selfish pleasures of life.  They are based on the satisfaction of desires, too, but a kind of satisfaction through which the desire itself disappears.  The pleasure in a meal, to be sure, can have its esthetic side, as often the harmony of the tastes and odors and sights of a rich feast may be brought to a certain artistic perfection.  But mere pleasure in eating has no esthetic value, as the object is destroyed by the partaking and not only the cake disappears but also our desire for the cake when the desire is fulfilled and we are satiated.  The work of art aims to keep both the demand and its fulfillment forever awake.

But then this stirring up of interests demands more than anything else a careful selection of those features in reality which ought to be admitted into the work of art.  A thousand traits of the landscape are trivial and insignificant and most of what happens in the social life around us, even where a great action is going on, is in itself commonplace and dull and without consequences for the event which stirs us.  The very first requirement for the artistic creation is therefore the elimination of the indifferent, the selection of those features of the complex offering of nature or social life which tell the real story, which express the true emotional values and which suggest the interest for everything which is involved in this particular episode of the world.  But this leads on to the natural consequence, that the artist must not only select the important traits, but must artificially heighten their power and increase their strength.  We spoke of the landscape with the tree on the rock and the roaring surf, and we saw how the scientist studies its smallest elements, the cells of the tree, the molecules of the seawater and of the rock.  How differently does the artist proceed!  He does not care even for the single leaves which the photographer might reproduce.  If a painter renders such a landscape with his masterly brush, he gives us only the leading movements of those branches which the storm tears, and the great swing in the curve of the wave.  But those forceful lines of the billows, those sharp contours of the rock, contain everything which expresses their spirit.

It is not different with the author who writes a historical novel or drama.  Every man’s life is crowded with the trivialities of the day.  The scholarly historian may have to look into them; the artist selects those events in his hero’s life which truly express his personality and which are fit to sustain the significant plot.  The more he brings those few elements out of the many into sharp relief, the more he stimulates our interest and makes us really feel with the persons of his novel or drama.  The sculptor even selects one single position.  He cannot, like the painter, give us any background, he cannot make his hero move as on the theater stage.  The marble statue makes the one position of the hero everlasting, but this is so selected that all the chance aspects and fleeting gestures of the real man appear insignificant compared with the one most expressive and most characteristic position which is chosen.