Thus with three strokes the master Coleridge depicts the onrush of the night over boundless spaces of sky and sea. Within the compass of a few lines, Tennyson registers the interminable, empty monotony of weary years: "No sail from day to day, but every day The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts Among the palms and ferns and precipices; The blaze upon the waters to the east; The blaze upon his island overhead; The blaze upon the waters to the west; Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail." Thus through selection does the artist work to interpretation. By detaching the eternal meaning from the momentary fact, by embodying his sense of its significance in such concrete forms as symbolize his idea, by investing the single instance with universally typical import, then in very truth he represents. Nature is not the subject of art; she is the universal treasury from whose infinitely various store the artist selects his symbols. A special method in art may here suggest itself as having for its purpose to reproduce the fact in perfect fidelity; the method is called _realism._ But a moment's considerate analysis shows that realism is only a label for one manner of handling, and in the end comes no nearer the object as it "really" is. In its essence realism is the artist's personal vision of the fact, exactly as idealism or romanticism or impressionism is personal. For after all, what is the reality? A chance newsboy is offering his papers on a crowded street corner. The fine lady recoils from his filth and from all contact with him; the philanthropist sees in him a human being to help and to redeem; the philosopher regards him dispassionately as a "social factor," the result of heredity and environment; the artist cries out in joy as his eye lights upon good stuff to paint. But all the while, which of these conceptions figures the "real" newsboy? Not one. For he is all these together; and the single observer, whatever his bias, cannot apprehend him at every point. Any attempt to represent him involves selection and interpretation, the suppression of some traits in order to emphasize others, which are the special aspects that have impressed the given observer. So there is no essential realism. The term applies to the method of those who choose to render what is less comforting in life, who insist on those characteristics of things which men call ugly. In realism, just as truly as in any other kind of treatment, is expressed the personality of the artist, his own peculiar way of envisaging the world.