Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/99

 that depends very much on the exact meaning to be attached to the term 'portrait.' This excessive sensibility is seen at its maximum intensity in connection with the imposture attempted by Mr. Liggins of Nuneaton. One would have thought that a woman possessed of such powers of humour would have been more impressed by the ridiculous than by the serious aspect of the incident. But George Eliot returns again and again to the subject in a tone of sincere annoyance.

And finally, the predominance of the philosophic over the artistic spirit in George Eliot has tended to make these volumes, containing the record of her private life, rather dull and—dare we say it?—commonplace. She was a great woman, but this is not a great book. Like all thinkers, she tended to weave a web of theory between herself and life, and seemed to reserve all her humour and liveliness for her books. It is possible that Mr. Cross has created this impression by an ill-judged excision of anything that does not display his wife on the stilts of philosophy and ethics. But as he claims vivacity as one of her prominent qualities, it is more likely that it did not display itself in her letter-writing. And the tendency to abstract theorising has removed from these volumes almost all personal traits of the many distinguished men and