asserting "real life" to be a conglomerate of innumerable details of
all possible degrees of pertinence and importance, and go on to show
that the novelist selects from this mass those which are the most
important and pertinent to his purpose. (I speak here particularly of
the novelist, but the same is alleged of all practitioners of the fine
arts.) And, in a way, this is true enough. But who (unless in an idle
moment, or with a view to writing a treatise in metaphysics) ever
takes this view of the world? Who regards it as a conglomerate of
innumerable details? Critics say that the artist's difficulty lies in
selecting the details proper to his purpose, and his justification
rests on the selection he makes. But where lives the man whose
difficulty and whose justification do not lie just here?--who is not
consciously or unconsciously selecting from morning until night? You
take the most ordinary country walk. How many millions of leaves and
stones and blades of grass do you pass without perceiving them at all?
How many thousands of others do you perceive, and at once allow to
slip into oblivion? Suppose you have walked four miles with the
express object of taking pleasure in country sights. I dare wager the
objects that have actually engaged your attention for two seconds are
less than five hundred, and those that remain in your memory, when you
reach home, as few as a dozen. All the way you have been, quite
unconsciously, selecting and rejecting. And it is the brain's
bedazzlement over this work, I suggest, and not merely the rhythmical
physical exertion, that lulls the more ambitious walker and induces
that phlegmatic mood so prettily described by Stevenson--the mood in
which

"we can think of this or that, lightly or laughingly, as a child
thinks, or as we think in a morning doze; we can make puns or
puzzle out acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ways with words