1819.—Mary Ann Evans, “George Eliot,” born November 22 at South Farm, Arbury, in Warwickshire. 1820–1841.—Lived at Griff House, Nuneaton, in the midst of farmhouses, and scenery described in “Adam Bede” and “The Mill on the Floss.” 1824–1827.—Attended Miss Lathom’s boarding school. 1827–1831.—Attended Miss Wellington’s school and read Bunyan, Defoe, Johnson, Scott, Lamb, etc. 1831–1834.—At the Misses Franklin’s school at Coventry, under strong Calvinistic influences. 1836.—Death of her brother; domestic cares; learns Italian and German; studies music, science, metaphysics, mathematics, and the great English poets. 1841.—March, removed to Coventry with her father; friendship with the Brays, resulting in a change in her religious views to Unitarianism; domestic disturbances. 1846.—Translated Strauss’s “Leben Jesu.” 1849.—May 31, death of her father, Robert Evans. 1849–1850.—Visited France and Italy; resided eight months in Geneva. 1851–1857.—Wrote for the Westminster Review, of which she became assistant editor; met Lewes, Chapman, Spencer, and the Martineaus. 1853.—Removed to Hyde Park, London. 1854.—Translated Feuerbach’s “Essence of Christianity.” 1854–1858.—Union with George Henry Lewes, journalist and philosopher; spent eight months in Weimar and Berlin; wrote for the Leader and Westminster. 1856–1858.—Publication of “Scenes of Clerical Life;” end of her incognito. 1859.—Publication of “Adam Bede,” her first long novel. 1860.—Publication of “The Mill on the Floss;” visited Italy. 1861.—Publication of “Silas Marner;” visited Florence in May. 1863.—Publication of her great Italian novel “Romola,” begun in the Cornhill Magazine for July, 1862. 1866.—Publication of “Felix Holt,” a socialistic novel. 1867.—Visited Spain. 1868.—Publication of “The Spanish Gypsy,” a dramatic poem, and other poems, “Agatha,” “How Liza Loved the King,” “Brother and Sister,” etc. 1870.—Journey to Berlin and Vienna. 1871–1872.—Publication of “Middlemarch.” 1872–1873—Visited Hamburg and Cambridge. 1874.—Publication of “Legend of Jubal,” and other poems. 1876.—Publication of “Daniel Deronda,” a Jewish novel. 1877.—Removed to “The Heights,” her country home in Surrey. 1878.—Met Turgenev and the Crown Prince and Princess of Germany; death of Lewes, November 28. 1879.—Publication of “Theophrastus Such.” 1880.—May 6, marriage with John Walter Cross; death December 22.

  Miss Evans (who wrote “Adam Bede”) was the daughter of a steward, and gained her exact knowledge of English rural life by the connection with which this origin brought her with the farmers. She was entirely self-educated, and has made herself an admirable scholar in classical as well as in modern languages. Those who knew her had always recognized her wonderful endowments, and only watched to see in what way they would develop themselves. She is a person of the simplest manners and character, amiable and unpretending, and Mrs. B— spoke of her with great affection and respect.

  It was at Villino Trollope, [the Florentine residence of Mr. T. Adolphus Trollope] that we first saw … George Eliot. She is a woman of forty, perhaps, of large frame and fair Saxon coloring. In heaviness of jaw and height of cheek-bone she greatly resembles a German; nor are her features unlike those of Wordsworth, judging from his pictures. The expression of her face is gentle and amiable, while her manner is particularly timid and retiring. In conversation, Mrs. Lewes is most entertaining, and her interest in young writers is a trait which immediately takes captive all persons of this class. We shall not forget with what kindness and earnestness she addressed a young girl who had just began to handle a pen, how frankly she related her own literary experience, and how gently she suggested advice. True genius is always allied to humility, and in seeing Mrs. Lewes do the work of a good Samaritan so unobtrusively, we learned to respect the woman as much as we had ever admired the writer. “For years,” said she to us, “I wrote reviews because I knew too little of humanity.”

  July 14th.—A. travelled down from London with G. H. Lewes, who took him to his home at Witley and introduced him to Mrs. Lewes (George Eliot). A. thought her “like the picture of Savonarola.”… July 22nd—… A. and Hallam called on Mr. and Mrs. Lewes. She is delightful in a tête-à-tête, and speaks in a soft soprano voice, which almost sounds like a fine falsetto with her strong masculine face.

  She is an accomplished linguist, a brilliant talker, a musician of extraordinary skill. She has a musical sense so delicate and exquisite that there are tender, simple, true ballad melodies which fill her with a pathetic pain almost too keen to bear; and yet she has the firm, strong command of tone and touch, without which a really scientific musician cannot be made. I do not think this exceeding sensibility of nature is often to be found in combination with a genuine mastery of the practical science of music. But Mrs. Lewes has mastered many sciences as well as literatures. Probably no other novel writer, since novel writing became a business, ever possessed one tithe of her scientific knowledge…. Mrs. Lewes is all genius and culture. Had she never written a page of fiction, nay, had she never written a line of poetry or prose, she must have been regarded with wonder and admiration by all who knew her as a woman of vast and varied knowledge; a woman who could think deeply and talk brilliantly, who could play high and severe classical music like a professional performer, and could bring forth the most delicate and tender aroma of nature and poetry lying deep in the heart of some simple, old-fashioned Scotch or English ballad. Nature, indeed, seemed to have given to this extraordinary woman all the gifts a woman could ask or have—save one. It will not, I hope, be considered a piece of gossiping personality if I allude to a fact which must, some day or other, be part of literary history. Mrs. Lewes is not beautiful. In her appearance there is nothing whatever to attract admiration.

  No one who had ever seen her could mistake the large head (her brain must be heavier than most men’s) covered with a mass of rich auburn hair. At first I thought her tall; for one could not think that such a head could rest on an ordinary woman’s shoulders. But, as she rose up, her figure appeared but of medium height. She received me very kindly. In seeing, for the first time, one to whom we owed so many happy hours, it was impossible to feel towards her as a stranger. All distance was removed by her courtesy. Her manners are very sweet, because very simple, and free from affectation. To me her welcome was the more grateful as that of one woman to another…. Looking into that clear calm eye, one sees a transparent nature, a soul of goodness and truth, an impression which is deepened as you listen to her soft and gentle tones. A low voice is said to be an excellent thing in woman. It is a special charm of the most finely-cultured English ladies. But never did a sweeter voice fascinate a listener—so soft and low, that one must almost bend to hear…. I should do her great injustice, if I gave the impression that there was in her conversation any attempt at display. There is no wish to “shine.” She is above that affectation of brilliancy which is often mere flippancy. Nor does she seek to attract homage and admiration. On the contrary, she is very averse to speak of herself, or even to hear the heart-felt praise of others. She does not engross the conversation, but is more eager to listen than to talk. She has that delicate tact—which is one of the fine arts among women—to make others talk, suggesting topics the most rich and fruitful, and by a word drawing the conversation into a channel where it may flow with a broad, free current.

  George Eliot is too great for the judgment of any less a critic than posterity. It will read her books in a broader light than we, in the light, also, of personal history of her life and of the literary material which has gone to the making of her books. In the absence of anything authentic about Shakespeare, the legendary deer-stealing became an event in English history. There is no writer who has had a more remarkable personal history than Mrs. Lewes, though she is known to the biographical dictionaries only by the dates of publication of her books, or a history that has had more marked influence on the direction of literary activity.

  Her face, instead of beauty, possessed a sweet benignity, and at times flashed into absolute brilliancy. She was older than I had imagined, for her hair, once fair, was gray, and unmistakable lines of care and thought were on the low, broad brow…. Dressed in black velvet, with point lace on her hair, and repeated at throat and wrists, she made me think at once of Romola and Dorothea Brooke…. She talked as she wrote; in descriptive passages, with the same sort of humor, and the same manner of linking events by analogy and inference. The walls were covered with pictures. I remember Guido’s Aurora, Michael Angelo’s prophets, Raphael’s sibyls, while all about were sketches, landscapes and crayon drawings, gifts from the most famous living painters, many of whom are friends of the house. A grand piano, open and covered with music, indicated recent and continual use.

	Dead! Is she dead?
	And all that light extinguished!
	*        *        *        *        *
	How plain I see her now.
	The twilight tresses, deepening into night,
	The brow a benediction, and the eyes
	Seat where compassion never set, and like
	That firm, fixed star, which altereth not its place
	While all the planets round it sink and swim,
	Shone with a steady guidance. O, and a voice
	Matched with whose modulations softest notes
	Of dulcimer by daintiest fingers stroked,
	Or zephyrs wafted over summer seas,
	On summer shores subsiding, sounded harsh.
	Listening whereto, steeled obduracy felt
	The need to kneel, necessity to weep,
	And craving to be comforted; a shrine
	Of music and of incense and of flowers,
	Where hearts, at length self-challenged, were content
	Still to be sad and sinful, so they might
	Feel that exonerating pity steal
	In subtle absolution on their guilt.

  However I may lament the circumstances, Westminster Abbey is a Christian Church and not a Pantheon, and the Dean thereof is officially a Christian priest, and we ask him to bestow exceptional Christian honours by this burial in the Abbey. George Eliot is known not only as a great writer, but as a person whose life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian practice in regard to marriage, and Christian theory in regard to dogma. How am I to tell the Dean that I think he ought to read over the body of a person who did not repent of what the Church considers mortal sin, a service not one solitary proposition in which she would have accepted for truth while she was alive? How am I to urge him to do that which, if I were in his place, I should most emphatically refuse to do? You tell me that Mrs. Cross wished for the funeral in the Abbey. While I desire to entertain the greatest respect for her wishes, I am very sorry to hear it. I do not understand the feeling which could create such a desire on any personal grounds, save those of affection, and the natural yearning to be near even in death to those whom we have loved. And on public grounds the wish is still less intelligible to me. One cannot eat one’s cake and have it too. Those who elect to be free in thought and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so called, which the world offers to those who put up with its fetters. Thus, however I look at the proposal it seems to me to be a profound mistake, and I can have nothing to do with it.

	OF THESE IMMORTAL DEAD WHO STILL LIVE ON
	IN MINDS MADE BETTER BY THEIR PRESENCE.
	HERE LIES THE BODY
	OF
	“GEORGE ELIOT”
	MARY ANN CROSS.
	BORN 22ND NOVEMBER, 1819.
	DIED 22ND DECEMBER, 1880.

  George Eliot, when you saw her in repose, had a forbidding countenance. People who did not like her used to say she looked like a horse; a remark which has also been made about a celebrated living actor. It was true so far as this: that the portion of the face below the eyes was disproportionately long and narrow. She had that square fullness of brow over the eyes which Blake had, and which led Blake to affirm that the shape of his head made him a Republican. George Eliot’s radicalism went much farther than mere republicanism. She never can have been a beautiful woman, either in face or figure. She was tall, gaunt, angular, without any flowing ease of motion, though with a self-possession and firmness of muscle and fibre which saved her from the shambling awkwardness often the characteristic of long and loose-jointed people…. Her eyes were, when she talked, luminous and beautiful, dark in colour and of that unfathomable depth and swift changefulness which are seldom to be seen in the same orbs, except in persons whose force of character and force of intellect are both remarkable. They could be very soft, and she smiled with her eyes as well as with that large mouth of hers; and the smile was full of loveliness when it did not turn to mocking or mark that contemptuous mood which was not, I gather, very infrequent with her. In conversation which did not wake this demon of scornfulness, born of conscious intellectual superiority, the face was full of vivacity and light, whether illuminated by a smile or not.

  Her low, soft voice, which is now spoken of as sweet and exquisitely modulated, seemed to me wanting in that something sympathetic and endearing which such voices usually possess. It was not exactly indifferent; but it seemed to have no vibrations of human weakness, whatever later sorrow and passion may have imparted to it. Subdued as it was, it was the voice of a strong woman; of one who needed not to assert herself and cared not for recognition.

  Somewhere about 1827 a friendly neighbor lent “Waverley” to an elder sister of little Mary Evans. It was returned before the child had read to the end, and in her distress at the loss of the fascinating volume she began to write out the story as far as she had read it for herself, beginning naturally where the story begins with Waverley’s adventures at Tully Veolan, and continuing until the surprised elders were moved to get her the book again. Elia divided her childish allegiance with Scott, and she remembered fastening with singular pleasure upon an extract in some stray almanac from the essay in commemoration of “Captain Jackson,” and his “slender ration of single Gloucester,” and proverbs in praise of cheeserind. This is an extreme example of the general rule that a wise child’s taste in literature is sounder than adults generally venture to believe. Not many years later we may imagine her a growing girl at school. Almost on the outskirts of the old town of Coventry, toward the railway station, the house may still be seen, itself an old-fashioned, five-windowed Queen Anne sort of dwelling, with a shell-shaped cornice over the door, with an old timbered cottage facing it, and near adjoining a quaint brick-and-timber building, with an oriel window thrown out upon oak pillars. Between forty and fifty years ago, Methodist ladies kept the school, and the name of “little mamma,” given by her schoolfellows, is a proof that already something was to be seen of the maternal air which characterised her in later years, and perhaps more especially in intercourse with her own sex. Prayer meetings were in vogue among the girls, following the example of their elders, and while taking no doubt a leading part in these, she used to suffer much self-reproach about her coldness and inability to be carried away with the same enthusiasm as others. At the same time nothing was further from her nature than any sceptical inclination, and she used to pounce with avidity upon any approach to argumentative theology within her reach, carrying Paley’s “Evidences” up to her bedroom, and devouring it as she lay upon the floor alone.

  Here [Nuneaton] she was born in November, 1820 [?]; and it seems pleasant to reflect that but a few miles off in the same county of Warwick was the birthplace of Shakspere, whose place among male writers seems more nearly filled by Marian Evans or George Eliot among female writers than by any other woman, so that we have the greatest English man and the greatest English woman born, though two centuries and a half apart in time, but a few miles apart in space.

  It is difficult for any one admitted to the great honor of friendship with either Mr. Lewes or George Eliot to speak of their home without seeming intrusive, in the same way that he would have been who, unauthorized, introduced visitors, yet something may be said to gratify a curiosity which surely is not now impertinent or ignoble. When London was full, the little drawing-room in St. John’s Wood was now and then crowded to overflowing with those who were glad to give their best of conversation, of information, and sometimes of music, always to listen with eager attention to whatever their hostess might say, when all that she said was worth hearing. Without a trace of pedantry, she led the conversation to some great and lofty strain. Of herself and her works she never spoke; of the works and thoughts of others she spoke with reverence, and sometimes even too great tolerance. But those afternoons had the highest pleasure when London was empty or the day wet, and only a few friends were present, so that her conversation assumed a more sustained tone than was possible when the rooms were full of shifting groups. It was then that, without any premeditation, her sentences fell as fully formed, as wise, as weighty, as epigrammatic, as any to be found in her books. Always ready, but never rapid, her talk was not only good in itself, but it encouraged the same in others, since she was an excellent listener, and eager to hear. Yet interesting as seemed to her, as well as to those admitted to them, her afternoons in London, she was always glad to escape when summer came, either for one of the tours on the Continent in which she so delighted, or lately to the charming home she had made in Surrey. She never tired of the lovely scenery about Witley, and the great expanse of view obtainable from the tops of the many hills.

  A woman of strong passions, like her own Maggie, deeply affectionate by nature, of a clinging tenderness of disposition, Marian Evans went through much inward struggle, through many painful experiences before she reached the moral self-government of her later years. Had she not, it is hardly likely that she could have entered with so deep a comprehension into the most intricate windings of the human heart. That, of course, was to a great extent due to her sympathy, sympathy being the strongest quality of her moral nature. She flung herself, as it were, into other lives, making their affairs, their hopes, their sorrows her own. And this power of identifying herself with the people she came near had the effect of a magnet in attracting her fellow-creatures.

