a too-learned manner, is a very small detraction from
the interest of her books.

In _Adam Bede_ she turns aside for a whole chapter to defend her method of
depicting accurately, minutely, in the simplest detail, the feelings,
motives, actions and surroundings of very commonplace and uninteresting
people. Her reasons for this method in novel-writing apply to all her
works, and are worthy of the author of _Adam Bede_ and _Silas Marner_.

I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could
create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the
morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a
harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields--on
the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your
indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and
helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your
outspoken, brave justice.

So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things
seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity,
which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread.
Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a
delightful facility in drawing a griffin--the longer the claws, and the
larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility, which we
mistook for genius, is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real
unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that,
even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to
say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings--much
harder than to say something fine about them which is _not_ the exact
truth.

It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in
many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise. I find a
source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous
homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my
fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic
suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn without shrinking, from
cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls and heroic warriors, to an
old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner,
while the noonday light, softened, perhaps, by a screen of leaves,
falls on her mob