Such is George Eliot's religion. It is the "Religion of Humanity" as interpreted by a woman, a poet and a genius. It differs from Comte's as the work of a poet differs from that of a philosopher, as that of a woman differs from that of a man. His positive religion gives the impression of being invented; it is artificial, unreal. Hers is, at least, living and beautiful and impressive; it is warm, tender and full of compassion, He invents a new symbolism, a new hierarchy, and a new worship; that is, he remodels Catholicism to fit the Religion of Humanity. She is too sensible, too wise, or rather too poetic and sympathetic, to undertake such a transformation, or to be satisfied with it when accomplished by another. She gives a new poetic and spiritual meaning to the old faith and worship; and in doing this makes no break with tradition, rejects nothing of the old symbolism.

It was her conviction that nothing of the real meaning and power of religion escaped by the transformation she made in its spiritual contents. She believed that she had dropped only its speculative teachings, while all that had ever made it of value was retained. That she was entirely mistaken in this opinion scarcely needs to be said; or that her speculative interpretation, if generally accepted, would destroy for most persons even those elements of religion which she accepted. A large rich mind, gifted with genius and possessed of wide culture, as was hers, could doubtless find satisfaction in that attenuated substitute for piety and worship which she accepted. There certainly could be no Mr. Tryan, no Dinah Morris, no Savonarola, no Mordecai, if her theories were the common ones; and it would be even less possible for a Dorothea, a Felix Holt, a Daniel Deronda, or a Romola to develop in such an atmosphere. What her intellectual speculations would accomplish when accepted as the motives of life, is seen all too well in the case of those many radical thinkers whom this century has produced. Only the most highly cultivated, and those of an artistic or poetic temperament, could accept her substitute for the old religion. The motives she presents could affect but a few persons; only here and there are to be found those to whom altruism would be a motive large enough to become a religion. To march in the great human army towards a higher destiny for humanity may have a strong fascination for some, and is coming to affect and inspire a larger number with every century; but it is not enough to know that the race is growing better. What is the end of human progress? we have a right to ask. Does that progress go on in accordance with some universal purpose, which includes the whole universe? We must look not only for a perfect destiny for man, but for a perfect destiny for all worlds and beings throughout the infinitude of God's creative influence. A progressive, intellectual religion such as will answer to the larger needs of modern life, must give belief in a universal providence, and it must teach man to trust in the spiritual capacities of his own soul. Unless the universe means something which is intelligible, and unless it has a purpose and destiny progressive and eternal, it is impossible that religion will continue to inspire men. That is, only a philosophy which gives such an interpretation to the universe can be the basis of an enduring and progressive religion.

If religion is to continue, it is also necessary that man should be able to believe in the soul as something more than the product of environment and heredity. It is not merely the belief in immortality which has inspired the greatest minds, but the inward impulse of creative activity, resting on the conviction that they were working with God for enduring results. Absorption into the life of humanity can be but a feeble motive compared with that which grows out of faith in the soul's spiritual eternity in co-operation with God.

George Eliot's religion is highly interesting, and in many ways it is suggestive and profitable. Her insistence on feeling and sympathy as its main impulses is profoundly significant; but that teaching is as good for Theism or Christianity as for the Religion of Humanity, and needs everywhere to be accepted. In like manner, her altruistic spirit may be accepted and realized by those who can find no sympathy for her intellectual speculations. Love of man, self-sacrifice for human good, cannot be urged by too many teachers. The greater the number of motives leading to that result, the better for man.



XII.

ETHICAL SPIRIT.

Whatever may be said of George Eliot's philosophy and theology, her moral purpose was sound and her ethical intent noble. She had a strong passion for the ethical life, her convictions regarding it were very deep and earnest, and she dwelt lovingly on all its higher accomplishments. Her books are saturated with moral teaching, and her own life was ordered after a lofty ethical standard. She seems to have yearned most eagerly after a life of moral helpfulness and goodness, and she has made her novels the teachers of a vigorous morality.

Her friends bear enthusiastic testimony to the nobleness of her moral life and to her zeal for ethical culture. We are told by one of them that "she had upbuilt with strenuous pains a resolute virtue," conquering many faults, and gaining a lofty nobleness of spirit. Another has said, that "precious as the writings of George Eliot are and must always be, her life and character were yet more beautiful than they." Her zeal for morality was very great; she was an ethical prophet; the moral order of life roused her mind to a lofty inspiration. If she could not conceive of God, if she could not believe in immortality, yet she accepted duty as peremptory and absolute. Her faith in duty and charity seemed all the more vigorous and confident because her religion was so attenuated and imperfect. Love of man with her grew into something like that mighty and absorbing love of God which is to be seen in some of the greatest souls. Morality became to her a religion, not so intense as with saints and prophets, but more sympathetic and ardent than with most ethical teachers. She was no stoic, no teacher of moral precepts, no didactic debater about moral duties, no mere dilettante advocate of human rights. She was a warm, tender, yearning, sympathetic, womanly friend of individuals, who hoped great things for humanity, and who believed that man can find happiness and true culture only in a moral life.

She was distinctively a moral teacher in her books. The novel was never to her a work of art alone. The moral purpose was always present, always apparent, always clear and emphatic. There was something to teach for her whenever she took the pen in hand; some deep lesson of human experience, some profound truth of human conduct, some tender word of sympathy for human sorrow and suffering. She seems to have had no sympathy with that theory which says that the poet and the novelist are to picture life as it is, without regard to moral obligations and consequences. In this respect she was one of the most partisan of all partisans, an absolute dogmatist; for she never forgot for a moment the moral consequences of life. She was one of the most ardent of modern preachers, her books are crowded with teaching of the most positive character. In her way she was a great believer, and when she believed she never restrained her pen, but taught the full measure of her convictions. She did not look upon life as a scene to be sketched, but as an experience to be lived, and a moral order to be improved by sympathy and devotedness. Consequently the artist appears in the teacher's garb, the novelist has become an ethical preacher. She does not describe life as something outside of herself, nor does she regard human sorrows and sufferings and labors merely as materials for the artist's use; but she lives in and with all that men do and suffer and aspire to. Hers is not the manner of Homer and Scott, who hide their personality behind the wonderful distinctness of their personalities, making the reader forget the author in the strength and power of the characters described. It is not that of Shakspere, of whom we seem to get no glimpse in his marvellous readings of human nature, who paints other men as no one else has done, but who does not paint himself. Hers is rather the manner of Wordsworth and Goethe, who have a theory of life to give us, and whose personality appears on every page they wrote. She has a philosophy, a morality and a religion to inculcate. She had a vast subjective intensity of conviction, and a strong individualism of purpose, which would not hide itself behind the scenes. Her philosophy impregnates with a strong personality all her classic utterances; her ethics present a marked purpose in the development of her plots and in her presentation of the outcome of human experience; and her religion glows in the personal ardor and sympathy of her noblest characters, and in their passion for renunciation and altruism.

Her ethical passion adds to the strength and purpose of George Eliot's genius. No supreme literary creator has been devoid of this characteristic, however objective and impersonal he may have been. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Shakspere, Scott, were all earnest ethical teachers. The moral problems of life impressed them profoundly, and they showed a strong personal preference for righteousness. The literary masters of all times and countries have loved virtue, praised purity, and admired ethical uprightness. Any other attitude than this argues something less than genius, though genius may be far from didactic and not given to preaching. The moral intent of life is so inwoven with all its experiences, that the failure of any mind to be impressed with it, and profoundly affected, proves it wanting in insight, poetic vision and genius. George Eliot is entirely in harmony, in this respect, with all the masters of the literary art. Her ethical passion is a clear sign of her genius, and proves the vigor of her intellectual vision. No one who rightly weighs the value of her books, and fairly estimates the nature of her teaching, can regret that she had so keen a love of ethical instruction. The vigor, enthusiasm and originality of her teaching compensate for many faults.

Her teachings have a special interest because they afford a literary embodiment of the ethical theories of the evolution philosophy. They indicate the form which is likely to be given to ethics if theism and individualism are discarded, and the peculiar effects upon moral life which will be induced by agnosticism. She applied agnosticism to morals, by regarding good and evil as relative, and as the results, of man's environment. For her, ethics had no infinite sanctions, no intuitive promulgation of an eternal law; but she regarded morality as originating in and deriving its authority from the social relations of men to each other. Our intuitive doing of right, or sorrow for wrong, is the result of inherited conditions. In Romola she speaks of Tito as affected by—

the inward shame, the reflex of that outward law which the great heart of mankind makes for every individual man, a reflex which will exist even in the absence of the sympathetic impulses that need no law, but rush to the deed of fidelity and pity as inevitably as the brute mother shields her young from the attack of the hereditary enemy. [Footnote: Chapter IX.]

This teaching is often found in her pages, and in connection with the assertion of the relativity of morals. There is no absolute moral law for her, no eternal ideal standard; but what is right is determined by the environment. Instead of Kant's categorical imperative of the moral law, proclaimed as a divine command in every soul, George Eliot found in the conscience and in the moral intuitions simply inherited experiences. In Daniel Deronda she says, "Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws; they are the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories."

