ently done; but, except for the slight indication of a neglected
estate, it stands apart from the plot or the play of character, and
might be bound up with the volume or omitted like a woodcut.
Undoubtedly the art of descriptive writing, which demands poetic
feeling and a delicate hand upon the organ of language, is practised
finely by the best of our modern novelists, and is a valuable element
of their popularity. Yet there are signs that it is already threatened
by the inexorable demands of the lower realism, which takes slight
account of the intimations that can be conveyed or the emotions that
may be roused by using language as an instrument for the
interpretation of nature, and requires to be shown the thing itself,
as it is seen in a photograph. 'The tendency of the times,' we are
told, 'seems to be to read less and less, and to depend more upon
pictorial records of events.' And the author from whom we quote[6]
proceeds to show how a few lines of sketch at once elucidate and
vivify whole pages of word-painting. He goes further, and relates how
'the fallacy of the accepted system of describing landscapes,
buildings, and the like in words,' was proved experimentally by
reading slowly a description of a castle, mountains, and a river
winding to the sea, from one of the Waverley novels, before a number
of students, three of whom proceeded to indicate on a black board the
leading lines of the mental picture produced by the words. The
drawings were all different and all wrong, as might indeed have been
confidently foretold; for the two sister arts of the pen and of the
pencil cannot possibly interpret each other reciprocally after this
fashion, or produce identical effects by their widely differing
methods.

Yet it is not impossible that the lower ranks of writers, who
exaggerate the prevailing fashion of exactly reproducing what any one
can see and hear, may find themselves outbid and overpowered on this
ground by illustration in line and colour. In this direction, indeed,
lies the danger of extreme Realism. It wages war against Romance,
which subsists upon idealistic conceptions of noble thought and
action; it pretends to hold up a true mirror to society, because it
reflects faithfully and without discrimination, like a photograph, the
street, the club, or the drawing-room, and arranges dramatically the
commonplace talk of everyday people. All this is fatal to high art, in
writing as in painting; nor can very clever