Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/19

 In making my estimates of George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Browning, and Newman, I have had the critical advantage, though the personal loss, of not being personally acquainted with the subjects of my essays except in one case. Of George Eliot I may say at least vidi tantum. I can still recall the feelings of ardent reverence with which I approached the Priory, North Bank, one Sunday afternoon in 1877. I had written an enthusiastic—I fear I must add gushing—defence of Daniel Deronda, from a Jewish point of view, in the June number of Macmillan's Magazine of that year, and George Henry Lewes had expressed a wish that I should call upon them. I went with all the feelings of the neophyte at the shrine for the first time. Need I say that I was disappointed? Authors give of their best in their works under the consciousness of addressing the whole world. We ought not to expect them to live up to that best at all times and before all onlookers: but we do.

I have few Boswellisms to offer. I remember being struck even at that early stage of my social discernment by the contrast between the boisterous Bohemian bonhomie of George Lewes and the almost old-maidenish refinement of his life's companion. I had tried to lead her talk to my own criticism, but was met by the quiet parry, 'I never read criticisms of my own works.' I could not help thinking at