Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 23.pdf/517

 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