Since I began to read and know, I have always longed for some ideal task, in which I might feel myself the heart and brain of a multitude—­some social captainship, which would come to me as a duty, and not to be striven for as a personal prize.

In her strong tendency to psychologic analysis George Eliot much resembles Robert Browning.  It is the life of passion and ideas which both alike delight to describe.  They greatly differ, however, in their methods of dissecting the inner life.  Browning lays bare the soul in some startling experience, George Eliot by the slow development of the mind through all the stages of growth.  He is impersonal, but she is always present to make comments and to expound the causes of growth.  Yet her characters are as clear-cut, as individual, as his.  His analysis is the more rapid, subtle and complete in immediate expression; hers is the more penetrating, vigorous and interesting.  His lightning flash sees the soul through and through in the present moment; her calmer and intenser gaze penetrates the long succession of hidden causes by which the soul is shaped to its earthly destiny.

Any account of George Eliot which dwells only on her humor and sarcasm, her realism and her powers of analysis, does her grave injustice.  She has also in rare degree the power of artistic constructiveness, a strong and brilliant imagination and genius of almost the highest range.  She can create character as well as analyze it, and with that brilliant command of resources which indicates a high order of genius.  She had culture almost equal to Goethe’s, and quite equal to Mrs. Browning’s; and she had that wide sympathy with life which was his, with an equal capacity for their expression in an artistic reconstruction of human experience.  While Mr. R. H. Hutton is justified in saying that “few minds at once so speculative and so creative have ever put their mark on literature,” yet the critic needs to beware lest he give the speculative tendency in her mind a place too prominent compared with that assigned to her creative genius.  The poet and the novelist are so seldom speculative, so seldom put into their creations the constant burden of great thoughts, that when one appears who does this, it is likely to be dwelt upon too largely by the critics.  George Eliot speculates about life and its experiences, and it is evident she had a philosophy of life at her command; but it is quite as true that she soars on pinions free into the heavens of genius, and brings back the song which no other has sung, and which is a true song.  She has created characters, she has described the histories of souls, in a manner which will cause some of her books to endure for all time.  If she has allied her genius to current culture and speculation, it has in that way been given continuity of purpose and definiteness of aim.  The genius is there and cannot be hidden or obscured; and those who love what is great and noble will be profoundly