  Mrs. Lewes’ manner had a grave simplicity which rose in closer converse into an almost pathetic anxiety to give of her best—to establish a genuine human relation between herself and her interlocutor—to utter words which should remain as an active influence for good in the hearts of those who heard them…. Mrs. Lewes’ humour, though fed from a deep perception of the incongruities of human fates, had not, except in intimate moments, any buoyant or contagious quality, and in all her talk,—full of matter and wisdom and exquisitely worded as it was,—there was the same pervading air of strenuous seriousness which was more welcome to those whose object was distinctly to learn from her than to those who merely wished to pass an idle and brilliant hour.

  On Friday, December 17, 1880, she attended the presentation of the Agamemnon of Æschylus in the original Greek, with the accompaniments of the ancient theatre, by the undergraduates of Balliol College, Oxford. She was very enthusiastic about this revival of ancient art, and planned to read anew all the Greek dramatists with her husband. The next day she attended a popular concert at St. James Hall, and listened with her usual intense interest. Sitting in a draught she caught cold, but that evening she played through much of the music she had heard in the afternoon. The next day she was not so well as usual, yet she met her friends in the afternoon. On Monday her larynx was slightly affected, and a physician was called, but no danger was apprehended. Yet her malady gained rapidly. On Tuesday night she was in a dangerous condition and on Wednesday the pericardium was found to be seriously diseased. Toward midnight of that day, December 22, after a period of unconsciousness, she quietly passed away. She was buried on the 29th, in the unconsecrated portion of Highgate Cemetery, by the side of George Henry Lewes.

  I may mention here that my wife told me the reason she fixed on this name was that George was Mr. Lewes’ Christian name, and Eliot was a good, mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.

  Music was an absorbing passion with her. She played brilliantly, but her technical knowledge was even better than her power of performance. She played only for a few chosen friends. Her music was so intensely part of herself, that she could not give it freely; and it had a wonderful effect upon her. After either performing, or listening to, fine music, she was frequently completely unnerved, unable to command herself, and more likely to break down into tears than to talk calmly. But she enjoyed writing about harmony. No one ever drew the musical nature better than she did in the musician of “Daniel Deronda.”

  Although I had known Mary Ann Evans as a child at her father’s house at Griff, our real acquaintance began in 1841, when after she came with her father to reside near Coventry, my sister, who lived next door to her, brought her to call upon us one morning, thinking, amongst other natural reasons for introducing her, that the influence of this superior young lady of Evangelical opinions might be beneficial to our heretical minds. She was then about one-and-twenty, and I can well recollect her appearance and modest demeanor as she sat down on a low ottoman by the window, and I had a sort of surprised feeling when she first spoke, at the measured, highly-cultivated mode of expression, so different from the usual tones of young persons from the country. We became friends at once. We soon found that her mind was already turning toward greater freedom of thought in religious opinion, that she had even bought for herself Hennell’s “Inquiry,” and there was much mutual interest between the author and herself in their frequent meetings at our house.

  The life of Marian Evans had much I never knew—a doom of fruit without the bloom, like the Niger fig:—

	Her losses make our gains ashamed—
	She bore life’s empty pack
	As gallantly as if the East
	Were swinging at her back.
	Life’s empty pack is heaviest,
	As every porter knows—
	In vain to punish honey,
	It only sweeter grows.

  As a wise, benignant soul George Eliot will still remain for all right-judging men and women.

  It is a pleasant, substantial house [Griff House], built of warm red brick, with old-fashioned, small-paned casement windows. The walls are almost hidden by creepers, a glorious old pear-tree, roses and jessamine, and over one end a tangle of luxuriant ivy. Across the smooth green lawn and its flower beds, an old stone vase covered with golden lichen made a point of color beneath the silver stems of a great birch-tree. Outside the light iron fence a group of sheep were bleating below a gnarled and twisted oak. Behind them rose the rich purple-brown wood we had come through, and beyond the wood we caught glimpses of far-away blue distance, swelling uplands and wide-stretching valleys, with here and there a huge chimney sending up a column of black smoke or white puff of steam. On the house roof pigeons were cooing forth their satisfaction at the sunshine. From the yew-tree close by, a concert of small chirping voices told that spring was coming, while a blackbird in the bushes made violent love to his mate, and wooed her with jovial, rollicking song. Within, the house is in much the same state as in the days of Mary Ann Evans’s girlhood.

  Conceive, next, the tenth Muse, or Sibyl, lounging in an arm-chair and shading her face idly with a hand screen; a powerful-looking, middle-aged woman, with a noticeable nose and chin, a low forehead, a fresh complexion, and full and very mobile mouth. Dress, on this occasion, a plainly cut, tight-fitting dress of blue cashmere, fastened at the throat with a cameo brooch. This was “Mawrian Evans,” as Carlyle called her, the George Eliot of the novels. She realised in face and form the description I afterward gave to her in the “Session of the Poets:”

	George Eliot gazed on the company boldly
	With the limbs of a sylph and the head of John Locke!

I had been particularly struck by her resemblance to Locke’s well-known portrait, engraved as a frontispiece of the famous “Essay.” At that time her figure was graceful to elegance. When I last saw her, shortly before her husband’s death, she stooped painfully as she walked, and wore an old-fashioned crinoline.

  She was not, as the world in general is aware, a handsome, or even a personable woman. Her face was long; the eyes not large, nor beautiful in color—they were, I think, of a grayish blue—the hair, which she wore in old-fashioned braids coming low down on either side of her face, of a rather light brown. It was streaked with gray when last I saw her. Her figure was of middle height, large-boned and powerful. Lewes often said that she inherited from her peasant ancestors a frame and constitution originally very robust. Her head was finely formed, with a noble and well-balanced arch from brow to crown. The lips and mouth possessed a power of infinitely varied expression. George Lewes once said to me when I made some observation to the effect that she had a sweet face (I meant that the face expressed great sweetness): “You might say what a sweet hundred faces! I look at her sometimes in amazement. Her countenance is constantly changing.” The said lips and mouth were distinctly sensuous in form and fulness…. Her speaking voice was, I think, one of the most beautiful I ever heard, and she used it conscientiously, if I may say so. I mean that she availed herself of its modulations to give thrilling emphasis to what was profound in her utterances, and sweetness to what was gentle or playful. She bestowed great care, too, on her enunciation, disliking the slipshod mode of pronouncing which is so common. I have several times heard her declare with enthusiasm that ours is a beautiful language, a noble language even to the ear, when properly spoken; and imitate with disgust the short, snappy, inarticulate way in which many people utter it.

  Her marriage with Mr. John Cross took place on May 6, 1880. It would be wrong to attempt to present any other account of this than that which Mr. Cross has himself given in the life of his wife. The marriage was severely criticised at the time by her best friends. This was due to various causes. Second marriages are absolutely forbidden by the Positivist creed, and her breach of this rule would be sure to alienate all who were of this persuasion. The world, which has forgiven her relations with Lewes on the ground that they arose from an overmastering devotion, was shocked when it found that the affection which had caused such an act of sacrifice was capable of being succeeded by another equally strong. The difference of nearly twenty years between the age of the bride and bridegroom also gave occasion for remark. On the other hand, no one can have studied the character of George Eliot, even superficially, without being convinced how necessary it was for her to have some one to depend upon, and how much her nature yearned for sympathy and support. No better companion could certainly have been found than Mr. Cross, with his strong vigorous sense, manly character, and business habits.

  There is no good portrait, I believe, of her. She had long features, and would have been called plain but for her solemn, earnest eyes, which had an expression quite in keeping with her voice, which was one not easily forgotten. I never detected in her any trace of genial humour, though I doubt not that it was latent in her; and I thought her a person who had drawn her ideas far more from books and an acquaintance with certain types of humanity whom she had set herself deliberately to study—albeit with rare perception—than from an easy intuitive familiarity with all sorts and conditions of men. But she worked out thoroughly what she knew by the intuition of genius, though in this she was very far inferior to Scott.

  After this first visit to “The Priory,” the doors were kindly open to us on Sundays during our stay in London. Unhappily, I have no notes of those visits, nor of George Eliot’s conversation, but I must always remember how the beauty of her voice impressed me. I also remarked the same quality I have mentioned in speaking of her letters—a sense of perfectness in her presentation of any scene or subject. I recall this impression especially in connection with a description she gave one afternoon of a late visit to Germany, portraying the charm of living in one of the places (was it Ilmenau?) made classic to us by association with Goethe. The whole was so clearly yet simply and vigorously said, that any listener, ignorant of her fame, must have felt her unusual qualities both of mind and heart.

  Only her intimate friends knew the exhausting labour which she bestowed on her books, and the untiring patience with which she strove to answer every call made on her attention by friendship, or her own household, or any incident of her literary life. Everything she did was carefully planned and studiously worked out; and whether it was a letter, the visit of a friend, a foreign tour, or the plot of a novel, she put into it the best she had, and the utmost pains to make it perfect. Where she failed at all, I think, was in spontaneity, verve, and abandon. This extreme conscientiousness to do everything as well as she could do it gave a certain air of stiffness to her letters, made some of her books overcharged and langweilig (this is especially true of “Romola”), and it certainly ruined her poetry.

Marriage

  If there is any one action or relation of my life which is, and always has been, profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr. Lewes. It is, however, natural enough that you should mistake me in many ways, for not only are you unacquainted with Mr. Lewes’s real character and the course of his actions, but also it is several years now since you and I were much together, and it is possible that the modifications my mind has undergone may be quite in the opposite direction of what you imagine. No one can be better aware than yourself that it is possible for two people to hold different opinions on momentous subjects with equal sincerity, and an equally earnest conviction that their respective opinions are alone the truly moral ones. If we differ on the subject of the marriage laws, I at least can believe of you that you cleave to what you believe to be good; and I don’t know of anything in the nature of your views that should prevent you from believing the same of me. How far we differ I think we neither of us know, for I am ignorant of your precise views; and, apparently, you attribute to me both feelings and opinions which are not mine. We cannot set each other quite right in this matter in letters, but one thing I can tell you in few words. Light and easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically. Women who are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done. That any unworldly, unsuperstitious person who is sufficiently acquainted with the realities of life can pronounce my relation to Mr. Lewes immoral, I can only understand by remembering how subtile and complex are the influences that mould opinion. But I do remember this: and I indulge in no arrogant or uncharitable thoughts about those who condemn us, even though we might have expected a somewhat different verdict. From the majority of persons, of course, we never looked for anything but condemnation. We are leading no life of self-indulgence, except, indeed, that, being happy in each other, we find everything easy. We are working hard to provide for others better than we provide for ourselves, and to fulfil every responsibility that lies upon us. Levity and pride would not be a sufficient basis for that.

  Of her relations to Lewes it seems to me discussion is not now possible. It is known that Lewes’s wife had once left him, that he had generously condoned the offence and received her again, and that in a year she again eloped; the laws of England make such a condonation preclude divorce; Lewes was thus prevented from legally marrying again by a technicality of the law which converted his own generosity into a penalty; under these circumstances George Eliot, moved surely by pure love, took up her residence with him, and according to universal account, not only was a faithful wife to him for twenty years until his death, but was a devoted mother to his children. That her failure to go through the form of marriage was not due to any contempt for that form, as has sometimes been absurdly alleged, is conclusively shown by the fact that when she married Mr. Cross, a year and a half after Lewes’s death, the ceremony was performed according to the regular rites of the Church of England.

	Pass on, O world, and leave her to her rest!
	Brothers, be silent while the drifting snow
	Weaves its white pall above her, lying low
	With empty hands crossed idly on her breast.
	O sisters, let her sleep! while unrepressed
	Your pitying tears fall silently and slow,
	Washing her spotless, in their crystal flow,
	Of that one stain whereof she stands confessed.
	Are we so pure that we should scoff at her,
	Or mock her now, low lying in her tomb?
	God knows how sharp the thorn her roses wore,
	Even what time their petals were astir
	In the warm sunshine, odorous with perfume.
	Leave her to Him who weighed the cross she bore!

  George Eliot was at heart too pure and noble as well as great to need any veil hung over her career. This is not meant in any sense to justify anything in that career that the highest laws of life will not justify. It is only to say that what George Eliot thought of it all in her own deep heart and mind, and which she has probably revealed in some of her letters, is the very divine secret of human existence that the struggling human heart everywhere longs to know. And in George Eliot’s case supremely it is this aspect of her life as understood and believed in or regretted by herself that everybody wants to understand. A hundred years hence her fidelity to George Lewes and her convictions about that will outweigh a thousand Daniel Derondas. George Eliot was a martyr to a mistaken idea of life. It is a new phase of martyrdom, and all the more important because she bore it like a saint.

  Is it strange that Marion Evans was often sad? that the knowledge of her power over men and women was more fruitful of sorrow than of delight to her? I may be wrong in thinking, but I like to think, that one of the motives, which determined her to accept the love of the man, to whom she gave her hand after Mr. Lewes’s death, was that she might, by the celebration of her marriage, do her best to preserve her name and fame and the story of her former life from being used to discredit an institution and a rite she venerated. Anyhow her marriage was an act, by which she publicly and impressively declared her disapproval of the great purpose of the enemies of marriage, and denied their right to speak of her as one of themselves. The act was thus interpreted by those innovators, who at the time of the marriage spoke with no little warmth of her miserable abandonment of their cause and principles…. She could not have proclaimed more effectually her deliberate opinion that the ordinances of marriage are salutary and sacred, and that it is the duty of women to comply with them. Instead of making for the end desired by the extreme Shelleyan Socialists, the story of the great novelist’s life sets forth nothing more clearly than that she regarded the main condition of her association with Mr. Lewes, regretfully.

  Society was at first as stern to George Eliot after her domestic intimacy with Lewes as Mrs. Carlyle had been. I remember hearing an instance of this some years after that connection was formed. Lewes and George Eliot once thought of establishing a domicile in Kent, and a south-eastern semi-suburb of London, much tenanted by wealthy city-people. When news of the intention of the distinguished pair reached the denizens of the region a council of male and female heads of families was held to consider whether George Eliot should be “received.” It was decided that she should not. As is well known, public opinion altered in course of time, and ultimately, the lady rejected by London citizens was courted and caressed by daughters of Queen Victoria herself.

  George Eliot’s more transcendental friends never forgave her for marrying. In a morally immoral manner they washed their virtuous hands of her. I could not help thinking it was the most natural thing for the poor woman to do. She was a heavily laden but interesting derelict, tossing among the breakers, without oars or rudder, and all at once the brave Cross arrives, throws her a rope, and gallantly tows her into harbour. I am sure that she was very sensitive, and must have had many a painful half-hour as the helpmate of Mr. Lewes. By accepting the position, she had placed herself in opposition to the moral instincts of most of those whom she held most dear. Though intellectually self-contained, I believe she was singularly dependent on the emotional side of her nature. With her, as with nearly all women, she needed a something to lean upon. Though her conduct was socially indefensible, it would have been cruel, it would be stupid, to judge her exactly as one would judge an ordinary offender. What a genius she must have had to have been able to draw so many high-minded people to her! I have an impression that she felt her position acutely, and was unhappy. George Eliot was much to be pitied. I think she knew that I felt for her … for more than once, when I was taking leave, she said, “Come and see me soon, Mr. Locker; don’t lose sight of us.” And this to an outsider, a nobody, and not in her set!

  Nothing can be sadder or more melancholy than the conclusion, which after events seem to have too surely proved, that the dream of these two distinguished intellects, of these two lonely hearts, was dispelled, and that their poor “house of cards” tottered and fell. It is to their credit, perhaps, that while they lived they let no human eye behold its ruins; that they bravely and valiantly enveloped them with flowers, meeting a malignant world with smiling front. We respect them as we do the man who covers, and does not flaunt his rags, who hides and does not display his infirmity…. It is to be supposed that whatever the end of the drama may have been which was played out between these two, at its beginning Marian Evans gauged what she was giving, knew what it would mean to her, and what it did. This liaison was at any rate a marriage; and if it wrung that tardy respect which is accorded to courage and consistency, even when ill-directed, it carried with it all the responsibilities of those ill-assorted unions to which death alone shall bring release. If others saw a certain measure of consecration in the relations of George Eliot and Mr. Lewes, in what were they to blame? They proclaimed themselves the prophets of no new freedom. Their position was rather defined by reticence and silence…. But if the “house of cards” crumbled at last, let it be remembered that many such frail fabrics have fallen before upon which the benediction of the Church of England has been spoken. We can hardly look upon the fatal blight which sapped at its foundation this particular edifice as the direct requital of an offended heaven.

