The reply might be a paradox:  yes and no.  This learning imparted to Eliot’s works a breadth of vision that is tonic and wins the respect of the judicious.  It helps her to escape from that bane of the woman novelist—­excessive sentiment without intellectual orientation.  But, on the other hand, there are times when she appears to be writing a polemic, not a novel:  when the tone becomes didactic, the movement heavy—­when the work seems self-conscious and over-intellectualized.  Nor can it be denied that this tendency grew on Eliot, to the injury of her latest work.  There is a simple kind of exhortation in the “Clerical Scenes,” but it disappears in the earliest novels, only to reappear in stories like “Daniel Deronda.”  Any and all culture that comes to a large, original nature (and such was Eliot’s) should be for the good of the literary product:  learning in the narrower, more technical sense, is perhaps likely to do harm.  Here and there there is a reminder of the critic-reviewer in her fiction.

George Eliot’s intellectual development during her last years widened her work and strengthened her comprehensive grasp of life.  She gained in interpretation thereby.  There will, however, always be those who hold that it would have been better for her reputation had she written nothing after “Middlemarch,” or even after “Felix Holt.”  Those who object on principle to her agnosticism, would also add that the negative nature of her philosophy, her lack of what is called definite religious convictions, had its share in injuring materially her maturest fiction.  The vitality or charm of a novel, however, is not necessarily impaired because the author holds such views.  It is more pertinent to take the books as they are, in chronologic order, to point out so far as possible their particular merits.

And first, the “Scenes from Clerical Life.”  It is interesting to the student of this novelist that her writing of fiction was suggested to her by Lewes, and that she tried her hand at a tale when she was not far from forty years old.  The question will intrude:  would a genuine fiction-maker need to be thus prodded by a friend, and refrain from any independent attempt up to a period so late?  Yet it will not do to answer glibly in the negative.  Too many examples of late beginning and fine fiction as a consequence are furnished by English literature to make denial safe.  We have seen Defoe and Richardson and a number of later novelists breaking the rules—­if any such exist.  No one can now read the “Clerical Scenes” without discovering in them qualities of head and heart which, when allowed an enlarged canvas and backed by a sure technique, could be counted on to make worthy fiction.  The quiet village life glows softly under the sympathetic touch of a true painter.