Thackeray was his rival in this historic insight and poetic power of
interpretation; and his superior success was due not only to his peculiar
genius but also to his romanticism. Scott failed where George Eliot
succeeded, in giving an intellectual interpretation of life. With certain
social and moral tendencies he was clearly at home. On its side of
adventure and social impulse and craving for a wider life, as a single
instance of his power, he was a true interpreter of the age of Elizabeth.
Its deeper spirit, its intellectual movements, he did not, and could not,
bring within the range of his story. It was here George Eliot was superior,
as is abundantly shown in _Romola_. The thoughtful aspects of Florentine
life she truthfully presented; but its more romantic elements it needed a
Scott to make living and real. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ there is very little
of genuine interpretation. Certain local features may be accurate, but the
spirit of the time is not there; the characters are not such as that age
and country developed. Scott, with all his romanticism, would have
introduced _reality_ into such an historic picture.

Within her own lines of power George Eliot is much greater than Scott, who
could not have written _Adam Bede_ or _Middlemarch_, or brought out what is
best in those works. Adventure was necessary to Scott; he could not have
transfigured the plain and homely with beauty as George Eliot has done.
Where she is at her best, as in the simple scenes of _Silas Marner_, there
is a charm, pathos and sympathy in her work which must endear it to all
hearts. That peculiar power Scott did not have; yet it would be most
difficult to decide which is the truer to nature. Genuine art, it is true,
has its foundation in the realities of human experience: but those
realities are not always best interpreted by the methods of realism. In his
own province Scott was truer to nature than George Eliot was in the same
field, as may be seen at once by comparing _The Spanish Gypsy_ with
_Ivanhoe_, or any of Scott's novels dealing with the mediaeval and feudal
ages, he took the past into himself, caught its spirit, reflected it in
its wholeness. In this he was a genuine realist, and all the more faithful
to reality because he did not accept realism as a theory.

In comparing George Eliot with Dickens, it must first of all be noted that
each is the superior of the other in his own special province. Dickens has
more imagination; he appe