This just balance, with all its intricate adjustments of compensation and equivalence, is peculiarly needed in the case of George Eliot, and at the same time is unusually difficult.  George Eliot was most conspicuous as an artist, as a worker in the sphere of imagination and creation.  At the same time, she had very rare powers and a really unusual learning quite outside of imaginative art.  And these reflective powers and such stores of knowledge are often antagonistic to creative art, and undoubtedly were so not seldom with her.  If Aristotle himself had written a dull psychological tragedy, we might read it for his sake, but we should not forgive him, and we ought not to forgive him.  And if Shakespeare himself had written the Novum Organum or the Principia, we should not have had Hamlet and Lear as we now know them.  There is no compensation between philosophy and poetry.  No profundity, no learning, can give beauty to verses which lack the divine fire.  If George Eliot’s fame has to be based solely on her great powers and endowments, her art would not be worth much.  However, it is not so:  she was an artist, with true artistic gifts.  Her philosophic power and her scientific attainments often ennoble these gifts:  yet it is too often evident that they seriously mar and embarrass them.

Turn it the other way.  Until nearly the age of forty, George Eliot was known only as a critical and philosophical writer.  And in reading, in logical acumen, and in breadth of view, she was the equal of the first minds of her time.  But no one of her contemporaries, eminent in philosophy and science, approached her, however remotely, in artistic gifts; and no one of them even attempted to invest ethical and social ideas with high imagination and beautiful ideals.  Thus, George Eliot was of a far higher mental plane than any contemporary who has used imaginative prose as an art, and she was also a far greater artist than any contemporary philosopher.  It is quite certain that learning and wisdom may be lodged in the same brain with the highest poetry, as Lucretius, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Goethe may prove.  And men of original power have not seldom used imaginative art with signal success to convey the ideas with which they were charged; for this has been done by Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift, Rousseau, Byron, Shelley, and Goethe.

It is therefore legitimate and natural that a powerful and teeming mind should resort to art as its medium, and also that an artist of high aims should be a systematic thinker and an omnivorous student.  The combination is very rare and success is singularly difficult.  To fail in art is to lose all and to end in utter failure.  And to carry ethical purpose and erudition into art is indeed a perilous undertaking, wherein but one or two of the greatest have wholly succeeded.  The problem with George Eliot is to judge how far she has succeeded in the all but impossible task.  That her success is far from complete is but too obvious.  That she has had many incidental successes is also obvious.  Her work is not sufficiently spontaneous, not easy or simple, not buoyant enough.  But it has great nobility, rare distinction.  It may not live as perfect art; but it should not perish as ambitious failures perish.