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170 The reader cannot fail to see what a difference there is between a scheme of this kind, and that pursued in the early novels. In this later method the story must partake largely of allegory, and will consequently infallibly lose value as a picture of life. The Spanish Gypsy is a metaphysical and ethnological problem in action. In all the later novels the plan is more or less founded on theory. The hero in 'Felix Holt,' Dorothea and Casaubon and Lydgate, Deronda and Mordecai, are so many problems dramatised, and the characters express themselves less, and are described and discussed more, even voluminously.

Nevertheless a common spirit animates all her books, though it does not continue to manifest itself in the same form. At the root of George Eliot's genius lay an extraordinarily deep and ever-present sense of the significance of human existence. Her relations with the world in which she found herself, both with its past and its present, pressed so incessantly and so forcibly on the springs of interest and curiosity, that there seems to have been hardly a moment when she was not observing, speculating, or analysing, and recording the results. The world within and the world without never ceased to be, for her, wonder-lands. Other famous writers, notably Carlyle, have made the significance of life their theme. But by him it was treated in a sardonic spirit, as if mocking at the pettiness and failure of most of the actors who have figured in a drama so momentous. In her case, sympathy with the actors was not less intense than wonder at the drama. It is difficult to say what there is in life, not obviously vile or futile, which did not keenly interest her, and she was thus led into a range of inquiry far beyond that of the ordinary learned woman. It appears to us that her interest in the race was deeper than in the individual; that she was more strongly attracted by varieties of life in the abstract than by persons – unless, indeed, by such as, embodying some epoch or crisis of thought or of action, conveniently presented to her a problem in the concrete. Art in all its modes of representing nature – philosophy in all its investigations of the internal and external worlds – were the familiar fields of her mental exercises. All this, however, would merely have made her a marvel of information but for the development of the constructive faculty – the power, so suddenly evinced that it may be said to have surprised herself, of arranging her stores and forming with them mental pictures. Happily for the manifestation of her genius, to all this was added an extraordinary aptitude of expression. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of her literary faculty is her power of seeing and stating brief problems of life, and so conveying in a sentence the result of a process of observation and thought. In her earlier works these were eminently happy, and so plain in their pithiness as to contribute greatly to her popularity. But in her later period her style lost much of this lightness; the presentation of the idea (possibly in itself less weighty and less clear) was so laden with accumulations in the effort after completeness and fulness, that the mind, no longer taking it in pleasantly and at once, had to deal with it like a proposition of Euclid. The habit, too, of using phrases and illustrations borrowed from science grew on her, and did not always