The Principles of Success in Literature | Page 9

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 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 novelty. To the eye that can read aright
there is an infinite variety even in the most ordinary human being. But
to the careless indiscriminating eye all individuality is merged in a
misty generality. Nature and men yield nothing new to such a mind. Of
what avail is it for a man to walk out into the tremulous mists of
morning, to watch the slow sunset, and wait for the rising stars, if he
can tell us nothing about these but what others have already told us---if
he feels nothing but what others have already felt? Let a man look for
himself and tell truly what he sees. We will listen to that. We must
listen to it, for its very authenticity has a subtle power of compulsion.
What others have seen and felt we can learn better from their own lips.
II.
I have not yet explained in any formal manner what the nature of that
insight is which constitutes what I have named the Principle of Vision;
although doubtless the reader has gathered its meaning from the
remarks already made. For the sake of future applications of the
principle to the various questions of philosophical criticism which must
arise in the course of this inquiry, it may be needful here to explain (as
I have already explained elsewhere) how the chief intellectual
operations--Perception, Inference, Reasoning, and Imagination--may be
viewed as so many forms of mental vision.
Perception, as distinguished from Sensation, is the presentation before
Consciousness of the details which once were present in conjunction
with the object at this moment affecting Sense. These details are
inferred to be still in conjunction with the object, although not revealed
to Sense. Thus when an apple is perceived by me, who merely see it, all
that Sense reports is of a certain coloured surface: the roundness, the
firmness, the fragrance, and the taste of the apple are not present to

Sense, but are made present to Consciousness by the act of Perception.
The eye sees a certain coloured surface; the mind sees at the same
instant many other co-existent but unapparent facts--it reinstates in
their due order these unapparent facts. Were it not for this mental vision
supplying the deficiencies of ocular vision, the coloured surface would
be an enigma. But the suggestion of Sense rapidly recalls the
experiences previously associated with