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. -MORLEY, JOHN, 1885, The Life of George Eliot, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 51, p. 250.

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

Or to put

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.-HARRISON, FREDERIC, 1885, The Choice of Books and Other Literary Pieces, p.

212.

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 onethere are no depths of spiritual dread (of which dramatically-as in "Romola"-she had yet a vivid conception), or even of spiritual tenderness-TULLOCH, JOHN, 1885, Movements of Religious Thought in Britain During the Nineteenth Century, p. 162.

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 train

ing 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.- WOOLSON, ABBA GOOLD, 1886, George Eliot and her Heroines, P. 173.

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.-WHIPPLE, EDWIN PERCY, 1887, In DickensLand, Scribner's Magazine, vol. 2, p. 744.

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.-SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1887, A Note on Charlotte Brontë, pp. 19, 21.

George Eliot's books have also been a study for me, sometimes rather an arduous one.-HAMERTON, PHILIP GILBERT, 1887, Books Which Have Influenced Me, p. 59.

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. MEIKLEJOHN, J. M. D., 1887, The English Language: Its Grammar, History and Literature, p. 365.

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. - READE, CHARLES L., AND REV. COMPTON, 1887, Memoir of Charles Reade, p. 301.

DAWSON, W. J., 1892, Quest and Vision, pp. 129, 146.

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

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. -LEWIN, WALTER, 1889, The Abuse of Fiction, The Forum, vol. 7, p. 665.

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. NEGRI, GAETANO, 1891, George Eliot: La sua vita ed i suoi Romanzi.

George Eliot's mental discipline and ascetic restraint in speculation does not permit her social sympathies full flow.-KAUFMAN, MORITZ, 1892, Charles Kingsley, Christian Socialist and Social Reformer, p. 138.

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.

Dickens was, to rely on outward eccentricities. In Tom and Maggie Tulliver, in Dorolen Harleth, we enter into and identify ourthea Brooke, in Tito Melema, or in Gwendoselves 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.-PANCOAST, HENRY S., 1893, Representative English Literature, p. 426.

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."-PORTER, DELIA LYMAN, 1893, Mr. Freeman at Home, Scribner's Magazine, vol. 14, p. 616.

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.-LEWIS, EDWIN HERBERT, 1894, The History of the English Paragraph, p. 157.

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.-SIMONDS, W. E., 1894, An Introduction to the Study of English Fiction, p. 68. 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 aesthetic, 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.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1895, Corrected Impressions, p. 162.

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. - SELBY, THOMAS G., 1896, The Theology of Modern Fiction, p. 8.

Its

Her genius was certainly great, and her style was often eloquent, always elaborate and skilful, and, in its earlier phases, inBut as she stinct with feeling and force. left the simplicity of her earlier canvas, so her style lost its distinctive character, and was less closely allied to her genius. 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. - CRAIK, HENRY, 1896, English Prose, vol. v, p. 666.

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.-SHORTER, CLEMENT, 1897, Victorian Literature, p. 52.

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.-WALDSTEIN, CHARLES, 1897, Library of the World's Best Literature, ed. Warner, vol. IX, p. 5367.

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-suffici ency 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.-Gosse, EDMUND, 1897, A Short History of Modern English Literature, p. 369.

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.-SCUDDER, VIDA D., 1898, Social Ideals in English Letters, p.

185.

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. . . .