requires that we also shall be content with just that same sort of minor satisfaction which arises from his artistic but purposeless exercise of his technique.

And to the same effect, were it not otiose to do so, it would be possible to cite the criticism of every age which has had a great literature; while a lack of sense for this "sorte de lieu commun moral" is an almost infallible sign of critical and literary decadence. For life is to us a moral affair; and if literature succeeds in its purpose of representing life, its perusal, like experience, will result in the attachment of correct values to human action, not because it is the business of literature to inculcate morals, but because it is the business of literature to represent life, and life is a moral affair. mere stylist like Gautier is felt to be less than first-rate, in spite of the seduction of his manner, simply because he has no great ideas of human life to commemorate.

The

But this is very different from expecting a novel to be written for the promotion of social or religious doctrine or for the exploitation of theories or hypotheses of any kind. To attempt to use literature for such a purpose, or to require of it the solution of philosophical problems, is evidence of a strange perversion on the part of writer or critic. Philosophies are at best fluctuating and transitory; they change from generation to generation.

The

consequences of human action are alone of eternal interest to the human kind. And he who builds beyond the moment must build not upon the former but upon the latter. Nor do such ideas, as a rule or as an exception, afford a just measure for the evaluation of human life. On the contrary, they tend to force life and its expression into narrow, ready-made equations, true enough for the day but by so much the falser for the morrow; in other words, to reduce it temporarily to order by the summary process of strait-jacketing it. One attempting the representation, or better the interpretation, of life, 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 inessential; 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 there are those who pretend 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 popularisation of literature-perhaps its vulgarisation, 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 disputation;—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 experience 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. This is the open school in which the novelist best learns his lesson, not in the cloisters of a creed. It is 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 formulæ or generalised prescriptions, but embedded in the tissue of individual examples by which he conveys them to others. Literature can never be studied 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 classifications of a rigid system, they are the peculiarities of flesh and blood.

Such was George Sand's training. It is well understood now that she belonged to no sect, accepted no creeds, held no tenets or dogmas,

2

literary or otherwise, which might have controlled her at the outset though at the risk of cramping her early genius. But unfortunately, while she began writing solely from her experience and observation, she began at a moment of violent reaction and revolt, when her feelings were still running riot with her reason. And this circumstance imparted to her first work, together with a spirit of reality and naturalness hitherto wanting to French fiction, a wildness and incoherence that marred the product. The naturalness and reality, for which she had her observation and experience to thank, gave her instant popularity, her writer's capital at the start; while her revolt produced the mental and moral confusion of her first period.

An

Free of creeds and dogmas as she naturally was, she could have met with nothing more unlucky for the development of her genius than that, almost immediately, and before her literary character was formed, she should have fallen under the influence of those who were essentially theorisers and doctrinaires. admirer of Rousseau from the first, with an obscure bias in her nature toward a hazy humanitarianism, she devoted the production of her second period, inspired by her masculine friendships and attachments, to the ill-advised attempt to make the novel an instrument of

social reform. No one can doubt that her enthusiasm over Lamennais' Christian communism was sincere for the moment, but equally so for another moment was her admiration for Pierre Leroux's socialism, and for still another her interest in freemasonry. The fact is that these notions for which she was momentarily inspired were never hers by origination and that she never made them so by adoption. The personal weight of those who professed them imposed them upon her feminine susceptibility; and with the artist's impulsiveness she worked them off upon her novels. Naturally her presentation of them was confused and uncertain. And the result is much the same with other novels of hers of this and other periods, which are not strictly Tendenz perhaps but may be fairly classed together with the preceding as extra-literary, since they were not written under purely literary inspiration or with purely literary motives, and since-the most important test-who reads them reads them primarily for something over and above their literary interest -for the side-light generally which they throw upon the life, character, or thought of their author or of her time. "I have found," says Coleridge, and the remark is as true of the novel as it is of poetry, "that where the subject is taken immediately from the author's personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of a