George Eliot, 1819-1880.

liberal religious views, spent a year (1849-50) in study at Geneva, and returned to England to assist soon afterward in editing the radical Westminster Review. She was thus brought into contact with eminent thinkers, among them George Henry Lewes, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. With the first-named, a brilliant critic of philosophical bent, she formed a union which lasted until his death in 1878. Very shortly before her own death she married Mr. J. W. Cross, a New York banker and an old friend.

It was under the influence of Spencer and Lewes that George Eliot discovered where her real talent lay, and also under the influence of them and others, including the French positivist philosopher Comte, that she came in the end to overlay that talent with such a web of science, philosophy, and ethical doctrine as almost to obscure its brilliance. In 1857 she contributed to Blackwood's Magazine "The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton," which with two other very realistic tales was published the next year under the title of Scenes of Clerical Life. In 1859 appeared her first long novel, Adam Bede, which placed her at once among the foremost writers of the time. It was followed in 1860 by another long novel, The Mill on the Floss, and that in 1861 by a shorter one, Silas Marner. Then came a somewhat marked change. While travelling in Italy she formed an "ambitious project," which was to write a romance of the Italian Renaissance with the scene laid in Florence at the time of Savonarola's career and martyrdom. The feat was accomplished, and the result was the ponderous but still successful story of Romola (1863). Her next exploit was in the field of English politics and love, with Felix Holt (1866), perhaps her weakest novel, as the result. Then, after her drama of the Spanish Gypsy (1868) and some not very poetical poetry, appeared a third novel of this later, more complex type, Middlemarch (1871-72). So well did this suit the taste of the time for patient analysis, complex character drawing, and free discussion of moral problems, that it established a kind of George Eliot cult,

and her name, oddly enough, was mentioned along with Shakespeare's and Goethe's. Her last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), dealing not unsympathetically with modern Hebrew life and ideals, showed once more a falling off from its predecessor.

It is still too early to speak with confidence of the final place and importance of this work. One thing, however, begins to seem clear, and that is that the significance which at the time of George Eliot's death was attached to her later achievements was an exaggerated one, and that the four novels of the early group show the greater vitality. They are works of much less study and labor, being less weighted with "purpose," and springing more directly from the author's experience and observation. Like the Vicar of Wakefield, which the author much admired, they are racy with the humor and pathos of peasant and lower middle-class life. The Scenes of Clerical Life were soon discovered to contain portraits dangerously "like." Maggie Tulliver, the rebellious genius of The Mill on the Floss, was clearly none other than Mary Ann Evans herself, and Tom was her brother Isaac; while Aunt Glegg and her parsimonious spouse, Aunt Pullet, the hen-pecked Uncle Pullet, Bob Jakin the pedler, and the rest, came out of the same provincial environment. Miss Evans had an aunt, too, who, like Dinah Morris in Adam Bede, was a Methodist exhorter, and who had told her just such an anecdote of child-murder as plays an important part in that novel. Adam Bede was partly modelled after her own father. The homely truthfulness of the scenes is not the least of their charms. One does not readily forget such a picture as that of Maggie Tulliver slipping fearfully in to dinner after cutting off her hair in a pique at being scolded for not keeping it behind her ears:

Mrs. Tulliver's scream made all eyes turn towards the same point as her own, and Maggie's cheeks and ears began to burn, while uncle Glegg, a kind-looking, white-haired old gentleman, said—

"Heyday! what little gell's this-why, I don't know her. Is it some little gell you've picked up in the road, Kezia?"

"Why, she's gone and cut her hair herself," said Mr. Tulliver in an under-tone to Mr. Deane, laughing with much enjoyment. "Did you ever know such a little hussy as it is?"

"Why, little miss, you've made yourself look very funny," said uncle Pullet, and perhaps he never in his life made an observation which was felt to be so lacerating.

"Fie, for shame!" said aunt Glegg, in her loudest, severest tone of reproof. "Little gells as cut their own hair should be whipped and fed on bread and water-not come and sit down with their aunts and uncles."

"Ay, ay," said uncle Glegg, meaning to give a playful turn to this denunciation, "she must be sent to jail, I think, and they'll cut the rest of her hair off there, and make it all even."

"She's more like a gypsy nor ever,” said aunt Pullet, in a pitying tone; "it's very bad luck, sister, as the gell should be so brown— the boy's fair enough. I doubt it'll stand in her way i' life to be so

brown."