George Eliot's rejection of any absolute standard of moral conduct or of happiness continually asserts itself in her pages. We must look at the individual, his inherited moral power, his environment, his special motives, if we would judge him aright. In the last chapters of The Mill on the Floss, when writing of Maggie's repentance, this idea appears. Maggie is not to be tried by the moral ideal of Christianity, nor by any such standard of perfection as Kant proposed, but by all the circumstances of her place in life and her experience. We are accordingly told that—

Moral judgments must remain false and hollow unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot.

George Eliot says in one of the mottoes in Felix Holt that moral happiness is "mainly a complex of habitual relations and dispositions." Even more explicit is her assertion, in one of the mottoes of Daniel Deronda, of the relativity of moral power.

Looking at life in the growth of a single lot, who having a practised vision may not see that ignorance of the true bond between events, and false conceit of means whereby sequences may be compelled—like that falsity of eyesight which overlooks the gradations of distance, seeing that which is afar off as if it were within a step or a grasp— precipitate the mistaken soul on destruction?

She does not teach, however, that man is a mere victim of circumstances, that he is a creature ruled by fate. His environment includes his own moral heredity, which may overcome the physical circumstances which surround him. In Middlemarch she says, "It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstances would have been less strong against us." The same thought appears in Zarca's appeal to Fedalma to be his true daughter, in one of the most effective scenes of The Spanish Gypsy. Moral devotedness is the strongest of all forces, he argues, even when it fails of its immediate aim; and even in failure the inherited life of the race is enlarged.

No great deed is done By falterers who ask for certainty. No good is certain, but the steadfast mind, The undivided will to seek the good: 'Tis that compels the elements, and wrings A human music from the indifferent air. The greatest gift the hero leaves his race Is to have been a hero. Say we fail!— We feed the high tradition of the world, And leave our spirit in our children's breasts.

George Eliot never goes so far as to say that man may, by virtue of his inward life, rise superior to all circumstances, and maintain the inviolable sanctity of his own moral nature. She does not forget that defeat is often the surest victory, that moral faithfulness may lead to disgrace and death; but even in these cases it is for the sake of the race we are to be faithful. The inward victory, the triumph of the soul in unsullied purity and serenity, she does not dwell upon; and it may be doubted if she fully recognized such a moral result. Her mind is so occupied with the social results of conduct as to overlook the individual victories which life ever brings to those who are faithful unto death. George Eliot has put her theory of morality into the mouth of Guildenstern, one of the characters in "A College Breakfast Party."

Where get, you say, a binding law, a rule Enforced by sanction, an Ideal throned With thunder in its hand? I answer, there Whence every faith and rule has drawn its force Since human consciousness awaking owned An Outward, whose unconquerable sway Resisted first and then subdued desire By pressure of the dire impossible Urging to possible ends the active soul And shaping so its terror and its love. Why, you have said it—threats and promises Depend on each man's sentence for their force: All sacred rules, imagined or revealed, Can have no form or potency apart From the percipient and emotive mind. God, duty, love, submission, fellowship, Must first be framed in man, as music is, Before they live outside him as a law. And still they grow and shape themselves anew, With fuller concentration in their life Of inward and of outward energies Blending to make the last result called Man, Which means, not this or that philosopher Looking through beauty into blankness, not The swindler who has sent his fruitful lie By the last telegram: it means the tide Of needs reciprocal, toil, trust and love— The surging multitude of human claims Which make "a presence not to be put by" Above the horizon of the general soul. Is inward reason shrunk to subtleties, And inward wisdom pining passion-starved?— The outward reason has the world in store, Regenerates passion with the stress of want, Regenerates knowledge with discovery, Shows sly rapacious self a blunderer, Widens dependence, knits the social whole In sensible relation more defined.

As these words would indicate, George Eliot's faith in the moral meaning and outcome of the world is very strong. All experience is moral, she would have us believe, and capable of teaching man the higher life. That is, all experience tends slowly to bring man into harmony with his environment, and to teach him that certain actions are helpful, while others are harmful. This teaching is very definite and emphatic in her pages, often rising into a lofty eloquence and a rich poetic diction, as her mind is wrought upon by the greatness and the impressiveness of the moral lessons of life.

However effective the outward order of nature may be in creating morality, it is to be borne in mind that ethical rules can have no effect "apart from the percipient and emotive mind." It is, in reality, the social nature which gives morality its form and meaning. It is a creation of the social organism. Its basis is found, indeed, in the invariable order of nature, but the superstructure is erected out of and by society. "Man's individual functions," says Lewes, "arise in relations to the cosmos; his general functions arise in relations to the social medium; thence moral life emerges. All the animal impulses become blended with human emotions. In the process of evolution, starting from the merely animal appetite of sexuality, we arrive at the purest and most far-reaching tenderness. The social instincts tend more and more to make sociality dominate animality, and thus subordinate personality to humanity.... The animal has sympathy, and is moved by sympathetic impulses, but these are never altruistic; the ends are never remote. Moral life is based on sympathy; it is feeling for others, working for others, aiding others, quite irrespective of any personal good beyond the satisfaction of the social impulse. Enlightened by the intuition of our community of weakness, we share ideally the universal sorrows. Suffering harmonizes. Feeling the need of mutual help, we are prompted by it to labor for others." [Footnote: Foundations of a Creed, vol. I., pp. 147, 153.] Morality is social, not personal; the result of those instincts which draw men together in community of interests, sympathies and sufferings. Its sanctions are all social; its motives are purely human; its law is created by the needs of humanity. There is no outward coercive law of the divine will or of invariable order which is to be supremely regarded; the moral law is human need as it changes from age to age. The increase of human sympathies in the process of social evolution gives the true moral ideal to be aspired after. What will increase the social efficiency of the race, what will promote altruism, is moral.

Alike because of the invariable order of nature, and the social dependence of men on each other, are the effects of conduct wrought out in the individual. George Eliot believes in "the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind." All evil is injurious to man, destructive of the integrity of his life. She teaches the doctrine of Nemesis with as much conviction, thoroughness and eloquence as the old Greek dramatists, making sin to be punished, and wrong-doing to be destructive. Sometimes she presents this doctrine with all the stern, unpitying vigor of an Aeschylus, as a dire effect of wrong that comes upon men with an unrelenting mercilessness. In Janet's Repentance she says,—

Nemesis is lame, but she is of colossal stature, like the gods; and sometimes, while her sword is not yet unsheathed, she stretches out her huge left arm and grasps her victim. The mighty hand is invisible, but the victim totters under the dire clutch.

Her doctrine of Nemesis resembles that of the old Greeks more than that of the modern optimists and theists. Hers is not the idealistic conception of compensation, which measures out an exact proportion of punishment for every sin, and of happiness for every virtuous action. Wrong-doing injures others as well as those who commit the evil deed, and moral effects reach far beyond those who set them in operation. Very explicitly is this fact presented in The Mill on the Floss.

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

In Adam Bede, Parson Irwine says to Arthur,—

Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences quite apart from any fluctuations that went before—consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.

Yet wrong-doing does not go unpunished, for the law of moral cause and effect ever holds good. This is the teaching of the first chapter of Felix Holt.

There is seldom any wrong-doing which does not carry along with it some downfall of blindly climbing hopes, some hard entail of suffering, some quickly satiated desire that survives, with the life in death of old paralytic vice, to see itself cursed by its woeful progeny—some tragic mark of kinship in the one brief life to the far-stretching life that went before, and to the life that is to come after, such as has raised the pity and terror of men ever since they began to discern between will and destiny. But these things are often unknown to the world, for there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

In the same novel we are told, that—

To the end of men's struggles a penalty will remain for those who sink from the ranks of the heroes into the crowd for whom the heroes fight and die.

The same teaching is to be found in the motto of Daniel Deronda, where we are bidden to fear the evil tendencies of our own souls.

Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires That trample o'er the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhalations laden with slow death, And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence.

The manner in which George Eliot believes Nemesis works out her results has already been indicated. Her effects do not appear in any outward and palpable results, necessarily; her method is often unknown to men, hidden even from the keenest eyes. Evil causes produce evil results, that is all; and these are shown in the most subtle and secret results of what life is. One of her methods is indicated in Adam Bede.

Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our consciences— out of the suffering we feel in the suffering we may have caused; there is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon. Our moral sense learns the manners of good society, and smiles when others smile; but when some rude person gives rough names to our actions, she is apt to take part against us.

The Mill on the Floss reflects this thought.

Retribution may come from any voice; the hardest, crudest most imbruted urchin at the street-corner can inflict it.

More effective still is that punishment which comes of our own inward sense of wrong-doing. George Eliot makes Parson Irwine say that "the inward suffering is the worst form of Nemesis." This is well illustrated in the experience of Gwendolen, who, after the death of her husband at Geneva, is anxious to leave that place.

