In Felix Holt I was naturally much interested, having read it in manuscript, and advised upon the point of law, as appears from her published letters in the Life by J. Cross.  There are two or three lines—­the lawyers’ “opinion on the case”—­which she asked me to sketch; and I remember telling her when she inserted these lines in the book, that I should always be able to say that I had written at least a sentence which was embodied in English literature. Felix Holt contains some fine characters and scenes, but it cannot be regarded as equal to Adam Bede and Silas Marner.  We will not speak of Theophrastus Such, 1879, written just before her death.  It was the work of a woman physically and intellectually exhausted.  I feel a certain guilty sense of disappointment when I think of the book, for I possibly had some hand in causing it to be written.  I had sent her a long letter pointing out that our literature, with all its wealth of achievement in every known sphere, was still deficient in one form of composition in which the French stood paramount and alone.  That was what they called Pensees—­moral and philosophical reflections in the form of epigrams or rather aphorisms.  I thought, and I still think, that this form of composition was peculiarly suited to her genius, at least in her prime.  It was not in her prime when she painfully evolved the sour affectations set forth in Theophrastus.

A word or two must be said about the Poems.  They have poetic subjects, ideas, similes:  they are full of poetic yearning, crowded with poetic imagery; they have everything poetry needs, except poetry.  They have not the poet’s hall-mark.  They are imitation poems, like the forged “ancient masters” they concoct at Florence, or the Tanagra statuettes they make in Germany.  With all her consummate literary gifts and tastes, George Eliot never managed to write a poem, and never could be brought to see that the verses she wrote were not poems.  It was an exaggeration of the defect that mars her prose; and her verses throw great light on her prose.  They are over-laboured; the conception overpowers the form; they are too intensely anxious to be recognised as poems.  We see not so much poetic passion, as a passionate yearning after poetic passion.  We have—­not the inevitable, incalculable, inimitable phrase of real poetry—­but the slowly distilled, calculated, and imitated effort to reach the spontaneous.

It is melancholy indeed to have to admit this, after such labour, such noble conceptions, such mastery over language:  but it is the truth.  And it explains much of kindred failure in her prose work.  Great imagination, noble conceptions, mastery over language can do much, but they cannot make a poet.  Nothing can, but being a poet.  Nor can these gifts make a great romancer or poet in prose.  Nothing can, but being born to romance, being a prose poet.  As the Gospel has it—­“Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?” George Eliot had not sufficiently meditated on this scripture.  She too often supposed that by taking thought—­by enormous pains, profound thought, by putting this thought in exquisite and noble words—­she might produce an immortal romance, an immortal poem.