Whiteley were creatures of the poet's brain.
Instantly I conceived consuming respect for the man who was so
circumstantial, so monotonous, so entirely purposeless a liar. With him
it must have been a case of art for art's sake. The joke sustained so
gravely through a respected lifetime was of that order of joke which is
shared with omniscience. But what struck me more cogently upon
reflection was the fact that these immeasurable trivialities, which had
struck me as utterly vulgar and arid when I thought they were true,
immediately became picturesque and almost brilliant when I thought they
were inventions of the human fancy. And here, as it seems to me, I laid
my finger upon a fundamental quality of the cultivated class which
prevents it, and will, perhaps, always prevent it from seeing with the
eyes of popular imagination. The merely educated can scarcely ever be
brought to believe that this world is itself an interesting place. When
they look at a work of art, good or bad, they expect to be interested,
but when they look at a newspaper advertisement or a group in the
street, they do not, properly and literally speaking, expect to be
interested. But to common and simple people this world is a work of art,
though it is, like many great works of art, anonymous.
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