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.
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