o keep well ahead of the best of feminine writers.
She is more thoroughly the master of her powers, is more self-centred,
looks out upon human experience more calmly and with a more penetrating
gaze. Foremost of the half-dozen women who during the present century have
sought to interpret the feminine side of life, she has done much for her
sex. Daring more than others, she has given a greater promise than any
other of what woman is to accomplish when her nature blossoms out into all
its possibilities.

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 traged