y 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.

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_