of imagination and
creation. At the same time, she had very rare powers and a really
unusual learning quite outside of imaginative art. And these
reflective powers and such stores of knowledge are often antagonistic
to creative art, and undoubtedly were so not seldom with her. If
Aristotle himself had written a dull psychological tragedy, we might
read it for his sake, but we should not forgive him, and we ought not
to forgive him. And if Shakespeare himself had written the _Novum
Organum_ or the _Principia_, we should not have had _Hamlet_ and _Lear_
as we now know them. There is no compensation between philosophy and
poetry. No profundity, no learning, can give beauty to verses which
lack the divine fire. If George Eliot's fame has to be based solely on
her great powers and endowments, her art would not be worth much.
However, it is not so: she was an artist, with true artistic gifts.
Her philosophic power and her scientific attainments often ennoble
these gifts: yet it is too often evident that they seriously mar and
embarrass them.

Turn it the other way. Until nearly the age of forty, George Eliot was
known only as a critical and philosophical writer. And in reading, in
logical acumen, and in breadth of view, she was the equal of the first
minds of her time. But no one of her contemporaries, eminent in
philosophy and science, approached her, however remotely, in artistic
gifts; and no one of them even attempted to invest ethical and social
ideas with high imagination and beautiful ideals. Thus, George Eliot
was of a far higher mental plane than any contemporary who has used
imaginative prose as an art, and she was also a far greater artist than
any contemporary philosopher. It is quite certain that learning and
wisdom may be lodged in the same brain with the highest poetry, as
Lucretius, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Goethe may prove. And men of
original power have not seldom used imaginative art with signal success
to convey the ideas with which they were charged; for this has been
done by Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift, Rousseau, Byron, Shelley, and
Goethe.

It is therefore legitimate and natural that a powerful and teeming mind
should resort to art as its medium, and also that an artist of high
aims should be a systematic thinker and an omnivorous student. The
combination is very rare and success is singularly difficult. To fail
in art is to lose all and to end in utter failure. And to carry
ethical