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GEORGE ELIOT

art, it is in the interest of morality rather than of science.

And this leads us to discuss for a moment the need of culture for the novelist. Obviously intellectual training is not alone sufficient. George Henry Lewes was exactly on a par with George Eliot in this regard, yet his Ranthorpe was deservedly a failure. Nor is culture combined with observation a complete equipment for the novelist. Riehl is allowed by George Eliot herself to have had a complete knowledge of the German peasant, and was besides a man of great culture; yet his Culturgeschichtliche Novellen, though republished by the Pitt Press, can scarcely rank as classic. On the other hand, Auerbach and George Eliot show that wide culture is no necessary bar to sympathetic delineation of the life furthest removed from culture. In so far as culture is real and has become instinctive and unconscious, it undoubtedly tends to give a wider background to the artistic picture and to affect us at more various points of contact. But observation, psychology, and culture can only increase the artistic value of the novel in so far as they are unconsciously applied and subordinated to the interest of character and incident. The selective principle with regard to the latter cannot be of an intellectual, conscious kind at all: it must clearly be