half-educated portion of the country middle-class, who have learnt no educated reticence,-and of the resident country gentry and clergy in their relations with these rough-mannered neighbours. This is a world in which she could not but learn a direct style of treatment. The habit of concealing, or at most of suggesting rather than downright expressing what is closest to our hearts, is, as we know, a result of education. It is quite foreign to the class of people whom George Eliot knows most thoroughly, and has drawn with the fullest power. All her deepest knowledge of human nature has probably been acquired among people who speak their thoughts with the directness, though not with the sharp metallic ring, of Miss Brontë's Yorkshire heroes. But instead of almost luxuriating, as Miss Brontë appears to do, in the startling emphasis of this mannerism, and making all her characters precipitate themselves in speech in the way best calculated to give a strongly-marked picture of the conception in her own brain,-George Eliot has evidently delighted to note all the varieties of form which varying circumstances give to these direct and simple manners, and takes as much pleasure in painting their different shades as Miss Austen does in guiding her more elaborate conversations to and fro so as to elicit traits of personal character. Directness of delineation is, indeed, evidently natural to the author of Adam Bede, but it has no tendency whatever to take, with her, the form of concentrated intensity, which it assumes in Miss Brontë: her style has all the general composure and range of tone of the life she paints, and certainly shows her as much in sympathy with the passive and stolid phases of rural life as with its more active forms. Miss Bronte's manner, on the other hand, is adapted to suit the exigencies of her own imagination, and while its effect is graphic and unique, it is monotonous and not unfrequently unreal.

George Eliot's pictures are not only directer and simpler than those of the drawing-room novelists, but there is much more variety in the degrees of depth which she gives to her characters, and more of universality and breadth about them. This, again, is in part a result of her field of study, though it cannot, of course, be considered apart from the constitution of her genius. The manners of "good society" are a kind of social costume or disguise, which is, in fact, much more effective in concealing how much of depth ordinary characters have, and in restraining the expression of universal human instincts and feelings, than in hiding the individualities, the distinguishing inclinations, talents, bias, and tastes of those who assume it. The slight restraints which are imposed by society upon the expression of individual bias are, in fact, only a new excitement to its more subtle and various, though less straightforward, development. Instead of

"

speaking itself simply out, it gleams out in a hundred ways by the side-paths of a more elaborate medium. To avail yourself skilfully of all the opportunities which educated social manners permit of being yourself, adds a fresh, though very egotistic, interest to life, and gives much of the zest to the sort of study in which Mr. Thackeray and Mr. Trollope are the acknowledged masters. But this applies only to the lighter and more superficial part of human personality. Those deeper instincts and emotions. in which all men share more or less deeply; which are in the strictest sense personal, and yet in the strictest sense universal; which are private, because either the objects or the occasions which excite them most deeply are different for every different person, and universal, because towards some objects, or on some Occasions, they are felt alike by all;-these most personal and most widely diffused of all the elements of human nature are sedulously suppressed in cultivated society; and even the most skilful of the drawing-room novelists find little room for delineating the comparative depth of their roots in different minds. And yet these deepest portions of human character, which the simpler and less educated grades of society, in their comparative indifference to the sympathy they receive, do not care to hide, and which educated society half suppresses, or expresses only by received formulas quite without, personal significance, are far truer measures of force and mass in human character than any jother elements. They are, in fact, the only common measures which are applicable to all in nearly equal degree. After all, what we care chiefly to know of men and women, is not so much their special tastes, bias, gifts, humours, or even the exact proportions in which these characteristics are combined,-as the general depth and mass of the human nature that is in them, the breadth and the power of their life, its comprehensiveness of grasp, its tenacity of instinct, its capacity for love, its need of trust. A thousand skilful outlines of character based on mere findividualities of taste and talent and temper, are not near as moving to us as one vivid picture of a massive nature stirred to the very depths of its commonplace instinct and commonplace faith. And the means of studying these broader aspects of human life are much fewer in the educated society which Miss Austen and Mr. Thackeray draw, than in the country-towns, mills, and farm-houses, which are dotted about George Eliot's Scenes from Clerical Life, and her more elaborate tales.

1

1

In the depth, force, and thorough naturalness of the human characteristics in the delineation of which she delights, the author of Adam Bede is not superior to Miss Brontë, who never fails to give us a distinct measure of the instinctive tenderness, depth of affection, and energy of will, of her creations,

