otal of life. As part of a whole which can be
apprehended, immediately it acquires purpose and becomes
significant. It is the sense of meaning in life which gives color and
warmth to the march of uniform days. So the literary artist shapes
his inchoate material to a definite end; out of the limitless complex
details at his command, he selects such passages of background,
such incidents, and such traits of character as make for the setting
forth of the idea he has conceived. Clearly the artist cannot use
everything, clearly he does not aim to reproduce the fact: there are
abridgments and suppressions, as there are accent and emphasis. The
finished work is a composite, embodying what is essential of many,
many preliminary studies and sketches, wrought and compiled with
generous industry. The master is recognized in what he omits; what
is suppressed is felt but not perceived: the great artist, in the result,
steps from peak to peak.

"The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the Dark."

Thus with three strokes the master Coleridge depicts the onrush of
the night over boundless spaces of sky and sea. Within the compass
of a few lines, Tennyson registers the interminable, empty monotony
of weary years:

"No sail from day to day, but every day
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
The blaze upon the waters to the east;
The blaze upon his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail."

Thus through selection does the artist work to interpretation. By
detaching the eternal meaning from the momentary fact, by
embodying his sense of its significance in such concrete forms as
symbolize his idea, by investing the single instance with universally
typical import, then in very truth he represents. Nature is not the
subject of art; she is the universal treasury from whose infinitely
various store the artist selects his symbols.

A special method in art may here suggest itself as having for its
purpose to reproduce the fact in perfect fidelity; the method is called
_realism._ But a moment's considerate analysis shows that realism is
only a label for one manner of handling, and in the end comes no
nearer the object as it "really" is. In its essence realism is the arti