Times were not wanting when the sun strove to shine through the gloom, when the resistance to melancholy was not wholly a failure, and when, as she says, she felt that Dante was right in condemning to the Stygian marsh those who had been sad under the blessed sunlight.  ’Sad were we in the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, bearing sluggish smoke in our hearts; now lie we sadly here in the black ooze.’  But still for the most part sad she remained in the sweet air, and the look of pain that haunted her eyes and brow even in her most genial and animated moments, only told too truly the story of her inner life.

That from this central gloom a shadow should spread to her work was unavoidable.  It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with Dante, with Pascal.  A novelist—­for as a poet, after trying hard to think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable—­as a novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their severity of form.  But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut melancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain.  Living in a time when humanity has been raised, whether formally or informally, into a religion, she draws a painted curtain of pity before the tragic scene.  Still the attentive ear catches from time to time the accents of an unrelenting voice, that proves her kindred with those three mighty spirits and stern monitors of men.  In George Eliot, a reader with a conscience may be reminded of the saying that when a man opens Tacitus he puts himself in the confessional.  She was no vague dreamer over the folly and the weakness of men, and the cruelty and blindness of destiny.  Hers is not the dejection of the poet who ’could lie down like a tired child, And weep away this life of care,’ as Shelley at Naples; nor is it the despairing misery that moved Cowper in the awful verses of the Castaway.  It was not such self-pity as wrung from Burns the cry to life, ’Thou art a galling load, Along a rough, a weary road, To wretches such as I;’ nor such general sense of the woes of the race as made Keats think of the world as a place where men sit and hear each other groan, ‘Where but to think is to be full of sorrow, And leaden-eyed despairs.’  She was as far removed from the plangent reverie of Rousseau as from the savage truculence of Swift.  Intellectual training had given her the spirit of order and proportion, of definiteness and measure, and this marks her alike from the great sentimentalists and the sweeping satirists.  ‘Pity and fairness,’ as she beautifully says (iii. 317), ’are two little words which, carried out, would embrace the utmost delicacies of the moral life.’  But hers is not seldom the severe fairness of the judge, and the pity that may go with putting on the black cap after a conviction for high treason.  In the midst of many an easy flowing page, the reader is surprised by some bitter aside, some judgment of intense and concentrated irony with the flash of a blade in it, some biting sentence where lurks the stern disdain and the anger of Tacitus, and Dante, and Pascal.  Souls like these are not born for happiness.