Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/47

Browning's); there was evidently not that direct rapport with her audience which is a necessary pre-requisite of all great literary art. However well suited Comtean conceptions may be for appeals to the literary emotions, such appeals cannot fail to be less telling when accompanied by elaborate explanations of the conceptions upon which their efficacy depends. This reflective or scientific side of her later works has seriously diminished their effectiveness, and the attempt to rouse an interest in the history of modern Judaism in Daniel Deronda was, with the ordinary reader, a complete failure. And it must be remembered that in really great works of art the decision rests with the 'ordinary reader'; success is here the real test of merit. No poem is great if only a small coterie admire it. What is to be the decision on George Eliot's last two great works depends upon the future of the speculative system with which they are connected. If the social philosophy there taught be that of the future, then Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda may become as gospels. But the risk has been run of subordinating the eternal truths of art to what may be the temporary opinions of science; and, in any case, the presence of the purely analytical element in her later works must necessarily detract from