I have throughout used Style in the narrower sense of expression rather than in the wider sense of “treatment” which is sometimes affixed to it.  The mode of treating a subject is also no doubt the writer’s or the artist’s way of expressing what is in his mind, but this is Style in the more general sense, and does not admit of being reduced to laws apart from those of Vision and Sincerity.  A man necessarily sees a subject in a particular light—­ideal or grotesque, familiar or fanciful, tragic or humorous, he may wander into fairy-land, or move amid representative abstractions; he may follow his wayward fancy in its grotesque combinations, or he may settle down amid the homeliest details of daily life.  But having chosen he must be true to his choice.  He is not allowed to represent fairy-land as if it resembled Walworth, nor to paint Walworth in the colours of Venice.  The truth of consistency must be preserved in his treatment, truth in art meaning of course only truth within the limits of the art; thus the painter may produce the utmost relief he can by means of light and shade, but is peremptorily forbidden to use actual solidities on a plane surface.  He must represent gold by colour, not by sticking gold on his fIgures. [This was done with naivete by the early painters, and is really very effective in the pictures of Gentile da Fabriano—­that Paul Veronese of the fifteenth century—­as the reader will confess if he has seen the “Adoration of the Magi,” in the Florence Academy; but it could not be tolerated now].  Our applause is greatly determined by our sense of difficulty overcome, and to stick gold on a picture is an avoidance of the difficulty of painting it.

Truth of presentation has an inexplicable charm for us, and throws a halo round even ignoble objects.  A policeman idly standing at the corner of the street, or a sow lazily sleeping against the sun, are not in nature objects to excite a thrill of delight, but a painter may, by the cunning of his art, represent them so as to delight every spectator.  The same objects represented by an inferior painter will move only a languid interest; by a still more inferior painter they may be represented so as to please none but the most uncultivated eye.  Each spectator is charmed in proportion to his recognition of a triumph over difficulty which is measured by the degree of verisimilitude.  The degrees are many.  In the lowest the pictured object is so remote from the reality that we simply recognise what the artist meant to represent.  In like manner we recognise in poor novels and dramas what the authors mean to be characters, rather than what our experience of life suggests as characteristic.