For what place, though it were the flowery vale of Enna, may not the inward sense turn into a circle of punishment where the flowers are no better than a crop of flame-tongues burning the soles of our feet?

Even before this, Gwendolen had come to realize the dire effects of selfish conduct in that dread and bitterness of spirit which subdued her and mocked all her hopes and joys.

Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines all currents toward itself, and makes the whole life its tributary. And the intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear, which compels to silence and drives vehemence into a constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary annihilation of the deserted object, something like the hidden rites of vengeance with which the persecuted have made a dark vent for their rage, and soothed their suffering into dumbness. Such hidden rites went on in the secrecy of Gwendolen's mind, but not with soothing effect—rather with the effect of a struggling terror. Side by side with the dread of her husband had grown the self-dread which urged her to flee from the pursuing images wrought by her pent-up impulse. The vision of her past wrong-doing, and what it had brought on her, came with a pale ghastly illumination over every imagined deed that was a rash effort at freedom, such as she had made in her marriage. [Footnote: Chapter LIV.]

The way in which wrong-doing affects us to our hurt is suggested also in Romola, where its results upon the inward life are explicitly revealed.

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds lies less in the commission than in the consequent adjustment of our desires—the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the purifying effect of public confession springs from the fact that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.

In the same novel the effect of wrong-doing is regarded as an inward and subduing fear of the consequences of our conduct. This dread so commonly felt, and made a most effective motive by all religions, George Eliot regards as the soul's testimony to the great law of retribution. Experience that moral causes produce moral effects, as that law is every day taught us, takes hold of feeling, and becomes a nameless dread of the avenging powers.

Having once begun to explain away Baldassarre's claim, Tito's thought showed itself as active as a virulent acid, eating its rapid way through all the tissues of sentiment. His mind was destitute of that dread which has been erroneously decried as if it were nothing higher than a man's animal care for his own skin; that awe of the divine Nemesis which was felt by religious pagans, and, though it took a more positive form under Christianity, is still felt by the mass of mankind simply as a vague fear at anything which is called wrong-doing. Such terror of the unseen is so far above mere sensual cowardice that it will annihilate that cowardice: it is the initial recognition of a moral law restraining desire, and checks the hard bold scrutiny of imperfect thought into obligations which can never be proved to have any sanctity in the absence of feeling. "It is good," sing the old Eumenides, in Aeschylus, "that fear should sit as the guardian of the soul, forcing it into wisdom—good that men should carry a threatening shadow in their hearts under the full sunshine; else how shall they learn to revere the light?" That guardianship may become needless; but only when all outward law has become needless—only when duty and love have united in one stream and made a common force. [Footnote: Chapter XI.]

Another form in which Nemesis punishes us is described in the essay on "A Half-Breed" in The Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Mixtus was a man with noble aims, but he was fascinated by Scintilla, and realized none of his ideals. He was captivated by her prettiness, liveliness and music, and then he was captured on his worldly side. She did not believe in "notions" and reforms, and he succumbed to her wishes. As a result, his life was crippled, he was always unsatisfied with himself. Of this form of retribution George Eliot says,—

An early deep-seated love to which we become faithless has its unfailing Nemesis, if only in that division of soul which narrows all newer joys by the intrusion of regret and the established presentiment of change. I refer not merely to the love of a person, but to the love of ideas, practical beliefs and social habits. And faithlessness here means not a gradual conversion dependent on enlarged knowledge, but a yielding to seductive circumstance; not a conviction that the original choice was a mistake, but a subjection to incidents that flatter a growing desire. In this sort of love it is the forsaker who has the melancholy lot; for an abandoned belief may be more effectively vengeful than Dido. The child of a wandering tribe, caught young and trained to polite life, if he feels a hereditary yearning, can run away to the old wilds and get his nature into tune. But there is no such recovery possible to the man who remembers what he once believed without being convinced that he was in error, who feels within him unsatisfied stirrings toward old beloved habits and intimacies from which he has far receded without conscious justification or unwavering sense of superior attractiveness in the new. This involuntary renegade has his character hopelessly jangled and out of tune. He is like an organ with its stops in the lawless condition of obtruding themselves without method, so that hearers are amazed by the most unexpected transitions—the trumpet breaking in on the flute, and the oboe confounding both.

With a strong and eloquent energy, George Eliot teaches the natural consequences of conduct. Every feeling, thought and deed has its effect, comes to fruition. Desire modifies life, shapes our destiny, moulds us into the image of its own nature. Actions become habits, become controlling elements in our lives, and tend to work out their own legitimate results. The whole of George Eliot's doctrine of retribution is, that human causes, as much as any other, lead to their appropriate effects. Her frequent use of the word Nemesis indicates the idea she had of the inevitableness of moral consequences, that a force once set in motion can never be recalled in its effects, which make a permanent modification of human life in its present and in its past. It was not the old doctrine of fate which she presented, not any arbitrary inflictment from supernatural powers. The inevitableness of moral consequences influenced her as a solemn and fearful reality which man must strictly regard if he would find true manhood.

The doctrine of retribution is very clearly taught by George Eliot in her comments. With a still greater distinctness it is taught in the development of her characters. As we follow the careers of Hetty, Maggie, Tito, Fedalma, Lydgate and Gwendolen we see how wonderful was George Eliot's insight into the moral issues of life. Not only with these, but with all her characters, we see a righteous moral unfoldment of character into its effects. There is no compromise with evil in her pages; all selfishness, wrong and crime comes to its proper results. The vanity and selfishness of Hetty leads to what terrible crime and shame for her, and what misery for others! Tito's selfishness and want of resolute purpose carries him inevitably downward to a hideous end. What is so plain in the case of these characters is as true, though not so palpable, in that of many others in her books. Dorothea's conduct is clearly shown to develop into consequences (as did Lydgate's) which were the natural results of what she thought, did and was. Maggie's misery was the product of her conduct, the legitimate outcome of it.

George Eliot goes beyond the conduct of any one person and its results, and attempts to show how it is affected by the person's environment. It was Maggie's family, education, social standing and personal qualities of mind and heart which helped to determine for her the consequences of her conduct. It was Dorothea's education and social environment which largely helped to shape her career and to leave her bereaved of the largest possibilities of which her life was capable. Gwendolen's life was largely determined by her early training and by her social surroundings. Yet with all these, life has its necessary issues, and Nemesis plays its part. Retribution is for all; it is ever stern, just and inevitable. Just, however, only in the sense that wrong-doing cannot escape its own effects, but not just in the sense that the guiltless must often share the fate of the guilty. Wrong-doing drags down to destruction many an innocent person. It is to be said of George Eliot, however, that she never presents any of her characters as doomed utterly by the past. However strong the memories of the ages lay upon them, they are capable of self-direction. Not one of her characters is wholly the victim of his environment. There is no hint in Middlemarch that Dorothea was not capable of heroism and self-consecration. Her environment gave a wrong direction to her moral purpose; but that purpose remained, and the moral nobleness of her mind was not destroyed. Still, it is largely true, that in her books the individual is sacrificed to his social environment. He is to renounce his own personality for the sake of the race. Consequently his fate is linked with that of others, and he must suffer from other men's deeds.

With all its limitations and defects, George Eliot's teaching concerning the moral effects of conduct is wholesome and healthy. It rests on a solid foundation of experience and scientific evidence. Her books are full of moral stimulus and strengthening, because of the profound conviction with which she has presented her conception of moral cause and effect. With her, we must believe that moral sequences are as inevitable as the physical.

It would be very unjust to George Eliot to suppose that she left man in the hands of a relentless moral order which manifests no tenderness and which is incapable of pity and mercy. She did not believe in an Infinite Father, full of love and forgiveness; that faith was not for her. Yet she did believe in a providence which can assuage man's sorrows and deal tenderly with his wrong-doing. While nature is stern and the moral sequences of life unbending, man may be sympathetic and helpful. Man is to be the providence of man; humanity is to be his tender forgiving Friend. A substitute so poor for the old faith would seem to have little power of moral renovation or sympathetic impulse in it; but it quickened George Eliot's mind with enthusiasm and ardor. The "enthusiasm of humanity" filled her whole soul, was a luminous hope in her heart and an inspiring purpose to her mind. With Goethe and Carlyle she found in work for humanity the substitute for all faith and the cure for all doubt. Faust finds for his life a purpose, and for the universe a solution, when he comes to labor for the practical improvement of humanity. This was George Eliot's own conclusion, that it is enough for us to see the world about us made a little better and more orderly by our efforts. All her noblest characters find in altruism a substitute for religion, and they find there a moral anchorage. She says very plainly in Middlemarch, that every doctrine is capable of "eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men." To the same effect is her saying in Romola, that "with the sinking of the high human trust the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is a part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled." In Janet's Repentance she has finely presented this faith in sympathetic humanitarianism, showing how Janet found peace in the sick-room where all had been doubt and trial before.

