en verse,
occasionally grandiose but never grand, and her purple passages have the
purple of plush not of velvet. Nor is she very remarkable as an
essayist, though some of her early articles have merit, and though
_Theophrastus Such_, appearing at a time when her general hold on the
public was loosening, not commending itself in form to her special
admirers, and injured in parts by the astonishing pseudo-scientific
jargon which she had acquired, was received rather more coldly than it
deserved. But as a novelist she is worthy of careful attention. Between
1860 and 1870, a decade in which Thackeray passed away early and during
which Dickens did no first-class work, she had some claims to be
regarded as the chief English novelist who had given much and from whom
more was to be expected; after Dickens' death probably four critics out
of five would have given her the place of greatest English novelist
without hesitation. Nevertheless, even from the first there were
dissidents: while at the time of the issue of _Middlemarch_ her fame was
at the very highest, the publication of _Daniel Deronda_ made it fall
rapidly; and a considerable reaction (perhaps to be reversed, perhaps
not) has set in against her since her death.

The analysis of George Eliot's genius is indeed exceedingly curious.
There are in her two currents or characters which are more or less
mingled in all her books, but of which the one dominates in those up to
and including _Silas Marner_, while the other is chiefly noticeable in
those from _Romola_ onward. The first, the more characteristic and
infinitely the more healthy and happy, is a quite extraordinary faculty
of humorous observation and presentation of the small facts and oddities
of (especially provincial) life. The _Scenes of Clerical Life_ show this
strongly, together with a fund of untheatrical pathos which scarcely
appears in so genuine a form afterwards. In _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill on
the Floss_ it combines with a somewhat less successful vein of tragedy
to make two admirable, if not faultless, novels; it lends a wonderful
charm to the slight and simple study of _Silas Marner_. But, abundant as
it is, it would seem that this is observation, not invention, nor that
happiest blending of observation and invention which we find in
Shakespeare and Scott. The accumulated experiences of her long and
passive youth were now poured out with a fortunate result. But in
default of invention, and in presence of