The authors of _Jane Eyre_ and _Wuthering Heights_ passed their days in
one long succession of wild, stormy, squalid, anxious, and miserable
scenes--almost as romantic, as poetic, and as tragic, to use George
Eliot's words, as their own stories. George Sand eagerly shared, even to
the pitch of passionate tumult and disorder, in the emotions, the
aspirations, the ardour, the great conflicts and controversies of her
time. In every one of these, their daily closeness to the real life of
the world has given a vitality to their work which we hardly expect that
even the next generation will find in more than one or two of the
romances of George Eliot. It may even come to pass that their position
will be to hers as that of Fielding is to Richardson in our own day.

In a letter to Mr. Harrison, which is printed here (ii. 441), George
Eliot describes her own method as 'the severe effort of trying to make
certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves
to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit.' The passage recalls a
discussion one day at the Priory in 1877. She was speaking of the
different methods of the poetic or creative art, and said that she began
with moods, thoughts, passions, and then invented the story for their
sake, and fitted it to them; Shakespeare, on the other hand, picked up a
story that struck him, and then proceeded to work in the moods,
thoughts, passions, as they came to him in the course of meditation on
the story. We hardly need the result to convince us that Shakespeare
chose the better part.

The influence of her reserved fashion of daily life was heightened by
the literary exclusiveness which of set purpose she imposed upon
herself. 'The less an author hears about himself,' she says, in one
place, 'the better.' 'It is my rule, very strictly observed, not to
read the criticisms on my writings. For years I have found this