"She's a naughty child, as'll break her mother's heart," said Mrs. Tulliver, with the tears in her eyes.

Maggie seemed to be listening to a chorus of reproach and derision. Her first flush came from anger, which gave her a transient power of defiance, and Tom thought she was braving it out, supported by the recent appearance of the pudding and custard. Under this impression, he whispered, "Oh my! Maggie, I told you you'd catch it." He meant to be friendly, but Maggie felt convinced that Tom was rejoicing in her ignominy. Her feeble power of defiance left her in an instant, her heart swelled, and, getting up from her chair, she ran to her father, hid her face on his shoulder, and burst out into loud sobbing.

"Come, come, my wench," said her father, soothingly, putting his arm round her, “never mind; you was i' the right to cut it off if it plagued you; give over crying: father'll take your part.” But beyond this simple realism the stories have their interest of humorous or tragic plot, and are provided with a quite sufficient and serious criticism of life. Silas Marner, for instance, the weaver of Raveloe, is a wronged and embittered man who finds nothing to live for but his hoard of gold, but who is brought back to human sympathy by the love of a child. "Eh, there's trouble i' this world," Mrs. Winthrop had counselled him, “and there's things as we can niver make out the rights on. And all

as we've got to do is to trusten, Master Marner-to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten." And Silas Marner declares in the end, "Since the time the child was sent to me, and I've come to love her as myself, I've had light enough to trusten by; and now she says she'll never leave me, I think I shall trusten till I die."

The merits of the later novels are to be sought in their keen analysis of character and ethical motive, and the underlying philosophy of life. Tito Melema, the beautiful young Greek in Romola, is a self-indulgent creature, not wholly indifferent to the call of duty, but weakly following the easiest line of conduct till character gradually slips away, and destiny, in the form of Baldassarre's avenging fingers, takes him by the throat. Dr. Lydgate, to select only one character from the almost epical Middlemarch, is another study in degeneration—a man sacrificing all his intellectual strength and aspiration to an unworthy but unconquerable passion, allowing the beauty of one weak woman to be the instrument of loss to the world at large. It is obvious that George Eliot has a strong propensity toward the portrayal of frustrated lives; she reiterates in various forms the human truth that "there's a sort of wrong that can never be made up for." Yet she is not a pessimist. The virtue of the individual may not bring personal reward, but she teaches very plainly that the self-sacrifice of the individual means hope and help for humanity, just as surely as the refusal to make such sacrifice means far more than personal ruin. Altruism is the name coined by Comte for this doctrine, and if one must reduce these novels of purpose to something like a formula, it must take this name. One may not care to treat creative literature thus; but facts are not to be ignored, and it is one of the facts of a strenuously intellectual and introspective age that art itself has been often the avowed instrument of a philosophical or moral creed. From Walter Scott, the careless romancer, to George Eliot, the painstaking moralist, is a very great span, but the nineteenth century novel bridged it in less than fifty years.

CHAPTER XX

MISCELLANEOUS VICTORIAN PROSE

CARLYLE RUSKIN NEWMAN ARNOLD HUXLEY

We are now to take up those discursive forms of prose that lie outside of creative fiction-the prose that serves as an embodiment of ideas rather than of imagination and invention. It ranges from the brief essay to the elaborate history. History and criticism, indeed, comprehend the major portion of such discursive prose of the Victorian age as rises to the status of literature, and it is further significant that criticism should be the more conspicuous of the two. The style, we shall find, is free, varying with the individual quite as much as in the earlier part of the century. The themes, moreover, are as diverse as the interests and activities of the age. It is of course natural that such activities should be reflected more directly in this prose than in poetry or fiction. Now and then a social problem may be made the half serious basis of an elaborate poem, as in Tennyson's Princess; politics may be glanced at in an occasional verse like that about Freedom "slowly broadening down;" or science may be employed in a chance figure. But the prose essay or treatise attacks these subjects directly. We may look to find, therefore, in the literary prose of the middle of the century abundant echoes of chartism, philanthropy, church reform, the new education, science and art,-in short, of the whole liberal

movement.

Of strictly critical writing, the larger part proceeds from the later years of the period now under consideration. Narration and exhortation, always more attractive from the literary point of view than deliberate exposition, still dominated in the earlier