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.
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