Times were not wanting when the sun strove to shine through the gloom,
when the resistance to melancholy was not wholly a failure, and when, as
she says, she felt that Dante was right in condemning to the Stygian
marsh those who had been sad under the blessed sunlight. 'Sad were we in
the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, bearing sluggish smoke in
our hearts; now lie we sadly here in the black ooze.' But still for the
most part sad she remained in the sweet air, and the look of pain that
haunted her eyes and brow even in her most genial and animated moments,
only told too truly the story of her inner life.

That from this central gloom a shadow should spread to her work was
unavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with
Dante, with Pascal. A novelist--for as a poet, after trying hard to
think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable--as a
novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand
trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their
severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut
melancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain. Living in a time
when humanity has been raised, whether formally or informally, into a
religion, she draws a painted curtain of pity before the tragic scene.
Still the attentive ear catches from time to time the accents of an
unrelenting voice, that proves her kindred with those three mighty
spirits and stern monitors of men. In George Eliot, a reader with a
conscience may be reminded of the saying that when a man opens Tacitus
he puts himself in the confessional. She was no vague dreamer over the
folly and the weakness of men, and the cruelty and blindness of destiny.
Hers is not the dejection of the poet who 'could lie down like a tired
child, And weep away this life of care,' as Shelley at Naples; nor is it
the despairing misery that moved Cowper in the awful verses of the