That a selection of this kind should be one of the marks of gentility is in itself no more than a natural consequence of the idealizing process as we see it continually exercised in the fine arts. Every work of fine art is a result of selection. The artist does not give us the natural truth as it is, but he purposely omits very much of it, and alters that which he recognizes. The genteel person is himself a work of art, and, as such, contains only partial truth. This is the central fact about gentility, that it is a narrow ideal, impoverishing the mind by the rejection of truth as much as it adorns it by elegance; and it is for this reason that gentility is disliked and refused by all powerful and inquiring intellects. They look upon it as a mental condition with which they have nothing to do, and they pursue their labors without the slightest deference or condescension to it. They may, however, profitably study it as one of the states of human life, and a state towards which a certain portion of humanity, aided by wealth, appears to tend inevitably. The misfortune of the genteel mind is that it is carried by its own idealism so far away from the truth of nature that it becomes divorced from fact and unable to see the movement of the actual world; so that genteel people, with their narrow and erroneous ideas, are sure to find themselves thrust aside by men of robust intelligence, who are not genteel, but who have a stronger grip upon reality. There is, consequently, a pathetic element in gentility, with its fallacious hopes, its certain disappointments, so easily foreseen by all whom it has not blinded, and its immense, its amazing, its ever invincible ignorance.