Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/310

298 attitude towards the Jews, which gradually prepared her last novel, began at this time, and she must have heard Humboldt's saying that Judaism is more easily reconcilable with science than other religions. The Hamburgische Briefe lay open before her at the table d'hôte ; she pronounces the Laokoon the most un-German of German books, and notices nothing between Berlin and Cologne but "the immortal old town of Wolfenbüttel." If Lessing was the favourite, Goethe was the master. Life at Weimar, with the sublime tradition, closed for George Eliot the season of storm and strain. Although she never practised art for its own sake, or submitted to the canon that poetry is aimless song, Goethe's gospel of inviolate serenity was soothing to a spirit disabled by excess of sensibility, and taught her to be less passionately affected either by sympathy or sorrow. The contrast is great between the agonising tones of the earlier life and the self-restraint and composure that succeeded. The conversion was not immediate. A scene is recorded at Berlin which recalls the time when Miss Evans was too clever to succeed at Coventry, and the crude smartness of the Westminster articles (toned in the reprint), the resentment and even misery caused by the impostor Liggins, were below the dignity of so noble a mind. But the change in the later years is unmistakable. Even the genial warmth of affection for persons was tempered by an impartial estimate of their characters and a disinterested neutrality towards their undertakings. A system that denies the hopes and memories which make pain and sadness shrink cannot be rich in consolation ; yet she