there, as she did with Camus, but who enjoyed better custom as a
stationer and bookseller; even if I had seen it, tied with string to
keep it in its place in the mosaic of monthly parts and pamphlets which
adorned either side of his doorway, a doorway more mysterious, more
teeming with suggestion than that of a cathedral, I should have noticed
and bought it there simply because I had recognised it as a book which
had been well spoken of, in my hearing, by the school-master or the
school-friend who, at that particular time, seemed to me to be
entrusted with the secret of Truth and Beauty, things half-felt by me,
half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which was the vague but
permanent object of my thoughts.

Next to this central belief, which, while I was reading, would be
constantly a motion from my inner self to the outer world, towards the
discovery of Truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in
which I would be taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with
more dramatic and sensational events than occur, often, in a whole
lifetime. These were the events which took place in the book I was
reading. It is true that the people concerned in them were not what
Francoise would have called 'real people.' But none of the feelings
which the joys or misfortunes of a 'real' person awaken in us can be
awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes;
and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding
that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated
structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted
in the suppression, pure and simple, of 'real' people would be a decided
improvement. A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him,
is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to
say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities
have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is
only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that
we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small
section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of
feeling any emotion either. The novelist's happy discovery was to think
of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human
spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which
the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it ma