having the faculty of stating in cold logic what he had conceived in hot wrath. In such a temperament the feelings are more likely to be turned against those responsible for misery than toward the victims, thus producing a negative effect, with the positive side left to our inference. The only one whose work is entirely unemotional is Peacock, and even he waxes warm over the exploitation of the helpless, and the crimes committed in the name of Progress. Aside from this he shines with a hard mental brilliance,—which, be it said, does not insure soundness of viewpoint, as no one on the whole list can surpass him in prejudice and injustice.
George Eliot, admitted by all to have a better intellectual equipment than any of her predecessors, admired above others by Meredith because her fiction was "the fruit of a well-trained mind," herself says, "Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotion."[1] And again, "There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns us to a corresponding stupidity."[2] This realization that mental inertness itself is the result of callous or defective emotion, and that these two elements are not only inseparable but mutually dependent, is one secret of the fine quality of her satire.[3] It is the sheen on the surface of a deep current of sympathetic com-*
- ↑ Middlemarch, II, 275. In this story also occurs the exquisite passage on the theme of the second citation above: "If we had a keen feeling and vision of all ordinary human life, it would be like seeing the grass grow and hearing the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."
- ↑ Daniel Deronda, III, 79.
- ↑ One of her biographers, G. W. Cooke, evidently holding to the old idea of satire, makes the opposite deduction, that "she is too much in sympathy with human nature to laugh at its follies and its weaknesses. * * * The foibles of the world she cannot treat in the vein of the satirist." Not if this vein be restricted to the Juvenalian and Popeian types, certainly.
