A scene from a story of actual life is necessarily secondary art, because here the painter imitates what is already an imitation, and cannot ascend above experience. He is confined to the invention of the novelist, and is therefore subordinate to him.
The written drama is available for the painter as a source for designs only in cases of high tragedy, or mixed plays containing strong dramatic events of tragic import. Seeing that the drama is itself an imitative art, only such actions or characters can be used by the painter which are above life experience, and it is only in tragedy that the dramatist can exalt human attributes, and ennoble the passions above this experience. Tragedy deals directly with the two great contrasting human mysteries--life and death. From one to the other is the most awful and sublime action within human knowledge, and consequently the motives and sentiments relating to it may be carried to the loftiest reach of the understanding. An exaggeration of ordinary life, where the combination of perfected parts in form and expression is not possible, means only the abnormal; while comedy, which imitates conditions inferior to ordinary life, cannot be exaggerated except into distortion. High tragedy therefore is the only section of the written drama that concerns the painter. If he draw from any other work of the dramatist he only produces secondary art, as when he draws from the novelist. The picture may be interesting, but both interest and beauty will be fleeting.
While the painter may use the written drama in certain cases, he can by no means be concerned with the acted drama. It is useless to attempt to produce a good picture by imitating an imitation accomplished by a combined art, as the opera or drama. A painted scene from a play as it is acted, is merely the execution of another man's design which in itself is entirely circumscribed by conditions of action and speech wholly foreign to the art of the painter. A picture of a particular moment of action in a written play, as it is thrown upon the brain in the course of reading, is interesting, firstly because our imagination has wide limits of invention, and we naturally and instinctively adopt a harmonious rendering of the scene so far as the writing will allow; and secondly for the reason that we pass rapidly from impression to impression, and so the whole significance of each picture, separately and relatively, is conveyed to us. But a painting of an acted scene is meaningless, for it can represent only one in a series of a thousand moments of action which are all connected, and of which the comprehension of any one is dependent upon our knowledge of the whole. The painter has no scope. He simply copies a number of figures in a fixed setting, and the result is necessarily inferior art to a copy of the poorest original picture, since in this case the artist at least copies the direct product of the imagination, while in the other he has only before him a series of dummies who are imitating the product. The sense of unreality arising from such a picture must instantly overpower any harmony of colour or form that may be present.