variety of daily intercourse, and never diversified by participation in
the external activities of the world, tended to bring about a loaded,
over-conscious, over-anxious state of mind, which was not only not
wholesome in itself, but was inconsistent with the full freshness and
strength of artistic work. The presence of the real world in his life
has, in all but one or two cases, been one element of the novelist's
highest success in the world of imaginative creation. George Eliot had
no greater favourite than Scott, and when a series of little books upon
English men of letters was planned, she said that she thought that
writer among us the happiest to whom it should fall to deal with Scott.
But Scott lived full in the life of his fellow-men. Even of Wordsworth,
her other favourite, though he was not a creative artist, we may say
that he daily saturated himself in those natural elements and effects,
which were the material, the suggestion, and the sustaining inspiration
of his consoling and fortifying poetry. George Eliot did not live in the
midst of her material, but aloof from it and outside of it. Heaven
forbid that this should seem to be said by way of censure. Both her
health and other considerations made all approach to busy sociability in
any of its shapes both unwelcome and impossible. But in considering the
relation of her manner of life to her work, her creations, her
meditations, one cannot but see that when compared with some writers of
her own sex and age, she is constantly bookish, artificial, and
mannered. She is this because she fed her art too exclusively, first on
the memories of her youth, and next from books, pictures, statues,
instead of from the living model, as seen in its actual motion. It is
direct calls and personal claims from without that make fiction alive.
Jane Austen bore her part in the little world of the parlour that she
described. The writer of _Sylvia's Lovers_, whose work George Eliot
appreciated with unaffected generosity (i. 305), was the mother of
children, and was surrounded by the wholesome actualities of the family.