purpose and erudition into art is indeed a perilous
undertaking, wherein but one or two of the greatest have wholly
succeeded. The problem with George Eliot is to judge how far she has
succeeded in the all but impossible task. That her success is far from
complete is but too obvious. That she has had many incidental
successes is also obvious. Her work is not sufficiently spontaneous,
not easy or simple, not buoyant enough. But it has great nobility,
rare distinction. It may not live as perfect art; but it should not
perish as ambitious failures perish.

If George Eliot were not a writer of romance, she was nothing at all in
the front ranks of Victorian literature. With all her powers of mind,
her mastery of language, her immense stores of knowledge and supreme
culture, she gave to the world nothing of great mark, acknowledged and
known as hers, except her famous romances; for, as we shall presently
see, we cannot count any of the poems as of great mark. But, as a
writer of romance, George Eliot differs essentially and for the worse
from all the other great writers of romance in her own or preceding
generations. Most certainly she was not a born romancer; she had no
spontaneous gift of telling stories, no irrepressible genius that way.
Now all the great romancers have been born to it, as Robinson Crusoe
was born to the sea, or as Turner was born to paint. Though Scott
published novels late, he had begun _Waverley_ at thirty-four; his
earlier works are romantic ballads and metrical romances; and from
boyhood, at home and abroad, he was ever filled with some tale of
adventure and character. Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth "lisped" in
novelettes, as Pope said he "lisped in numbers." Though Charlotte
Bronte published so little, she wrote stories incessantly from
childhood. Lytton, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, invented tales as
part of their daily lives, and from the earliest age. But George Eliot
was thirty-nine when her first tales were published, and she was forty
before she was known to the public as a novelist at all. And so little
was novel-writing her natural gift, that her most intimate friends
never suspected her power, nor did she herself altogether enjoy the
exercise of her art. To the last her periods of mental gestation were
long, painful, and unhopeful. Parturition was a dangerous crisis, and
the long-expected infant was reared with misgivings and a superfluity
of coddling. The romances of Geo