Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/67

 But for the precious salt of his humour, which compels him to reproduce external traits that serve, in some degree, as a corrective to his frequently false psychology, his preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic boatmen and courtesans, would be as noxious as Eugene Sue's idealised proletaires in encouraging the miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and want; or that the working classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial state of altruism, wherein every one is caring for every one else, and no one for himself.'

The frequent reference to psychology in this passage is significant, and indicates the dangerous tendency in George Eliot's own art which led to the psychological strain in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, and finally resulted in the psychological scarecrows of Theophrastus Such. To the novelist 'the curtain is the picture,' and if he turns to the psychologist to analyse the painting, only the canvas and frame remain intact. There is too great a tendency for the psychological novelist to regard his characters as so many corpora vilia for his scientific theories. Luckily for George Eliot her interests were ethical rather than psychological, and if she ever does violence to