the scientific or
pseudo-scientific spirit which was partly natural to her and partly
imbibed from those who surrounded her, she began, after _Silas Marner_,
to draw always in part and sometimes mainly upon quite different
storehouses. It is probable that the selection of the Italian
Renaissance subject of _Romola_ was a very disastrous one. She herself
said that she "was a young woman when she began the book and an old one
when she finished it." It is a very remarkable _tour de force_, but it
is a _tour de force_ executed entirely against the grain. It is not
alive: it is a work of erudition not of genius, of painful manufacture
not of joyous creation or even observation. And this note of labour
deepened and became more obvious even when she returned to modern and
English subjects, by reason of the increased "purpose" which marked her
later works. It has been noted by all critics of any perception as
extremely piquant, though not to careful students of life and letters at
all surprising, that George Eliot, whose history was always well known,
is in almost every one of her books the advocate of the strictest union
of love and marriage--no love without marriage and no marriage without
love. But she was not satisfied with defending this thesis, beneficial,
comparatively simple, and, in the situations which it suggests, not
unfriendly to art. In her last book, _Daniel Deronda_, she embarked on a
scheme, equally hopeless and gratuitous, of endeavouring to enlist the
public sympathies in certain visions of neo-Judaism. In all these books
indeed, even in _Deronda_, the old faculty of racy presentation of the
humours of life recurred. But it became fainter and less frequent; and
it was latterly obscured, as has been hinted, by a most portentous
jargon borrowed from the not very admirable lingo of the philosophers
and men of science of the last half of the nineteenth century. All these
things together made the later books conspicuously, what even the
earlier had been to some extent, lifeless structures. They were
constructed no doubt with much art and of material not seldom precious,
but they were not lively growths, and they were fatally tinged with
evanescent "forms in chalk," fancies of the day and hour, not less
ephemeral for being grave in subject and seeming, and almost more jejune
or even disgusting to posterity on that account.

Almost as much of the time, though curiously different in the aspect of
it which he represe