Day after day, with only short intervals of rest, Janet kept her place in that sad chamber. No wonder the sick-room and the lazaretto have so often been a refuge from the tossings of intellectual doubt—a place of repose for the worn and wounded spirit. Here is a duty about which all creeds and all philosophies are at one:—here, at least, the conscience will not be dogged by doubt—the benign impulse will not be checked by adverse theory: here you may begin to act without settling one preliminary question. To moisten the sufferer's parched lips through the long night-watches, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the helpless limbs, to divine the want that can find no utterance beyond the feeble motion of the hand or beseeching glance of the eye—these are offices that demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no assent to propositions, no weighing of consequences. Within the four walls where the stir and glare of the world are shut out, and every voice is subdued,—where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender mercies of his fellow,—the moral relation of man to man is reduced to its utmost clearness and simplicity: bigotry cannot confuse it, theory cannot pervert it, passion, awed into quiescence, can neither pollute nor perturb it. As we bend over the sick-bed all the forces of our nature rush towards the channels of pity, of patience and of love, and sweep down the miserable choking drift of our quarrels, our debates, our would-be wisdom, and our clamorous, selfish desires. This blessing of serene freedom from the importunities of opinion lies in all simple, direct acts of mercy, and is one source of that sweet calm which is often felt by the watcher in the sick-room, even when the duties there are of a hard and terrible kind. [Footnote: Chapter XXIV.]

The basis of such sympathetic helpfulness she finds in the common sorrows and trials of the world. All find life hard, pain comes to all, none are to be found unacquainted with sorrow. These common experiences draw men together in sympathy, unite them in a common purpose of assuagement and help. The sorrow of Adam Bede made him more gentle and patient with his brother.

It was part of that growing tenderness which came from the sorrow at work within him. For Adam, though you see him quite master of himself, working hard and delighting in his work after his inborn inalienable nature, had not outlived his sorrow—had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the same man again. Do any of us? God forbid! It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it—if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown toward which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy—the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love. Not that this transformation of pain into sympathy had completely taken place in Adam yet; there was still a great remnant of pain, which he felt would subsist as long as her pain was not a memory, but an existing thing, which he must think of as renewed with the light of every morning. But we get accustomed to mental as well as bodily pain, without, for all that, losing our sensibility to it; it becomes a habit of our lives, and we cease to imagine a condition of perfect ease as possible for us. Desire is chastened into submission; and we are contented with our day when we are able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering. For it is at such periods that the sense of our lives having visible and invisible relations beyond any of which either our present or prospective self is the centre, grows like a muscle that we are obliged to lean on and exert.

Armgart finds that "true vision comes only with sorrow." Sorrow and suffering create a sympathy which sends us to the relief of others. "Pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion," we are told in Middlemarch. In the trying hours of Maggie Tulliver's life she came to know—

that new sense which is the gift of sorrow—that susceptibility to the bare offices of humanity which raises them into a bond of loving fellowship.

Again, she learns that "more helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us." Man is in this way brought to live for man, to suffer in his sufferings, to be mercifully tender and pitiful with him in his temptations and trials. Sympathy builds up the moral life, gives an ethical meaning to man's existence. Thus humanity becomes a providence to man, and it is made easier for him to bear his sufferings and to be comforted in his sorrows. Nemesis is stern, but man is pitiful; retribution is inexorable, but humanity is sympathetic. Nature never relents, and there is no God who can so forgive us our sins as to remove their legitimate effects; but man can comfort us with his love, and humanity can teach us to overcome retribution by righteous conduct.

All idealistic rights are to be laid aside, according to her theory, all personal claims and motives are to be renounced. In the duties we owe to others, life is to find its rightful expression. In Janet's Repentance she says,—

The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires and impulses.

To live for self, George Eliot seems to regard as immoral; self is to be ignored except in so far as it can be made to serve humanity. As rights are individual they are repudiated, and the demand for them is regarded as revolutionary and destructive.

That man is a moral being because he is a social being she carries to its farthest extreme in some of her teachings, as when she makes public opinion the great motive power to social improvement. Felix Holt pronounces public opinion—the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honorable and what is shameful—to be the greatest power under heaven. In the "Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt," published in Blackwood's Magazine, Felix is made to say to his fellows,—

Any nation that had within it a majority of men—and we are the majority—possessed of much wisdom and virtue, would not tolerate the bad practices, the commercial lying and swindling, the poisonous adulteration of goods, the retail cheating and the political bribery which are carried on boldly in the midst of us. A majority has the power of creating a public opinion. We could groan and his-s before we had the franchise: if we had groaned and hissed in the right place, if we had discerned better between good and evil, if the multitude of us artisans and factory hands and miners and laborers of all sorts had been skilful, faithful, well-judging, industrious, sober—and I don't see how there can be wisdom and virtue anywhere without these qualities—we should have made an audience that would have shamed the other classes out of their share in the national vices. We should have had better members of Parliament, better religious teachers, honester tradesmen, fewer foolish demagogues, less impudence in infamous and brutal men; and we should not have had among us the abomination of men calling themselves religious while living in splendor on ill-gotten gains. I say it is not possible for any society in which there is a very large body of wise and virtuous men to be as vicious as our society is—to have as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so much belief in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion of what pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his fellows. Therefore let us have done with this nonsense about our being much better than the rest of our countrymen, or the pretence that that was a reason why we ought to have such an extension of the franchise as has been given to us.

The essay on "Moral Swindlers," in Theophrastus Such, clearly indicates George Eliot's point of view in ethics. She makes those moral traits which are social of greater importance than those which are personal. She complains that a man who is chaste and of a clean personal conduct is regarded as a moral man when his business habits are not good. To her, his relations to his fellows in all the social and business affairs of life are of higher importance than his personal habits or his family relations. She rebels against that deep moral instinct of the race which identifies morality with personal character, and is indignant that the altruism she so much believed in is not everywhere made identical with ethics. To her, the person is nothing; the individual is thought of only as a member of a community. She forgot that any large and noble moral life for a people must rest upon personal character, upon a pure and healthy state of the moral nature in individuals. Nations cannot be moral, but persons can. Public corruption has its foundation in personal corruption. The nation cannot have a noble moral life unless the individuals of which it is composed are pure in character and noble in conduct. She complains that sexual purity is made identical with morality, while business integrity is not. Every social and moral bond we have, she says, "is a debt; the right lies in the payment of that debt; it can lie nowhere else." It is a debt owed, not to God, but to humanity; it is therefore to be paid, not by personal holiness, but by human sympathy and devotion.

The higher social morality, that which inspires nations with great and heroic purposes, George Eliot believes is mainly due, as she says in the essay on "The Modern Hep, Hep, Hep!" "to the divine gift of a memory which inspires the moments with a past, a present and a future, and gives the sense of corporate existence that raises man above the otherwise more respectable and innocent brute." The memories of the past lie mainly in the direction of national movements, and hence the higher moral life of the present must be associated with national memories. The glorious commonplaces of historic teaching, as well as of moral inspiration, are to be found in the fact "that the preservation of national memories is an element and a means of national greatness, that their revival is a sign of reviving nationality, and that every heroic defender, every patriotic restorer, has been inspired by such memories and has made them his watchword." To reject such memories, such social influences, she regards as "a blinding superstition," and says that the moral visions of a nation are an effective bond which must be accepted by all its members. Two of her most characteristic books are written to inculcate this teaching. In The Spanish Gypsy we learn that there is no moral strength and purpose for a man like Don Silva, who repudiates his country, its memories and its religion. The main purpose of Daniel Deronda is to show how binding and inspiring is the vision of moral truth and life which comes from association even with the national memories of an outcast and alien people.

She wished to see individuals helped and good done in the present. She makes Theophrastus Such, in the essay on "Looking Backward," speak her own mind.

"All reverence and gratitude for the worthy dead on whose labors we have entered, all care for the future generations whose lot we are preparing; but some affection and fairness for those who are doing the actual work of the world, some attempt to regard them with the same freedom from ill-temper, whether on private or public grounds, as we may hope will be felt by those who will call us ancient! Otherwise, the looking before and after, which is our grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitterness than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven."

