Not only do we apportion our applause according to the degree of versimilitude attained, but also according to the difficulty each involves.  It is a higher difficulty, and implies a nobler art to represent the movement and complexity of life and emotion than to catch the fixed lineaments of outward aspect.  To paint a policeman idly lounging at the street corner with such verisimilitude that we are pleased with the representation, admiring the solidity of the figure, the texture of the clothes, and the human aspect of the features, is so difficult that we loudly applaud the skill which enables an artist to imitate what in itself is uninteresting; and if the imitation be carried to a certain degree of verisimilitude the picture may be of immense value.  But no excellence of representation can make this high art.  To carry it into the region of high art, another and far greater difficulty must be overcome; the man must be represented under the strain of great emotion, and we must recognise an equal truthfulness in the subtle indications of great mental agitation, the fleeting characters of which are far less easy to observe and to reproduce, than the stationary characters of form and costume.  We may often observe how the novelist or dramatist has tolerable success so long as his personages are quiet, or moved only by the vulgar motives of ordinary life, and how fatally uninteresting, because unreal, these very personages become as soon as they are exhibited under the stress of emotion:  their language ceases at once to be truthful, and becomes stagey; their conduct is no longer recognisable as that of human beings such as we have known.  Here we note a defect of treatment, a mingling of styles, arising partly from defect of vision, and partly from an imperfect sincerity; and success in art will always be found dependent on integrity of style.  The Dutch painters, so admirable in their own style, would become pitiable on quitting it for a higher.

But I need not enter at any length upon this subject of treatment.  Obviously a work must have charm or it cannot succeed; and the charm will depend on very complex conditions in the artist’s mind.  What treatment is in Art, composition is in Philosophy.  The general conception of the point of view, and the skilful distribution of the masses, so as to secure the due preparation, development, and culmination, without wasteful prodigality or confusing want of symmetry, constitute Composition, which is to the structure of a treatise what Style—­in the narrower sense—­is to the structure of sentences.  How far Style is reducible to law will be examined in the next chapter.

Editor.

The laws of style.