any of its shapes both unwelcome and impossible. But in considering the
relation of her manner of life to her work, her creations, her
meditations, one cannot but see that when compared with some writers of
her own sex and age, she is constantly bookish, artificial, and
mannered. She is this because she fed her art too exclusively, first on
the memories of her youth, and next from books, pictures, statues,
instead of from the living model, as seen in its actual motion. It is
direct calls and personal claims from without that make fiction alive.
Jane Austen bore her part in the little world of the parlour that she
described. The writer of _Sylvia's Lovers_, whose work George Eliot
appreciated with unaffected generosity (i. 305), was the mother of
children, and was surrounded by the wholesome actualities of the family.
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
t