'The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification'

 'The novel, for a long while, has been over-furnished. The property man has been so busy on its pages, the importance of material objects and their vivid presentation have been so stressed, that we take it for granted whoever can observe, and can write the English language, can write a novel. Often the latter qualification is considered unnecessary.'
That's Willa Cather, kicking off a short but pungent essay, 'The Novel Démeublé' (collected in Not Under Forty). The essay takes aim at the form of 'realism' that 'asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations.' Cather acknowledges that the novels of Balzac and Tolstoy (and Flaubert, whom she doesn't mention) are decidedly over-furnished, but she excuses both on the grounds that the furniture, however luxuriant, is essential to their artistic purpose, to the creation of a particular world and a particular emotional atmosphere. 
  'If the novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot be at the same time a vivid and brilliant form of journalism,' she writes, and 'the higher processes of art are all processes of simplification.' She takes a swipe at D.H. Lawrence: 'A novel crowded with physical sensations is no less a catalogue than one crowded with furniture. A book like The Rainbow sharply reminds us how vast a distance lies between emotion and mere sensory reactions ... Can one imagine anything more terrible than the story of Romeo and Juliet rewritten in prose by D.H. Lawrence?' Indeed.
  'How wonderful it would be,' she concludes, 'if we could throw all the furniture out of the window; and along with it, all the meaningless reiterations concerning physical sensations, all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre...'
  This is bracing stuff, from a writer whose own short, wonderful novels typically contain only the barest minimum of furniture.