ooser in
words than in deeds. It marks the silent strength and pressure of the
spirit of the Victorian middle class that even to Dickens it never
occurred to revive the verbal coarseness of Smollett or Swift. The other
proof of the same pressure is the change in George Eliot. She was not a
genius in the elemental sense of Dickens; she could never have been
either so strong or so soft. But she did originally represent some of
the same popular realities: and her first books (at least as compared
with her latest) were full of sound fun and bitter pathos. Mr. Max
Beerbohm has remarked (in his glorious essay called _Ichabod_, I think),
that Silas Marner would not have forgotten his miserliness if George
Eliot had written of him in her maturity. I have a great regard for Mr.
Beerbohm's literary judgments; and it may be so. But if literature
means anything more than a cold calculation of the chances, if there is
in it, as I believe, any deeper idea of detaching the spirit of life
from the dull obstacles of life, of permitting human nature really to
reveal itself as human, if (to put it shortly) literature has anything
on earth to do with being _interesting_--then I think we would rather
have a few more Marners than that rich maturity that gave us the
analysed dust-heaps of _Daniel Deronda_.

In her best novels there is real humour, of a cool sparkling sort; there
is a strong sense of substantial character that has not yet degenerated
into psychology; there is a great deal of wisdom, chiefly about women;
indeed there is almost every element of literature except a certain
indescribable thing called _glamour_; which was the whole stock-in-trade
of the Brontes, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp clambers amid rotten
wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray when Esmond with his
melancholy eyes wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues
of Castlewood. Of this quality (which some have called, but hastily, the
essential of literature) George Eliot had not little but nothing. Her
air is bright and intellectually even exciting; but it is like the air
of a cloudless day on the parade at Brighton. She sees people clearly,
but not through an atmosphere. And she can conjure up storms in the
conscious, but not in the subconscious mind.

It is true (though the idea should not be exaggerated) that this
deficiency was largely due to her being cut off from all those
conceptions that had made the fiction of a Muse; the dee