pass that their position will be to hers as that of Fielding is to Richardson in our own day. In a letter to Mr. Harrison, which is printed here (ii. 441), George Eliot describes her own method, as “the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit,” The passage recalls a discussion one day at the Priory in 1877. She was speaking of the different methods of the poetic or creative art, and said that she began with moods, thoughts, passions, and then invented the story for their sake, and fitted it to them; Shakespeare, on the other hand, picked up a story that struck him, and then proceeded to work in the moods, thoughts, passions, as they came to him in the course of meditation on the story. We hardly need the result to convince us that Shakespeare chose the better part. The influence of her reserved fashion of daily life was heightened by the literary exclusiveness which of set purpose she imposed upon herself. “The less an author hears about himself,” she says, in one place, “the better.” “It is my rule, very strictly observed, not to read the criticisms on my writings. For years I have found this abstinence necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as an artist, which ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends to produce in us.” George Eliot pushed this repugnance to criticism beyond the personal reaction of it upon the artist, and more than disparaged its utility, even in the most competent and highly trained hands. She finds that the diseased spot in the literary culture of our time is touched with the finest point by the saying of La Bruyère, that “the pleasure of criticism robs us of the pleasure of being keenly moved by very fine things” (iii. 327). “It seems to me,” she writes (ii. 412), “much better to read a man’s own writings, than to read what others say about him, especially when the man is first-rate and the others third-rate. As Goethe said long ago about Spinoza, ‘I always preferred to learn from the man himself what _he_ thought, rather than to hear from some one else what he ought to have thought.’” As if the scholar will not always be glad to do both, to study his author and not to refuse the help of the rightly prepared commentator; as if even Goethe himself would not have been all the better acquainted with Spinoza, if he could have read Mr. Pollock’s book upon him. But on this question Mr. Arnold has fought a brilliant battle, and to him George Eliot’s heresies may well be left.