George Sand and Her French Style ly 



row; in other words, to reduce it temporarily to order by the 

 summary process of straight- jacketing it. One attempting the 

 representation, or better the interpretation of Hfe, ought to bring 

 to its study no preconceived ideas. All such ideas should, where 

 they enter literature at all, be strictly distinguished as foreign to 

 its purpose ; that is. as extra-literary. They may not always be 

 impertinent or uninteresting, but they are subordinate and ines- 

 sential ; and where they rise into prominence and importance 

 above the life of the book, they are so, — both impertinent and 

 uninteresting from the point of view of literature. And yet one 

 finds persons enough to read a novel for nothing more than its 

 historical background, or its treatment of a political issue or 

 some other vexed question. In spite of the modern populariza- 

 tion of literature, — perhaps its vulgarization, — one has not ceased 

 to recommend Scott for the historical information to be got out 

 of him ; or George Eliot for her curious cases of moral casuistry ; 

 or Mrs. Ward for her religious disputations : — clearly literary 

 impertinences in any case and not the vitality that gives these 

 writers their strength. 



The best training for a novelist is not a system but an expe- 

 rience — a first-hand knowledge of men and their ways acquired 

 from the give and take of existence, where the hard facts, by 

 dint of battering the consciousness, finally gain recognition. If 

 there is one thing, though but one, for which we are indebted to 

 naturalism, it is the conviction that literature and science are in 

 thus far alike — that both proceed not from speculation but from 

 observation. This is the open school in which the novelist learns 

 his lesson, not in the cloisters of a creed. Here he learns of 

 human responsibility, of the consequences of human action, of 

 the fatality of the human will; here he learns "what life and 

 death is ;" and here finally he gets his ideas of the world direct 

 from the world itself, not in set formulae or generalized pre- 

 scriptions, but embedded in the tissue of individual examples by 

 which he conveys them to others. Literature can never be stud- 

 ied from any mirrored image, not even from literature itself, 

 without distortion or conventionality. Some arrangements of 

 facts he must make, no doubt; but these are not the classifica- 



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