Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/90

the fusion, of the two modes of work. In the catastrophe of The Mill on the Floss the novelist describes the mass of broken timber bearing down upon the brother and sister (physicists say the boat would always keep ahead). Tom sees it, cries, 'It is coming, Maggie!' clasps her, and they meet their fate. For the artist who only wished to realise the scene this would suffice. But with George Eliot there is the equal need to 'moralise' it, and so she continues: 'The boat reappeared—but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted: living through again in one supreme moment the days when they had clasped their little hands in love and roamed the daisied fields together.' The beauty of this passage must not blind us to its inartistic, or rather extra-artistic, character. The emotions, æsthetic or moral, which the artist desired to produce by this reference to childhood's days ought to have been produced spontaneously by the catastrophe itself if the previous presentation of their childhood had been artistically effective. But it is George Eliot's peculiarity that she tries to bring into consciousness those feelings which her narrative ought to have produced by itself. She makes two attempts to produce her effect—by artistic presentation and by philosophic reflection. By so endeavouring she practically