not rally to the standard, but sit, each one at home, warming his
hands over his own fire and brooding on his own private thought!"

Again, certain critics never seem tired of pelting the novelist with
comparisons drawn between painting and photography. "Mr. So-and-So's
fidelity to life suggests the camera rather than the brush and
palette"; and the implication is that Mr. So-and-So and the camera
resemble each other in their tendency to reproduce irrelevant detail.
The camera, it is assumed, repeats this irrelevant detail. The
photographer does not select. But is this true? I have known many
enthusiasts in photography whose enthusiasm I could not share. But I
never knew one, even among amateurs, who wished to photograph
everything he saw, from every possible point of view. Even the amateur
selects--wrongly as a rule: still he selects. The mere act of setting
up a camera in any particular spot implies a process of selection. And
when the deed is done, the scenery has been libelled. Our eyes behold
the photograph, and go through another process of selection. In short,
whatever they look upon, men and women are selecting ceaselessly.

The artist therefore does well and consciously, and for a particular
end, what every man or woman does poorly, and unconsciously, and
casually. He differs in the photographer in that he has more licence
to eliminate. When once the camera is set up, it's owner's power over
the landscape has come to an end. The person who looks on the
resultant photograph must go through the same process of choosing and
rejecting that he would have gone through in contemplating the natural
landscape. The sole advantage is that the point of view has been
selected for him, and that he can enjoy it without fatigue in any
place and at any time.

The truth seems to be that the human brain abhors the complexity--the
apparently aimless complexity--of nature and real life, and is for
ever trying to get away from it by selecting this and ignoring that.
And it contrives so well that I suppose the average man is not
consciously aware twice a year of that conglomerate of details which
the critics call real life. He holds one stout thread, at any rate, to
guide him through the maze--the thread of self-interest.

The justification of the poet or the novelist is that he discovers a
better thread. He follows up a universal where the average man follows
only a particular. But in following it, he does but use those