If George Eliot were not a writer of romance, she was nothing at all in the front ranks of Victorian literature.  With all her powers of mind, her mastery of language, her immense stores of knowledge and supreme culture, she gave to the world nothing of great mark, acknowledged and known as hers, except her famous romances; for, as we shall presently see, we cannot count any of the poems as of great mark.  But, as a writer of romance, George Eliot differs essentially and for the worse from all the other great writers of romance in her own or preceding generations.  Most certainly she was not a born romancer; she had no spontaneous gift of telling stories, no irrepressible genius that way.  Now all the great romancers have been born to it, as Robinson Crusoe was born to the sea, or as Turner was born to paint.  Though Scott published novels late, he had begun Waverley at thirty-four; his earlier works are romantic ballads and metrical romances; and from boyhood, at home and abroad, he was ever filled with some tale of adventure and character.  Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth “lisped” in novelettes, as Pope said he “lisped in numbers.”  Though Charlotte Bronte published so little, she wrote stories incessantly from childhood.  Lytton, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, invented tales as part of their daily lives, and from the earliest age.  But George Eliot was thirty-nine when her first tales were published, and she was forty before she was known to the public as a novelist at all.  And so little was novel-writing her natural gift, that her most intimate friends never suspected her power, nor did she herself altogether enjoy the exercise of her art.  To the last her periods of mental gestation were long, painful, and unhopeful.  Parturition was a dangerous crisis, and the long-expected infant was reared with misgivings and a superfluity of coddling.  The romances of George Eliot came like some enfant de miracle, born late in the mother’s life, at the cost of infinite pain, much anxiety, and amidst the wondering trepidation of expectant circles of friends.

Even in her best books we never quite get over the sense of almost painful elaboration, of a powerful mind having rich gifts striving to produce some rare music with an unfamiliar and uncongenial instrument.  It reminds us of Beethoven evolving his majestic sonatas on an untuned and dilapidated old piano, the defects of which he could not himself hear.  The conventional critic in The Vicar of Wakefield is told to say that “the picture would have been better if the artist had taken more pains.”  With George Eliot too often we are made to feel that the picture would have been, at any rate, more enjoyable if the artist had taken less pains.  To study her more ambitious tales is like an attempt to master some new system of psychology.  The metaphysical power, the originality of conception, the long brooding over anomalies and objections—­these are all there:  but the rapid improvisation and easy