Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/266

 by the Taoist than life itself? The answer to the question involves the essential nature of the literary art.

In the first place, no imitation of life in art is completely reproductive. No novel or poem or history can be anything more than a selective representation. All that it can possibly give us is a reproduction of the impression which life has made upon a particular author. But to select from life is to criticize life. It is to reshape the world in such fashion as to place upon it the stamp of the author's individual point of view.

We talk a good deal of nonsense nowadays about "scientific" history and "realistic" fiction, as if we had learned some new method of presenting a quite depersonalized imitation of reality. And no doubt writers without much character, writers whose souls have no form, can throw handsful of disordered and unrelated facts between the covers of a book without giving to these facts anything but the stamp of a disorderly personality. But the moment an author undertakes to arrange facts in the most elementary way so that they shall have a beginning, a middle, and an end; the moment one undertakes to compose a book, so that it shall have proportions, sequence, design—in that