Eliot, George - Henry James (review date 1868)

Henry James (review date 1868)

SOURCE: A review of The Spanish Gypsy, in A Century of George Eliot Criticism, edited by Gordon S. Haight, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965, pp. 55-64.

[In the following review, which was originally published in The North American Review in October 1868, James comments on the inferiority of Eliot's poetry in comparison with her novels.]

I know not whether George Eliot has any enemies, nor why she should have any; but if perchance she has, I can imagine them to have hailed the announcement of a poem from her pen as a piece of particularly good news. "Now, finally," I fancy them saying, "this sadly overrated author will exhibit all the weakness that is in her; now she will prove herself what we have all along affirmed her to be,—not a serene, self-directing genius of the first order, knowing her powers and respecting them, and content to leave well enough alone, but a mere showy rhetorician,...

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