fiction.

George Eliot at this period looked perilously like a Blue
Stocking. The range and variety of her reading and the severely
intellectual nature of her pursuits justify the assertion. Was
this well for the novelist?

The reply might be a paradox: yes and no. This learning imparted
to Eliot's works a breadth of vision that is tonic and wins the
respect of the judicious. It helps her to escape from that bane
of the woman novelist--excessive sentiment without intellectual
orientation. But, on the other hand, there are times when she
appears to be writing a polemic, not a novel: when the tone
becomes didactic, the movement heavy--when the work seems
self-conscious and over-intellectualized. Nor can it be denied
that this tendency grew on Eliot, to the injury of her latest work.
There is a simple kind of exhortation in the "Clerical Scenes,"
but it disappears in the earliest novels, only to reappear in
stories like "Daniel Deronda." Any and all culture that comes to
a large, original nature (and such was Eliot's) should be for
the good of the literary product: learning in the narrower, more
technical sense, is perhaps likely to do harm. Here and there
there is a reminder of the critic-reviewer in her fiction.

George Eliot's intellectual development during her last years
widened her work and strengthened her comprehensive grasp of
life. She gained in interpretation thereby. There will, however,
always be those who hold that it would have been better for her
reputation had she written nothing after "Middlemarch," or even
after "Felix Holt." Those who object on principle to her
agnosticism, would also add that the negative nature of her
philosophy, her lack of what is called definite religious
convictions, had its share in injuring materially her maturest
fiction. The vitality or charm of a novel, however, is not
necessarily impaired because the author holds such views. It is
more pertinent to take the books as they are, in chronologic
order, to point out so far as possible their particular merits.

And first, the "Scenes from Clerical Life." It is interesting to
the student of this novelist that her writing of fiction was
suggested to her by Lewes, and that she tried her hand at a tale
when she was not far from forty years old. The question will
intrude: would a genuine fiction-maker need to be thus prodded
by a friend, and refrain from any independent attempt up to a
period so late? Yet it will not do to answer