rom the highway into the first wood he ever saw; when Hornung
paints a group of chimney-sweepers--more is done toward linking the
higher classes with the lower, toward obliterating the vulgarity of
exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical
dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of
amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men
beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task
of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People.
Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial
aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false
ideas about evanescent fashions--about the manners and conversation of
beaux and duchesses; but it _is_ serious that our sympathy with the
perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humor in the
life of our more heavily laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and
turned toward a false object instead of the true one.

This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepresentation which
give rise to it has what the artist considers a moral end. The thing for
mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences which the
moralist thinks _ought_ to act on the laborer or the artisan, but what
are the motives and influences which _do_ act on him. We want to be
taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant,
but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his
suspicious selfishness.

We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of
rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could
give us their psychological character--their conception of life, and
their emotions--with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books
would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of
social sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Plornish's colloquial
style with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while there is the
same startling inspiration in his description of the gestures and phrases
of "Boots," as in the speeches of Shakespeare's mobs or numskulls, he
scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and
tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a
moment before in his artistic truthfulness. But for the precious salt of
his humor, which compels him to reproduce external traits that serve in
some