Again, she says that "the action by which we can do the best for future ages is of the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for contemporaries." And this was not merely the teaching of her books, it was the practice of her life. Miss Edith Simcox has made it clear that she was zealously anxious to help men and women by personal effort. She tells us that "George Eliot's sympathies went out more readily towards enthusiasm for the discharge of duties than for the assertion of rights. It belonged to the positive basis of her character to identify herself more with what people wished to do themselves than with what they thought somebody else ought to do for them. Her indignation was vehement enough against dishonest or malicious oppression, but the instinct to make allowance for the other side made her a bad hater in politics, and there may easily have been some personal sympathy in her description of Deronda's difficulty about the choice of a career. She was not an inviting auditor for those somewhat pachydermatous philanthropists who dwell complacently upon 'cases' and statistics which represent appalling depths of individual suffering. Her imagination realized these facts with a vividness that was physically unbearable, and unless she could give substantial help, she avoided the fruitless agitation. At the same time, her interest in all rational good works was of the warmest, and she was inclined to exaggerate rather than undervalue the merits of their promoters, with one qualification only. 'Help the millions, by all means,' she has written; 'I only want people not to scorn the narrower effect.' Charity that did not begin at home repelled her as much as she was attracted by the unpretentious kindness which overlooked no near opportunity; and perhaps we should not be far wrong in guessing that she thought for most people the scrupulous discharge of all present and unavoidable duties was nearly occupation enough. Not every one was called to the high but difficult vocation of setting the world to rights. But on the other hand, it must be remembered that her standard of exactingness was 'high, and some of the things that in her eyes it was merely culpable to leave undone might be counted by others among virtues of supererogation. Indeed, it is within the limits of possibility that a philanthropist wrapped in over-much conscious virtue might imagine her cold to the objects proposed, when she only failed to see uncommon merit in their pursuit. No one, however, could recognize with more generous fervor, more delighted admiration, any genuine unobtrusive devotion in either friends or strangers, whether it were spent in making life easier to individuals, or in mending the conditions among which the masses live and labor.' This writer gives us further insight into George Eliot's character when we are told that 'she came as a very angel of consolation to those persons of sufficiently impartial mind to find comfort in the hint that the world might be less to blame than they were as to those points on which they found themselves in chronic disagreement with it. But she had nothing welcome for those whose idea of consolation is the promise of a deus ex machina by whose help they may gather grapes of thorns and figs of thistles. She thought there was much needed doing in the world, and criticism of our neighbors and the natural order might wait at all events until the critic's own character and conduct were free from blame.' She had faith in ordinary lives, and these she earnestly desired to help and encourage. Those who themselves struggle with difficulties are best capable, she thought, of helping others out of theirs. In Daniel Deronda she said, 'Our guides, we pretend, must be sinless; as if those were not often the best teachers who only yesterday got corrected for their mistakes.'"

George Eliot's interest in the present amelioration of human conditions was strengthened by her faith in the future of the race. She expected no rapid improvement, no revolutionizing development; but she believed the past of mankind justifies faith in a gradual attainment of perfect conditions. This conviction was expressed when she said,—

What I look to is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something firm if I am falling.

She saw too much evil and suffering to be an optimist; she could not see that all things are good or tending towards what is good. Yet her faith in the final outcome was earnest, and she looked to a slow and painful progress as the result of human struggles. When called an optimist, she responded, "I will not answer to the name of optimist, but if you like to invent Meliorist, I will not say you call me out of my name." She trusted in that gradual development which science points out as the probable result of the survival of the fittest in human life. In "A Minor Prophet" she has presented her conception of human advancement, and tenderly expressed her sympathy with all humble, imperfect lives.

Bitterly I feel that every change upon this earth Is bought with sacrifice. My yearnings fail To reach that high apocalyptic mount Which shows in bird's-eye view a perfect world, Or enter warmly into other joys Than those of faulty, struggling human kind, That strain upon my soul's too perfect wing Ends in ignoble floundering: I fall Into short-sighted pity for the men Who, living in those perfect future times, Will not know half the dear imperfect things That move my smiles and tears—will never know The fine old incongruities that raise My friendly laugh; the innocent conceits That like a needless eyeglass or black patch Give those who wear them harmless happiness; The twists and cracks in our poor earthenware, That touch me to more conscious fellowship (I am not myself the finest Parian) With my coevals. So poor Colin Clout, To whom raw onions give prospective zest, Consoling hours of dampest wintry work, Could hardly fancy any regal joys Quite unimpregnate with the onion's scent: Perhaps his highest hopes are not all clear Of waftings from that energetic bulb: 'Tis well that onion is not heresy. Speaking in parable, I am Colin Clout. A clinging flavor penetrates ray life— My onion is imperfectness: I cleave To nature's blunders, evanescent types Which sages banish from Utopia. "Not worship beauty?" say you. Patience, friend! I worship in the temple with the rest; But by my hearth I keep a sacred nook For gnomes and dwarfs, duck-footed waddling elves Who stitched and hammered for the weary man In days of old. And in that piety I clothe ungainly forms inherited From toiling generations, daily bent At desk, or plough, or loom, or in the mine, In pioneering labors for the world. Nay, I am apt, when floundering confused From too rash flight, to grasp at paradox, And pity future men who will not know A keen experience with pity blent, The pathos exquisite of lovely minds Hid in harsh forms—not penetrating them Like fire divine within a common bush Which glows transfigured by the heavenly guest, So that men put their shoes off; but encaged Like a sweet child within some thick-walled cell, Who leaps and fails to hold the window-bars; But having shown a little dimpled hand, Is visited thenceforth by tender hearts Whose eyes keep watch about the prison walls. A foolish, nay, a wicked paradox! For purest pity is the eye of love, Melting at sight of sorrow; and to grieve Because it sees no sorrow, shows a love Warped from its truer nature, turned to love Of merest habit, like the miser's greed. But I am Colin still: my prejudice Is for the flavor of my daily food. Not that I doubt the world is growing still, As once it grew from chaos and from night; Or have a soul too shrunken for the hope Which dawned in human breasts, a double morn, With earliest watchings of the rising light Chasing the darkness; and through many an age Has raised the vision of a future time That stands an angel, with a face all mild, Spearing the demon. I, too, rest in faith That man's perfection is the crowning flower Towards which the urgent sap in life's great tree Is pressing—seen in puny blossoms now, But in the world's great morrows to expand With broadest petal and with deepest glow.

With no disgust toward the crude and wretched life man everywhere lives to-day, but with pity and tenderness for all sorrow, suffering and struggle, she yet believed that the world is being shaped to a glorious and a mighty destiny. This faith finds full and clear expression in the concluding lines of the poem just quoted.

The faith that life on earth is being shaped To glorious ends, that order, justice, love, Mean man's completeness, mean effect as sure As roundness in the dewdrop—that great faith Is but the rushing and expanding stream Of thought, of feeling, fed by all the past. Our finest hope is finest memory, As they who love in age think youth is blest Because it has a life to fill with love. Full souls are double mirrors, making still An endless vista of fair things before Repeating things behind: so faith is strong Only when we are strong, shrinks when we shrink. It comes when music stirs us, and the chords Moving on some grand climax shake our souls With influx new that makes new energies. It comes in swellings of the heart and tears That rise at noble and at gentle deeds— At labors of the master-artist's hand Which, trembling, touches to a finer end, Trembling before an image seen within. It comes in moments of heroic love, Unjealous joy in love not made for us— In conscious triumph of the good within, Making us worship goodness that rebukes. Even our failures are a prophecy, Even our yearnings and our bitter tears After that fair and true we cannot grasp; As patriots who seem to die in vain Make liberty more sacred by their pangs, Presentiment of better things on earth Sweeps in with every force that stirs our souls To admiration, self-renouncing love, Or thoughts, like light, that bind the world in one: Sweeps like the sense of vastness, when at night We hear the roll and dash of waves that break Nearer and nearer with the rushing tide, Which rises to the level of the cliff Because the wide Atlantic roils behind, Throbbing respondent to the far-off orbs.

George Eliot did all that could be done to make the morality she taught commendable and inspiring. In her own direct teachings, and in the development of her characters and her plots, she has done much to make it acceptable. Her strong insistence on the social basis of morality is to be admired, and the truth presented is one of great importance. Even more important is her teaching of the stern nature of retribution, that every thought, word and deed has its effect. There is need of such teaching, and it can be appropriated into the thought and life of the time with great promise of good. Yet the outcome of George Eliot's morality was rather depressing than otherwise. While she was no pessimist, yet she made her readers feel that life was pessimistic in its main tendencies. She makes on the minds of very many of her readers the impression that life has not very much light in it. This comes from the whole cast of her mind, and still more because the light of true ideal hopes was absent from her thought. A stern, ascetic view of life appears throughout her pages, one of the results of the new morality and the humanitarian gospel of altruism. Unbending, unpitiful, does the universe seem to be when the idea of law and Nemesis is so strongly presented, and with no relief from it in the theory of man's free will. Not less depressing to the moral nature is an unrelieved view of the universe under the omnipotent law of cause and effect, which is not lighted by any vision of God and a spiritual order interpenetrating the material. Her teaching too often takes the tone of repression; it is hard and exacting. She devotes many pages to showing the effects of the law of retribution; she gives comparatively few to the correlative law that good always has its reward. Renunciation is presented as a moral force, and as duty of supreme importance; life is to be repressed for the sake of humanity. The spontaneous tendencies of the mind and heart, the importance of giving a free and healthy development to human nature, is not regarded. Her morality is justly to be criticised for its ascetic and pessimistic tendencies.



XIII.

EARLIER NOVELS.

