Now a strikingly similar contrast obtains as between George Eliot and Charles Dickens. Every one will recognize as soon as it is mentioned the microscopic analysis of character throughout George Eliot as compared with the rapid cartoon-strokes by which Dickens brings out his figures. But the antithesis cannot be left here as between George Eliot and Dickens; for it is the marvel of the former's art that, though so cool and analytic, it nevertheless sets before us perfect living flesh-and blood people by fusing the whole analytic process with a synthetic fire of the true poet's human sympathy.
And here we come upon a farther difference between George Eliot and Dickens of which we shall have many and beautiful examples in the works we have to study. This is a large, poetic tolerance of times and things which, though worthy of condemnation, nevertheless appeal to our sympathy because they once were closely bound with our fellow-men's daily life. For example, George Eliot writes often and lovingly about the England of the days before the Reform Bill, the careless, picturesque country-squire England; not because she likes it, or thinks it better than the England of the present, but with much the same feeling with which a woman looks at the ragged, hob-nailed shoes of her boy who is gone--a boy who doubtless was often rude and disobedient and exasperating to the last degree, but who was her boy.
A keen insight into this remarkable combination of the poetic tolerance with the sternness of scientific accuracy possessed by this remarkable woman--the most remarkable of all writers in this respect, we should say, except Shakspeare--is offered us in the opening lines of the first chapter of her first story, _Amos Barton_. (I love to look at this wonderful faculty in its germ). The chapter begins: "Shepperton Church was a very different looking building five-and-twenty years ago.... Now there is a wide span of slated roof flanking the old steeple; the windows are tall and symmetrical; the outer doors are resplendent with oak graining, the inner doors reverentially noiseless with a garment of red baize;" and we have a minute description of the church as it is. Then we have this turn in the next paragraph, altogether wonderful for a George Eliot who has been translating Strauss and Feuerbach, studying physics, Comtism and the like among the London agnostics, a fervent disciple of progress, a frequent contributor to the _Westminster Review_; "Immense improvement! says the well-regulated mind, which unintermittingly rejoices in the new police ... the penny-post, and all guaranties of human advancement, and has no moments when conservative reforming intellect takes a nap, while imagination does a little Toryism by the sly, revelling in regret that dear old brown, crumbling, picturesque inefficiency is everywhere giving place to spick-and-span, new-painted, new-varnished efficiency, which will yield endless diagrams, plans, elevations and sections, but alas! no picture. Mine, I fear is not a well-regulated mind: it has an occasional tenderness for old abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over the days of nasal clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for the departed shades of vulgar errors." And it is worth while, if even for an aside, to notice in the same passage how this immense projection of herself out of herself into what we may fairly call her antipodes, is not only a matter of no strain, but from the very beginning is accompanied by that eye-twinkle between the lines which makes much of the very ruggedest writing of George Eliot's like a Virginia fence from between whose rails peep wild roses and morning-glories.