The Fellowship of Princes

William Shakespeare would probably not impress us with a sense of our inferiority if we were to meet him tomorrow. Most likely we should be bitterly disappointed; because, having formed our conception of him as the man who wrote Hamlet and Othello we forget that these were not the products of his ordinary moods, but the manifestations of his power at white heat. In ordinary moods he must be very much as ordinary men, and it is in these we meet him.

How notorious is the astonishment of friends and associates when any man's achievements suddenly emerge into renown. "They could never have believed it." Why should they? Knowing him only as one of their circle, and not being gifted with the penetration which discerns a latent energy, but only with the vision which discerns apparent results, they are taken by surprise.

Nay, so biased are we by superficial judgments, that we frequently ignore the palpable fact of achieved excellence simply because we cannot reconcile it with our judgment of the man who achieved it. Because our personal impressions of him do not correspond with our conceptions of a powerful man, we abate or withdraw our admiration, and attribute his success to lucky accident.

This blear-eyed, taciturn, timid man, whose knowledge of many things is manifestly imperfect, whose inaptitude for many things is apparent, can HE be the creator of such glorious works? Can HE be the large and patient thinker, the delicate humourist, the impassioned poet? Nature seems to have answered this question for us; yet so little are we inclined to accept Nature's emphatic testimony on this point, that few of us ever see without disappointment the man whose works have revealed his greatness.

It stands to reason that we should not rightly appreciate Shakespeare if we were to meet him simply because we should meet him as an ordinary man, and not as the author of Hamlet.

—George Henry Lewes, The Principles of Success in Literature

Painting: Cobbe Portrait

The Admission and Omission of Details

Foolish critics often betray their ignorance by saying that a painter or a writer "only copies what he has seen, or puts down what he has known."

They forget that no man imagines what he has not seen or known, and that it is in the selection of characteristic details that the artistic power is manifested.

Those who suppose that familiarity with scenes or characters enables a painter or a novelist to "copy" them with artistic effect, forget the well-known fact that the vast majority of men are painfully incompetent to avail themselves of this familiarity, and cannot form vivid pictures even to themselves of scenes in which they pass their daily lives; and if they could imagine these, they would need the delicate selective instinct to guide them in the admission and omission of details, as well as in the grouping of the images.

Let any one try to "copy" the wife or brother he knows so well,—to make a human image which shall speak and act so as to impress strangers with a belief in its truth,—and he will then see that the much-despised reliance on actual experience is not the mechanical procedure it is believed to be.

George Henry Lewes, The Principles of Success in Literature

Painting: Claude Monet, Pathway in Monet's Garden at Giverny