Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/311

Rh strove not to overdo the tragedy of human life. The pathos of Mrs. Browning is less profound, the pathos of the Misérables is less genuine, but they excite more intense emotion. Happiness and success contributed to that majestic calm which is the proper prize of intelligent immersion in Goethe.

George Eliot came back conscious of much affinity with the Germans, and impressed by their methodical energy and massive power. The lack of literary point and grace provoked her ; she yawned even over Schiller and Goethe, and the relief she derived from Heine accentuated the favourable estimate of his character in the essay on German wit. She was nowhere so well and so happy ; but she described the North as a region of unmannerly pedants, and preferred the cheerful ease and cogent hospitality of the South. International culture had disengaged her patriotism from prejudice, and she felt less for the country between the four seas than for the scenery, the character, and the dialect of the Trent valley.

The Italian journey reveals that weakness of the historic faculty which is a pervading element in her life. Her psychology was extracted from fortuitous experience, from observations made on common people in private life, under the sway of thoughtless habit and inherited stupidity, not from the heroic subjects, the large questions and proportions of history. Italy was little more to her than a vast museum, and Rome, with all the monuments and institutions which link the old world with the new, interested her less than the galleries of Florence. She surveys the grand array of tombs in St. Peter's, and remarks nothing but some peasants feeling the teeth of Canova's lion.

Travel supplied the later books with the materials which came at first from home. The Spanish Gypsy was derived from a Venetian picture. The celestial frescoes in Savonarola's home at San Marco suggested the argument of Romola. A Dresden Titian haunted her for years. It became the portrait of her latest