The first four novels written by George Eliot form a group by themselves; and while all similar to each other in their main characteristics, are in important respects different from her later works. This group includes Clerical Scenes, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. With these may also be classed "Brother Jacob." They are all alike novels of memory, and they deal mainly with common life. Her own life and the surroundings of her childhood, the memories and associations and suggestions of her early life, are drawn upon. The simple surroundings and ideas of the midland village are seldom strayed away from, and most of the characters are farmers and their laborers, artisans or clergymen. The Mill on the Floss offers a partial exception to this statement, for in that book we touch upon the border of a different form of society, but we scarcely enter into it, and the leading characters are from the same class as those in the other books of this group. "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" alone enters wholly within the circle of aristocratic society. There is more of the realism of actual life in these novels than in her later ones, greater spontaneity and insight, a deeper sympathy and a more tender pathos. They came more out of her heart and sympathies, are more impassioned and pathetic.

Throughout the Scenes of Clerical Life are descriptions of actual scenes and incidents known to George Eliot in her girlhood. Mrs. Hackit is a portrait of her own mother. In the first chapter of "Amos Barton," Shepperton Church is that at Chilvers Colon, which she attended throughout her childhood. It is from memory, and with an accurate pen, she describes—

Shepperton Church as it was in the old days with its outer court of rough stucco, its red-tiled roof, its heterogeneous windows patched with desultory bits of painted glass, and its little flight of steps with their wooden rail running up the outer wall, and leading to the school-children's gallery. Then inside, what dear old quaintnesses! which I began to look at with delight, even when I was so crude a member of the congregation that my nurse found it necessary to provide for the reinforcement of my devotional patience by smuggling bread-and-butter into the sacred edifice. There was the chancel, guarded by two little cherubims looking uncomfortably squeezed between arch and wall, and adorned with the escutcheons of the Oldinport family, which showed me inexhaustible possibilities of meaning in their blood-red hands, their death's-heads and cross-bones, their leopards' paws and Maltese crosses. There were inscriptions on the panels of the singing-gallery, telling of benefactions to the poor of Shepperton, with an involuted elegance of capitals and final flourishes which my alphabetic erudition traced with ever-new delight. No benches in those days; but huge roomy pews, round which devout churchgoers sat during "lessons," trying to look everywhere else than into each others' eyes. No low partitions allowing you, with a dreary absence of contrast and mystery, to see everything at all moments; but tall dark panels, under whose shadow I sank with a sense of retirement through the Litany, only to feel with more intensity my burst into the conspicuousness of public life when I was made to stand up on the seat during the psalms or the singing.

Not only is this description of Shepperton Church accurate in every particular, but a subject of neighborhood gossip is made the basis of the story of "Amos Barton." When George Eliot was about a dozen years old a strange lady appeared at the Cotou parsonage, and became a subject of much discussion on the part of the parishioners. Much pity was felt for the wife of the curate, an intimate friend of Marian Evans's mother, whose poverty, seven children and poor health made her burdens far from easy. She died not long after, and her grave may be seen at Chilvers Coton. The Knebley Church of "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" is located only a short distance from Chilvers Coton, and is the chancel of the collegiate church founded by Sir Thomas de Astley in the time of Edward III. Its spire was very high, and served as a landmark to travellers through the forest of Arden, and was called "The lanthorn of Arden." The spire fell in the year 1600, but was rebuilt later. The present church was repaired by the patron of George Eliot's father, Sir Roger Newdigate. She describes it in the first chapter of "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" as—

a wonderful little church, with a checkered pavement which had once rung to the iron tread of military monks, with coats of arms in clusters on the lofty roof, marble warriors and their wives without noses occupying a large proportion of the area, and the twelve apostles with their heads very much on one side, holding didactic ribbons, painted in fresco on the walls.

A delightful lane, overshadowed with noble trees, that ran by Griff House, the birthplace of George Eliot, led to the lodge of Arbury Hall, the home of Sir Roger Newdigate. Arbury Hall was situated in the midst of a fine old forest, and it was originally a large quadrangular brick house. Sir Roger rebuilt it, acting as his own architect, and made it into a modern dwelling of the commodious gothic Order. This house and its owner appear in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" as Cheverel Manor and Sir Christopher Cheverel. In the fourth chapter the reader is told that,—

For the next ten years Sir Christopher was occupied with the architectural metamorphosis of his old family mansion, thus anticipating through the prompting of his individual taste that general re-action from the insipid imitation of the Palladian style towards a restoration of the Gothic, which marked the close of the eighteenth century. This was the object he had set his heart on, with a singleness of determination which was regarded with not a little contempt by his fox-hunting neighbors.... "An obstinate, crotchety man," said his neighbors. But I, who have seen Cheverel Manor as he bequeathed it to his heirs, rather attribute that unswerving architectural purpose of his, conceived and carried out through long years of systematic personal exertion, to something of the fervor of genius.

In this story an incident in the life of Sir Roger Newdigate may have been made use of by George Eliot. He was childless, and adopted a cottager's child he and his wife heard singing at its father's door one day. They educated the child, who proved to have a fine voice and a passionate love of music.

Janet's Repentance also has its scenes from actual life. Dr. Dempster was thought to be recognized by his neighbors as a well-known person in Nuneaton. Milby and its High street are no other than Nuneaton and its market-place. The character of the town and the manner of life there are all sketched from the Nuneaton of George Eliot's childhood. The school she attended was very near the vicarage. While she was attending this school, when about nine years old, a young curate from a neighboring hamlet was permitted by the Bishop to give Sunday-evening lectures in the Nuneaton church, with the results described in Janet's Repentance.

In Adam Bede there is also a considerable element of actual history. The heroine, Dinah Morris, is, in some slight particulars at least, sketched from Elizabeth Evans, an aunt of George Eliot's. Elizabeth Evans was born at Newbold, Lincolnshire, in 1776. [Footnote: This subject has been fully worked out in a book published by Blackwood, "George Eliot in Derbyshire: a volume of gossip about passages in the novels of George Eliot," by Guy Roslyn. Reprinted from London Society, with alterations and additions, and an introduction by George Barnett Smith. Its statements are mainly based on a small book published in London in 1859, by Talbot & Co., entitled "Seth Bede, the Methody: his Life and Labors." Guy Roslyn is a pseudonym for Joshua Hatton.] She was a beautiful woman when young, with soft gray eyes and a fine face, and had a very simple and gentle manner. She was a Methodist preacher, lived at Wirksworth, Derbyshire, and preached wherever an opportunity occurred. When it was forbidden that women should preach, she continued to exhort in the cottages, and to visit the poor and the sick in their homes. She married Samuel Evans, who was born in Boston, and was a carpenter. He had a brother William, who was a joiner and builder. Their father was a village carpenter and undertaker, honest and respectable, but who took to drink in his later years. He was at an ale-house very late one night, and the next morning was found dead in a brook near his house. Samuel became a Methodist and a preacher, but was teased about it by his brother, who criticised his blunders in prayer and preaching. He was gentle and very considerate at home, and was greatly attached to his brother, though they could not agree in matters of religion. While they were partners in business they prospered, but Samuel did not succeed when by himself. Samuel and Elizabeth were married at St. Mary's Church, Nottingham. In company with a Miss Richards, Elizabeth attended, in 1801 or 1802, a Mary Voce who had poisoned her child. They visited her in jail, and were with her when she was hung in Nottingham. Elizabeth wrote an account of her own life, especially of her conversion and her early work in the ministry. Concerning the execution of Mary Voce, she gives this account: "At seven o'clock [on the morning of the execution] we all knelt down in prayer, and at ten minutes before eight o'clock the Lord in mercy spoke peace to her soul. She cried out, 'Oh, how happy I am! the Lord has pardoned all my sins, and I am going to heaven.' She never lost the evidence for one moment, and always rejoiced in the hope of glory. Is it not by grace we are saved through faith? And is not the Saviour exalted at the Father's right hand to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins? If salvation were by works who would be saved? The vilest and worst may come unto Him. None need despair. None ought to presume. Miss Richards and I attended her to the place of execution. Our feelings on this occasion were very acute. We rode with her in the cart to the awful place. Our people sang with her all the way, which I think was a mile and a half. We were enabled to lift up our hearts unto the Lord in her behalf, and she was enabled to bear a public testimony that God in mercy had pardoned all her sins. When the cap was drawn over her face, and she was about to be turned off, she cried, 'Glory! glory! glory! the angels are waiting around me.' And she died almost without a struggle. At this awful spot I lost a great deal of the fear of man, which to me had been a great hindrance for a long time. I felt if God would send me to the uttermost parts of the earth I would go, and at intervals felt I could embrace a martyr's flame. Oh, this burning love of God, what will it not endure? I could not think I had an enemy in the world. I am certain I enjoyed that salvation that if they had smote me on one cheek, I could have turned to them the other also. I lived

"'The life of heaven above, All the life of glorious love.'

"I seemed myself to live between heaven and earth. I was not in heaven because of my body, nor upon earth because of my soul. Earth was a scale to heaven, and all I tasted was God. I could pray without ceasing, and in everything give thanks. I felt that the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him. If I wanted to know anything I had only to ask, and it was given, generally in a moment. Whether I was in the public street, or at my work, or in my private room, I had continued intercourse with my God; and many, I think I may say hundreds of times, He shone upon His Word, and showed me the meaning thereof, that is, texts of scripture, so as to furnish me with sufficient matter to speak to poor sinners for a sufficient length of time."

