It may come to nothing, of course, but it may also come to something
worth more than a thousand twaddling novels. The immense _use_ of
it--if one must think about the use--is that such a life might really show
commonplace and ordinary people how to handle the simplest materials of
life with zest and delicacy. Novels don't really do that--they only make
people want to escape from middle-class conditions, what everyone is the
better for seeing is not how life might conceivably be handled, but how it
actually has been handled, freshly and distinctly, by someone in a
commonplace milieu. Life isn't a bit romantic, but it is devilish
interesting. It doesn't go as you want it to go. Sometimes it lags,
sometimes it dances; and horrible things happen, often most unexpectedly.
In the novel, everything has to be rounded off and led up to, and you never
get a notion of the inconsequence of life. The interest of life is not what
happens, but how it affects people, how they meet it, how they fly from it:
the relief of a biography is that you haven't got to invent your setting
and your character--all that is done for you: you have just got to select
the characteristic things, and not to blur the things that you would have
wished otherwise. For God's sake, let us get at the truth in books, and not
use them as screens to keep the fire off, or as things to distract one from
the depressing facts in one's bank-book.
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