The chief rule for novel-writing laid down by George Eliot in these essays is, that the novel shall be the result of experience and true to nature.  She emphasizes the importance of this condition, and says that the novelist is bound to use actual experience as his material, and that alone, or else keep silent.  Weak and silly novels are the result of an effort to break away from this rule; but the writer who ventures to disregard it never can be other than silly or weak.  Novelists, she says, may either portray experience outwardly through observation, or inwardly through sentiment, or through a combination of both.

Observation without sentiment usually leads to humor or satire; sentiment without observation to rhetoric and long-drawn lachrymosity.  The extreme fault of the one is flippant superficiality, that of the other is what is called sickly sentimentality.

All true literature, she says, is based on fact, describes life as it is lived by men and women, touches and is fragrant with reality.  This cardinal principle of literary art she has defined and illustrated in her own strong and expressive manner in this Review article.

All poetry, all fiction, all comedy, all belles-lettres, even to the playful caprices of fancy, are but the expression of experiences and emotions; and these expressions are the avenues through which we reach the sacred adytum of humanity, and learn better to understand our fellows and ourselves.  In proportion as these expressions are the forms of universal truths, of facts common to all nations or appreciable by all intellects, the literature which sets them forth is permanently good and true.  Hence the universality and immortality of Homer, Shakspere, Cervantes, Moliere.  But in proportion as these expressions are the forms of individual, peculiar truths, such as fleeting fashions or idiosyncrasies, the literature is ephemeral.  Hence tragedy never grows old, for it arises from elemental experience; but comedy soon ages, for it arises from peculiarities.  Nevertheless, even idiosyncrasies are valuable as side glances; they are aberrations that bring the natural orbit into more prominent distinctness.

It follows from what has been said, that literature, being essentially the expression of experience and emotion—­of what we have seen, felt and thought—­that only that literature is effective, and to be prized accordingly, which has reality for its basis (needless to say that emotion is as real as the three-per-cents), and effective in proportion to the depth and breadth of that basis.

In writing? of the authors of Jane Eyre and Mary Barton, she shows how important to her mind it is that the novel should have its basis in actual experience, and that it should be an expression of reality.