The life of Elizabeth Evans was only a hint to the mind of the author of Adam Bede. Dinah was not intended as a portrait, and the resemblances between the two were probably not the result of a conscious purpose on the part of George Eliot. Soon after the publication of Adam Bede, when gossip had begun to report that Dinah Morris was an accurate sketch of Elizabeth Evans, and even that her sermon and prayers had been copied from the writings of the aunt, George Eliot wrote a letter to her intimate friend, Miss Sara Hennell, in which she explained to what extent she was indebted to Elizabeth Evans for the portrait of Dinah Morris.

HOLLY LODGE, Oct. 7, 1850.

Dear Sara,—I should like, while the subject is vividly present with me, to tell you more exactly than I have ever yet done, what I knew of my aunt, Elizabeth Evans. My father, you know, lived in Warwickshire all my life with him, having finally left Staffordshire first, and then Derbyshire, six or seven years before he married my mother.... [Footnote: What is here omitted of this letter will be found on page 12.]

As to my aunt's conversation, it is a fact that the only two things of any interest I remember in our lonely sittings and walks are her telling me one sunny afternoon how she had, with another pious woman, visited an unhappy girl in prison, stayed with her all night, and gone with her to execution, and one or two accounts of supposed miracles in which she believed—among the rest, the face with the crown of thorns seen in the glass. In her account of the prison scenes. I remember no word she uttered—I only remember her tone and manner, and the deep feeling I had under the recital. Of the girl she knew nothing, I believe—or told me nothing—but that she was a common coarse girl, convicted of child-murder. The incident lay in my mind for years on years as a dead germ, apparently, till time had made my mind a nisus in which it could fructify; it then turned out to be the germ of Adam Bede.

I saw my aunt twice after this. Once I spent a day and a night with my father in the Wirksworth cottage, sleeping with my aunt, I remember. Our interview was less interesting than in the former time: I think I was less simply devoted to religious ideas. And once again she came with my uncle to see me—when father and I were living at Foleshill; then there was some pain, for I had given up the form of Christian belief, and was in a crude state of free-thinking. She stayed about three or four days, I think. This is all I remember distinctly, as matter I could write down, of my dear aunt, whom I really loved. You see how she suggested Dinah; but it is not possible you should see as I do how her entire individuality differed from Dinah's. How curious it seems to me that people should think Dinah's sermon, prayers and speeches were copied—when they were written with hot tears as they surged up in my own mind!

As to my indebtedness to facts of locale, and personal history of a small kind connected with Staffordshire and Derbyshire—you may imagine of what kind that is when I tell you that I never remained in either of those counties more than a few days together, and of only two such visits have I more than a shadowy, interrupted recollection. The details which I knew as facts and have made use of for my picture were gathered from such imperfect allusion and narrative as I heard from my father in his occasional talk about old times.

As to my aunt's children or grandchildren saying, if they did say, that Dinah is a good portrait of my aunt—that is simply the vague, easily satisfied notion imperfectly instructed people always have of portraits. It is not surprising that simple men and women without pretension to enlightened discrimination should think a generic resemblance constitutes a portrait, when we see the great public so accustomed to be delighted with mis-representations of life and character, which they accept as representations, that they are scandalized when art makes a nearer approach to the truth.

Perhaps I am doing a superfluous thing in writing all this to you, but I am prompted to do it by the feeling that in future years Adam Bede and all that concerns it may have become a dim portion of the past, and I may not be able to recall so much of the truth as I have now told you.

Once more, thanks, dear Sara. Ever your loving

MARIAN.

When, in 1876, a book was published to show the identity of Dinah Morris and Elizabeth Evans, George Eliot wrote to the author to protest against such a conclusion. She said to him that the one was not intended to represent the other, and that any identification of the two would be protested against as not only false in fact and tending to perpetuate false notions about art, but also as a gross breach of social decorum. Yet these declarations concerning Elizabeth Evans have been repeated, and to them has been added the assertion that she actually copied in Adam Bede the history and sermons of Dinah Morris. [Footnote: "Dinah Morris and Elizabeth Evans," an article by L. Buckley in The Century for August, 1882.] During visits to her aunt in 1842 we are told they spent several hours together each day. "They used to go to the house of one of Mrs. Evans's married daughters, where they had the parlor to themselves and had long conversations. These secret conversations excited some curiosity in the family, and one day Mrs. Evans's daughter said, 'Mother, I can't think what thee and Mary Ann have got to talk about so much.' To which Mrs. Evans replied, 'Well, my dear, I don't know what she wants, but she gets me to tell her all about my life and my religious experience, and she puts it all down in a little book. I can't make out what she wants it for.' While at Wirksworth, Miss Evans made a note of everything people said in her hearing; no matter who was speaking, down it went into the note-book, which seemed never out of her hand. These notes she transcribed every night before going to rest. After her departure Mrs. Evans said to her daughter, 'Oh dear, Mary Ann has got one thing I did not mean her to take away, and that is the notes of the first sermon I preached on Ellaston Green.' The sermon preached by Dinah on Hayslope Green has been recognized as one of Mrs. Evans's." The purpose here seems to be to convey the impression that George Eliot actually carried away one of Mrs. Evans's sermons, and that she afterwards copied it into Adam Bede. George Eliot's own positive statement on this subject ought to be sufficient to convince any candid mind the sermon was not copied. The evidence brought forward so far in regard to the relations of Dinah Morris to Elizabeth Evans is not sufficient to prove the one was taken from the other. George Eliot's declarations, written soon after Adam Bede was published, when all was perfectly fresh in her mind, and after her relatives had made their statements about Mrs. Evans, ought to settle the matter forever. Unless new and far more positive evidence is brought forward, Dinah Morris ought to be regarded as substantially an original creation.

That some features of Elizabeth Evans's character were sketched into that of Dinah Morris seems certain. It is also said that the names of Mrs. Poyser and Bartle Massey were the names of actual persons, the latter being the schoolmaster of her father. As showing her power of local coloring, Miss Mathilde Blind relates this incident: "On its first appearance, Adam Bede was read aloud to an old man, an intimate associate of Robert Evans in his Staffordshire days. This man knew nothing concerning either author or subject beforehand, and his astonishment was boundless on recognizing so many friends and incidents of his own youth portrayed with unerring fidelity, he sat up half the night listening to the story in breathless excitement, now and then slapping his knees as he exclaimed, 'That's Robert, that's Robert, to the life.'"

In Adam Bede, as well as in the Clerical Scenes and The Mill on the Floss, she describes types of character instead of actual personages; and yet so much of the realistic is embodied that more than one of her characters has been identified as being in a considerable degree a sketch from life. This is true of The Mill on the Floss even more fully than of her previous books. In Maggie she has portrayed one side of her own character, and made use of much of her early experience. Lucy is said to be her sister, and two of her aunts are sketched in the aunts of Maggie—Mrs. Glegg and Mrs. Pullett. Her brother recognized the minute faithfulness of this story, as he did that of Adam Bede. The town of St. Ogg's is a good description of the tide-water town of Gainesborough in Lincolnshire. The Hayslope of Adam Bede has been identified as the village of Ellaston, four miles from Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. It is near Wirksworth, the home of Elizabeth Evans.

The local exactness of George Eliot's descriptions is another evidence of her realism. "It is not unlikely," suggests Mr. Kegan Paul, "that the time will come when with one or other of her books in their hand, people will wander among the scenes of George Eliot's early youth, and trace each allusion, as they are wont to do at Abbotsford or Newstead, and they will recognize the photographic minuteness and accuracy with which these scenes, so long unvisited, had stamped themselves on the mind of the observant girl." The historical setting of her novels is also faithful in even minute details. The time of "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" is at the beginning of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and it well describes the country customs of the earlier years of the present century. Adam Bede describes the first decade of the present century, while Silas Marner is a little later. With "Amos Barton," and The Mill on the Floss we are in the second decade of the century, before hand-looms had gone out or railroads had come in. She has a fondness for these days of rustic simplicity, quiet habits and homely disingenuousness, and she more than once expresses a doubt if much has been gained by the introduction of machinery, suffrage and culture. She regrets that—

Human advancement has no moments when conservative reforming intellect takes a nap, while imagination does a little toryism by the sly, revelling in regret that dear old brown, crumbling, picturesque inefficiency is everywhere giving place to sick-and-span, new-painted, new-varnished efficiency, which will yield endless diagrams, plans, elevations and sections; but, alas! no picture. Mine, I fear, is not a well-regulated mind: it has an occasional tenderness for old abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over the days of nasal clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for the departed shades of vulgar errors. [Footnote: Amos Barton, chapter I.]

In Adam Bede, when describing a leisurely walk home from church in the good old days, she bursts out again into enthusiastic praise of the time before there was so much advancement and culture.

