acility. Nor was general
benignity in her at all of the poor kind that is incompatible with a
great deal of particular censure. Universal benevolence never lulled an
active critical faculty, nor did she conceive true humility as at all
consisting in hiding from an impostor that you have found him out. Like
Cardinal Newman, for whose beautiful passage at the end of the
_Apologia_ she expresses such richly deserved admiration (ii. 387), she
unites to the gift of unction and brotherly love a capacity for giving
an extremely shrewd nip to a brother whom she does not love. Her
passion for Thomas-a-Kempis did not prevent her, and there was no reason
why it should, from dealing very faithfully with a friend, for instance
(ii. 271); from describing Mr. Buckle as a conceited, ignorant man; or
castigating Brougham and other people in slashing reviews; or otherwise
from showing that great expansiveness of the affections went with a
remarkably strong, hard, masculine, positive, judging head.

The benefits that George Eliot gained from her exclusive companionship
with a man of lively talents were not without some compensating
drawbacks. The keen stimulation and incessant strain, unrelieved by
variety of daily intercourse, and never diversified by participation in
the external activities of the world, tended to bring about a loaded,
over-conscious, over-anxious state of mind, which was not only not
wholesome in itself, but was inconsistent with the full freshness and
strength of artistic work. The presence of the real world in his life
has, in all but one or two cases, been one element of the novelist's
highest success in the world of imaginative creation. George Eliot had
no greater favourite than Scott, and when a series of little books upon
English men of letters was planned, she said that she thought that
writer among us the happiest to whom it should fall to deal with Scott.
But Scott lived full in the life of his fellow-men. Even of Wordsworth,
her other favourite, though he was not a creative artist, we may say
that he daily saturated himself in those natural elements and effects,
which were the material, the suggestion, and the sustaining inspiration
of his consoling and fortifying poetry. George Eliot did not live in the
midst of her material, but aloof from it and outside of it. Heaven
forbid that this should seem to be said by way of censure. Both her
health and other considerations made all approach to busy sociability in