  Mrs. Procter declared [1884] that she “had never called on George Eliot; that she would not have taken a house-maid with such a character.” This brought out Browning and Lord Houghton, who told me many hitherto unknown stories about Thornton Hunt, the supposed lover of the first Mrs. Lewes; of Lewes himself, and of George Eliot, who seemed to have been most generous and self-sacrificing in giving up fame and name for Lewes, whom they did not think deserved so much goodness.

  Lewes was a brilliant talker of the firework school, and no mean dilettante in art and literature. Scholars affirm he had not the least glimmer of insight into what the Greeks of old meant by their philosophy; it was just the most dangerous mind to have control over George Eliot’s brain, that much larger and more powerful machine.

Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857–58

  I trouble you with a MS. of “Sketches of Clerical Life” which was submitted to me by a friend who desired my good offices with you. It goes by this post. I confess that before reading the MS. I had considerable doubts of my friend’s powers as a writer of fiction; but, after reading it, these doubts were changed into very high admiration. I don’t know what you will think of the story, but, according to my judgment, such humor, pathos, vivid presentation, and nice observation have not been exhibited (in this style) since the “Vicar of Wakefield;” and, in consequence of that opinion, I feel quite pleased in negotiating the matter with you.

  The January number begins with the first of a new series by an unknown writer. I do not even know his name. If he is not a first-rate, he is the best simulation I have seen for many a day. All who have read the proof here agree in my admiration. Mr. Simpson’s only fear is that “Amos Barton” being so perfectly admirable, the man must have exhausted himself in the first story of the series. What will be the effect of two first-rate series going on in the Magazine at once? (The other was Bulwer’s “What will He do with It?”) It has long been a dream of mine that such a combination might work wonders, and now there seems a chance of realising it. I recollect offering Warren any amount if he would set to work on a series while “My Novel” was going on.

  Sir,—Will you consider it impertinent in a brother author and old reviewer to address a few lines of earnest sympathy and admiration to you, excited by the purity of your style, originality of your thoughts, and absence of all vulgar seeking for effect in those “Scenes of Clerical Life” now appearing in Blackwood? If I mistake not much, your muse of invention is no hackneyed one, and your style is too peculiar to allow of your being confounded with any of the already well-known writers of the day. Your great and characteristic charm is, to my mind, Nature…. What I see plainly I admire honestly, and trust that more good remains behind. Will you always remain equally natural? That is the doubt. Will the fear of the critic, or the public, or the literary world, which spoils almost every one, never master you? Will you always write to please yourself, and preserve the true independence which seems to mark a real supremacy of intellect? But these questions are, I fear, impertinent. I will conclude. Pardon this word of greeting from one whom you may never see or know, and believe me your earnest admirer.

  My Dear Sir,—I have been so strongly affected by the two first tales in the book you have had the kindness to send me, through Messrs. Blackwood, that I hope you will excuse my writing to you to express my admiration of their extraordinary merit. The exquisite truth and delicacy both of the humor and the pathos of these stories, I have never seen the like of; and they have impressed me in a manner that I should find it very difficult to describe to you, if I had the impertinence to try. In addressing these few words of thankfulness to the creator of the Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, and the sad love-story of Mr. Gilfil, I am (I presume) bound to adopt the name that it pleases that excellent writer to assume. I can suggest no better one: but I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman. I have observed what seemed to me such womanly touches in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so like a woman since the world began.

  You would not, I imagine, care much for flattering speeches, and to go into detail about the book would carry me farther than at present there is occasion to go. I can only thank you most sincerely for the delight which it has given me; and both I myself, and my wife, trust that the acquaintance which we seem to have made with you through your writings may improve into something more tangible. I do not know whether I am addressing a young man or an old—clergyman or a layman. Perhaps, if you answer this note, you may give us some information about yourself. But at any rate, should business or pleasure bring you into this part of the world, pray believe that you will find a warm welcome if you will accept our hospitality.

  Mr. Eliot’s strength lies in the conception of female character.

  They are intensely realistic pictures of perfectly commonplace life and character. The style of the composition is admirable. It is admirable enough to make these sketches well worth reading for the sake of the style alone. But it is so completely admirable that it scarcely of itself attracts any attention at all.

  If you should be wandering meditatively along the bank of some tiny brook, a brook so narrow that you can leap across it without effort, so quiet in its singing that its loudest tinkle cannot be heard in the next field, carrying upon its bosom no craft that would draw more water than the curving leaf of a wild-rose floating down stream, too small in volume to dream of a mill-wheel and turning nothing more practical than maybe a piece of violet-petal in a little eddy off somewhere,—if, I say, you should be strolling alongside such a brook and should see it suddenly expand, without the least intermediate stage, into a mighty river, turning a thousand great wheels for man’s profit as it swept on to the sea, and offering broad highway and favorable currents to a thousand craft freighted with the most precious cargoes of human aspiration: you would behold the aptest physical semblance of that spiritual phenomenon which we witnessed at our last meeting, when in tracing the quiet and mentally-wayward course of demure Marian Evans among the suave pastorals of her native Warwickshire, we came suddenly upon the year 1857 when her first venture in fiction—“The Scenes of Clerical Life”—appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine and magically enlarged the stream of her influence from the diameter of a small circle of literary people in London to the width of all England.

  The “Scenes of Clerical Life” were to George Eliot’s future works what a bold, spirited sketch is to a carefully elaborated picture. All the qualities that distinguished her genius may be discovered in this, her first essay in fiction. With all Miss Austen’s matchless faculty for painting commonplace characters, George Eliot has that other nobler faculty of showing what tragedy, pathos, and humor may be lying in the experience of a human soul “that looks out through dull gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.”

  A piece of work which in all her after life, George Eliot never surpassed. It was probably only the humourous mise en scène, the delightful picture of the village and the surrounding farms and their inhabitants, Mrs. Hackett, and her neighbours, which he (Mr. Lewes) read in that tremendous moment while the author stood by, not the least aware that her faltering essay was in fact, in its brevity and humility, as perfect a work of genius as ever was given to the world.

  The work of George Eliot which first arrested attention and compelled admiration were the “Scenes of Clerical Life.” There the quality most conspicuous is the intensity of emotion, the concentration of tragic feeling within the sphere of commonplace life. The canvas is small; the incident is uneventful; there is no complexity of plot, and no august dramatic picture. But what impresses us most is, nevertheless, the intense depth of tragic feeling. There is none of the delicate monotone of Jane Austen’s novels, with their smoothness of movement, the subtle delicacy of description, their avoidance of any touch of tragedy. But in George Eliot the depth of feeling is portrayed with restless effort and certainty of hand, and no elaboration is spared that may heighten the effect. The commonplace, the humorous, the restful picture of everyday life, is skilfully worked in; but we never for one moment are allowed to forget that all the side touches are mere contributions to one special aim—that of increasing the intensity of the tragic chord that is to be struck. The style corresponds exactly to this central aim. Not a sentence is other than elaborately framed. Each antithesis of feeling is carefully pressed home. Each incident that is to heighten the effect is told with almost painful care. Each touch of humour is so expressed as to heighten the note of tragedy and contrast. In the very narrowing of the scene, and in the concentration with which it is focussed, we have another proof of the determination with which the author’s purpose is kept in view.

  Arbury Hall was probably finished in or about 1773, as in that year Sir John Astley, of the adjoining Astley Castle, made Sir Roger Newdigate a present of the famous painting depicting the celebrated exploits of Sir John de Astley, who flourished in the early part of the fifteenth century. The outside of the house, with its castellated grey-tinted front and mullioned windows, is easily recognised by all readers of “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story.” It is in the inside, however, that the descriptions of George Eliot force themselves upon the mind as the visitor looks with a curious eye upon the ecclesiastical and other adornments placed in their respective positions by the lavish hand of Sir Roger.

Adam Bede, 1859

  When on October 29, I had written to the end of the love-scene at the Farm between Adam and Dinah, I sent the MS. to Blackwood, since the remainder of the third volume could not affect the judgment passed on what had gone before. He wrote back in warm admiration, and offered me, on the part of the firm, £800 for four years’ copyright. I accepted the offer. The last words of the third volume were written and despatched on their way to Edinburgh, November the 16th, and now on the last day of the same month I have written this slight history of my book. I love it very much, and am deeply thankful to have written it, whatever the public may say to it—a result which is still in darkness, for I have at present had only four sheets of the proof.

  I owe the author much gratitude for some very pleasing hours. The book indeed is worthy of great admiration. There are touches of beauty in the conception of human character that are exquisite, and much wit and much poetry embedded in the “dialect,” which nevertheless the author over-uses. The style is remarkably good whenever it is English and not provincial—racy, original, and nervous. I congratulate you on having found an author of such promise, and published one of the very ablest works of fiction I have read for years.

  I do not think that any novelist has strewed over his work wit so abundant or so varied, so fruitful in surprises, so full of sallies. Mrs. Poyser in “Adam Bede,” is in this respect one of the most extraordinary creations of prose fiction.

  It is as a picture, or rather as a series of pictures, that I find “Adam Bede” most valuable. The author succeeds better in drawing attitudes of feeling than in drawing movements of feeling.

  Of “Dinah” we scarcely can trust ourselves to speak. The character is so eminently and heartily Christian, even in the most of its finer shades, that we do not care to point out the particulars in which it betrays the want of the entirest sympathy on the part of the author. Surely it was written from the fresh remembrances of days of warm and confiding Christian faith, now perhaps under the chill of an honest, and a temporary eclipse.

  Is always likely to remain George Eliot’s most popular work. It is a story of which any English author, however great his name, could not fail to have been proud. Everything about it (if I except perhaps a touch of melodrama connected with the execution scene) is at once simple and great, and the plot is unfolded with singular simplicity, purity, and power.

  We feel inclined to call her best work.

  That beautiful Dinah Morris you will remember in “Adam Bede,”—solemn, fragile, strong, Dinah Morris, the woman-preacher whom I find haunting my imagination in strange but entrancing unions of the most diverse forms, as if, for instance, a snowdrop could also be St. Paul, as if a kiss could be a gospel, as if a lovely phrase of Chopin’s most inward music should become suddenly an Apocalypse revealing us Christ in the flesh,—that rare, pure and marvelous Dinah Morris who would alone consecrate English literature if it had yielded no other gift to man…. This publication of “Adam Bede” placed George Eliot decisively at the head of English novel-writers, with only Dickens for second, even.

  Where in modern fiction shall we find more of the exhilarating surprise that is the offspring of wit, or humour more profoundly, yet more laughingly wise, than are to be found in the pages of “Adam Bede?” Where, out of those pages, shall we find fitting counterparts to the immortal Mrs. Poyser, and her fellow-immortal, the amiable cynic, Bartle Massey. The humour of Scott never pierces into the heart of things, as does that of George Eliot; the humour of Dickens, glorious in its frolicsome extravagance, is clownish and superficial, and cannot be compared with the “ideal comedy,”—to use Shelley’s expression—which we find in the prose drama of George Eliot.

  Whether, in Dinah Morris, George Eliot intended to represent Mrs. Evans or not, she did represent her faithfully and fully…. The only point at which the writer has deviated from fact is in the marriage of Dinah and Adam. As a matter of fact the real Dinah married Seth Bede (Samuel Evans). Adam was George Eliot’s father, Robert Evans.

  Every conscience, as well as every imagination, will be clarified and invigorated by the perusal of “Adam Bede,” the first work of the author that attracted wide public attention. A novel of the real school, humble in its characters, faithful in its portraiture, and beyond praise in its moral spirit. The epoch is of the eighteenth century.

  George Eliot never drew a more living figure than this of Hetty, hiding such a hard little heart under that soft dimpling beauty of hers. Again, I think that only a woman would have depicted just such a Hetty as this. The personal charms of this young girl are drawn in words that have the glow of life itself; yet while intensely conscious of her beauty, we are kept aware all the time that, to use one of the famous Mrs. Poyser’s epigrammatic sayings, Hetty is “no better nor a cherry wi’ a hard stone inside it.” George Eliot is never dazzled or led away by her own bewitching creation as a man would have been.

  The first and last master-piece of George Eliot. “Adam Bede” breaks upon the reader with all the freshness and truth of nature. Every element influencing character is expressed in the workings of the very souls of the rural, half-educated folk acting out their lives according to their conscience, their early training, and their personal character. Their beliefs are there, and their lives are colored by their beliefs.

  George Eliot, who had personally experienced the sentiment of Christianity in its purest and most intimate form, has created to prove its efficacy the sweet and admirable figure of Dinah Morris. This young and beautiful woman, borne up by religious enthusiasm, devotes her whole life, her ardent soul, her persuasive tongue, her courageous labours, to the ideal of charity taught her by the Gospel. She is above all rigidity of form, above all prejudice. A powerful movement bears her on: She overflows with love and compassion, and in the intensity of her feelings this weak girl finds a supreme force.

  Adam Bede was a new book, and in this I had my first knowledge of that great intellect for which I had no passion, indeed, but always the deepest respect, the highest honor; and which has from time to time profoundly influenced me by its ethics…. The life and character I have found portrayed there have appealed always to the consciousness of right and wrong implanted in me; and from no one has this appeal been stronger than from George Eliot. Her influence continued through many years, and I can question it now only in the undue burden she seems to throw upon the individual, and her failure to account largely enough for motive from the social environment. There her work seems to me unphilosophical.

  It is of all her books the heartiest, the wittiest, the most cheerful, or rather the least desponding. In that book it may be that she exhausted herself and her own resources of observation as an eye-witness. She wrote fine things in other veins, in different scenes, and she conceived other characters and new situations. But, for all practical purposes “Adam Bede” was the typical romance which everything she had thought or known impelled her to write, in which she told the best of what she had seen and the most important of what she had to say. Had she never written anything but “Adam Bede,” she would have had a special place of her own in English romance:—and I am not sure that anything else which she produced very materially raised, enlarged, or qualified that place.

  The reason why she at first wrote under a nom de plume is plain. To the great wallowing world she was neither Miss Evans nor Mrs. Lewes, so she dropped both names as far as title pages were concerned and used a man’s name instead—hoping better to elude the pack. When “Adam Bede” came out a resident of Nuneaton purchased a copy and at once discovered local earmarks. The scenes described, the flowers, the stone walls, the bridges, the barns, the people—all was Nuneaton. Who wrote it? No one knew, but it was surely some one in Nuneaton. So they picked out a Mr. Liggins, a solemn-faced preacher, who was always about to do something great, and they said “Liggins.” Soon all London said “Liggins.” As for Liggins, he looked wise and smiled knowingly. Then articles began to appear in the periodicals purporting to have been written by the author of “Adam Bede.” A book came out called “Adam Bede, Jr.,” and to protect her publisher, the public, and herself, George Eliot had to reveal her identity.

  No one of George Eliot’s novels has given to the world a larger number of clear and memorable portraits. The weakness and vanity of Hetty, the thoughtless profligacy of the not wholly evil Donnithorne, the genial common sense and humor of Parson Irwine, the rapt and mystic yet most practical piety of Dinah Morris, and the shrewd wit and caustic proverbs of Mrs. Poyser. All these are household words. Of the picture of the hero, Adam Bede himself, the present Bishop Wilkinson once said in his pulpit that it seemed to him the best presentment in modern guise and colour of the earthly circumstances which surrounded the life of the divine Founder of Christianity, as he toiled in the carpenter’s shop, to supply His own, His mother’s wants. That surely is no commonplace effort of fiction which throws any illustrative light, however faint or broken, on the sacred narrative of human redemption.