Surely all other leisure is hurry compared with a sunny walk through the fields from "afternoon church"—as such walks used to be in those old leisurely times when the boat, gliding sleepily along the canal, was the newest locomotive wonder; when Sunday books had most of them old brown leather covers, and opened with a remarkable precision always in one place. Leisure is gone—gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses and the slow wagons and the pedlers who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons. Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them; it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now—eager for amusement; prone to excursion trains, art museums, periodical literature and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage; he only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that "periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion—of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis, happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall, and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of week-day services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing—liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port wine—not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations. Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure; he fingered the guineas in his pocket, and ate his dinners and slept the sleep of the irresponsible; for had he not kept up his charter by going to church on the Sunday afternoon? Fine old Leisure! Do not be severe upon him and judge him by our modern standard; he never went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read Tracts for the Times or Sartor Resartus." [Footnote: Adam Bede, chapter LII.]

Her faithfulness to the life she describes is seen in her skilful use of dialect. The sense of local coloring is greatly heightened by the dialogues which speak the language of the people portrayed. When Luke describes his rabbits as nesh things, and Mrs. Jerome says little gells should be seen and not heard, and Tommy Trounsom mentions his readiness to pick up a chanch penny, we are brought closer to the homely life of these people. She has so well succeeded, in Mr. Carson's words, in portraying "what they call the dileck as is spoke hereabout," the reader is enabled to realize, as he could not so well do by any other method, the homeliness and rusticity of the life presented.

George Eliot has not attempted a great variety in the use of dialect, for she has avoided unfamiliar words, and has made use of no expressions which would puzzle her readers in the attempt to understand them. The words not to be found in the dictionary are those which may in almost every instance be heard in the speech of the uncultured wherever the English language is spoken. Among others are these words: chapellin', chanch, coxy, corchey, dawnin', fettle, franzy, gell, megrim, nattering, nesh, overrun, queechy, plash. In a letter to Professor Skeats, published in the Transactions of the English Dialect Society, she has explained her methods of using dialect.

It must be borne in mind that my inclination to be as close as I could to the rendering of dialect, both in words and spelling, was constantly checked by the artistic duty of being generally intelligible. But for that check I should have given a stronger color to the dialogue in Adam Sede, which is modelled on the talk of North Staffordshire and the neighboring part of Derbyshire. The spelling, being determined by my own ear alone, was necessarily a matter of anxiety, for it would be as possible to quarrel about it as about the spelling of Oriental names. The district imagined as the scene of Silas Marner is in North Warwickshire; but here, and in all my other presentations of English life except Adam Bede, it has been my intention to give the general physiognomy rather than a close portraiture of the provincial speech as I have heard it in the Midland or Mercian region. It is a just demand that art should keep clear of such specialties as would make it a puzzle for the larger part of its public; still, one is not bound to respect the lazy obtuseness or snobbish ignorance of people who do not care to know more of their native tongue than the vocabulary of the drawing-room and the newspaper.

It may be said of George Eliot's realism that she did not borrow nearly so much from actual observation as was done by Charlotte Bronte, in whose novels, scenes, persons and events are described with great accuracy and fulness. In large measure Charlotte Bronte borrowed her materials from the life about her. Large as was her invention, original as her mind was, and unique in its thought, yet she seems to have been unable to create the plots of her novels without aid from real events and persons. Persons and scenes and events were so vividly portrayed in Jane Eyre as to be at once recognized, subjecting the author to much annoyance and mortification. In Shirley there is even a larger use of local traditions and manners, the locality of the story being described with great accuracy. George Eliot did not use such materials to nearly so great an extent, being far less dependent on them. Nor had she anything of Scott's need of local traditions. Accurate as she is, she creates her own story, not depending, as he did, on the suggestive help of the stories of the past. Few of his novels are the entire creations of his own mind; but he used every hint and suggestion he could find as the basis of his work. In this, George Eliot is no more a realist than either of her great predecessors. Even Goldsmith and Fielding were no more creative and original than she, for they depended as much as she on the occurrences of real life for their plots. All genuine novelists have drawn their materials from the life about them, and they could not attain success otherwise. All depends, however, on how the material thus used is made to bear its results. If Charlotte Bronte borrowed more from actual life of event and scenery, yet she was not more a realist; rather her power lies in something higher than realism, in that subtle insight and creative power which gives originality to her work. She was an idealist keeping close to the actual; and in this fact is to be found her superiority to George Eliot in certain directions. George Eliot studied life accurately and intimately, but she did not tie herself to any individual occurrences or persons. She had so absorbed the spirit of the life amidst which she lived, as to give a true expression to it under an almost purely fictitious garb.

There is less of distinct teaching in the Scenes of Clerical Life than in George Eliot's later novels. Yet even in these earlier stories there is to be found many a clear indication of her thought. In "Amos Barton" she has especially set forth her sympathy with humble life. This fundamental canon of her art is presented more distinctly in this story, and dwelt upon more fully, than in any of her subsequent novels. It would be difficult to discover any special teaching in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story;" and this is perhaps the only production of George Eliot's pen which has not some distinct object beyond the telling of the story itself. The religious motif is strong in Janet's Repentance, and not to be mistaken by any attentive reader who now for the first time takes up the story. The value of religion as a reforming force is plainly inculcated, as well as that the main and only value of that force is altruistic. It presents a fine picture of the Evangelical movement and its work, though mainly on its humanitarian side. Its deeper spirit of devotion, its loftier religious ideal, its craving after a more intimate realization of the divine presence, is not portrayed. The real purport of the story is contained in its closing words, where the reader is told that the true memorial left behind him by Edgar Tryan is to be found in a life saved to all noble thing's by his efforts.

It is Janet Dempster, rescued from self-despair, strengthened with divine hopes, and now looking back on years of purity and helpful labor. The man who has left such a memorial behind him must have been one whose heart beat with true compassion, and whose lips were moved by fervent faith.

These Scenes of Clerical Life surpass all George Eliot's later novels in one respect—their pathos. Adam Bede comes nearer them in this particular than any of the later works, but even that novel does not equal them in their power to lay hold of feeling and sympathy and in moving the reader to tears. They differ greatly in this respect from another short story, written only a few years later, entitled "Brother Jacob." This story has more of light banter in it than any other novel of George Eliot's, and less of tenderness and pathos. It is but another lesson on her great theme of retribution. The author says in the last sentence of the story that "we see in it an admirable instance of the unexpected forms in which the great Nemesis hides herself." The central thought of the story is, that even in the lives of the most ordinary persons, and in the case of even the smallest departures from the right, there is a power of retribution at work bringing us an unfailing punishment for the evil we do.

The literary excellences of the Scenes from Clerical Life are many. They are simple, charming stories, full of life, and delightful in tone. Their humor is rare and effective, never coarse, but racy and touching. Their tenderness of tone lays warm hold upon the reader's sympathies and brings him closer to the throbbing hearts of his fellow-men. There is a pure idyllic loveliness and homelikeness about these stories that is exquisite. They all evidently grew out of the tender memories and associations of George Eliot's girlhood.

In Adam Bede the author's purpose is concentrated on character and the moral unfoldment of the lives she describes, while the thorough dramatic unity is lacking which such a work demands. It is a delightful picture of country life, and for idyllic loveliness is scarcely equalled, never surpassed, in English literature. The charm of the narrative is only rivalled by the deep human interest the characters have for us. This exquisite picture of rural life is not merely a piece of fine painting; but the deepest problems, the largest human interests, ever appear as a perpetual background of spiritual reality, giving a sublimity to the whole that truly dignifies it. The thoughtful reader soon finds this inweaving of a larger purpose adding greatly to the idyllic loveliness of these scenes. The moral tone is clear and earnest, and the religious element gives a charm and nobility to this delightful picture of rustic simplicity.

Adam Bede has probably delighted a larger number of her readers than any other of George Eliot's books, and even a majority of her critics prefer it to any other. It at once arrests and fixes the attention of the reader. The first chapter has an immediate interest in its wonderful picture of Adam, and its most vivid description of the workshop. The second chapter, with its account of Dinah Morris and her preaching, leaves no possibility of doubt about the genius and power of the book. The reader is brought at once face to face with scenes and persons that act as enchantment on him; and this complete absorption of interest never flags to the end. The elements of this fascination, which is in itself so simple, natural and human, have been pointed out by various critics. They are to be found in the homeliness, pathos and naturalness of the whole story from beginning to end. Little as the critics have noted it, however, much of this fascination comes of the high and pure moral tone of the story, its grasp on the higher motives and interests of life, and its undertone of yearning after a religious motive and ideal adequate to all the problems of human destiny. This religious motive is indeed more than a yearning, for it is a fixed and self-contained confidence in altruism, expressed in sympathy and feeling and pathos most tender and passionate. This novel is full of an eager desire to realize to men their need of each other, and of longing to show them how much better and happier the world would be if we were more sympathetic and had more of fellow-feeling. Life is full of suffering, and this can be lessened only as we help and love each other, only as we can make our feelings so truly tender as to feel the sorrows of others as our own, causing us to live for the good of those who suffer. It is said of Adam Bede that—