attitude towards the Jews, which gradually prepared her last novel, began at this time, and she must have heard Humboldt's saying that Judaism is more easily reconcilable with science than other religions. The Hamburgische Briefe lay open before her at the table d'hôte ; she pronounces the Laokoon the most un-German of German books, and notices nothing between Berlin and Cologne but "the immortal old town of Wolfenbüttel." If Lessing was the favourite, Goethe was the master. Life at Weimar, with the sublime tradition, closed for George Eliot the season of storm and strain. Although she never practised art for its own sake, or submitted to the canon that poetry is aimless song, Goethe's gospel of inviolate serenity was soothing to a spirit disabled by excess of sensibility, and taught her to be less passionately affected either by sympathy or sorrow. The contrast is great between the agonising tones of the earlier life and the self-restraint and composure that succeeded. The conversion was not immediate. A scene is recorded at Berlin which recalls the time when Miss Evans was too clever to succeed at Coventry, and the crude smartness of the Westminster articles (toned in the reprint),[1] the resentment and even misery caused by the impostor Liggins, were below the dignity of so noble a mind. But the change in the later years is unmistakable. Even the genial warmth of affection for persons was tempered by an impartial estimate of their characters and a disinterested neutrality towards their undertakings. A system that denies the hopes and memories which make pain and sadness shrink cannot be rich in consolation ; yet she
- ↑ Some secrets of style reveal themselves to anybody who compares the articles in the Review with the text which she afterwards prepared, and there are many touches and omissions significant of the vast change her mind had undergone. The last essay, which supposes that Young came into the world without a wig, and calls George the First "that royal hog," was composed at the same time as the first novel ; and the contrast shows with what effort and constraint the scenes were written. The perfection of language was not reached at once. A single paragraph of the Mill on the Floss contains the terms "phiz," "masculinity," "that same Nature." There is a slight mannerism in the formula "which has been observed"; and the perilous word "mutual" is sometimes misapplied. One of her favourite expressions is usual with Comte, and we used to hear another at school in "that central plain, watered at one extremity by the Avon, at the other by the Trent."
