e. What claims the attention of all thinking men cannot long
be kept out of poetry and art. In painting and in music it has been
largely developed in the direction of a more intimate and sympathetic
interpretation of nature and man. In literature the new method has been
mainly brought into application hitherto in the form of photographic
studies of human life. To describe what is, to make a true word-picture,
has been the chief aim. With George Eliot began a wider use of the new
method and its application in a more sympathetic spirit to the deeper
problems of the mind and heart. She was not content to paint the surface of
nature, to give photographic sketches of the outside of human life, but she
wished to realize every subtle fact and every most secret impulse. An
admirer of the Dutch school in painting, and of Jane Austen as a novelist,
she was not content with their results and methods, wishing to interpret
the spirit as well as the letter of nature and life.

In literature, the new method as developed in recent years consists in an
application of psychology to all the problems of man's nature. George
Eliot's intimate association with the leaders of the scientific movement in
England, naturally turned her mind into sympathy with their work, and made
her desirous of doing in literature what they were doing in science. In the
special department of physiological psychology, no one did more than George
Henry Lewes, and her whole heart went out in genuine appreciation of his
work. He studied the mind as a function of the brain, as being developed
with the body, as the result of inherited conditions, as intimately
dependent on its environment. Here was a new conception of man, which
regarded him as the last product of nature, considered as an organic whole.
This conception George Eliot everywhere applied in her studies of life and
character. She studied man as the product of his environment, not as a
being who exists above circumstances and material conditions. "In the eyes
of the psychologist," says Mr. James Sully, "the works of George Eliot must
always possess a high value by reason of their large scientific insight
into character and life." This value consists, as he indicates, in the fact
that she interprets the inner personality as it is understood by the
scientific student of human nature. She describes those obscure moral
tendencies, nascent forces, and undertones of feeling and thought, which
enter so much into life