Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/39

 this error is the statement, frequently repeated in the obituary notices of the newspapers, that George Eliot was essentially an analytic genius, and that she constructed her characters out of analytic materials. The idea immediately suggested by this curiously uncritical assertion is that the perusal of Mr. Bain's works is the best propædeutic for the creation of a character like Dolly Winthrop. It would be far more correct to say that George Eliot's genius was essentially constructive, and that her analytic comments are the results of her training and experience. Like all great moderns, George Eliot possessed the power of feeling deeply and of simultaneously intellectualising her feelings; this is the most characteristic note of the modern mind. In this regard it is interesting to notice her accuracy and completeness, which at first sight appear peculiarly scientific. Yet it is the selective accuracy of the artist, not the exhaustive exactness of the savant, that she displays. When Cabel Garth's eyebrows 'make their pathetic angle' we have this trait alone given, and not a paragraph from Mr. Darwin's Expression of the Emotions. It would perhaps be more appropriate to point to her stern adherence to the fact of human nature as answering to the accuracy and impartiality of the scientific mind. Maggie