Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FEATURES OF FACT AND FANCY IN THE WORKS OF GEORGE ELIOT. BY JAMES T. FOAED. T)OPULAR taste is as fickle and capricious, as inex- .1. plicable in its literary as in its fashionable preferences, in its choice of books as of bonnets. Considerations of genuine taste, excellence, or true art have no importance and almost as little influence. The last novelty is invariably the best until it is no longer the last and the next appears. He, indeed, would be a bold man who ventured to prophesy the immortality of a season for " the book of the season." It may be dead in a day as in a decade. Shall we essay an apparently very simple problem, and try and ascertain apart from momentary influences what was and is George Eliot's proper place in literature ? Is she one of the immortals ? Is it true, as her zealous admirers suggest, that " she is greater than Shakespeare," that her genius will " be linked indissolubly with that of Goethe's to distant ages," or as a still more fervid disciple declares, that, being " neither a poet or genius merely," she is, " like Byron, an elemental power," whatever that may mean. There is no stint in the adulation ofmodern critical cant. It is nothing if not hysterical, and these are but specimens of the tributary rhetorical wreaths placed on her tomb. Apart from such rhapsodical utterances, and the immediate glamour of her undeniably great gifts, it certainly appears to me no unfit task to endeavour to guage her influences on the world of fiction and in the domain of art generally. In the main, she exercised a beneficent ministration in the area of fiction. She was earnest, she was sincere, skilful, and accomplished, and, if not precisely a paragon among feminine writers, was almost without parallel. In what follows I shall assess if possible her di...