In her best novels there is real humour, of a cool sparkling sort; there
is a strong sense of substantial character that has not yet degenerated
into psychology; there is a great deal of wisdom, chiefly about women;
indeed there is almost every element of literature except a certain
indescribable thing called _glamour_; which was the whole stock-in-trade
of the Brontes, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp clambers amid rotten
wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray when Esmond with his
melancholy eyes wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues
of Castlewood. Of this quality (which some have called, but hastily, the
essential of literature) George Eliot had not little but nothing. Her
air is bright and intellectually even exciting; but it is like the air
of a cloudless day on the parade at Brighton. She sees people clearly,
but not through an atmosphere. And she can conjure up storms in the
conscious, but not in the subconscious mind.
It is true (though the idea should not be exaggerated) that this
deficiency was largely due to her being cut off from all those
conceptions that had made the fiction of a Muse; the deep idea that
there are really demons and angels behind men.
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