Book of Snobs”:  “If fun is good, truth is better still, and love best of all.”  To read him with open mind is to feel assured that his works, taken in their entirety, reflect these humane sentiments.  It is a pity, therefore, for any reader of the best fiction, through intense appreciation of Dickens or for any other reason, to cut himself off from such an enlightening student of humanity and master of imaginative literature.

CHAPTER X

GEORGE ELIOT

George Eliot began fiction a decade later than Thackeray, but seems more than a decade nearer to us.  With her the full pulse of modern realism is felt a-throbbing.  There is no more of the ye’s and thous with which, when he would make an exordium, Thackeray addressed the world—­a fashion long since laid aside.  Eliot drew much nearer to the truth, the quiet, homely verity of her scenes is a closer approximation to life, realizes life more vitally than the most veracious page of “Vanity Fair.”  Not that the great woman novelist made the mistake of a slavish imitation of the actual:  that capital, lively scene in the early part of “The Mill on the Floss,” where Mrs. Tulliver’s connections make known to us their delightsome personalities, is not a mere transcript from life; and all the better for that.  Nevertheless, the critic can easily discover a difference between Thackeray and Eliot in this regard, and the ten years between them (as we saw in the case of Dickens and Thackeray) are partly responsible:  technique and ideal in literary art were changing fast.  George Eliot was a truer realist.  She took more seriously her aim of interpreting life, and had a higher conception of her artistic mission.  Dickens in his beautiful tribute to Thackeray on the latter’s death, speaks of the failure of the author of “Pendennis” to take his mission, his genius, seriously:  there was justice in the remark.  Yet we heard from the preface to “Pendennis” that Thackeray had the desire to depict a typical man of society with the faithful frankness of a Fielding, and since him, Thackeray states, never again used.  But the novelist’s hearers were not prepared, the time was not yet ripe, and the novelist himself lacked the courage, though he had the clear vision.  With Eliot, we reach the psychologic moment:  that deepest truth, the truth of character, exhibited in its mainsprings of impulse and thought, came with her into English fiction as it had never before appeared.  It would hardly be overstatement to say that modern psychology in the complete sense as method and interest begins in the Novel with Eliot.  For there is a radical difference, not only between the Novel which exploits plot and that which exploits character:  but also between that which sees character in terms of life and that which sees it in terms of soul.  Eliot’s fiction does the latter:  life to her means character building, and has its meaning only as an arena for spiritual struggle.  Success or failure means but this:  have I grown in my higher nature, has my existence shown on the whole an upward tendency?