“It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise.... All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children—in our gardens and in our homes. But let us love that other beauty, too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy.” It is Rembrandt, then, rather than Titian, who is her chosen painter. But she does not often attain his marvellous _chiaroscuro_. Her style is clear and almost always firm in drawing, though deficient in colour. It is full of meaning, almost over-scrupulous in defining precisely what she wishes to express. Here and there it flashes into a wise saying, a sparkling epigram. At other times, especially in her later books, it spreads out and becomes too diffuse, too slow, like Sir Walter Scott’s. But it never repels by vulgar smartness, nor perplexes by vagueness and artificial obscurity. It serves her purpose well—to convey the results of her scrutiny of the inner life and her loving observation of the outer life in its humblest forms. In these respects it is admirable and satisfying. And it is her own—she does not imitate, nor write according to a theory. Her general view of human nature is not essentially different from that expressed in a passage which I quoted from Thackeray in the previous chapter. We are none of us “irreproachable characters.” We are “mixed human beings.” Therefore she wishes to tell her stories “in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy.” * * * * * As I began so let me end this chapter—with a word on women. For myself, I think it wise and prudent to maintain with Plutarch that _virtue_ in man and woman is one and the same. Yet there is a difference between the feminine and the masculine virtues. This opinion Plutarch sets forth and illustrates in his brief histories, and George Eliot in her novels. But of the virtues of women she gives more and finer examples. THE POET OF IMMORTAL YOUTH One of the things that surprized and bewildered old Colonel Newcome when he gathered his boy’s friends around the mahogany tree in the dull, respectable dining-room at 12 Fitzroy Square, was to hear George Warrington declare, between huge puffs of tobacco smoke, “that young Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young Raphael.” At this Charles Honeyman sagely nodded his ambrosial head, while Clive Newcome assented with sparkling eyes. But to the Colonel, sitting kindly grave and silent at the head of the table, and recalling (somewhat dimly) the bewigged and powdered poetry of the age of Queen Anne, such a critical sentiment seemed radical and revolutionary, almost ungentlemanly.