Had George Eliot written nothing else than the poems which bear her name, she would have been assigned a permanent place among the poets.  Having first attained her rank in the highest order of novelists, however, her poetry suffers in comparison with her prose.  The critics tell us that no person gifted with supreme excellence in one form of creative expression has ever been able to attain high rank in another.  They forget that Goethe was great both in prose and poetry; that his Wilhelm Meister is of scarcely inferior genius to his Faust.  They also forget that Victor Hugo holds the first place among the French poets of the present century, at the same time that he is the greatest of all French novelists.  It would be well for them also to remember that Scott held high rank as a poet before he began his wonderful career as a novelist.  A contemporary of George Eliot’s, to name a single instance of another kind, was equally excellent as poet and painter.  Dante Rossetti made for himself a lasting place in both directions, and in both he did work of a high order.

In reality, the novel much resembles the narrative or epic poem; and if a work of true genius, it is difficult to distinguish it from the poem except as they differ in external form.  The novel has for its main elements those qualities of imagination, description, high-wrought purpose, which are also constituents of much of the best poetry.  The novel is more expansive than the poem, one of the chief characteristics of which is condensation; its theme may take a wider range, and it may embrace those cruder and more common features of life which are inappropriate to the poem.  The novelist can make a greater use of humor, he can give more detail to description, and portrayal of character can be carried to a much greater extent, than is usual with the poet.  The poet requires a subject more sublime, inspiring and naturally beautiful than the novelist, who seeks what is the more human, nearer the level of daily social existence, and full of the affecting even if ruder interests and passions of life.  The novel is so similar to the poem, and in so many ways requires such similar qualities of mind for its production, that there is no inherent reason why the same person cannot do equally good work in both.  The supposition is that the poet may become a novelist, or the novelist a poet, in all cases except where there is some outward disqualification.  The novelist may not have the sense of rhythmical form and of metrical expression; and the poet may not possess that constructive faculty which builds up plots, incidents and characters.  In nearly all respects but these the two forms of creative genius so nearly assimilate each other, it is to be expected a novelist may turn poet if he have a large imagination and a stimulating capacity for metrical expression.