The influence of her reserved fashion of daily life was heightened by the literary exclusiveness which of set purpose she imposed upon herself.  ‘The less an author hears about himself,’ she says, in one place, ‘the better.’  ’It is my rule, very strictly observed, not to read the criticisms on my writings.  For years I have found this abstinence necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as an artist, which ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends to produce in us.’  George Eliot pushed this repugnance to criticism beyond the personal reaction of it upon the artist, and more than disparaged its utility, even in the most competent and highly trained hands.  She finds that the diseased spot in the literary culture of our time is touched with the finest point by the saying of La Bruyere, that ’the pleasure of criticism robs us of the pleasure of being keenly moved by very fine things’ (iii. 327).  ‘It seems to me,’ she writes (ii. 412), ’much better to read a man’s own writings than to read what others say about him, especially when the man is first-rate and the others third-rate.  As Goethe said long ago about Spinoza, “I always preferred to learn from the man himself what he thought, rather than to hear from some one else what he ought to have thought."’ As if the scholar will not always be glad to do both, to study his author and not to refuse the help of the rightly prepared commentator; as if even Goethe himself would not have been all the better acquainted with Spinoza if he could have read Mr. Pollock’s book upon him.  But on this question Mr. Arnold has fought a brilliant battle, and to him George Eliot’s heresies may well be left.

On the personal point whether an author should ever hear of himself, George Eliot oddly enough contradicts herself in a casual remark upon Bulwer.  ‘I have a great respect,’ she says, ’for the energetic industry which has made the most of his powers.  He has been writing diligently for more than thirty years, constantly improving his position, and profiting by the lessons of public opinion and of other writers’ (ii. 322).  But if it is true that the less an author hears about himself the better, how are these salutary ‘lessons of public opinion’ to penetrate to him?  ‘Rubens,’ she says, writing from Munich in 1858 (ii. 28), ’gives me more pleasure than any other painter whether right or wrong.  More than any one else he makes me feel that painting is a great art, and that he was a great artist.  His are such real breathing men and women, moved by passions, not mincing, and grimacing, and posing in mere imitation of passion.’  But Rubens did not concentrate his intellect on his own ponderings, nor shut out the wholesome chastenings of praise and blame, lest they should discourage his inspiration.  Beethoven, another of the chief objects of George Eliot’s veneration, bore all the rough stress of an active and troublesome calling, though of the musician, if of any, we may say, that his is the art of self-absorption.