e sketched. Where George Eliot best succeeded they would have
failed. Her real advance upon Dickens and Thackeray, however, lay in
another direction. She says in the essay just quoted, speaking of Diekens's
portraitures of town populations, that "if he could give us their
psychological character--their conception of life and their emotions--with
the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest
contribution art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies."
In the two directions here indicated lay her superiority over other
novelists,--her humanitarian sympathies and her psychologic insight. In
reality, she did not contribute anything new to the realism of literary
art. All which can be said for faithfulness to nature in art and poetry has
been said by Ruskin, and George Eliot was early a reader of his books. Her
predecessors, especially Thackeray, opened the way in the application of
the realistic principles in its newer spirit. The enlargement of realism,
however, was carried on to a much greater extent by the pre-Raphaelites in
painting and poetry, and George Eliot was influenced by them as well. Their
principle of loyal fidelity to the time and circumstances depicted was her
own, at least in theory.

It was in another direction her chief characteristic lay, that of
describing "psychologic character." Here she was no imitator, but she made
a way of her own, and developed a new method. The method of science she
applied to literature. Science has adopted the method of analysis, of
inductive inquiry, of search in all the facts of nature for the laws which
underlie them. So magnificent have been the results obtained by this
process in the study of the material world, that it has been applied with
the hope of securing the same thorough investigation of the phenomena
presented by history, ethics and religion. Even here the method has
justified itself, and has in recent years opened up new and valuable
results, giving to the world an enriched conception of the life of man.
The speculative mind has been stimulated to fresh activity, and new
philosophies, of vast and imposing proportions, have been the result. The
studies of Charles Darwin, and the elaboration of the theory of evolution,
have given a marvellous incentive to the new method, resulting in its
wide-spread application to all the questions of nature and life.

A method so productive in all directions must have its effect on
literatur