The rage for “realism,” which is healthy in as far as it insists on truth, has become unhealthy, in as far as it confounds truth with familiarity, and predominance of unessential details.  There are other truths besides coats and waistcoats, pots and pans, drawlng-rooms and suburban villas.  Life has other aims besides these which occupy the conversation of “Society.”  And the painter who devotes years to a work representing modern life, yet calls for even more attention to a waistcoat than to the face of a philosopher, may exhibit truth of detail which will delight the tailor-mind, but he is defective in artistic truth, because he ought to be representing something higher than waistcoats, and because our thoughts on modern life fall very casually and without emphasis on waistcoats.  In Piloty’s much-admired picture of the “Death of Wallenstein” (at Munich), the truth with which the carpet, the velvet, and all other accessories are painted, is certainly remarkable; but the falsehood of giving prominence to such details in a picture representing the dead Wallenstein—­as if they were the objects which could possibly arrest our attention and excite our sympathies in such a spectacle—­is a falsehood of the realistic school.  If a man means to paint upholstery, by all means let him paint it so as to delight and deceive an upholsterer; but if he means to paint a human tragedy, the upholsterer must be subordinate, and velvet must not draw our eyes away from faces.

I have digressed a little from my straight route because I wish to guard the Principle of Vision from certain misconceptions which might arise on a simple statement of it.  The principle insists on the artist assuring himself that he distinctly sees what he attempts to represent.  What he sees, and how he represents it, depend on other principles.  To make even this principle of Vision thoroughly intelligible in its application to all forms of Literature and Art, it must be considered in connection with the two other principles—­Sincerity and Beauty, which are involved in all successful works.  In the next chapter we shall treat of Sincerity.

Editor.

CHAPTER IV.

The principle of sincerity.

It is always understood as an expression of condemnation when anything in Literature or Art is said to be done for effect; and yet to produce an effect is the aim and end of both.

There is nothing beyond a verbal ambiguity here if we look at it closely, and yet there is a corresponding uncertainty in the conception of Literature and Art commonly entertained, which leads many writers and many critics into the belief that what are called “effects” should be sought, and when found must succeed.  It is desirable to clear up this moral ambiguity, as I may call it, and to show that the real method of securing the legitimate effect is not to aim at it, but to aim at the truth, relying on that for securing effect.  The condemnation of whatever is “done for effect” obviously springs from indignation at a disclosed insincerity in the artist, who is self-convicted of having neglected truth for the sake of our applause; and we refuse our applause to the flatterer, or give it contemptuously as to a mountebank whose dexterity has amused us.