"A picture of human life, such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, _which may be called the raw material of sentiment_.... Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the people. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life." Another interesting passage is one containing an estimate of Dickens, in which she considers the Oliver Twists, Joes, and Nancys terrible and pathetic pictures of London life:-- "And if Dickens had been able to give us their psychological character, their conception of life, and their emotions, with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be _the greatest contribution to art ever made to the awakening of social sympathies_." George Eliot might thus be classified as one of the greatest if not the greatest realist of the analytical or psychological order. But this would, to our mind, be a one-sided and incomplete estimate of the chief character in her writing and genius. Truthful rendering of life and character may have been one of the chief motives to composition, and a fundamental requisite to the art of her fiction; but it remained a means to a further end--the ultimate end--of her writing, as it no doubt was the fundamental stimulus to her imagination and design. And this end and motive make her an idealist and not a realist in fiction. The direction in which this idealism goes we have indicated in the lines we have italicized in the passages we quote from her, and is to be found in the ethical motive below and beyond all her thought and composition, the predominance of the social philosophy in her fiction and poetry, to which we have already referred. We will dismiss the coarse and caricatured distinction between realism and idealism, in which the one is supposed to render truthfully _whatever is_, without any principle of selection or composition; while the other starts with preconceived notions of the _ought to be_, be it from the point of view of formal beauty or spiritual harmony, and proves the facts that are. Art, and the novel above all,--which deals with life at once so clear and familiar to us, and so perplexingly manifold and varied as constantly to elude choice and design,--can neither forego truth nor unity of design.