It marks the silent strength and pressure of the
spirit of the Victorian middle class that even to Dickens it never
occurred to revive the verbal coarseness of Smollett or Swift. The other
proof of the same pressure is the change in George Eliot. She was not a
genius in the elemental sense of Dickens; she could never have been
either so strong or so soft. But she did originally represent some of
the same popular realities: and her first books (at least as compared
with her latest) were full of sound fun and bitter pathos. Mr. Max
Beerbohm has remarked (in his glorious essay called _Ichabod_, I think),
that Silas Marner would not have forgotten his miserliness if George
Eliot had written of him in her maturity. I have a great regard for Mr.
Beerbohm's literary judgments; and it may be so. But if literature
means anything more than a cold calculation of the chances, if there is
in it, as I believe, any deeper idea of detaching the spirit of life
from the dull obstacles of life, of permitting human nature really to
reveal itself as human, if (to put it shortly) literature has anything
on earth to do with being _interesting_--then I think we would rather
have a few more Marners than that rich maturity that gave us the
analysed dust-heaps of _Daniel Deronda_.
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