e no reader of her novels will doubt,
or that she saw and understood its capacities for artistic delineation.
The opening paragraphs of her _Westminster Review_ article on the "Natural
History of German Life" afford further evidence of her insight and
wisdom on this subject. They also afford evidence of her hatred of the
conventional and the artificial in art, literature and life. The spirit of
imitation and mannerism common to the eighteenth century was in every way
repugnant to her. She could have had only contempt for the literary art of
a Pope or a Boileau. The nature of her realism, and the conception she had
of its importance, may be understood from these paragraphs, for in them she
has unfolded her theory more clearly than in anything else she has written,
and with that genius for sympathetic description which is so marked in her
novels.

How little the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to
those who are outside them, how little their natural history has been
studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our art as well as by our
political and social theories. Where, in our picture exhibitions, shall
we find a group of true peasantry? What English artist even attempts to
rival in truthfulness such studies of popular life as the pictures of
Teniers or the ragged boys of Murillo? Even one of the greatest
painters of the pre-eminently realistic school, while in his picture of
"The Hireling Shepherd" he gave us a landscape of marvellous
truthfulness, placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who were not
much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our chimney
ornaments. Only a total absence of acquaintance and sympathy with our
peasantry could give a moment's popularity to such a picture as "Cross
Purposes," where we have a peasant girl who looks as if she knew
L.E.L.'s poems by heart, and English rustics whose costumes seem to
indicate that they are meant for ploughmen with exotic features that
remind us of a handsome _primo tenore_. Rather than such cockney
sentimentality as this as an education for the taste and sympathies, we
prefer the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. But
even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of
features, who are far above the effeminate feebleness of the "Keepsake"
style, treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and
pre