That George Eliot's direct influence is no longer active
does not cancel her importance as a molder of English
fiction. Indeed the fact that an influence has been absorbed
and diffused is an indication that is was worth assimilating,
and this is for our purpose the main consideration.

If we were searching only for affiliations and dependences
it might be difficult to indicate George Eliot's importance
in her craft. She is, when we strike the balance, decidedly
more a creditor than a debtor. Something she owed to
Fielding and something less to Scott, but so far as her own
contemporaries are concerned she was perpetually pulling
in a contrary direction. She stands for nothing almost
that is to be found in the novels of Dickens, Thackeray,
or George Sand. It is definitely less difficult to indicate
successors who reaped from her sowing. Henry James was
no one author's disciple, but of the blended influence of
Balzac, Mérimée, Turgénev, and George Eliot he was
himself consciously aware; and a novelist who can claim
James as a transmitting medium is assured of a vicarious
immortality were his books forever unopened on our
shelves.

It was her philosophy and powers of observation that
impressed James rather than her art. "It is to this union
of the keenest observation with the ripest reflection, that
her style owes its essential force. She is a thinker, not,
perhaps, a passionate one, but at least a serious one; and
the term can be applied with either adjective neither to
Dickens nor Thackeray. The constant play of lively and

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