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 having been
beyond his village," I understand a mental no less than topographical
limitation. The penetrating sympathy of genius will, even from a
village, traverse the whole world. What I mean is, that unless by
personal experience, no matter through what avenues, a man has gained
clear insight into the facts of life, he cannot successfully place them
before us; and whatever insight he has gained, be it of important or of
unimportant facts, will be of value if truly reproduced. No sunset is
precisely similar to another, no two souls are affected by it in a
precisely similar way. Thus may the commonest phenomenon have a