It is to me a truly melancholy duty to have to admit that so much in the noble conceptions and rich thought of George Eliot was not a complete success in ultimate execution—­and that, in great measure, because the conception and aim were so great and the execution so profoundly conscientious.  I knew her well, I was amongst those who had the deepest regard for her mental power and her moral insight.  I always recognised her as one of the best and most cultured minds of her time.  I had great faith in her judgment, and could respect her courage even when I repudiated her opinions.  But I never was one of those who exaggerated her gifts as an artist.  I never could count anything later than Silas Marner as a complete and unqualified masterpiece.  One may have the imaginative power shown by Michael Angelo in his Sistine Chapel, or his Medicean tombs, and yet, if one is not complete master of the brush and the chisel, no imagination, no thought, will produce a masterpiece in fresco or in marble.  George Eliot was a most thoughtful artist, but she was more of a thinker than an artist; she was always more the artist when she was least the thinker; and when she conceived a work of art in her sublimest aspirations (as notably in The Spanish Gypsy), she almost makes us doubt if she were an artist at all.

She was an artist; and the younger generations will make an unpardonable error if they fail to do justice to the permanent survival of her best and earliest work.  They will also be guilty of unpardonable blindness if they fail to note how completely she stands above all her contemporary rivals in romance, by thought, by knowledge, by nobility of aim.  She raised the whole art of romance into a higher plane of thought, of culture, and of philosophic grasp.  And when she failed, it was often by reason of the nobility of her aim itself, of the volume of her own learning, of the intensity of her own standard of perfection.  Her passages in prose are studied with the care that men usually bestow on a sonnet; her accessories and landscapes are patient and conscientious transcripts of actual spots of country and town; her drama is a problem of ethical teaching, subtly elaborated, and minutely probed.  In these high aims and difficult ambitions, she not seldom failed, or achieved a somewhat academic and qualified success.  But the task was not seldom such that even to have fallen short of complete success was a far from ignoble triumph.

She raised the whole art of romance to a higher plane, I say; and, although in this ambitious aim she too often sacrificed freshness, ease, and simplicity, the weight of the limits she imposed on herself must fairly be counted in the balance.  Romance had never before in England been written with such a sense of responsibility, with such eager subtlety of form, and with such high ethical purpose.  The sense of responsibility wearies many readers, and at last crushed the writer; the form became “precious,”