itions seem to escape this way and that in
the attempt to locate it as an idea. But every one will understand me if
I call it George Eliot.

I begin with this great woman of letters for both the two reasons
already mentioned. She represents the rationalism of the old Victorian
Age at its highest. She and Mill are like two great mountains at the end
of that long, hard chain which is the watershed of the Early Victorian
time. They alone rise high enough to be confused among the clouds--or
perhaps confused among the stars. They certainly were seeking truth, as
Newman and Carlyle were; the slow slope of the later Victorian vulgarity
does not lower their precipice and pinnacle. But I begin with this name
also because it emphasises the idea of modern fiction as a fresh and
largely a female thing. The novel of the nineteenth century was female;
as fully as the novel of the eighteenth century was male. It is quite
certain that no woman could have written _Roderick Random_. It is not
quite so certain that no woman could have written _Esmond_. The strength
and subtlety of woman had certainly sunk deep into English letters when
George Eliot began to write.

Her originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power
in fiction as well or better than she. Charlotte Bronte, understood
along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The
latter comes into our present consideration only as that most
exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an
unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the
complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all
the after women went about looking for their brains. She could describe
a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Bronte could do.
She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what
she did not know--like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished
world before the great progressive age of which I write.

One of the characteristics of the central Victorian spirit was a
tendency to substitute a certain more or less satisfied seriousness for
the extremes of tragedy and comedy. This is marked by a certain change
in George Eliot; as it is marked by a certain limitation or moderation
in Dickens. Dickens was the People, as it was in the eighteenth century
and still largely is, in spite of all the talk for and against Board
School Education: comic, tragic, realistic, free-spoken, far l