  The work on which her reputation with the general public still mainly rests.

The Mill on the Floss, 1860

  This “Mill” has delighted me. It has turned out such an amount of good grist, it is so filled with heart-probings and knowledge of human life, so earnestly free from any attempt to dress up, to express, or find a vent for the author’s egotism! It deals sturdily with the real stuff that life is made of, and, like life, constantly makes you wish that the characters were a little different—that this and that would not turn out just so.

  The chief defect—indeed, the only serious one—in “The Mill on the Floss” is its conclusion.

  It is a masterly fragment of fictitious biography in two volumes, followed by a second-rate one-volume novel,—the three connected into a single whole by very inadequate links…. Yet, “The Mill on the Floss” is a book of great genius. Its overflowing humor would alone class its author high among the humorists, and there are some sketches in it of English country life which have all the vivacity and not a little of the power of Sir Walter Scott’s best works.

  Few or none, I should suppose, of the most passionate and intelligent admirers would refuse to accept “The Mill on the Floss” as on the whole at once the highest and the purest and the fullest example of her magnificent and matchless powers—for matchless altogether, as I have already insisted, they undoubtedly are in their own wide and fruitful field of work. The first two-thirds of the book suffice to compose perhaps the very noblest of tragic as well as of humorous prose idyls in the language; comprising, as they likewise do, one of the sweetest as well as saddest and tenderest as well as subtlest examples of dramatic analysis—a study in that kind as soft and true as Rousseau’s, as keen and true as Browning’s, as full as either of the fine and bitter sweetness of a pungent and fiery fidelity. But who can forget the horror of inward collapse, the sickness of spiritual reaction, the reluctant incredulous rage of disenchantment and disgust, with which the first came upon the thrice unhappy third part?

  Is the most poetical of George Eliot’s novels. The great Floss, hurrying between green pastures to the sea, gives a unity of its own to this story, which opens to the roar of waters, the weltering waters which accompany it at the close. It forms the elemental background which rounds the little lives of the ill-starred family group nurtured on its banks.

  Maggie, the heroine of “The Mill on the Floss,” is perhaps the rarest and happiest combination in fiction of a human being living on the flat level of commonplace experiences, and yet invested with a poetic, romantic, and pathetic beauty which touches the very quick of the reader’s sentiment, and allies her creator to Goldsmith and Bunyan in an artless eloquence which is irresistible.

  I suppose it is her best book, though it may not contain her best scenes. The objection which is often made and still oftener felt to the repulsiveness of Maggie’s worship of a counter-jumping cad like Stephen, is somewhat uncritical. I suspect that most women resent it, because they feel the imputation to be true: and most men out of a not wholly dissimilar feeling which acts a little differently.

  A work in which passion and the tumult of the soul are not objectively analyzed but sympathetically portrayed with unsurpassed vividness and elemental power, a work which is undisputably one of the great literary epitomes of the pathos and tragedy of human existence—it is hard to reconcile one’s self to the evolution in which temperament disappeared so completely in devotion to the intellect alone as to result in the jejune artificiality of “Daniel Deronda.”

  If we choose Maggie Tulliver for the representative woman of George Eliot, as we chose Lucy Fountain in the case of Charles Reade, we shall at least be going no farther wrong, I think. She is at any rate typical of that order of heroine which her author most strongly imagined, not quite upon the Miltonian formula for a poem of “simple, sensuous, passionate,” but upon such a variation of it as should read complex, sensuous, passionate. She is, of all the kinds of heroines, the most difficult for men justly to appreciate, and in their failure something of the ignoble slight they feel for her attaches also to her creator.

  In the “Mill on the Floss,” there is a superabundance of talk, and a certain lack of perspective in the characters. When, however, she controls her pen for a supreme effect, as at the death of the brother and sister in the final chapter, then indeed she shows herself a true artist.

Silas Marner, 1861

  “Silas Marner” comes to show in its turn that the author, among the other secrets of genius, possesses that of fecundity…. What wonderful creations are Dinah and Hetty, Maggie and Silas, old Lisbeth and the Dobson family! Every one of George Eliot’s personages, however subordinate the part, however passing the appearance, has a special physiognomy and characteristic style of speaking.

  To a certain extent, I think “Silas Marner” holds a higher place than any of the author’s works. It is more nearly a masterpiece; it has more of that simple, rounded, consummate aspect, that absence of loose ends and gaping issues, which marks a classical work.

  I call “Silas Marner” her most finished work, not only because of the symmetry with which each part is adjusted in relation to the whole, nor because of the absence of those partly satirical, partly moral reflections with which George Eliot usually accompanies the action of her stories, but chiefly on account of the simple pathos of the central motive into which all the different incidents and characters naturally converge.

  Men of letters, I believe, give the palm to “Silas Marner.” They are attracted by the exquisite workmanship of the story. The plot was constructed by George Eliot out of the merest hint. The story was written in haste, at one gush. It is a perfect gem—a pure work of art, in which the demands of art have alone to be considered.

  Comes nearer to being a great success than any of the more elaborate books.

  “Silas Marner” is perhaps by general consent the author’s most perfect work of art. It contains many of her striking characteristics as a thinker and writer, but is free from the vein of philosophic teaching which makes her later novels rather heavy reading. In the story of the linen-weaver of Raveloe we find blended in happy proportion the homely humor and lively portrayal of country life familiar in George Eliot’s earlier novels and the tragic pathos and deep moral purpose of her later work. It is noted as well for its unusual number of strong dramatic situations as for the poetic beauty of its style. It also has special merits for the student who wishes to compare the essay with the novel.

  “Silas Marner” is the only novel in which George Eliot deals with tense, direct action and curtails the profusion of by-play among her minor incidental personages. In all probability this is the work to which posterity will assign the position of honour.

  In Silas Marner George Eliot is a little tempted to fall into the error of the amiable novelists who are given to playing the part of Providence to their character. It is true that the story begins by a painful case of apparent injustice…. A modern “realist” would, I suppose, complain that she had omitted, or touched too slightly for his taste, a great many repulsive and brutal elements in the rustic world. The portraits, indeed, are so vivid as to convince us of their fidelity, but she has selected the less ugly, and taken the point of view from which we see mainly what was wholesome and kindly in the little village community. Silas Marner is a masterpiece in that way, and scarcely equalled in English literature, unless by Mr. Hardy’s rustics in “Far From the Madding Crowd” and other early works.

Romola, 1863

  George Eliot first went astray in “Romola.” All her previous works had been living products of the imagination,—“Romola” was manufactured. A very great piece of work, unquestionably: a piece of work that perhaps produces a higher sense of the writer’s immense and diversified force than any of her other works; but bearing the same relation to art, when compared with Hetty or Janet, that an elaborate imitation of one of the great Italian masters does when compared with a bit of true rainy sky by Turner or one of Wilkie’s dirty boy-faces.

  Her “Romola” is one of the finest historical novels in our language, yet it was a publisher’s failure. Its style was too pure, its art too refined, its pictures too clearly and faithfully drawn, for the readers of her former works. But the book lifted her instantly into a new importance in the estimate of the small class whose verdict is but another term for fame.

  A highly-finished, eloquent, artistic work, and by a select class considered the greatest intellectual effort of the author.

  The Lady who writes over the nom de plume of George Eliot is the greatest living Englishwoman,—a woman who, since Mrs. Browning died, has had no peer as a literary artist among her sex; but she carefully elaborates in her best work a high moral purpose, and, lest some fool may possibly miss or mistake it, she works it all into the last page of “Romola.”

  I have just read through the cheap edition of “Romola,” and though I have only made a few alterations of an important kind—the printing being unusually correct—it would be well for me to send this copy to be printed from. I think it must be nearly ten years since I read the book before, but there is no book of mine about which I more thoroughly feel that I could swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood, such as it is, and with the most ardent care for veracity of which my nature is capable. It has made me often sob with a sort of painful joy as I have read the sentences which had faded from my memory. This helps one to bear false representations with patience; for I really don’t love any Gentleman who undertakes to state my opinions well enough to desire that I should find myself all wrong in order to justify this statement.

  Nobody who did not share the scholar’s enthusiasm could have described the blind scholar in his library in the adorable fifth chapter of “Romola;” and we feel that she must have copied out with keen gusto of her own those words of Petrarch which she puts into old Bardo’s mouth.

  It is, perhaps, the best historical novel ever written. Replete with learning, weighted with knowledge in every page, the finish is so rare that the joints between erudition and imagination cannot be discovered. Read it when you have never been to Florence, it will make you long to go there; read it when you have learnt to love Florence, it will make you love Florence more; read it when you have studied the Renaissance which George Eliot had studied so deeply, and you will feel its beauties as those feel the beauties of a symphony of Beethoven who know the score by heart.

  To call it a complete success is to go too far. The task was too great. To frame in a complex background of historical erudition an ethical problem of even greater complexity and subtlety—this was a task which might have sorely tried even greater powers than hers—a task in which Goethe and Scott might have succeeded, but which Goethe and Scott were too truly the born artists to attempt, without ample care, and too busy with many things to devote to it the required labour. “Romola” is certainly a wonderful monument of literary accomplishments; but it remains a tour de force, too elaborate, too laboured, too intricate, too erudite. As the French say, it has trop de choses, it is too long, too full, over-costumed, too studiously mounted on the stage.

  In “Silas Marner,” beautiful and complete in itself as it is, we have only the preface, to which “Romola” is the accomplished fact. While “Silas Marner” is perfect in its simplicity, “Romola” is great in its complexity. We must remember the stupendous historic background of the story—Florence with all her ancient grandeur, her teeming inhabitants with their cries of joy, of pain, of hope, of revenge; and above all is heard the clarion voice of Savonarola rushing through the Florentine soul like a mad river. All this gigantic background is conjured up to show—what? The evolution of one beautiful life! Great and good people always leave their souls behind them, whether it be in statuary, or books, or deeds. George Eliot has left her living soul with Romola.

  I read it again and again with the sense of moral enlargement which the first fiction to conceive of the true nature of evil gave all of us who were young in that day. Tito Malema was not only a lesson, he was a revelation, and I trembled before him as in the presence of a warning and a message from the only veritable perdition. His life, in which so much that was good was mixed with so much that was bad, lighted up the whole domain of egotism with its glare, and made one feel how near the best and the worst were to each other, and how they sometimes touched without absolute division in texture and color. The book was undoubtedly a favorite of mine, and I did not see then the artistic falterings in it which were afterward evident to me.

  It is a very remarkable tour de force, but it is a tour de force executed entirely against the grain. It is not alive: it is a work of erudition not of genius, of painful manufacture not of joyous creation or even observation.

  In Romola and in Savonarola we touch the heights. The “tall lily” is an exquisite conception and is supreme in human loveliness.

  “Romola” is unique in its way, and has hosts of admirers. There are readers to whom it introduced the Italian Renaissance, who, in its pages first read of Florence, Savonarola, the Medici. There are scholars who shared George Eliot’s enthusiasm for “the City by the Arno” and “the wonderful fifteenth century,” so cordially as to credit “Romola” with having successfully reproduced a moment and a milieu which they were only too grateful to have recalled. Besides, there is that master-piece of evolution, the character of Tito Melema.

  “Romola” is full of faults. The learning is too obstrusive. There is too much and too obvious an effort at minute historical accuracy, which is the mint and anise and cumin of every historical romance. Romola herself, though a portrait lovingly drawn, is hardly a creation of flesh and blood. But, in spite of Mr. Stephen, I respectfully maintain that the figure of Savonarola stands out in almost startling reality, and that Tito Melema is absolutely true to life…. “Romola” is not a smooth tale, chiefly of love. It is a serious attempt to depict Florentine life four hundred years ago, and by its success or failure in achieving that object it must stand or fall.

  It would be absurd to speak without profound respect of a book which represents the application of an exceptionally powerful intellect carrying out a great scheme with so serious and sustained a purpose…. Romola is to me one of the most provoking of books. I am alternately seduced into admiration and repelled by what seems to me a most lamentable misapplication of first-rate powers…. If we can put aside the historical paraphernalia, forget the dates and the historical Savonarola and Machiavelli, there remains a singularly powerful representation of an interesting spiritual history; of the ordeal through which a lofty nature has to pass when brought into collision with characters of baser composition; throw into despair by the successive collapses of each of the supports to which it clings; and finding some solution in spite of its bewilderment amidst conflicting gospels, in each of which truth and falsehood are strangely mixed. There is hardly any novel, except “The Mill on the Floss,” in which the stages in the inner life of a thoughtful and tender nature are set forth with so much tenderness and sympathy.

Felix Holt, 1866

  I have got two copies of “Felix Holt”—the last sent me by Mr. Langford. I suppose as an equivalent for the six copies of “Miss Marjoribanks,” which I ought to have; and I fear I have got them on false pretences, for I don’t think I could say anything satisfactory about it. It leaves an impression on my mind as of “Hamlet” played by six sets of gravediggers. Of course it will be a successful book, but I think chiefly because “Adam Bede” and “Silas Marner” went before it. Now that I have read it, I have given up the idea of reviewing it.

  Decidedly inferior to the rest.

  I cannot tell you with that eagerness I devoured “Felix Holt.” For perfect force-in-repose, Miss Evans (or, I should have said, Mrs. Lewes) is not excelled by any writer.

  Felix is a typical conception with all the reality in it that the genius of his creator could infuse, but still only a typical conception. We question, too, whether, as the Radical workman of 1832, he is not also an anachronism. The trial scene, in which the hero is the prisoner at the bar, has two really fine passages in it—the sympathetic, spontaneous utterance of the independent minister, and the earnest and self-forgetting, yet self restraining passion which impels Esther to volunteer and give her evidence in vindication of the unlucky Felix. In humorous talk and witty repartee this novel is less affluent than “Adam Bede,” the “Mill on the Floss,” or “Silas Marner.” The opening chapter offers, perhaps, the very finest picture of rural scenery and remote country life to be found even in the works of George Eliot.

  In its construction “Felix Holt” is perhaps the most unsatisfactory of all George Eliot’s books. The ins and outs of Transome and Durfey and Scaddon and Bycliffe were all too intricate in the weaving and too confused in the telling to be either intelligible or interesting. In trying on the garment of Miss Braddon the author of “Felix Holt” showed both want of perception and a deplorable misfit…. Felix himself is one of George Eliot’s masterpieces in the way of nobleness of ideal and firmness of drawing.

  “Felix Holt” contains at least the lovable Mr. Lyon, and though the wearisome wordiness of the book is a handicap from which it will always suffer, it will always remain a highly interpretative picture of a momentous epoch in English political and social history—the birth, in fact, of the modern English world engendered by the Reform Bill.

  I have in my possession about sixteen letters written to me in the months from January to May, 1866, asking for assistance in legal points relating to “Felix Holt.” And during that period I had many interviews with her thereon, and read large portions of the story in MS. and in proof. The letters and my own recollections testify to the indefatigable pains that she took with every point of local color, her anxiety about scrupulous accuracy of fact, and the often feeble health under which the book was produced…. “Felix Holt” and “Daniel Deronda” were the only novels on which I was consulted, and then simply as to points of law and legal practice. I wrote the “opinion” of the Attorney-General, printed in italics in chapter xxxv. of “Felix Holt,” as a guide to the language used in Lincoln’s Inn, and she inserted it bodily in the book. I remember telling her that I should always boast of having written one sentence that was embodied in English literature. The “opinion” was little more than “common form,” and she took kindly my little mot.

  Mr. Felix Holt would have been quite in his place at Toynbee Hall; but is much too cold-blooded for the time when revolution and confiscation were really in the air. Perhaps this indicates the want of masculine fiber in George Eliot and the deficient sympathy with rough popular passions which makes us feel that he represents the afterthought of the judicious sociologist and not the man of flesh and blood who was the product of the actual conditions. Anyhow, the novel appears to be regarded as her least interesting.

