certain that no woman could have written _Roderick Random_. It is not
quite so certain that no woman could have written _Esmond_. The strength
and subtlety of woman had certainly sunk deep into English letters when
George Eliot began to write.

Her originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power
in fiction as well or better than she. Charlotte Brontë, understood
along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The
latter comes into our present consideration only as that most
exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an
unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the
complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all
the after women went about looking for their brains. She could describe
a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Brontë could do.
She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what
she did not know--like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished
world before the great progressive age of which I write.

One of the characteristics of the central Victorian spirit was a
tendency to substitute a certain more or less satisfied seriousness for
the extremes of tragedy and comedy. This is marked by a certain change
in George Eliot; as it is marked by a certain limitation or moderation
in Dickens. Dickens was the People, as it was in the eighteenth century
and still largely is, in spite of all the talk for and against Board
School Education: comic, tragic, realistic, free-spoken, far looser in
words than in deeds. It marks the silent strength and pressure of the
spirit of the Victorian middle class that even to Dickens it never
occurred to revive the verbal coarseness of Smollett or Swift. The other
proof of the same pressure is the change in George Eliot. She was not a
genius in the elemental sense of Dickens; she could never have been