In Pursuit of Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age

Peter Allan Dale
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

"Lewes' approach is different.  It is self-consciously Aristotelian, indeed, neoclassical in its focus on mimesis or representation rather than expression and effect.  What he wants, above all, to write about is the relation between artistic structures and the real structure of the world; what he wants, above all, to recommend is that that relation to be literal or transparent, not symbolic.  In this we may, in fact, find him even more of a positivist in criticism than Mill, who, after all, allowed poetry its symbolic existence, where one might, for a time, escape from the rigors fo scientific analysis.  Correlatively, Lewes is still more radically opposed to the romantic aesthetic than is Mill, whose concept of the poetic derives from Coleridge and Carlyle, even as it reduces the symbol's metaphysical referents to psychological ones."  (65-66)