Middlemarch, 1871–72

  I suppose you cannot have read “Middlemarch,” as you say nothing about it. It stands quite alone. As one only just moistens one’s lips with an exquisite liqueur, to keep the taste as long as possible in one’s mouth, I never read more than a single chapter of “Middlemarch” in the evening, dreading to come to the last, when I must wait two months for a renewal of the pleasure. The depth of humour has certainly never been surpassed in English literature. If there is ever a shade too much learning, that is Lewes’s fault.

  The book has all the multifariousness of life; the author has, as it were, created a world in which we see the diverse feelings, passions, and interests of complicated characters without the veils of self adulation or of exaggerated distrust with which we view our own lives, or the prejudice with which we regard those of our neighbors. Ordinary terms of praise sound insipid before the excellence with which this task is done. The very truth which this writer possesses seems so like simplicity that we feel inclined to take it for granted as a sine qua non, which we ought to accept with as little emotion as we do the air we breathe…. One of the most remarkable books of one of the greatest living writers…. From its wonderful accuracy in depicting life, from the morality of its lesson, from the originality, keenness, and fate-like sternness of the author, we may draw the conclusion that it is a book which every one should read for a wide knowledge of the world.

  Despite the vigorous bloom, the inconsistent life of “Middlemarch,” do we not feel that there is an overwrought completion about it? The persons of the story are elaborated almost to exhaustion; there appears to be a lack of proportion in the prominence so fully accorded to each individual in his or her turn, for minor characters are dwelt upon too much in detail; and there is little or no mystery of distance about any of the figures, at any time…. As an effort of clear intellectual penetration into life, we could hardly demand anything better than “Middlemarch.” But it is still too much an effort, and not enough an accomplished insight; it remains, as the author has called it, a study, rather than a finished dramatic representation.

  “Middlemarch,” with its undeniable excellences, is a somewhat disjointed composition, and disperses the interest of the reader ad infinitum.

  Certainly George Eliot is no maudlin sentimentalist—no melodramatic emotion-monger like him of “Little Nell.” But for high and pure pathos,—pathos conceived in the key of that magnanimity which, in a world like ours, fallen and in sore need of redemption, is always the highest and purest pathos,—I should scarcely know where to look for anything finer than “Middlemarch” supplies.

  In “Middlemarch” the peculiar powers of the author are exhibited in the highest and widest play of their development. None of her books is so deeply thoughtful, none commands so broad a view of the human horizon, none is so rich in personal portraiture.

  I know not where else in literature to look for a work which leaves such a strong impression on the reader’s mind of the intertexture of human lives. Seen thus in perspective, each separate individuality, with its specialized consciousness, is yet as indissolubly connected with the collective life as that of the indistinguishable zoöphyte which is but a sentient speck necessarily moved by the same vital agency which stirs the entire organism.

  One of her works, notwithstanding, must always be the guide of those who would know the provincial England of our day. “Middlemarch” is Nature herself. If merit is to be judged by perfection of execution, this depressing work sets George Eliot higher than the mingled pathos and humour of “Adam Bede” and “The Mill on Floss,” the dignity of “Romola,” or the moral enthusiasm of “Daniel Deronda.”

  It is a great prose epic, large in size, commanding in structure, affording an ample space for a great artist to work upon. Perhaps even more than “Adam Bede” has it become part of the ordinary furniture of our minds, of the current coin of our thoughts. Casaubon, Will Laidlaw, Mr. Brooke are types which are ever present with us, like Becky Sharp and Colonel Newcome; and if Dorothea and Lydgate are more remote, it is because they are rarer characters, not because they are less truly drawn. “Middlemarch” gives George Eliot the chiefest claim to stand by the side of Shakespere. Both drew their inspiration from the same sources, the villages and the country houses which we know so well.

  The style of “Middlemarch” is so full of science, of culture, of observation, of experience, that to follow it in its development, to see how it arises from the very heart of things, to gather its meaning in the original and incisive phrases in which it is clothed, is an intense intellectual enjoyment.

  The girl is real enough; it is her chances which she and her biographer seem to me to have singularly missed, probably because the very weight and worth of English Dissenters forty to fifty years ago secluded them from all society but their own…. In truth, “Middlemarch” is to me as a landscape seen in the twilight; au teint grisâtre. It is from first to last the plaint of a lost ideal. I do not think it even a true rendering of life as it was lived in England sixty years ago. It would be easy to account for this by saying that the writer had lost “the wider hope.” I prefer not to do it. Such an explanation is, indeed, so far obviously true as that in a country town the most strenuous belief, the most unflagging work, is religious. But the scepticism of “Middlemarch” also extends to things social and human.

  It is, indeed, a half dozen novels in one. Its scale is cyclopædic, as I said, and it is the microcosm of a community rather than a story concerned with a unified plot and set of characters. And it is perhaps the writer’s fullest expression of her philosophy of life.

  “Middlemarch” is George Eliot herself, with her large, grave, earnest, tolerant view of human nature and human life.

Daniel Deronda, 1876

  Here we have what goes a considerable way towards filling an intellectual void—faithful pictures of modern Anglo-Jewish domestic life. But the author in some respects proceeds further, and evidently possesses loftier and wider aims than the mere exercise of the romance-writer’s skill among new scenes. George Eliot has thrown no hasty or superficial glance over the externals of Judaism. She has acquired an extended and profound knowledge of the rites, aspirations, hopes, fears, and desires of the Israelites of the day. She had read their books, inquired into their modes of thought, searched their traditions, accompanied them to the synagogue; nay, she had taken their very words from their lips, and, like Asmodeus, has unroofed their houses. To say that some slight errors have crept into “Daniel Deronda” is to say that no human work is perfect; and these inaccuracies are singularly few and unimportant…. Curiously enough the Jewish episodes in “Daniel Deronda” have been barely adverted to by the reviewers. Most of these gentlemen have slurred over some of the finest and most characteristic passages in the book, with the remark that they possessed no general interest. Possibly the critics were unable to appreciate the beauty of the scenes they deemed unworthy of attention, or perhaps they consider the Jewish body too insignificant to be worth much discussion…. The book is a romance. Artistic truth in literature, as in painting, is always sought for by great workmen in preference to mere realistic truth. In Daniel Deronda, George Eliot has created a type which, though scarcely likely to appeal to the masses, aught to teach more than one lesson to serious thinkers. Here is a man who lays aside entirely all purely personal considerations, all feelings of ambition or aggrandisement, to devote the best years of his existence to the loftiest national aims.

  “Daniel Deronda” alone (the book, not the man) is proof enough that its author has the courage to enter upon the surest road to the highest kind of popularity—that which apparently leads above it. There is not a sentence, scarcely a character, in “Daniel Deronda” that reads or looks as if she were thinking of her critics before her readers at large, or of her readers at large before the best she could give them. She has often marred a stronger or more telling effect for the sake of a truer and deeper—and this belongs to a kind of courage which most artists will be inclined to envy her. But her processes of construction open another question, too long to speak of in a few words. Apart from all considerations of such processes in detail, “Daniel Deronda” is a probably unique example of the application of the forms of romance to a rare and difficult problem in human nature, by first stating the problem—(the transformation of Gwendolen)—in its extremest form, and then, with something like scientific precision as well as philosophic insight, arranging circumstances so as to throw upon it the fullest light possible.

  “Daniel Deronda” has succeeded in awaking in my somewhat worn-out mind an interest. So many stories are tramping over one’s mind in every modern magazine nowadays that one is macadamized, so to speak. It takes something unusual to make a sensation. This does excite and interest me, as I wait for each number with eagerness.

  It seems to us that none of George Eliot’s former novels so distinctly present the quality of her intellect, as “Daniel Deronda.” In it she has reached both her clearest height of achievement and the barriers of art which she is unable to scale. It is no disparagement to recognize the latter, for they equally mark the extent of her development and the intensity of her aspiration. In reviewing the first volume of the work we noticed her tendency to analyze, as well as present, her characters. She explains, and comments upon them, their words, movements, and changes of countenance: sometimes a chapter seems to open in some realm of abstract philosophical speculation, out of which the author slowly descends to take up the thread of her story. Sometimes these disquisitions are so sound and admirably stated that we are glad to come upon them: frequently they strike us as unnecessary and not particularly important; and occasionally they are mere high-sounding platitudes.

  “Daniel Deronda” is a novel both of incident and character; and, in addition, it exhibits a wealth of subtle, deep and comprehensive thought altogether unexampled among the novels of the time. One feels in reading, rereading and studying the book that in respect to mere largeness of intellect it is unmatched among the works of the most distinguished novelists of the century. Scott, Dickens and Thackeray may excel George Eliot in their special departments of fiction; but if we apply the intellectual test, and ask which of the four has mastered most thoroughly the knowledge and advanced thought of the age, the judgment of all cultivated persons would be given unreservedly in favor of the author of “Daniel Deronda.” In sobriety, breadth and massiveness of understanding, in familiar acquaintance with the latest demonstrated truths of physical, historical, economic and intellectual science, and in the capacity to use these truths as materials for a philosophy of nature, and human nature, this woman is the acknowledged peer of such men as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. Leaving out of view the peculiar powers which make the great novelist, and fastening our attention on the understanding alone, it is obvious that George Eliot might hold, in one corner of her broad brain, all that portion of Scott’s intellect which dealt with the philosophy of history as distinguished from its picturesqueness; in another corner, all that part of the intellect of Dickens which, in dealing with political economy, was prone to substitute benevolent sentiments for inexorable laws; and in still another corner, all that portion of the intellect of Thackeray which penetrated beneath the social shams he pitilessly satirized to the principles which make society possible.

  The first thing that it is natural for a Jew to say about “Daniel Deronda” is some expression of gratitude for the wonderful completeness and accuracy with which George Eliot has portrayed the Jewish nature. Hitherto the Jew in English fiction has fared unhappily; being always represented as a monstrosity, most frequently on the side of malevolence and greed, as in Marlowe’s Barabbas and Dickens’s Fagin, or sometimes as in Dickens’s Riah, still more exasperatingly on the side of impossible benevolence. What we want is truth, not exaggeration, and truth George Eliot has given us with the large justice of the great artist. The gallery of Jewish portraits contained in “Daniel Deronda” gives in a marvelously full and accurate way all the many sides of our complex national character…. Perhaps the most successful of the minor portraits is that of the black sheep Lapidoth, the Jew with no redeeming love for family, race or country to preserve him from that sordid egotism (the new name for wickedness) into which he has sunk. His utter unconsciousness of good and evil is powerfully depicted in the masterly analysis of his state of mind before purloining Deronda’s ring…. Criticism on the Mordecai part of “Daniel Deronda” has been due to lack of sympathy and want of knowledge on the part of the critics, and hence its failure is not (if we must use the word) objective. If a young lady refuses to see any pathos in Othello’s fate because she dislikes dark complexions, we blame the young lady, not Shakspeare: and if the critics have refused to see the pathos of Mordecai’s fate because he is a Jew of the present day—so much the worse for the critics!

  Beside the clever critics some readers of “Daniel Deronda” ought perhaps to put on record their experience, and confess what have been the dealings of this book with their spirits. Those who have heard in it “the right voice,” which one follows “as the water follows the moon, silently,” will have been conscious of a quickening and exaltation of their entire spiritual life. The moral atmosphere they breathed became charged with a finer and more vivifying element; the face of the world seemed to glow for them with richer tint, “a more vivid gravity of expression;” moods of ennui or rebellion appeared more futile and unworthy than formerly; it became natural to believe high things of man; and a certain difficulty and peril attended the necessary return to duller or at least humbler tempers of heart (as it is difficult to pass from a sonata of Beethoven to the common household sounds), until these too were touched and received a consecration. The book has done something to prevent our highest movements from making our every-day experience seem vulgar and incoherent, and something to prevent our every-day experience from making our highest moments seem spectral and unreal. To discover the central motive of “Daniel Deronda” it should be studied in connection with its immediate predecessor, “Middlemarch.”

  I repeat that the story of Gwendolen and Grandcourt takes its place beside the author’s best work: and that, if the character-drawing is not stronger, it is at any rate subtler and more scientific. Gwendolen’s conversation with Klesmer on her vocation as an actress, her interview with Mirah when she wishes to ascertain the truth of the rumors she has heard about Deronda, the tragedy on board the boat in the Gulf of Genoa, the good-byes and the confessions at the moment of final separation, are among the scenes, hard to manage, or even unmanageable, where the genius of George Eliot, compact at once of tact and power, breaks out in all its supremacy.

  If I were asked for the most significant, the most tender, the most pious and altogether the most uplifting of modern books it seems to me I should specify “Daniel Deronda.”… No man could deny the truth of the picture; the galled jade was obliged to wince; this time it was my withers that were wrung. Thus the moral purpose of “Daniel Deronda,” which is certainly beyond all comparison less obtrusive than that of any other book written by George Eliot, grew, by its very nearness, out of all perspective. Though a mere gnat, it sat on the very eyelash of society and seemed a monster.

  I have always thought, for instance, that the figure of Daniel Deronda, whose portrait, blurred and uncertain as it is, has been drawn with the most amazing care and with endless touches and retouches, must have become at last to George Eliot a kind of awful veiled spectre, always in her brain, always seeming about to reveal his true features and his mind, but never doing it, so that to the end she never clearly perceived what manner of man he was, nor what was his real character.

  She made a noble picture of Florence. And, in “Daniel Deronda,” a fine defence of the Jews. That, I think, was the most Christian thing she ever did.

  The story of Gwendolen in “Deronda,” up to the moment of her marriage, is one of the most masterly of impersonations. When, however, a female perfection comes in the shape of Dorothea, and still more a male perfection in the form of Daniel Deronda, this admirable genius fails and sinks into morasses of fictitious imagination, and laboured utterance. Her true inspiration had nothing to do with these artificial and fantastic embodiments of new philosophy and a conventional ideal.

  The choice of “Adam Bede” to represent George Eliot is again evidence of the soundness of the popular instinct; but it is not surprising to find many books preferred to “Daniel Deronda.”

  One day she told me that in order to write “Daniel Deronda,” she had read through two hundred books. I longed to tell her that she had better have learned Yiddish and talked with two hundred Jews, and been taught, as I was by my friend Solomon the Sadducee, the art of distinguishing Fraülein Löwenthal of the Ashkenazim from Senorita Aguado of the Sephardim by the corners of their eyes!

  A friend told me something which I think puts the matter in a nut shell. He said he had been seated next to what he described as a girl of the period. It was the period when “Daniel Deronda” was the reigning book, and so he put to her the inevitable question, “Have you read ‘Daniel Deronda?’” And what do you think was the answer? “No, but I have been told it.” Think; she had been told “Daniel Deronda!” You who have read “Daniel Deronda”—that compendium of a whole philosophy of life, combined with a story as intricate as Shakespeare’s plots—fancy a young lady being told the whole! It was as if someone had been asked, “Have you read Herbert Spencer’s ‘Psychology?’” and he should answer, “Well, no; but I heard it across the dinner table.” “Have you heard Mendelssohn’s ‘Elijah?’” And the reply would be, “Yes; that is to say, a friend hummed it over to me.”

  When “Daniel Deronda” is reached, there is but little left of the author of “Adam Bede.”

  “Daniel Deronda” is the most wearisome, the least artistic, and the most unnatural of all George Eliot’s books. Of course it has the masterly touch, and, for all its comparative inferiority, has also its supreme excellence. But in plot, treatment and character it is far below its predecessors.

  “Daniel Deronda” was then a work of great audacity. For it was deliberately planned to present a new heroic type. Deronda is no reminiscence nor survival: he is a hero who would never have existed till our own day.

  The chief sign of decline in George Eliot’s last novel, “Daniel Deronda,” is the attempt to replace these vigorous living beings with badly imagined puppets like the Meyricks. She had used up the material of her youth, and found nothing in her brilliant life of culture and travel to take its place.

