Note 11 to Chapter 3 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
"Realism in Art," p. 499. Cf. Lewes's essay on "The Novels of Jane Austen," p. 102: "It is obvious that the thing represented will determine degrees in art. Raphael will always rank higher than Teniers; Sophocles and Shakespeare will never be lowered to the rank of Lope de Vega and Scribe." On Lewes's objections to "ugliness" and "horrible realities" in fiction, see Alice R. Kaminsky, George Henty Lewes as Literary Critic (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1968), pp. 80, 90, and Walter M. Kendrick, "Balzac and British Realism: Mid-Victorian Theories of the Novel," Victorian Studies, 20 (1976), 13-14..
Last modified 20 September 2000