Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/63

 ring them to their father's name, we cannot deduce the figure of Timothy's Bess's Ben in the same novel. Observation is, indeed, needed for the novel, but some kinds of observation are destructive of all individualising. Tell a painter to observe his hand as he paints and the result will be disastrous. Similarly, if a writer consciously notices the processes which make up his creations, they are doomed as artistic presentations. Observation must have become unconscious and ingrained in the artist's mind before it can aid in giving the realistic details of the novel.

And further, the novelist requires something more than keen observation of the workings of human nature; this is useless without the power and the love of story-telling. Nothing in these essays, nothing in the impression George Eliot made on her friends, indicated her possession of the faculty that builds up incident and character into a story. To the last she was somewhat deficient in this, as is shown by the fact that she displays none of the worker's joy in her own production. To tell a story requires that one should have lived a story. And it was probably the exceptional nature of her relations with George Henry Lewes, which commenced in 1854, that brought about the change in George Eliot which we have been attempting