LITERATURE AND THE LAW ANY eminent men of letters have begun their careers as lawyers, and
have speedily freed themselves from the ties of what seems to have im pressed them as a singularly uncon
genial pursuit.
It is an often repeated
saying, that such men find the law’ irk some, and there is a widely prevalent
opinion that the law and literature do not go together.
As a matter of fact
they have much in common ——- the debt of literary men to the law is immeas urably great, and instead of stifling their talents, their knowledge of the law
has had, in spite of every possible objec tion, a most stimulating effect upon their
powers. It is something more than a mere coincidence that Thackeray, Maeter linck, Anthony Hope and Galsworthy should have entered the bar, that George
with life than any other? They may have tired of its dreary technicalities and dry abstractions, and a profession so enamored of dull facts and cold logic may have sometimes oppressed them with a sense of its sterility. But law has also another side, which attracts rather than repels, and the charm of the law is something of which it is hard to write and which every lawyer who has not taken leave of imagination well understands for himself. And to all these men, the higher, more human side of the law gave something which may be seen enshrined in the work of their hands. Even as a painter studies anatomy to perfect his knowledge of the human form, so may a novelist study the dry
bones of the law that he may write
Meredith and Arnold Bennett should
intelligently of the living society modeled upon them. The law may help him to master arts of observation and analysis which must be exercised in the produc
have studied law, that Bacon should have been equally great in two profes sions, that Scott, Dickens, Fielding and Balzac should not always seem to, be writing from a layman's standpoint.
him to achieve realism when his imagi nation threatens to make him merely fantastic. It may be that some authors have
tion of every great novel. It may help
Nor is it an incongruity to be attributed solely to a remarkable accident that Thomas Nelson Page and Robert Grant should have turned with such success
disagreeable memories of tedious hours in a lawyer's office, and that they have forsaken the law in disgust. Yet we
from the law to literature. In fact, there is nothing surprising or exceptional in any of these instances. Why should not
intellectual processes of the lawyer to
such men have been powerfully attracted by a study more closely bound up
find these selfsame writers applying the the study not of a few select cases of wills, torts and real property, but to the illimitable reservoir of fact in which
all case law has its origin.
They have
