A lyric, for example, may arise from 'real' emotions due to transitory
conditions peculiar to the poet. But these emotions and conditions,
however interesting biographically, are poetically irrelevant. The poem,
what the poet _says_, is universal, and is appropriated by people who
live centuries after him and perhaps know nothing of him and his life;
and if it arose from mere imagination it is none the worse (or the
better) for that. So far as it cannot be appropriated without a
knowledge of the circumstances in which it arose, it is probably, so
far, faulty (probably, because the difficulty _may_ come from our
distance from the whole mental world of the poet's time and country).
What is said in the text applies equally to all the arts. It applies
also to such aesthetic apprehension as does not issue in a work of art.
And it applies to this apprehension whether the object belongs to
'Nature' or to 'Man.' A beautiful landscape is not a 'real' landscape.
Much that belongs to the 'real' landscape is ignored when it is
apprehended aesthetically; and the painter only carries this unconscious
idealisation further when he deliberately alters the 'real' landscape in
further ways.
All this does not in the least imply that the 'real' thing, where there
is one (personal emotion, landscape, historical event, etc.), is of
small importance to the aesthetic apprehension or the work of art. But
it is relevant only as it appears _in_ that apprehension or work.
If an artist alters a reality (_e.g._ a well-known scene or historical
character) so much that his product clashes violently with our familiar
ideas, he may be making a mistake: not because his product is untrue to
the reality (this by itself is perfectly irrelevant), but because the
'untruth' may make it difficult or impossible for others to appropriate
his product, or because this product may be aesthetically inferior to
the reality even as it exists in the general imagination.