ABSTRACT
We know that Yeats was not sympathetic to George Eliot. Balzac was the only nineteenth-century novelist Yeats liked - 'it is hard', Denis Donoghue suggests, 'to think of Yeats as a reader of Middlemarch. When he writes of society, it seems to consist of invisible men ... his imagination is stirred by the theme of race, kindred, blood, consanguinity.'2 Donoghue has in mind the following passage from 'At Stratford-on-Avon':
Balzac would have us understand that behind the momentary self which acts and lives in the world, and is subject to the judgement of the world, there is that which cannot be called before any mortal judgement seat, even though a great poet, or novelist, or philosopher, be sitting upon it. Great literature ... is ... the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin as in George Eliot, who plucks Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else. George Eliot has a fierceness hardly to be found but in a woman turned argumentative ... she grew up in a century of utilitarianism, when nothing about a man seemed important except his utility to the state.3
