n
England been written with such a sense of responsibility, with such
eager subtlety of form, and with such high ethical purpose. The sense
of responsibility wearies many readers, and at last crushed the writer;
the form became "precious," and at last pedantic; and the ethical
purpose was sometimes more visible than the ethical life. In the
French drama Corneille had great conceptions, noble types of character,
stately verse, and tragic situations; but English readers too often
find him mannered, artificial, dull. Corneille, I freely admit, is not
Shakespeare: I greatly prefer Shakespeare; but I prefer Corneille to
Ibsen. We have plenty of Ibsenites to-day, and rather a plethora than
a dearth of ignoble creatures in squalid situations who expose to us
their mean lives with considerable truth to nature. In such an age, it
is just as well that the lessons of _Adam Bede_, _Romola_, Fedalma and
Zarca, should not be quite forgotten.

The art of romance, in the widest and loftiest sense of the term, is
even yet in its infancy. Ancient literature, mediaeval literature,
knew nothing of it. Nor indeed did modern literature entirely conceive
it in all its fulness until the days of Le Sage, Richardson, Fielding,
and Goldsmith. Nay, we may say that its power was not quite revealed
before Scott, Goethe, Manzoni, Jane Austen, Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens,
and George Sand. Its subtlety, its flexibility, its capacity for
analytic research, its variety of range, and facility for reaching all
hearts and all minds--all this is simply incalculable. And we may be
sure that the star of romance has not yet reached its zenith. It is
the art of the future--and an art wherein women are quite as likely to
reign as men. It would be treason to Art to pretend that George Eliot
came near to such perfection. But she had certain qualities that none
of her predecessors had quite possessed, and she strove for an ideal
which may one day become something more than a dream--a dream that as
yet eludes and escapes from the mind as it struggles to grasp it and to
fix it.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDIES IN EARLY VICTORIAN
LITERATURE***

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