Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/37

 be referred to the object depicted. A likeness can never be produced by a bare enumeration of the individual features of a human face; and, in the same way, the poet who can only say what a thing is, and not what its effects are, and how it reveals itself by impression on the senses, labours in vain, however great and however delicate may be his expenditure of observation. Now we can expand this fundamental axiom of the poetic art, and apply it to the poetic treatment of intellectual forces and phenomena, which must not be delineated in a disjointed and fragmentary manner, but must, on the contrary, appear before us as influences affecting mankind, and find their expression in characteristic motives. It was not to be expected, therefore, from a genius such as George Eliot, that she would present us, in her work, with a text-book of Judaism, with an exposition of her own