They have both given imaginative expression to actual experience—­they have not invented, but reproduced; they have preferred the truth, such as their own experience testified, to the vague, false, conventional notions current in circulating libraries.  Whatever of weakness may be pointed out in their works will, we are positive, be mostly in those parts where experience is deserted, and the supposed requirements of fiction have been listened to; whatever has really affected the public mind is, we are equally, certain, the transcript of some actual incident, character or emotion.  Note, moreover, that beyond this basis of actuality these writers have the further advantage of deep feeling united to keen observation.

Especially severe is her condemnation of the tendency to introduce only fashionable or learned people into novels.  She says the silly novelists rarely make us acquainted with “any other than very lofty and fashionable society,” and very often the authors know nothing of such society except from the reading of other such novels.

It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life.  If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men, tradespeople and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they have seen and heard, and what they have not seen and heard, with equal faithfulness.

What is simple, natural, unaffected, she pleads for as the true material of fiction.  How she would apply this idea may be seen in her condemnation of a novelist who devoted her pages to a defence of Evangelicalism.  This writer is “tame and feeble” because she attempts to depict a form of society with which she is not familiar.  That the common phases of religious life are capable of affording the richest material for the novelist, George Eliot has abundantly shown, and what she says of their value in this discussion of “Silly Novelists” is of great interest in view of her own success in this kind of portraiture.  What she suggested as a fine field for the novelist was to be the one she herself was so well to occupy.  Her success proved how clearly she comprehended the nature of novel-writing, and how well she understood the character of the material with which the best results can be attained.

It is less excusable in an Evangelical novelist than any other, gratuitously to seek her subjects among titles and carriages.  The real drama of Evangelicalism—­and it has abundance of fine drama for any one who has genius enough to discern and reproduce it—­lies among the middle and lower classes; and are not Evangelical opinions understood to give an especial interest in the weak things of the earth, rather than in the mighty?  Why, then, cannot our Evangelical