"Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do"

Elizabeth Bowen’s assertion that "Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do" explores the profound relationship between human consciousness, emotion, and survival. Illusion, often maligned as deception or unreality, is reimagined here as a creative force, akin to art itself. For those attuned to feeling, the "feeling person", illusions are not mere escapism but essential constructions through which the complexities of life are mediated and understood.

Art arises from human imagination and the need to translate raw experience into meaning. It weaves narratives, paints realities, and constructs visions that, while shaped by subjectivity, bring forth essential truths. Bowen posits that the illusions we create, our hopes, dreams, stories, and self-conceptions, are not failures of perception, but an artistic process. They allow us to navigate both beauty and pain, providing the scaffolding for emotional endurance. Through art, illusions are elevated from personal fantasy to shared experience, forming the connective tissue of community and culture.

To live "by art", then, is to recognize that survival itself is bound up with the imagination’s capacity to remake reality in forms that nurture and sustain us. When she adds, "if we do", Bowen introduces an existential tension. Not all endure; the absence of art, or an inability to embrace illusion, may make survival itself untenable. For the deeply feeling, to lose one’s hold on the sustaining patterns of artful illusion is to lose the will or ability to persist.

Here, illusion is both necessary and generative, not a retreat from truth but a means of engaging with it more fully. Human beings thrive in spaces shaped by artistic vision and emotional resonance. Life, in all its uncertainty, is not diminished by illusion, but rendered possible, vivid, meaningful, and bearable, through the art that grows from feeling and imagination.