h reading. I cannot
see that it serves any good purpose whatever. Fortunately, we have in our
day illustrations of a different treatment of the vulgar. I do not know
any more truly realistic pictures of certain aspects of New England life
than are to be found in Judd's "Margaret," wherein are depicted
exceedingly pinched and ignoble social conditions. Yet the characters and
the life are drawn with the artistic purity of Flaxman's illustrations of
Homer. Another example is Thomas Hardy's "Far from the Madding Crowd."
Every character in it is of the lower class in England. But what an
exquisite creation it is! You have to turn back to Shakespeare for any
talk of peasants and clowns and shepherds to compare with the
conversations in this novel, so racy are they of the soil, and yet so
touched with the finest art, the enduring art. Here is not the realism of
the photograph, but of the artist; that is to say, it is nature
idealized.

When we criticise our recent fiction it is obvious that we ought to
remember that it only conforms to the tendencies of our social life, our
prevailing ethics, and to the art conditions of our time. Literature is
never in any age an isolated product. It is closely related to the
development or retrogression of the time in all departments of life. The
literary production of our day seems, and no doubt is, more various than
that of any other, and it is not easy to fix upon its leading tendency.
It is claimed for its fiction, however, that it is analytic and
realistic, and that much of it has certain other qualities that make it a
new school in art. These aspects of it I wish to consider in this paper.

It is scarcely possible to touch upon our recent fiction, any more than
upon our recent poetry, without taking into account what is called the
Esthetic movement--a movement more prominent in England than elsewhere. A
slight contemplation of this reveals its resemblance to the Romantic
movement in Germany, of which the brothers Schlegel were apostles, in the
latter part of the last century. The movements are alike in this: that
they both sought inspiration in mediaevalism, in feudalism, in the
symbols of a Christianity that ran to mysticism, in the quaint, strictly
pre-Raphael art which was supposed to be the result of a simple faith. In
the one case, the artless and childlike remains of old German pictures
and statuary were exhumed and set up as worthy of imitation; in the
other, we have carried ou