a classification as this, it is no
wonder, considering the strong re-action of language on thought, that
many minds, dizzy with indigestion of recent science and philosophy,
are fain to seek for the grounds of social duty; and without
entertaining any private intention of committing a perjury which would
ruin an innocent man, or seeking gain by supplying bad preserved meats
to our navy, feel themselves speculatively obliged to inquire why they
should not do so, and are inclined to measure their intellectual
subtlety by their dissatisfaction with all answers to this "Why?"

It would be quite impossible for George Eliot to write an essay without
some fresh thought or some new suggestion. To those who admire her genius
and are in sympathy with her teachings this volume will have a special
interest. Its few essays which touch upon moral or speculative subjects are
of the utmost value as interpretations of her life and thought.

All her essays, the later as the earlier, are mainly of interest as aids to
an understanding of her philosophy. Nothing is worthless which helps us
clearly to comprehend an original mind.

XIX.

THE ANALYTIC METHOD.

George Eliot's literary method was that of Fielding and Thackeray, both of
whom evidently influenced her manner. Their realism, and especially their
method of comment and moral observation, she made her own. She had little
sympathy with the romanticism of Scott or the idealism of Dickens. Her
moral aims, her intense faith in altruism, kept her from making her art a
mere process of photographing nature. Nature always had a moral meaning to
her, a meaning in reference to man's happiness and health of soul; and that
moral bearing of all human experiences gave dignity and purpose to her art.

It was the method of Scott to present the romantic, picturesque and poetic
side of life. He was not untrue to nature, but he cared more for beauty and
sentiment than for fact. He sometimes perverted the historic incidents he
made use of, but he caught the spirit of the time with which he was dealing
with absolute fidelity. In this capacity for historic interpretation he
surpassed George Eliot, who had not his instinctive insight into the past.
Scott had no theory about the past, no philosophy of history was known to
him; but above all novelists he had the power to see by the light of other
days, and to make the dead times live again. Not George Eliot and not