He who writes literature does not select scenes of life which are beautiful in themselves, scenes which we would have liked to live through, full of radiant happiness and joy; he does not eliminate from his picture of life that which is disturbing to the peace of the soul, repellant and ugly and immoral.

On the contrary, all the great works of literature have shown us dark shades of life beside the light ones.

They have spoken of unhappiness and pain as often as of joy.
We have suffered with our poets, and in so far as the musical composer expresses the emotions of life the great symphonies have been full of pathos and tragedy.

True art has always been selection, but never selection of the beautiful elements in outer reality.
But if the esthetic value is independent of the imitative approach to reality and independent of the elimination of unpleasant elements or of the collection and addition of pleasant traits, what does the artist really select and combine in his creation?
How does he shape the world?
How does nature look when it has been remolded by the artistic temperament and imagination?
What is left of the real landscape when the engraver's needle has sketched it?
What is left of the tragic events in real life when the lyric poet has reshaped them in a few rhymed stanzas?
Perhaps we may bring the characteristic features of the process most easily to recognition if we contrast them with another kind of reshaping process.

The same landscape which the artist sketches, the same historic event which the lyric poet interprets in his verses, may be grasped by the human mind in a wholly different way.