eatest of the novelists in the delineation of
feeling and the analysis of motives. In "uncovering certain human lots,
and seeing how they are woven and interwoven," some marvellous work has
been done by this master in the two arts of rhetoric and fiction.

If you say the telling of a story is her forte, you put her below Wilkie
Collins or Mrs. Oliphant; if you say her object is to give a picture of
English society, she is surpassed by Bulwer and Trollope; if she be
called a satirist of society, Thackeray is her superior; if she intends
to illustrate the absurdity of behavior, she is eclipsed by Dickens; but
if the analysis of human motives be her forte and art, she stands first,
and it is very doubtful whether any artist in fiction is entitled to
stand second. She reaches clear in and touches the most secret and the
most delicate spring of human action. She has done this so well, so
apart from the doing of everything else, and so, in spite of doing some
other things indifferently, that she works on a line quite her own, and
quite alone, as a creative artist in fiction. Others have done this
incidentally and occasionally, as Charlotte Bronte and Walter Scott, but
George Eliot does it elaborately, with laborious painstaking, with
purpose aforethought. Scott said of Richardson: "In his survey of the
heart he left neither head, bay, nor inlet behind him until he had traced
its soundings, and laid it down in his chart with all its minute
sinuosities, its depths and its shallows."

This is too much to say of Richardson, but it is not too much to say of
George Eliot. She has sounded depths and explored sinuosities of the
human heart which were utterly unknown to the author of "Clarissa
Harlowe." It is like looking into the translucent brook--you see the
wriggling tad, the darting minnow, the leisurely trout, the motionless
pike, while in the bays and inlets you see the infusoria and animalculae
as well.

George Eliot belongs to and is the greatest of the school of artists in
fiction who write fiction as a means to an end, instead of as an end.
And, while she certainly is not a story-teller of the first order,
considered simply as a story-teller, her novels are a striking
illustration of the power of fiction as a means to an end. They remind
us, as few other stories do, of the fact that however inferior the story
may be considered simply as a story, it is indispensable to the
delineation of character. No other form o