The Book of Months by E.F. Benson

The barren, sterile emotions which Art gives us, though they have the advantage of harmlessness over the emotions of Life itself, that tree of sweet and bitter fruits, bear with them the inherent defects of their unreality; and whereas there is hardly an emotion of Life which does not leave us stronger and more vivified, there is hardly an emotion of Art where one's senses are stirred, not by actual events of joy or sorrow, but the imagined scenes thereof, which does not leave us flat and unbraced in proportion as the emotion excited has been keen. Love and death, the two great _motifs_ on which the drama of Life is based, whether they are whispered on the shivering strings, or piped on remote flutes, or thundered with the blast of trumpets and the clash of cymbals, leave us, when such actual experience has touched us, the richer for it, and stronger and more vivified.

But such is not the case in the reflection of experience which Art gives us; vivid it may be -- so vivid, indeed, that reality after it seems shadow-like and unreal -- but its life is temporary. We thrill with ecstasies that are not really ours; our soul, in its secret place, sickens with sin or withers with renunciations which are not its own; and when the mimic spectacle is over, and we wake from the storms or sunshine of a coloured dream to a gray morning, and have to take up again the dispiriting thread of uneventful hours, it is with an intolerable sense of flatness that we at first look out over the undistinguished landscape of life. For a week, perhaps, or a fortnight, we have agonized with the throes of Titans; monstrous joys and sorrows have been our portion, and for the monstrous we take up again the minute.