But in the novelist's attitude towards human life there are two distinct points of view from which a new classification of novelists might be made: the position given to ethics, the moral laws in the presentation of life. The laws of human conduct are so essential to the relation of man to man, that the fundamental question as to what position ethics holds in our narrative cannot be ignored. The novelist must have decided whether he is going to consider its claims in the primary structure of his novel, and in the creation and development of characters, or not. Is he going to prepare the groundwork of artistic labor with a view to ethical design, or pure artistic design? It may be said that the best work requires both. But still, in so far as the one is heeded more than the other, will the writer be an idealist or a realist in this sense. The idealist will focus his view of the characters, their experiences and sufferings and surroundings, from a view of moral fitness and design; the realist will find the design and composition, the harmony which all art needs, in the characters, in the scenes, in the life itself, and the inner organic relation of the parts to the whole. The one leads to the best idealism, the other to the best realism. The one produces a George Eliot, the other a Guy de Maupassant. This realist ignores the general fitness of things, the moral law, and says:--"This character is interesting in itself, this situation is amusing, curious, striking, or terrible,--they are worth depicting, without any question as to their relation to social or moral ideals." Guy de Maupassant takes characters and situations and depicts them with consummate art; he never troubles himself about general moral fitness, --we never know what his moral and social ideals are, nor whether he has any at all. Jane Austen is interested in her characters, in the tone and range of ideas of the period and the society in which she lives, the types of life, and she draws them with consummate art; but though we are left in no doubt in her case as to the good and the bad, and though the good generally prevails and the bad is defeated, these are not subordinated to a clear conception of an ideal social order, without which the characters and the story could not have been conceived and developed--as is always the case with George Eliot. Gwendolen Harleth, Felix Holt, Maggie, Dorothea, Lydgate, the life and surroundings of these figures, all bear a fixed relation to the social ideals of the author; and it is in this relation that she conceives and develops them. Nay, it is for the purpose of illustrating and fixing this that she creates them at all. Strange as it may sound, in so far Jane Austen might be called a realist and be classed with Guy de Maupassant; while George Sand, with whom she has so much similarity of spirit, is by contrast an idealist. It is a difference in the initial methods of dealing with life in fiction.