nto that class of novels which describe life's blotches, burrs
and pimples, and calls it "the most striking instance extant of this study
of cutaneous disease." He says the personages are picked up from behind
the counter and out of the gutter, and he finds "there is not a single
person in the book of the smallest importance to anybody in the world but
themselves, or whose qualities deserved so much as a line of printer's
type in their description." To the same effect is Swinburne's criticism
of Maggie's relations to Stephen Guest. He calls it "the hideous
transformation by which Maggie is debased." He says that most of George
Eliot's admirers would regard this as "the highest and the purest and the
fullest example of her magnificent and matchless powers. The first two
thirds of the book suffice to compose perhaps the very noblest of tragic as
well as of humorous prose idyls in the language; comprising one of the
sweetest as well as saddest and tenderest, as well as subtlest examples of
dramatic analysis--a study in that kind as soft and true as Rousseau's, as
keen and true as Browning's, as full as either's of the fine and bitter
sweetness of a pungent and fiery fidelity. But who can forget the horror of
inward collapse, the sickness of spiritual re-action, the reluctant,
incredulous rage of disenchantment and disgust, with which he came upon the
thrice-unhappy third part? The two first volumes have all the intensity and
all the perfection of George Sand's best work, tempered by all the simple
purity and interfused with all the stainless pathos of Mrs. Gaskell's; they
carry such affluent weight of thought, and shine with such warm radiance of
humor, as invigorates and illuminates the work of no other famous woman;
they have the fiery clarity of crystal or of lightning; they go near to
prove a higher claim and attest a clearer right on the part of their author
than that of George Sand herself to the crowning crown of praise conferred
on her by the hand of a woman ever greater and more glorious than either in
her sovereign gift of lyric genius, to the salutation given as by an angel
indeed from heaven, of 'large-brained woman and large-hearted man.'" In the
momentary lapse of Maggie, Swinburne finds a fatal defect, which no
subsequent repentance atones for. He says that "here is the patent flaw,
here too plainly is the flagrant blemish, which defaces and degrades the
very crown and flower of George Eliot's wonderful and most