est 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 towards a
false object instead of the true one.

This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepresentation
which gives 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 conceptions 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 Shakspere'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 degree, as a corrective to his
frequently false psychology, his preternaturally virtuous poor children
and artisans, his melodramatic bootmen and courtesans, wou