  I must repeat that George Eliot was intensely feminine, though more philosophical than most women. She shows it to the best purpose in the subtlety and the charm of her portraits of women, unrivalled in some ways by any writer of either sex; and shows it also, as I think, in a true perception of the more feminine aspects of her male characters. Still, she sometimes illustrates the weakness of the feminine view. Daniel Deronda is not merely a feminine but, one is inclined to say, a school-girl’s hero. He is so sensitive and scrupulously delicate that he will not soil his hands by joining in the rough play of ordinary political and social reformers. He will not compromise, and yet he shares the dislikes of his creator for fanatics and the devotees of “fads.”

Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879

  Her thoughts are too intense to bear crowding. We have been accustomed of old to her subtle psychological analysis; but we have never before had it given to us in the undiluted form. Narrative and dialogue have elsewhere allowed the characters to develop themselves gradually and dramatically under our eyes. In her present work, however, George Eliot allows herself to speak under a thin disguise in her own person; and the result is a series of character sketches, admirable in truthfulness, insight, and power, but almost painful in their elaborateness and weight of matter. Theophrastus Such, the eponymus of the volume, had probably for his raison d’ être the desire of the author to avoid that possible imputation of self-consciousness which might have been raised by the critical reader, had the essays been published without the intervention of such a suppositious godfather. A bachelor of unprepossessing and awkward exterior, Theophrastus has not turned out a success in social life, and he gives us his impressions of others and of himself with a genuine frankness which is partially attributed to his expectation that nobody will read his fugitive sketches. In his first essay, “Looking Inward,” he deals with that most difficult of problems, his own individuality as it seems to others.

  A great authoress of our time was urged by a friend to fill up a gap in our literature by composing a volume of Thoughts: the result was that least felicitous of performances, “Theophrastus Such.”

  It contains studies of character, such as might form the rough drafts for future novels, embodying moral lessons which she desired to convey. The style is weighty and periodic, influenced by the English of the seventeenth century which she loved so well. The compact statement of arguments, the subtlety of analysis and insight are as apparent as in any of her works. The humour is sometimes admirable, at others heavy and laboured; there is little dramatic interest. “Theophrastus” does not exist as a personality, and the veil which divides him from the writer herself is of varying degrees of density. Still the book furnishes many “wise, witty, and tender sayings,” and from its inherent truthfulness and absence of affectation is a most valuable source of information for the feelings and opinions which lay deepest at her heart.

  The summer of 1878 was partly occupied by George Eliot in writing “Theophrastus Such”—perhaps the only one of her books which was not a success. I have a guilty conscience as to this book, as I may have contributed to induce her to write it. I pointed out to her that our English literature, so rich and splendid in almost every field of poetry and prose, was deficient in those collections of Thoughts which the French call Pensées—pregnant apothegms embedded in terse and memorable phrase which would be remembered like fine lines of poetry, and be cited as readily as a familiar proverb. It seemed to me—it seems to me still—that she was eminently fitted to produce such a book, and indeed the “Wit and Wisdom of George Eliot” was a volume culled from her writings. But “Theophrastus Such”—where the queer title came from I know not—was not an adequate expression of her powers. She was in very poor health all the time, and George Lewes was then stricken with his last illness. His death delayed publication, and when she read “Theophrastus” in revise, she had serious thoughts of suppressing it…. Would she had done so! Her life was ebbing away when it was actually published.

Poems

  The writing has the diffuseness of literature, rather than the condensation of poetry; and, admirable as some of it is, we wish it away: at the lowest, we say to ourselves, if a poet had had to utter this, our pleasure would have been perfect; but, as it is, what is before us is almost too good, and yet it is not good enough; it does not compel us to think, le poëte a le frisson, either while we read or afterward. There is too much aggregation and accumulation about it; we are set thinking, and set feeling; we are agitated; but we are not thrilled by any single sudden notes…. Leaving the workmanship and the intellectual conception, or interwoven moral criticism, of the poem (“Spanish Gypsy”) and coming to the story, I am sure of only echoing what all the world will say when I call this in the highest degree poetic; and poetically dramatic, too.

  We imagine George Eliot is quite philosopher enough, having produced her poems mainly as a kind of experimental entertainment for her own mind, to let them commend themselves to the public on any grounds whatever which will help to illustrate the workings of versatile intelligence,—as interesting failures, if nothing better. She must feel they are interesting; an exaggerated modesty cannot deny that…. In whatever George Eliot writes, you have the comfortable certainty, infrequent in other quarters, of finding an idea, and you get the substance of her thought in the short poems, without the somewhat rigid envelope of her poetic diction. If we may say, broadly, that the supreme merit of a poem is in having warmth, and that it is less valuable in proportion as it cools by too long waiting upon either fastidious skill or inefficient skill, the little group of verses entitled “Brother and Sister” deserve our preference.

  George Eliot’s metrical work has special interest, coming from a woman acknowledged to be, in her realistic yet imaginative prose, at the head of living female writers. She has brought all her energies to bear, first upon the construction of a drama, which was only a succes d’estime, and recently upon a new volume containing “The Legend of Jubal” and other poems. The result shows plainly that Mrs. Lewes, though possessed of great intellect and sensibility, is not, in respect to metrical expression, a poet. Nor has she a full conception of the simple strength and melody of English verse, her polysyllabic language, noticeable in the moralizing passages of “Middlemarch,” being very ineffective in her poems. That wealth of thought which atones for all her deficiencies in prose does not seem to be at her command in poetry. “The Spanish Gypsy” reads like a second-rate production of the Byronic school. “The Legend of Jubal” and “How Lisa Loved the King” suffer by comparison with the narrative poems, in rhymed pentameter, of Morris, Longfellow, or Stoddard. A little poem in blank-verse, entitled “O may I join the choir invisible!” and setting forth her conception of the “religion of humanity,” is worth all the rest of her poetry, for it is the outburst of an exalted soul foregoing personal immortality and compensated by a vision of the growth and happiness of the human race.

  The “Legend of Jubal” tells, in sustained language, the story of the lyre and its inventor, and the fate he met at the hands of those who loved his music. But the same volume contains four dramatic scenes—entitled “Armgart”—presenting phases in the life of a passionate proud singer who loses her exquisite voice, and these scenes are fuller of real poetry, albeit, as tragic sketches, they are not compact enough in the grouping of the figures. The artistic exultation of the singer in the earlier scenes is conveyed to us in a wondrously full manner. Here, and in a subsequent poem, “Stradivarius,” the deep musician-nature of the poetess reveals itself almost uncontrollably. In “Stradivarius” we have a sombre-toned picture of the steady conscientious violin-maker pursuing his loved occupation with as great a sense of responsibility as if he had been ordained to the work by the direct command of heaven. The character is drawn in simple strong lines. But the verses that most genuinely reveal such distinctly poetic faculty as George Eliot possessed are those entitled “Brother and Sister.” This short series of sonnets on child-life is autobiographical, and, even more emphatically than the description of Maggie Tulliver’s girlhood, shows how keenly the novelist had lived as a child, and how lasting her impressions of her early existence were. Probably George Eliot never excelled, in prose, the extraordinary studies of child-life (boy-life as well as girl-life) in “The Mill on the Floss.”

  In her poetry George Eliot is much more a doctrinaire than in her novels, all her poems, except a few of the shorter ones, are devoted to the inculcation of some moral or philosophic teaching. The very effort she was obliged to make to give herself utterance in poetry predisposed her to intellectual subjects and those of a controversial nature. For this reason her verse has a special interest for those who are attracted to her teachings. Her pen was freer, more creative, in her great novels than in her poems. In fact, her novels, especially “Adam Bede” and “The Mill on the Floss,” are much more poetical than much she did in verse.

  George Eliot, with brain surcharged with richest thought and choicest, carefulest culture; with heart to hold all humanity, if that could save; with tongue of men and angels to tell the knowledge of her intellect, the charity of her heart—yet, having not faith, becomes, for all of satisfaction that she gives the soul, but sounding brass and tinkling cymbal! She will not bid me hope when she herself has no assurance of the thing hoped for. She must not speak of faith in the unknown. She cannot be cruel, but she can be dumb; and so her long procession of glorious thoughts, and sweet humanities, and noblest ethics, and stern renunciations, and gracious common lots, and lofty ideal lives, with their scalding tears, and bursting laughter, and flaming passion—all that enters into mortal life and time’s story—makes its matchless march before our captured vision up to—the stone-wall…. Her teaching takes its shape from the attitude of her own soul. To epitomize, then. George Eliot’s pages are a labyrinth of wonder and beauty; crowded with ethics lofty and pure as Plato’s; with human natures fine and fresh as Shakespeare’s; but a labyrinth in which you lose the guiding cord! With the attitude and utterance of her spirit confronting me, I cannot allow her verse to be poetry. She is the raconteur, not the vates; the scientist, not the seer.

  “The Spanish Gypsy” is the work upon which the deniers of George Eliot’s poetic faculty, mainly base their judgment. In speaking of it their voice is loud and confident. “The Legend of Jubal” and “Brother and Sister” bring it down to a lower tone; and as they approach that lyric of solemn rapture, “Oh may I join the choir invisible!” it dies into a whisper. “The Spanish Gypsy” is therefore the structure brave upon which those who greatly dare, because they greatly admire, will, with courageous eagerness plant their standard as a signal that there as elsewhere they are ready to stand an assault. Nor will they fear to admit that there are passages in “The Spanish Gypsy” which lack the metrical inevitableness just referred to,—passages which might have taken the form of prose without any loss of essential weight or beauty; but then they are to be found not less in the “Iliad,” the “Inferno,” the “Paradise Lost.” To the whole world, however, these works are indubitable poetry; and those who regard “The Spanish Gypsy” also as poetry, and poetry of a very noble order, base their regard on the fact that the final impression left by it as by them is of an imaginative conception which could only be made fully manifest in an embodiment of verse.

  With all her consummate literary gifts and tastes, George Eliot never managed to write a poem, and never could be brought to see that the verses she wrote were not poems. It was an exaggeration of the defect that mars her prose; and her verses throw great light on her prose. They are over-laboured; the conception overpowers the form; they are too intensely anxious to be recognized as poems. We see not so much poetic passion, as a passionate yearning after poetic passion. We have,—not the inevitable, incalculable, inimitable, phrase of real poetry,—but the slowly distilled, calculated, and imitated effort to reach the spontaneous.

  Her genius was sensuous enough, and passionate enough, in all conscience; but the first note of poetry, simplicity, was signally lacking. The thought of her poems is profound, involved and highly analytical; in a word, as much as possible the reverse of simple; and the verbal medium and apparatus is rugged with the ruggedness of a violent attempt to press into poetic form that of which poetry itself is intolerant.

  She merely put some of the thoughtful commonplaces of her time and school into wooden verse, occasionally grandiose but never grand, and her purple passages have the purple of plush not velvet.

The Spanish Gypsy, 1868

  I read the “Spanish Gypsy” about a month ago, and enjoyed it very much. Perhaps, in point of form, it is an imperfection that it is neither drama nor epic, but it has the advantage of greater variety in being both.

  “The Spanish Gypsy,” like “Romola,” is a mistake, and a mistake in several respects. The story violates the laws of imaginative probability; the dialogue is strained and declamatory; the dramatic action, in spite of the sustained intellectual force, is feeble and flags; the characters are destitute of life. Yet on each of these details an immense amount of hard and conscientious labour has been expended, and the cleverness of the counterfeit is in places so remarkable, that it need not surprise us that even sharp-sighted critics should have been deceived, it is indeed better poetry than almost any one except a poet could write…. Brilliant with epigram though it be, is uneasy, artificial and declamatory. It manifests a ceaseless striving after effects. There is hardly a page unvexed by some verbal paradox.

  On the whole, Zarca, the gypsy chief, is perhaps the most vividly drawn of George Eliot’s purely ideal characters…. There is an unmistakable grandeur and power of invention in the heroic figure of Zarca, although, in spite of this power, we miss the convincing stamp of reality in him and not only in him, but more or less in all the characters of “The Spanish Gypsy.”… For, although she here chose one of the most romantic of periods and localities, the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, with the mingled horror and magnificence of its national traditions, she does not really succeed in resuscitating the spirit which animated those devout, cruel, fanatical, but ultra-picturesque times. The Castilian noble, the Jewish astrologer, Zarca, and the Spanish Inquisitor, even the bright, gloriously conceived Fedalma herself, think and speak too much like sublimated modern positivists.

  The fatal objection to “The Spanish Gypsy,” and to all George Eliot’s poems, is that, save for a few lines here and there, they might as well, or better, have been written in prose.

The Legend of Jubal, 1870

  In the evening read “The Legend of Jubal,” by Mrs. Lewes,—a poem of a good deal of power, but in parts rather confused, as the “new style” poetry often is to me.

  In the “Legend of Jubal” (1870) the authoress found a subject which called all her most characteristic qualities into exercise—wisdom, large-heartedness, gentle irony, heartfelt compassion. The poetical form is also most happily chosen; the grand heroic couplet, laden but not overladen with noble thought, sweeps on with accumulating power to the most affecting of catastrophes.

General

  It is one of the greatest merits of the greatest living writer of fiction,—of the authoress of “Adam Bede,”—that she never brings you to anything without preparing you for it; she has no loose lumps of beauty, she puts in nothing at random: after her greatest scenes, too, a natural sequence of subordinate realities again tones down the mind to this sublunary world. Her logical style—the most logical, probably, which a woman ever wrote—aids in this matter her natural sense of due proportion; there is not a space of incoherency, not a gap. It is not natural to begin with the point of a story, and she does not begin with it; when some great marvel has been told, we all wish to know what came of it, and she tells us. Her natural way—as it seems to those who do not know its rarity—of telling what happened, produces the consummate effect of gradual enchantment and as gradual disenchantment.

  From the time when the interesting “Scenes of a Clerical Life” were published, down to the issue of “Felix Holt,” George Eliot has the great merit of being true to herself…. The corruption which a life of fiction-writing, like a life of politics, is apt to produce, has not been able to dull her moral sense, nor to rust the keenness of her sympathy for the sorrows and joys of men and women. Even the wearing effects of time she shows but little. She has neither become a cynic, nor a humorist, nor coarse, but still keeps in the path of realistic art, studying the roadside nature, and satisfied with it. She continues to receive the great reward which every true realist longs for, that she is true to nature without degenerating to the commonplace, and the old blame, that they have not enough of the ideal, which they covet too.

  Considering George Eliot as a writer generally without having regard to her special vocation as a writer of novels, criticism cheerfully recognises many rare excellences. First among these of common consent, must be placed her style. It would be flattery to place her on a level with Thackeray. But now that we have lost Thackeray, she is in this point above all others. Trollope, indeed, has a merit of his own; but his easy naturalness is altogether on a lower level. George Eliot’s style is rich in beauty and power. It is a splendid vehicle. We can often mark its effect in raising the thought to a dignity greater than its own. Her wealth of allusion is considerable, and it is indicated with becoming reserve, not ostentatiously obtruded, as is the fashion with most of our present novelists; to borrow a graceful simile from Mr. Hannay, it is like “violets hidden in the green of her prose.” Above all her style is not the result of art only: it has that indescribable stamp which marks it as the result of feeling and thought. The thought may not be always deep, the feeling may not be always right, but both are uniformly original and sincere.

  If he were not so fantastic, if he were less gross and cruel, if he could believe in anything, if life were not a hideous strife of interests in which the stronger tramples on the weak, if he did not love evil for its own sake, Balzac would certainly be one of the two greatest novelists of the world, Miss Evans the other. As it is, he must always be admired with reservations, and regarded as a ruthless pathologist. The higher place of a true physiologist (such as I think Miss Evans is) cannot be claimed for him.

  The novels of George Eliot are not didactic treatises. They are primarily works of art, and George Eliot herself is artist as much as she is teacher. Many good things in particular passages of her writings are detachable; admirable sayings can be cleared from their surroundings, and presented by themselves, knocked out clean as we knock out fossils from a piece of limestone. But if we separate the moral soul of any complete work of hers from its artistic medium, if we murder to dissect, we lose far more than we gain…. Complete in all its parts, and strong in all, the nature of George Eliot is yet not one of those rare natures which without effort are harmonious. There is no impression made more decisively upon the reader of her books than this. No books bear upon their faces more unmistakably the pain of moral conflict, and the pain of moral victory, only less bitter than that of defeat. Great forces warring with one another; a sorrowful, a pathetic victory—that is what we discern.

