imposing themes. Condemned by naive incapacity to be a reporter, and
not a seer, he hopes to shine by the reflected glory of his subjects.
It is natural in him to mistake ambitious art for high art. He does not
feel that the best is the highest.

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