172 LITERATURE AND DRAMA 



or Romola. The present book falls wholly short of any such 

 revelation. Possibly George Eliot never revealed herself except 

 by her books, yet how we long to know what that narrow Low 

 Church creed meant to the girl ; how we long to understand how 

 she felt when the faith to which she clung left her wholly within 

 a few days. No picture of this mental and moral development 

 could be presented without the highest artistic skill ; but this 

 woman had the skill she experienced the change she was one 

 of the great ones of womankind, and we are left without a vestige 

 of a record of the stupendous change. 



Passing on, we know that this woman of pure heart and right 

 moral feeling lived as wife to a man who had no right to marry 

 her. How did she feel ? How did passion speak to this great 

 soul ? We see the possibility of a daily record of thoughts, hopes, 

 fears, doubts, faith, love in fact, beside which the ' Confessions of 

 Rousseau ' or the ' Diary of Pepys ' would seem very poor reading ; 

 but, as it is, we know no more of all this than if taking Mr. Lewes 

 for life had been no more than taking a house on lease. Conse- 

 quently Pepys and Rousseau, though one was no very great man 

 and the other was a mean fellow, will be of interest to men and 

 women when George Eliot's ' Life ' interests historians only. No 

 doubt what we have got is much more decorous, respectable, 

 nice, in fact, than what we should have got if we had a true record 

 of what this woman felt ; but, somehow, one does now and then 

 hanker for something else than niceness, and the appetite is not 

 unwholesome ; it is merely the appetite for intimate communion 

 with a great person. 



We can go further. The ' Life ' shows a moral growth 

 throughout her life which inspires admiration. The narrow- 

 minded, somewhat pert methodistic school-girl becomes a clear- 

 headed, businesslike freethinker, doing work diligently with dis- 

 content. This rather shallow literary hack fell in love with 

 George Lewes, and thereupon the possibility of true sacred passion 

 became manifest to her, and remained an unshaken article of faith. 

 But for this she would probably never have become an artist. 

 Her books reveal not so much the hard-headed thinker of whom 

 women are proud because she could think dispassionately like a 

 man, but a warm, large-hearted woman, seeking for a higher life 

 than any intellectual exercise can occupy. In reading her artistic 