  Her writing does not soothe, because she keeps so constantly before us the stern effort she is making, not to swerve from strict analysis. The authoress presides too watchfully over the progress of our acquaintance with the imaginary beings to whom she has introduced us; and we should be more at ease, if she would omit some of the more wordy of her examinations into their mental status at each new turn of the story.

  George Eliot is more than a brilliant novelist. She is a great writer. She is more than simply a great writer. She is a prime elemental literary power. In literature such, she is scarcely less in ethics. She is a great ethical teacher—it may be not an original, but at least a highly charged derivative, moral living force. Perhaps even thus much is still too little to have said. For George Eliot seems already securely to belong to the very small number of those choice literary names which we jealously account our greatest…. She loves to be sententious. She is fonder of reflection than she is of narration. Her plot is for the sake of her dialogue, her dialogue is for the sake of her character, and her character is for the sake of the wit and the wisdom that her many-sided genius is consciously capable and therefore desirous of lavishing on the world…. Psychological analysis is her strength and her joy. She creates character, she devises incident and situation, chiefly that she may have her occasion of indulging that almost superhuman faculty which is hers, of laying bare to its ultimate microscopic secret, the anatomy of the living human consciousness in play…. The knowledge of the human heart that George Eliot displays, is not an acquired knowledge. It was born with her and in her. It is genius. It is a gift which is Shakespearian in quality—one might, perhaps, as well be frankly true to himself and out with his thought—it is finer than Shakespeare. In quantity it is less, but in quality it is more.

  What novelist has more conclusively made good her claim to rank almost with the highest, than George Eliot?

  Among the highest characteristics of “George Eliot” as a writer of fiction is her remarkable power in the delineation, not so much of character already formed, as of its development. Almost unconsciously the reader follows every process in the growth of those strong individual types with which her novels are filled, and sees the logical influence of every circumstance and event brought to bear upon their lives. In all of her works the physical and material difficulties to which her actors are subjected, and all those things which ordinarily constitute the “plot” of a romance, are, without losing their interest in any way, made completely subordinate to this leading design of picturing the development of the individual character under different conditions. Thus her novels form some of the best examples in the English language of the true carrying out of the highest purpose of fiction.

  But two women before her—Madame de Staël and George Sand—have so devoted themselves to lifelong study, in all attainable departments of knowledge, for the sake of high success in literature. She is more feminine than the former, more masculine than the latter, resembles both in her interest in physical, ethical, and social science, yet, in her style as a writer, hardly reaches either the sculptured symmetry of the one or the warmth, color, and fluent grace of the other.

  To exalt the social and abase the selfish principle, to show the futility of merely personal claims, cares and cravings, to purify the passions by exhibiting their fatal or miserable issues when they are centered in the individual alone—such are the moral purposes which we feel at work beneath all her artistic purposes…. The flow of George Eliot’s writing, we have felt, is apt to be impeded with excess of thought; while of writing which does flow, and in flowing carry the reader delightfully along, George Sand is an incomparable mistress. But this is only the sign of deeper differences. George Sand excels in the poetical part of her art. George Eliot excels in the philosophical. Each is equally mistress of human nature and its secrets, but the one more by instinct, the other more by reflection. In everything which is properly matter of the intellect, the English writer is the superior of the French by far.

  In largeness of Christian charity, in breadth of human sympathy, in tenderness toward all human frailty that is not vitally base and self-seeking, in subtle power of finding “a soul of goodness even in things apparently evil,” she has not many equals, certainly no superior, in the writers of the day…. Self-sacrifice as the Divine law of life, and its only fulfilment; self-sacrifice, not in some ideal sphere sought out for ourselves in the vain spirit of self-pleasing, but wherever God has placed us, amid homely, petty anxieties, loves and sorrows; the aiming at the highest attainable good in our own place, irrespective of all results of joy or sorrow, of apparent success or failure,—such is the lesson that begins to be conveyed to us in these “Scenes.” The lesson comes to us in the quiet, unselfish love, the sweet, hourly self-devotion of the “Milly” of Amos Barton, so touchingly free and full that it never recognises itself as self-devotion at all.

  But if she has failed as a novelist where novelists of less genius have succeeded, she exhibits power to which, amongst other novelists, we can hardly find a parallel, and which only very rarely have expressed themselves in prose fiction at all. She may be less than Miss Austen in art, but she is greater than Scott in insight. Indeed, to compare her even to Scott is an unfairness to her. We must go for our parallel yet a stage higher; and we must not stop short of the world’s greatest poets.

  George Eliot is genius and culture. Had she never written a page of fiction, she must have been regarded with admiration by all who knew her as a woman of deep thought and of a varied knowledge such as men complacently believe to be the possession only of men. It was not this, however, which made her a great novelist. Her eyes were not turned inward or kept down in metaphysical contemplation. She studied the living world around her. She had an eye for external things keen almost as that of Dickens or Balzac. George Eliot is the only novelist who can paint such English people as the Poysers and the Tullivers just as they are. She looks into the very souls of such people. She tracks out their slow, peculiar mental processes; she reproduces them fresh and firm from very life. Mere realism, mere photographing, even from the life, is not in art a great triumph. But George Eliot can make her dullest people interesting and dramatically effective. She can paint two dull people with quite different ways of dulness—a dull man and a dull woman, for example—and the reader is astonished to find how utterly distinct the two kinds of stupidity are, and how intensely amusing both can be made.

  She, of all novelists, has attacked the profound problems of our existence. She has taught that the mystery worthy of a great artist is not the shallow mystery of device, but the infinite perspective of the great, dark enigmas of human nature; that there is a deeper interest in human life seen in the modern, scientific daylight, than in life viewed through a mist of ancient and dying superstitions; that the interest of human character transcends the interest of invented circumstances; that the epic story of a hero and a heroine is not so grand as the natural history of a community. She, first of all, has made cross sections of modern life, and shown us the busy human hive in the light of a great artistic and philosophic intellect. She has not sought to see men in the dim haze of a romantic past, but to bring men into close vision, who, by difference of race, condition, or the lapse of time, were far away. George Eliot has made the typical novel of this age of scientific thought and growing unbelief in the supernatural…. George Eliot, more than any other, has shown that romance, so far from dying under the influence of the stern skepticism of our time, has had opened to it a new and more vigorous life.

  George Eliot’s novels are admirably various in their scenery. They now paint Methodist life in the days of Wesley, now Mediæval Catholicism in the days of Savonarola, now the whole range of the Jewish nationality. They are alike in their rich play of humour and pathos, in sympathy with the varieties of human character, in the spirit of humanity that is allied with every honest aspiration; they are alike also in the steadiness with which every one exalts the life that is firmly devoted to the highest aim it knows. Again and again, there is the type of the weak pleasure-loving mind, too easily misled, and of the firm spirit, capable of self-denial, true to its own highest sense of right. George Eliot’s novels will cloud no true faith; they are the work of a woman of rare genius whose place is, for all time, among the greatest novelists our country has produced.

  What Lord Beaconsfield says of Lady Montford in “Endymion” is perfectly applicable to George Eliot: “Her character was singularly feminine; she never affected to be a superior woman.” Though the intellectual equal of any woman who ever wrote a book, and of many men who have no intellectual superiors among their fellows, George Eliot was yet as unpretending as if she had no right to a place among the most worthy. Others of her sex, without a tithe of her abilities, are given to demanding their rights. She was satisfied to discharge to the best of her power what she regarded as her duties as a member of a civilized community. Her ideal of existence was a very different one from that which women of inferior gifts but greater pretensions set forth in writing or in speech.

  At the present moment George Eliot is the first of English novelists, and I am disposed to place her second of those of my time. She is best known to the literary world as a writer of prose fiction, and not improbably whatever of permanent fame she may acquire will come from her novels. But the nature of her intellect is very far removed indeed from that which is common to the tellers of stories. Her imagination is, no doubt, strong, but it acts in analyzing rather than in creating. Everything that comes before her is pulled to pieces so that the inside of it shall be seen, and be seen, if possible, by her readers as clearly as by herself. This searching analysis is carried so far that in studying her later writings, one feels one’s self to be in company with some philosopher rather than with a novelist. I doubt whether any young person can read with pleasure either “Felix Holt,” “Middlemarch,” or “Daniel Deronda.” I know that they are very difficult to many that are not young. Her personifications of character have been singularly terse and graphic and from them has come her great hold on the public, though by no means the greatest effect which she has produced. The lessons which she teaches remain, though it is not for the sake of the lessons that her pages are read. Seth Bede, Adam Bede, Maggie and Tom Tulliver, old Silas Marner, and, much above all, Tito, in “Romola,” are characters, which when once known, can never be forgotten. I cannot say quite so much for any of those in her later works, because in them the philosopher so greatly overtops the portrait-painter, that, in the dissection of the mind, the outward signs seem to have been forgotten. In her, as yet, there is no symptom whatever of that weariness of mind which, when felt by the reader, induces him to declare that the author has written himself out. It is not from decadence that we do not have another Mrs. Poyser, but because the author soars to things which seem to her to be higher than Mrs. Poyser.

  That she did teach positivism is unfortunately true, so far as her literary touch and expression is concerned. That philosophy affects all her books with its subtly insinuating flavor, and it gives meaning and bias to most of them. They thus gain in definiteness of purpose, in moral vigor, in minutely faithful study of some phases of human experience, and in a massive impression of thoughtfulness which her work creates. At the same time, they undoubtedly lose in value as studies of life; in free range of expression for her genius, her poetry and her art; and in that spiritual vision which looks forward with keen gazing eyes of hope and confident inquiry. Her teaching, like most teaching, is a mingled good and evil…. George Eliot’s books have an interest as an attempt at an interpretation of life from its more practical and realistic side, and not less as a reaction against the influences of very near all the great literary minds of the earlier half of the century in England…. Her enthusiasm for altruism, her zeal for humanity, lends a delightful feature to her books. It gives a glow and a consecration to her work, and makes her as great a prophet as positivism is capable of creating. And it is no idle power she awakens in her positivist faith in man. She shames those who claim a broader and better faith.

  George Eliot is the greatest of the novelists in the delineation of feeling and the analysis of motives…. If you say the telling of a story is her forte, you put her below Wilkie Collins or Mrs. Oliphant; if you say her object is to give a picture of English society, she is surpassed by Bulwer and Trollope; if she be called a satirist of society, Thackeray is her superior; if she intends to illustrate the absurdity of behavior, she is eclipsed by Dickens; but if the analysis of human motives be her forte and art, she stands first, and it is very doubtful whether any artist in fiction is entitled to stand second. She reaches clear in and touches the most secret and the most delicate spring of human action.

  If it be true that the work of every artist is but a confession of his own life and feelings, one may say that the writings of George Eliot are essentially a confession of her childhood. The most living characters of her novels, those who have a home in all our memories, are sprung from the real men and women of her early days. That is why they are so veracious and so vivid. Nothing lives and endures like the life and recollection of our very first impressions, like the heart of the child which pulses in the brain of the man. Her own child’s heart is born again to us in the adorable image of Maggie Tulliver, the dear little girl, so oddly compact of day-dreams and logic, of imaginative enthusiasm and serious good feeling.

  I will not do Mr. Trollope such an ill turn as to compare him with George Eliot, the greatest, I suppose, of all writers of fiction till she took to theories and Jews. It was a wonderful feat to draw Romola; it was a wonderful feat to draw Mrs. Poyser; but for the same hand to draw Romola and Mrs. Poyser was something more than wonderful; if the fact were not certain, one would deem it impossible.

  It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with Dante, with Pascal. A novelist—for as a poet, after trying hard to think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable—as a novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut melancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain. Living in a time when humanity has been raised, whether formally or informally, into a religion, she draws a painted curtain of pity before the tragic scene. Still the attentive ear catches from time to time the accents of an unrelenting voice, that proves her kindred with those three mighty spirits and stern monitors of men. In George Eliot, a reader with a conscience may be reminded of the saying that when a man opens Tacitus he puts himself into the confessional. She was no vague dreamer over the folly and the weakness of men, and the cruelty and blindness of destiny. Hers is not the dejection of the poet who “could lie down like a tired child, and weep away this life of care,” as Shelley at Naples; nor is it the despairing misery that moved Cowper in the awful verses of the “Castaway.” It was not such self-pity as wrung from Burns the cry of life “Thou art a galling load, along, a rough, a weary road, to wretches such as I;” nor such general sense of the woes of the race as made Keats think of the world as a place where men sit and hear each other groan, “Where but to think is to be full of sorrow, and leaden-eyed despairs.” She was as far removed from the plangent reverie of Rousseau as from the savage truculence of Swift. Intellectual training had given her the spirit of order and proportion, of definiteness and measure, and this marks her alike from the great sentimentalists and the sweeping satirists.

  After all that has been written about George Eliot’s place as an artist, it may be doubted if attention has been properly directed to her one unique quality. Whatever be her rank amongst the creators of romance (and perhaps the tendency now is to place it too high rather than too low), there can be no doubt that she stands entirely apart and above all writers of fiction, at any rate in England, by her philosophic power and general mental calibre. No other English novelist has ever stood in the foremost rank of the thinkers of his time. Or to put it the other way, no English thinker of the higher quality has ever used romance as an instrument of thought. Our greatest novelists could not be named beside her off the field of novel-writing. Though some of them have been men of wide reading, and even of special learning, they had none of them pretensions to the best philosophy and science of their age. Fielding and Goldsmith, Scott and Thackeray, with all their inexhaustible fertility of mind, were never in the higher philosophy compeers of Hume, Adam Smith, Burke, and Bentham. But George Eliot, before she wrote a tale at all, in mental equipment stood side by side with Mill, Spencer, Lewes, and Carlyle. If she produced nothing in philosophy, moral or mental, quite equal to theirs, she was of their kith and kin, of the same intellectual quality.

  Religion even to George Eliot is not an inner power of Divine mystery awakening the conscience. It is at best an intellectual exercise, or a scenic picture, or a beautiful memory. Her early Evangelicalism peeled off her like an outer garment, leaving behind only a rich vein of dramatic experience which she afterwards worked into her novels. There is no evidence of her great change having produced in her any spiritual anxiety. There is nothing indeed in autobiography more wonderful than the facility with which this remarkable woman parted first with her faith and then with the moral sanctions which do so much to consecrate life, while yet constantly idealizing life in her letters, and taking such a large grasp of many of its moral realities. Her scepticism and then her eclectic Humanitarianism had a certain benignancy and elevation unlike vulgar infidelity of any kind. There are gleams of a higher life everywhere in her thought. There is much self-distrust, but no self-abasement. There is a strange externality—as if the Divine had never come near to her save by outward form or picture—never pierced to any dividing asunder of soul and spirit. Amid all her sadness—and her life upon the whole is a very sad one—there are no depths of spiritual dread (of which dramatically—as in “Romola”—she had yet a vivid conception), or even of spiritual tenderness.

  Her commanding position among the novelists of her time renders her the harbinger among women of that eminent achievement in the world of letters which is destined to follow a thorough and liberal training of their native gifts. But, although greater writers may hereafter appear in the domain of fiction, their most brilliant portrayals of the society around them can never supersede the pictures she has given to the world. Her novels will possess a permanent value, not only as literary masterpieces, but as glowing transcripts of such phases of women’s advancement as belong to the history of our century. In their profound study of that social and intellectual progress which the author was privileged to see, they will serve as a more vivid illustration of the development of woman’s mind than any mere historian could supply. But while the future will honor her imperishable work, and the transcendent powers she brought to its accomplishment, it cannot fail, from the standpoint of distance, to recognize, also, the limitations of her view. It will perceive that her interpretation of human life stopped short of the utmost truth; since a lack of spiritual insight blinded her vision to the limitless outcomes of endeavor, the final adjustments of time. Her penetrative glance, which no visible atom could escape, will appear then too weak to have discerned, below the material surface, those stable foundations upon which the universe rests in eternal poise; too sadly downcast to have turned from the passing shadows at her feet to behold the clear sunlight of heaven.

