Her novels, like much of the poetry of the same period, are eclectic in spirit, combining with the naturalistic methods those of the historic, socialistic, culture and speculative schools.  Art and culture for their own sake combined in her novels with the purpose to use history and social life obedient to a distinct conception of their meanings.  To describe life accurately there must be a clear conception of what life means.  Genius never works aimlessly; and in seeing life as it is, always sees that it has a tendency and direction.  A mind so thoughtful as George Eliot’s, with so strong a love of speculative interest in it, was likely to give to novel-writing done by her a large philosophic element.  Yet her philosophy is nearly always subject to her imagination and to her naturalism.  Her love of nature, her intimate interest in life and its elemental problems, her passionate sympathy with all human passions and experiences, saves her from becoming a mere doctrinaire, and gives to her speculations a pathetic, living interest.  The poetic elements of her novels are so many as to subordinate the philosophic to the true purposes of art.

In one direction George Eliot departed from the methods of her predecessors, and to so great an extent as to be herself the originator of a new school of fiction.  She followed the bent of her time for analysis and psychologic interpretation.  It is here more than anywhere else she differs from Charlotte Bronte and George Sand.  These two great novelists create character by direct representation, by making their persons live and act.  George Eliot shows her characters to the reader by analyzing their motives and by giving the history of their development.  The disadvantages of the analytic method are apparent when George Eliot is compared with Scott.  Unique, personal and human are his creations, instinct with all human emotions, and profoundly real.  It is only the poetic side of life which he sees, not its philosophic.  George Eliot wanted to know the meanings of things, and this very desire brings a largeness into her books which is not found in Scott’s.  She was much the more thoughtful of the two, the one who tried to realize to the intellect what life means.  Yet her method of doing this is not always the best one for the poet or the novelist.  Scott was no realist, and yet George Eliot has not been more accurate than he.  Indeed, he is far more truly accurate in so far as he paints the soul as well as the body of life.  The sad endings of her novels grew out of a false theory, and from her inability to see anything of spiritual reality beyond the little round of man’s earthly destiny.  She did not accept the doctrine that art is to be cultivated only for art’s sake, for art was always to her the vehicle of moral or philosophic teaching.  The limitations of her art largely lay in the direction of her agnosticism.  Scott and George Sand gain for their work a great power and effect by their acceptance of the spiritual