And this aerial quality, this delicacy and innocent grace and tenderness, is not confined alone to such representations of children, but is peculiar to English painting. Even when perfectly ordinary subjects from modern life are in question the basis of this art is, as in the first half of the century, by no means the sense for what is purely pictorial, by no means that naturalistic pantheism which inspires the modern French, but rather a sense for what is moral or ethical. The painter seldom paints merely for the joy of painting, and the numberless technical questions which play such an important part in French art are here only of secondary importance. It accords with the character and taste of the people that their artists have rather a poetic design than one which is properly pictorial. The conception is sometimes allegorical and subtle to the most exquisite fineness of point, sometimes it is vitiated by sentimentality, but it is never purely naturalistic; and this qualified realism, this realism with a poetic strain to keep it ladylike, set English art, especially in the years when Bastien-Lepage and Roll were at their zenith, in sharp opposition to the art of France. In those days the life-size artisan picture, the prose of life, and the struggle for existence reigned almost exclusively in the Parisian Salon, whereas in the Royal Academy everything was quiet and cordial; an intimate, inoffensive, and heartfelt cheerfulness was to be found in the pictures upon its walls, as if none of these painters knew of the existence of such a place as Whitechapel. A connection between pictures and poems is still popular, and some touching trait, some tender episode, some expression of softness, is given to subjects drawn from the ordinary life of the people. Painters seek in every direction after pretty rustic scenes, moving incidents, or pure emotions. Instead of being harsh and rugged in their sense of truth and passion, they glide lightly away from anything ugly, bringing together the loveliest and most beautiful things in nature, and creating elegies, pastorals, and idylls from the passing events of life. Their method of expression is fastidious and finished to a nicety; their vision of life is smiling and kindly, though it must not be supposed that their optimism has now anything in common with the _genre_ picture of 1850. The _genre_ painters from Wilkie to Collins epitomised the actual manners of the present in prosaic compositions. But here the most splendid poetry breaks out, as indeed it actually does in the midst of ordinary life. If in that earlier period English painting was awkward in narration, vulgar, and didactic, it is now tasteful, refined, beautiful, and of distinction. The philistinism of the pictures of those days has been finally stripped away, and the humorously anecdotic _genre_ entirely overcome. The generation of tiresome narrative artists has been followed by painter-poets of delicacy and exquisite tenderness of feeling.