ous labor with which George Eliot amassed
the materials for "Romola," a realistic study of Florence during
the Renaissance; but though we recognize the work as that of a
thorough student, the details still fail to convince us as do the
details of her studies of contemporary Warwickshire. The young
aspirant to the art of fiction who knows himself to be an incipient
realist had therefore best confine his efforts to attempted
reproduction of the life he sees about him. He had better accept the
common-sensible advice which the late Sir Walter Besant gave in his
lecture on "The Art of Fiction": "A young lady brought up in a quiet
country village should avoid descriptions of garrison life; a writer
whose friends and personal experiences belong to what we call the
lower middle class should carefully avoid introducing his characters
into society; a South-countryman would hesitate before attempting to
reproduce the North-country accent. This is a very simple rule, but
one to which there should be no exception--never to go beyond your own
experience."

=The Freedom of Romance.=--The incipient realist is almost obliged to
accept this advice; but the incipient romantic need not necessarily do
so. That final injunction of Besant's--"never to go beyond your own
experience"--seems somewhat stultifying to the imagination; and there
is a great deal of very wise suggestion in Henry James' reply to it:
"What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and
end?... The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel
upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me)
to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the
military. Greater miracles have been seen than that, imagination
assisting, she should speak the truth about some of these gentlemen."
The romantic "upon whom nothing is lost," may, "imagination
assisting," project his truth into some other region of experience
than those which he has actually observed. Edgar Allan Poe is
indubitably one of the great masters of the art of fiction; but there
is nothing in any of his stories to indicate that he was born in
Boston, lived in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York, and died in
Baltimore. "The Assignation" indicates that he had lived in
Venice--where, in fact, he had never been; others of his stories have
the atmosphere of other times and lands; and most of them pass in a
dream-world of his own creation, "out of space, out of time."