  Add Thackeray’s sharp and bright perception to Trollope’s nicety in detail, and supplement both with large scholarship and wide reach of philosophic insight; conceive a person who looks, not only at life and into life, but through it, who sympathizes with the gossip of peasants and the principles of advanced thinkers, who is as capable of reproducing Fergus O’Connor as John Stuart Mill, and is as blandly tolerant of Garrison as of Hegel—and you have the wonderful woman who called herself George Eliot, probably the largest mind among the romancers of the century, but with an incurable sadness at the depth of her nature which deprives her of the power to cheer the readers she interests and informs.

  Such wealth and depth of thoughtful and fruitful humour, of vital and various intelligence, no woman has ever shown—no woman perhaps has ever shown a tithe of it. In knowledge, in culture, perhaps in capacity for knowledge and for culture, Charlotte Brontë was no more comparable to George Eliot than George Eliot is comparable to Charlotte Brontë in purity of passion, in depth and ardour of feeling, in spiritual force and fervour of forthright inspiration…. George Eliot, as a woman of the first order of intellect, has once and again shown how much further and more steadily and more hopelessly and more irretrievably and more intolerably wrong it is possible for mere intellect to go than it ever can be possible for mere genius. Having no taste for the dissection of dolls, I shall leave Daniel Deronda in his natural place above the ragshop door; and having no ear for the melodies of a Jew’s harp, I shall leave the Spanish Gipsy to perform on that instrument to such audience as she may collect.

  George Eliot’s books have also been a study for me, sometimes rather an arduous one.

  Her style is everywhere pure and strong, of the best and most vigorous English, not only broad in its power, but often intense in its description of character and situation, and always singularly adequate to the thought. Probably no novelist knew the English character—especially in the Midlands—so well as she, or could analyze it with so much subtlety and truth. She is entirely mistress of the country dialects. In humour, pathos, knowledge of character, power of putting a portrait firmly upon the canvas, no writer surpasses her, and few come near her. Her power is sometimes almost Shakespearian. Like Shakespeare, she gives us a large number of wise sayings, expressed in the pithiest language.

  He, Charles Reade, had no stomach for the fulsome eulogy piled on George Eliot, the less so because it became an open secret that this bold advertisement was the outcome of judicious wire-pulling. As an artist he conceived it the right of every member of his craft to demand a fair field and no favor. No marvel, therefore, if when, stung by a keen sense of injustice, he delivered himself rather slightingly of the idol before whom, at the bidding of her own Nebuchadnezzar behind the scenes, the entire press of England did obeisance.

  The nineteenth-century Amazon.

  George Eliot was, indisputably, a woman of genius, but her writings (the popular verdict to the contrary notwithstanding) include, at most, only one novel of the first rank. Her excellence is in her wise sayings.

  In her vast and lucid intellect, German Criticism, French Positivism, and English Rationalism, in which she was successively trained, were dominated and directed by an active spirit of tolerance, of love and of compassion, and the outcome is an individuality profoundly original. Her art, like her reason, perfectly balanced, trained to the purest realism, is as far removed from the crudeness now too bitter and again too fine-spun of the French, as it is from the formless nebulosity of the Russian writers. She also looks at life with a microscope to discover the fibres of which it is composed; but she does not use clouded glasses, and therefore she sees and reproduces perfect images. Science and poetry unite in her to teach us a moral based upon love and tolerance, a moral which, instead of repudiating modern thought, is deduced from it as a logical consequence. This is the reason of the originality of this powerful writer, the reason of her charm and her glory, and the reason also of this book, in which I have tried to trace the salient lines of this noble figure.

  George Eliot’s mental discipline and ascetic restraint in speculation does not permit her social sympathies full flow.

  How great was the place George Eliot filled in modern literature we may measure by the impossibility of naming her successor…. Her fiction is wrought with a majesty and power which give it a category of its own and secure for it a noble place in English literature. It is superb fiction; but it is much more than fiction.

  George Eliot’s work fills us with an intense sense of reality. Her characters are substantial, living people, drawn with a Shakesperean truth and insight. In order to interest us in them she is not forced, as Dickens was, to rely on outward eccentricities. In Tom and Maggie Tulliver, in Dorothea Brooke, in Tito Melema, or in Gwendolen Harleth, we enter into and identify ourselves with the inner experiences of a human soul. These and the other great creations of George Eliot’s genius are not set characters; like ourselves, they are subject to change, acted upon by others, acting on others in their turn; moulded by the daily pressure of things within and things without. We are made to understand the growth of the degeneration of their souls; how Tito slips half consciously down the easy slopes of self-indulgence, or Romola learns through suffering to ascend the heights of self-renunciation. The novels of George Eliot move under a heavy weight of tragic earnestness; admirable as is their art, graphic and telling as is their humor, they are weighed down with a burden of philosophic teaching, which in the later books, especially “Daniel Deronda,” grows too heavy for the story, and injures the purely literary value.

  He [Edward A. Freeman] liked the reality and truth to life of George Eliot’s works, but curiously failed to appreciate Dickens. “I read ‘The Mill on the Floss’ years ago, but not lately,” he wrote in 1885. “‘Adam Bede’ I read again this year. George Eliot’s people are all real people. You have seen such people, or you feel you might have seen such—so utterly different from the forced wit and vulgarity of so many, I should say, of Dickens.”

  In its averages George Eliot’s style approaches that of Dickens, except that the less elaborate philosophizing of the latter keeps the word-average of his paragraph down. But the sentence of the two writers is nearly the same, and George Eliot’s percentage of sentences of less than 15 words is the same, within 3 per cent., as Dickens’s. Of the two writers the balance in the matter of the short sentence is in favor of the woman, who has 43 per cent. Evidently there is here quite as much variability in the female style as in the masculine. It should be noted, however, that George Eliot’s short sentences tend to occur together; the same is true of her long sentences. In the dialogue the sentence is short; in the narrative it is long. We may say that George Eliot’s paragraphs have unity, barring an occasional philosophical digression. We may say that they show logical coherence, excepting now and then one where a remote conclusion is introduced before it is analyzed.

  George Eliot’s people were never made: they were born like mortals. Personality existed in them, and their author gave them an essence, as no writer excepting Shakespeare had ever done; with the development of this strong personality, moreover, there existed also a power of expression rivalled only by that of the great dramatist himself. Her humor is inimitable; it is natural and genuine, and nowhere in her pages are we jarred by the intrusion of the grotesque or the unreal; here all is intensely human, with the unity of nature and its calm. But there is a third respect in which this woman novelist surpassed her predecessors, and won a place in the domain of story-telling which has not yet been wrested from her.

  Twenty years ago it required, if not a genuine strength of mind, at any rate a certain amount of “cussedness,” not to be a George-Eliotite. All, or almost all, persons who had “got culture” admired George Eliot, and not to do so was to be at a best a Kenite among the chosen people, at worst an outcast, a son of Edom and Moab and Philistia. Two very different currents met and mingled among the worshippers who flocked in the flesh to St. John’s Wood, or read the books in ecstasy elsewhere. There was the rising tide of the æsthetic, revering the creator of Tito. There was the agnostic herd, faithful to the translator of Strauss and the irregular partner of Mr. G. H. Lewes. I have always found myself most unfortunately indisposed to follow any fashion, and I never remember having read a single book of George Eliot’s with genuine and whole-hearted admiration.

  Perhaps few students adequately realise the singular service that much of George Eliot’s work may be made to render to the truth. Nature meant her for a great theologian, as well as a superb interpreter of human life and character; but the Coventry Socinians, the task of translating Strauss, and the sinister influence of George Henry Lewes turned her into a nominal agnostic not altogether content with her rôle. Essentially constructive in genius, we can almost hear the sigh of pain surging in her breast when she feels compelled for the moment to be destructive. She seems never to have entirely lost the Christian sympathies of her early life, and in some attenuated sense is an illustration of the doctrine of final perseverance. The saddest and most depressing of her books have in them a lingering aroma of religion, indeed more than an aroma; for they illustrate many principles which are precise parallels and analogies to some of the fundamental principles of the faith whose historic credulity she had thought well to repudiate. In her own soul there was a subtle residuum of theology nothing could volatilize or destroy. And she was ever seeing some of the elements of this rudimentary theology verified in those manifold phases of life she studied with an almost infallible scrutiny.

  Her genius was certainly great, and her style was often eloquent, always elaborate and skilful, and, in its earlier phases, instinct with feeling and force. But as she left the simplicity of her earlier canvas, so her style lost its distinctive character, and was less closely allied to her genius. Its analytical precision wearies us; its elaboration seems to be studied in order to produce an impression upon that vague entity—the average reader; and what was at first the impulse of the eager student of human nature, seeking an outlet for emotion in delicacy and subtlety of expression, became a literary trick and an imposing pedantry. It was only the strength of her intellectual power that preserved her genius from being even more depressed by an acquired and unnatural habit.

  The creations of George Eliot,—Tito and Baldassare, Mrs. Poyser and Silas Marner, Dorothea Brooke and Gwendolen,—are not as familiar to the reading public of to-day as they were to that of ten or fifteen years ago. Of the idolatry which almost made her a prophetess of a new cult we hear nothing now. She has not maintained her position as Dickens, Thackeray, and Charlotte Brontë have maintained theirs. But if there be little of partisanship and much detraction, it is idle to deny that George Eliot’s many gifts, her humour, her pathos, her remarkable intellectual endowments, give her an assured place among the writers of Victorian literature.

  Her writings always depend upon a primary postulate, and to this postulate all characters, scenes, and situations are ultimately subordinated. This postulate is: The ideal social order as a whole, the establishment of sane and sound social relations in humanity, the development and progress of human society toward such an ideal of general human life.

  In the “Mill on the Floss” and “Silas Marner” a curious phenomenon appeared—George Eliot divided into two personages. The close observer of nature, mistress of laughter and tears, exquisite in the intensity of cumulative emotion, was present still, but she receded; the mechanician, overloading her page with pretentious matter, working out her scheme as if she were building a steam-engine, came more and more to the front. In “Felix Holt” and on to “Daniel Deronda” the second personage preponderated, and our ears were deafened by the hum of the philosophical machine, the balance of scenes and sentences, the intolerable artificiality of the whole construction. George Eliot is a very curious instance of the danger of self-cultivation. No writer was ever more anxious to improve herself and conquer an absolute mastery over her material. But she did not observe, as she entertained the laborious process, that she was losing those natural accomplishments which infinitely outshone the philosophy and science which she so painfully acquired. She was born to please, but unhappily she persuaded herself, or was persuaded, that her mission was to teach the world, to lift its moral tone, and, in consequence, an agreeable rustic writer, with a charming humour and very fine sympathetic nature, found herself gradually uplifted until, about 1875, she sat enthroned on an educational tripod, an almost ludicrous pythoness. From the very first she had been weak in that quality which more than any other is needed by a novelist, imaginative invention. So long as she was humble, and was content to reproduce, with the skillful subtlety of her art, what she had personally heard and seen, her work had delightful merit. But it was an unhappy day, when she concluded that strenuous effort, references to a hundred abstruse writers, and a whole technical system of rhetoric would do the wild-wood business of native imagination. The intellectual self-sufficiency of George Eliot has suffered severe chastisement. At the present day scant justice is done to her unquestionable distinction of intellect or to the emotional intensity of much of her early work.

  Never, surely, were books more wistful than those great novels, “Romola,” “Middlemarch,” “Daniel Deronda.” Their animus is wholly new: it is neither scorn nor laughter; it is sympathy. This sympathy, more than any other quality, gives to the work of George Eliot a depth of thoughtfulness unsounded by the shallow criticism on life of her predecessors.

  To the theologian George Eliot offers, for a variety of reasons, a most fascinating study. The bent of her mind was distinctly theological, and underlying all she wrote there was a theological conception of life and of the universe…. Singular to say, the very feature in George Eliot’s works which imparts to them a supreme interest for the student of religion and theology, is that to which special exception has been taken by the critics…. It is profoundly affecting to think that before George Eliot sat down to the composition of her first novel she had ceased to be a Christian believer. Though she could not but have felt the painfulness of the wrench it cost her to part with so much that was dear, and though she did show some concern at the grief she caused her friends, yet she quailed not before consequences nor ever once exhibited any vacillation of judgment, nor any sign of recantation or retreat. She never appears to have faltered in her unbelief, never seems to have doubted the rectitude of the change which had come over her…. George Eliot’s ethical system is summed up in the one word Duty. With her it was an imperial word which covered the entire territory of life, and included every relation in which men stand to each other, whether as landlord and tenant, priest and parishioner, husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister. With her the way of Duty must ever be trodden, though it be bordered with no wayside flowers, and is strewn with cruel flints that make the traveller’s feet to bleed.

  Notwithstanding all these differences between her earlier and her later work, George Eliot was from first to last a philosopher and moralist. All her novels and tales are constructed on the ethical formula of Mrs. Gaskell’s “Ruth.” For the way in which she thought out and applied this doctrine of the act and its train of good and ill, the only appropriate epithet is magnificent. She explained chance and circumstance, giving to these words a new content. All happenings, she showed, are but the meeting and the intermingling of courses of events that have their source in the inner history of mankind. This invisible medium in which we move is outside of time. The past is here in what was done yesterday; the future is herein what is done to-day; and “our finest hope is finest memory.” Whatever may be her method of telling a story,—whether she begins at the beginning or breaks into the midst of her plot and in due time gathers up its threads,—George Eliot always comes quickly to an incident which discovers somewhat the moral quality of her characters; and then she proceeds slowly with their self-revelation.

  As regards her style, George Eliot may be accepted as one of the safest models in our language. Her mastery of English was remarkable, her choice of words was unerring, and her vocabulary was sufficiently extensive to meet the demands of her great intellect. Her sentences, when subjected to the most acute analysis, will be found not only to conform to the laws of unity, mass, and coherence, but to possess a strength and rhythm characteristic of only our highest prose. Her style is admirably adapted to her subject, that of English provincial life; and in this branch of the novel she stands supreme.

  George Eliot certainly stands at the head of psychological novelists, and though within far narrower limits she has here and there been equalled—by Mr. Hardy, for example; and in highly differentiated types, in the subtleties and nuances of the genre by Mr. Henry James—it is probable that the genre itself will decay before any of its practitioners will, either in depth or range, surpass its master spirit…. One may speak of George Eliot’s style as of the snakes in Iceland. She has no style. Her substance will be preserved for “the next ages” by its own pungency or not at all. No one will ever read her for the sensuous pleasure of the process. She is a notable contradiction of the common acceptation of Buffon’s “le style c’est l’homme.” Her very marked individuality expresses itself in a way which may be called a characteristic manner, but which lacks the “order and movement” that Buffon defined style to be when he was defining it instead of merely saying something about it.

  In spite of her detractors, in spite of the demon of depreciation raging and seeking whom in the past he may next devour, George Eliot was very great. Her moral force, her sustaining power in holding up to her contemporaries the highest ideal she could frame of what has been called the evangel of altruism, never deserted her; she loathed egotism and the worship of self. Had she seen the latest manifestations of the decadent school, she would have felt amply justified in lashing as she did the first symptoms of this malady. She believed in herself, and her disciples believed in her, with unquestioning fervour; but when we attempt to find out what in her work will live, it is doubtful if the admiration of those who are not disciples does not mean more than the enthusiasm of her worshippers. She was great and she was also original; the pathos of Silas Marner, the humour of Mrs. Poyser, the limitations of Tulliver père, the fascinations of Tito, the detestableness of Grandcourt, &c., have a spontaneous and vibrating ring which is of the essence of George Eliot’s mind; and the ring is the ring of genius.