conscientious. I knew her well, I was amongst those who had
the deepest regard for her mental power and her moral insight. I
always recognised her as one of the best and most cultured minds of her
time. I had great faith in her judgment, and could respect her courage
even when I repudiated her opinions. But I never was one of those who
exaggerated her gifts as an artist. I never could count anything later
than _Silas Marner_ as a complete and unqualified masterpiece. One may
have the imaginative power shown by Michael Angelo in his Sistine
Chapel, or his Medicean tombs, and yet, if one is not complete master
of the brush and the chisel, no imagination, no thought, will produce a
masterpiece in fresco or in marble. George Eliot was a most thoughtful
artist, but she was more of a thinker than an artist; she was always
more the artist when she was least the thinker; and when she conceived
a work of art in her sublimest aspirations (as notably in _The Spanish
Gypsy_), she almost makes us doubt if she were an artist at all.

She was an artist; and the younger generations will make an
unpardonable error if they fail to do justice to the permanent survival
of her best and earliest work. They will also be guilty of
unpardonable blindness if they fail to note how completely she stands
above all her contemporary rivals in romance, by thought, by knowledge,
by nobility of aim. She raised the whole art of romance into a higher
plane of thought, of culture, and of philosophic grasp. And when she
failed, it was often by reason of the nobility of her aim itself, of
the volume of her own learning, of the intensity of her own standard of
perfection. Her passages in prose are studied with the care that men
usually bestow on a sonnet; her accessories and landscapes are patient
and conscientious transcripts of actual spots of country and town; her
drama is a problem of ethical teaching, subtly elaborated, and minutely
probed. In these high aims and difficult ambitions, she not seldom
failed, or achieved a somewhat academic and qualified success. But the
task was not seldom such that even to have fallen short of complete
success was a far from ignoble triumph.

She raised the whole art of romance to a higher plane, I say; and,
although in this ambitious aim she too often sacrificed freshness,
ease, and simplicity, the weight of the limits she imposed on herself
must fairly be counted in the balance. Romance had never before i