y passions, not mincing, and grimacing, and posing in mere
imitation of passion.' But Rubens did not concentrate his intellect on
his own ponderings, nor shut out the wholesome chastenings of praise and
blame, lest they should discourage his inspiration. Beethoven, another
of the chief objects of George Eliot's veneration, bore all the rough
stress of an active and troublesome calling, though of the musician, if
of any, we may say, that his is the art of self-absorption.

Hence, delightful and inspiring as it is to read this story of diligent
and discriminating cultivation, of accurate truth and real erudition and
beauty, not vaguely but methodically interpreted, one has some of the
sensations of the moral and intellectual hothouse. Mental hygiene is apt
to lead to mental valetudinarianism. 'The ignorant journalist,' may be
left to the torment which George Eliot wished that she could inflict on
one of those literary slovens whose manuscripts bring even the most
philosophic editor to the point of exasperation: 'I should like to stick
red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his
handwriting.' By all means. But much that even the most sympathetic
reader finds repellent in George Eliot's later work might perhaps never
have been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with more than Russian rigour
a censorship of the press and the post-office which kept every
disagreeable whisper scrupulously from her ear. To stop every draft with
sandbags, screens, and curtains, and to limit one's exercise to a drive
in a well-warmed brougham with the windows drawn up, may save a few
annoying colds in the head, but the end of the process will be the
manufacture of an invalid.

Whatever view we may take of the precise connection between what she
read, or abstained from reading, and what she wrote, no studious man or
woman can look without admiration and envy on the breadth, variety,
seriousness, and energy, with which she set herself her tasks and
executed them. She says in one of her letters, 'there is something more
piteous almost than soapless poverty in the application of feminine
incapacity to literature' (ii. 16). Nobody has ever taken the
responsibilities of literature more ardently in earnest. She was
accustomed to read aloud to Mr. Lewes three hours a day, and her
private reading, except when she was engaged in the actual stress of
composition, must have filled as many more. His extraordinary alacrity
and her broo