lways the best one for the poet or the novelist. Scott was no
realist, and yet George Eliot has not been more accurate than he. Indeed,
he is far more truly accurate in so far as he paints the soul as well as
the body of life. The sad endings of her novels grew out of a false theory,
and from her inability to see anything of spiritual reality beyond the
little round of man's earthly destiny. She did not accept the doctrine that
art is to be cultivated only for art's sake, for art was always to her the
vehicle of moral or philosophic teaching. The limitations of her art
largely lay in the direction of her agnosticism. Scott and George Sand gain
for their work a great power and effect by their acceptance of the
spiritual as real. There is a light, a subtle aroma, a width of vision, a
sense of reality, in their work from this source, which is wanting in
George Eliot's. The illimitable mystery beyond the region of the real is
the greatest fact man has presented to him, and that region is a reality in
all the effects it works on humanity. No poet can ignore it or try to limit
it to humanity without a loss to his work. It is this subtle, penetrative,
aromatic and mystic power of the ideal which is most to be felt as lacking
in the works of George Eliot. Much as we may praise her, we can but feel
this limitation. Great as is our admiration, we can but feel that there is
a higher range of poetic and artistic creation than any she reached.

The quotations presented from her early writings prove that George Eliot
began her career as a novelist with a fully elaborated conception of the
purposes of the novel and of the methods to be followed in its production.
She had thoroughly studied the subject, had read many of the best works of
the best writers, and had formed a carefully digested theory of the novel.
That she could do this is rather an indication of critical than of creative
power. Her novels everywhere betray the greatness of her reasoning powers,
that she was a thinker, that she had strong powers of intellectual
analysis, and that she had a logical, accurate mind. Had her mind taken no
other direction than this, however, she never could have become a great
novelist. These essays indicated something beside powers of reasoning and
psychological analysis. They also indicated her capacity for imaginative
insight into the motives and impulses of human nature, and an intuitive
comprehension of what is most natural to human thought