I do not assert that inferior writers abstain from the familiar and trivial.  On the contrary, as imitators, they imitate everything which great writers have shown to be sources of interest.  But their bias is towards great subjects.  They make no new ventures in the direction of personal experience.  They are silent on all that they have really seen for themselves.  Unable to see the deep significance of what is common, they spontaneously turn towards the uncommon.

There is, at the present day, a fashion in Literature, and in Art generally, which is very deporable, and which may, on a superficial glance, appear at variance with what has just been said.  The fashion is that of coat-and-waistcoat realism, a creeping timidity of invention, moving almost exclusively amid scenes of drawing-room existence, with all the reticences and pettinesses of drawing-room conventions.  Artists have become photographers, and have turned the camera upon the vulgarities of life, instead of representing the more impassioned movements of life.  The majority of books and pictures are addressed to our lower faculties; they make no effort as they have no power to stir our deeper emotions by the contagion of great ideas.  Little that makes life noble and solemn is reflected in the Art of our day; to amuse a languid audience seems its highest aim.  Seeing this, some of my readers may ask whether the artists have not been faithful to the law I have expounded, and chosen to paint the small things they have seen, rather than the great things they have not seen?  The answer is simple.  For the most part the artists have not painted what they have seen, but have been false and conventional in their pretended realism.  And whenever they have painted truly, they have painted successfully.  The authenticity of their work has given it all the value which in the nature of things such work could have.  Titian’s portrait of “The Young Man with a Glove” is a great work of art, though not of great art.  It is infinitely higher than a portrait of Cromwell, by a painter unable to see into the great soul of Cromwell, and to make us see it; but it is infinitely lower than Titian’s “Tribute Money,” “Peter the Martyr,” or the “Assumption.”  Tennyson’s “Northern Farmer” is incomparably greater as a poem than Mr. Bailey’s ambitious “Festus;” but the “Northern Farmer” is far below “Ulysses” or “Guinevere,” because moving on a lower level, and recording the facts of a lower life.

Insight is the first condition of Art.  Yet many a man who has never been beyond his village will be silent about that which he knows well, and will fancy himself called upon to speak of the tropics or the Andes—–­on the reports of others.  Never having seen a greater man than the parson and the squire and not having seen into them—­he selects Cromwell and Plato, Raphael and Napoleon, as his models, in the vain belief that these impressive personalities will make his work impressive.  Of course I am speaking figuratively.  By “never