(as we
saw in the case of Dickens and Thackeray) are partly
responsible: technique and ideal in literary art were changing
fast. George Eliot was a truer realist. She took more seriously
her aim of interpreting life, and had a higher conception of her
artistic mission. Dickens in his beautiful tribute to Thackeray
on the latter's death, speaks of the failure of the author of
"Pendennis" to take his mission, his genius, seriously: there
was justice in the remark. Yet we heard from the preface to
"Pendennis" that Thackeray had the desire to depict a typical
man of society with the faithful frankness of a Fielding, and
since him, Thackeray states, never again used. But the
novelist's hearers were not prepared, the time was not yet ripe,
and the novelist himself lacked the courage, though he had the
clear vision. With Eliot, we reach the psychologic moment: that
deepest truth, the truth of character, exhibited in its
mainsprings of impulse and thought, came with her into English
fiction as it had never before appeared. It would hardly be
overstatement to say that modern psychology in the complete
sense as method and interest begins in the Novel with Eliot. For
there is a radical difference, not only between the Novel which
exploits plot and that which exploits character: but also
between that which sees character in terms of life and that
which sees it in terms of soul. Eliot's fiction does the latter:
life to her means character building, and has its meaning only
as an arena for spiritual struggle. Success or failure means but
this: have I grown in my higher nature, has my existence shown
on the whole an upward tendency?

If so, well and good. If not, whatever of place or power may be
mine, I am among the world's failures, having missed the goal.
This view, steadily to be encountered in all her fiction, gives
it the grave quality, the deep undertone and, be it confessed,
at times the almost Methodistic manner, which mark this woman's
worth in its weakness and its notable strength. In her early
days, long before she made fiction, she was morbidly religious;
she became in the fulness of time one of the intellectually
emancipated. Yet, emotionally, spiritually, she remained to the
end an intensely religious person. Conduct, aspiration,
communion of souls, these were to her always the realities. If
Thackeray's motto was Be good, and Dickens', Do good, Eliot's
might be expressed as: Make me good! Consider for a moment and