But

room

in breadth of range George Eliot is far beyond Currer Bell. Intensity is the main characteristic of the authoress of Jane Eyre. She cannot paint quiet massive strength, still less, easy, composed, and inert natures. George Eliot enters into these with even more insight than into the more concentrated. Eager prejudice, dumb pain, the passive famine of inarticulate desires, are painted by both authors with marvellous and almost equal power; but George Eliot has the wider and more tranquil yas nature, and sometimes almost seems to rival Sir Walter Scott in the art of delineating the repose of strong natures and the effortless strength they put forth. Again, in one field-the field of religious faith-the author of Adam Bede shows much broader insight than any of the writers we have named. The drawingm school of novelists do not and cannot often go down to a deep enough stratum of life to come upon the springs of faith. Miss Austen never touches them. Mr. Thackeray turns dizzy with the very mobility of his own sympathies, and finding a distinct type of faith in every different man's mind, not only proclaims the inscrutability of all divine topies, but refuses to assign any strong motive power to religious emotions at all in his delineations of human life. Miss Bronte, too, found it needful to eliminate the supernatural, though she once or twice admits the preternatural, in her pictures. As an artist she is strictly a secularist, delineating religious enthusiasm only once, and then exhibiting it as the stimulus of a cold nature and as putting forth unlawful claims to overrule legitimate human affections. Even Sir Walter Scott, powerfully as he could paint fanaticism, and keen as was his pleasure in the marvellous, never attempted to paint the quieter and deeper forms of religious faith. He evidently did not admit any supernatural element into his conception of sensible men and women, and never paints its influence over a sober and tranquil will. Apparently, the author of Adam Bede,-if we may judge by a few hints she drops here and there in her various asides to the reader, and from the relative place she gives to the supernatural element in her different characters, partly agrees with Mr. Thackeray that divine things are inscrutable, and that the stronger class of intellects meddle least with the subject, at all events intellec

--

tually. But she sees far more clearly than any of them the actual space occupied by spiritual motives in human life, the depth, beauty, and significance which they, and they alone, give to human action. And, accordingly, in almost all her tales she introduces some character with conscious cravings for something beyond human happiness; while in the most perfect of her works she delineates the most delicately beautiful and spiritual nature with which we have ever met in the whole range of fiction.

Goethe's picture of the "Fair Saint" in Wilhelm Meister cannot properly be said to belong to fiction at all. Not only is it, in fact, a minute copy from real life, but it is not even woven by his imagination into the texture of his story. It is an episode of mere description, and the character is not delineated in action at all. Nay, even in itself the "Schöne Seele" which Goethe has so delicately mirrored for us cannot compare in simplicity and beauty with Dinah in Adam Bede.

Another element in which the author of Adam Bede shows the masculine breadth and strength of her genius adds but little to the charm of her tales,-we mean the shrewdness and miscellaneous range of her observations on life. Nothing is rarer than to see that kind of strong acute generalisation in women's writings which Fielding introduced so freely. But we do not think the miscellaneous observations in which George Eliot so often indulges us, after the fashion of the day, are at all suited to the particular bent of her genius; indeed, they often break the spell which that genius has laid upon us. She is not a satirist, and she has too much adopted the style of a satirist in these elements of her books. There is a dash of Mr. Thackeray in all these asides, which does not at all assimilate with the exceedingly differing character of her genius. A powerful and direct style of portraiture is in ill-keeping with that flavour of sarcastic innuendo in which Mr. Thackeray delights. It jars upon the ear in the midst of the simple and faithful delineations of human nature as it really is, with which George Eliot fills her books. It is all very well for Mr. Thackeray, who makes it his main aim and business to expose the hollowness and insincerities of human society, to add his own keen comment to his own one-sided picture. But then it is of the essence of his genius to lay bare unrealities, and leave the sound life almost untouched. It is rather a relief than otherwise to see him playing with his dissecting-knife after one of his keenest probing feats; you understand better how limited his purpose is,-that he has been in search of organic disease, and you are not surprised, therefore, to find that he has found little that was healthy. But George Eliot has a different power. She can delineate what is sound even more powerfully than what is unsound. She does not expose but paints human nature, its weakness and its strength; and the satirical tone in which Mr. Thackeray justifies to his readers the severity of his criticisms, by trying to show that they are all of them open to criticisms at least as severe, is a setting not at all in harmony with George Eliot's style of art. This is, indeed, usually so deep, direct, and real, that the interruption needed to listen to the author's aside is a painful break. It would. suit her books far better if in this respect she followed Miss

Brontë's eager and undeviating style of narration, and did not indulge in the pleasure of being her own critic. But if she must intersperse her narratives with comments and thoughts of her own, she could not find a less suitable tone for them than that satirical contempt for his readers' unreal state of mind to which the author of Vanity Fair has accustomed us. When in the midst of an admirable sketch of the farm-labourers on Mr. Poyser's farm, by no means ill-natured in itself, we come upon such a sentence as this,-"When Tityrus and Melibous happen to be on the same farm, they are not sentimentally polite to each other," we feel suddenly transported to the latitude of Vanity Fair. This is a kind of mannerism which, characteristic and perhaps fascinating in Mr. Thackeray, has a foreign and discordant bitterness in the pages of George Eliot; and we are sorry to see it increasing in her books. In the Scenes from Clerical Life it is only occasionally met with, though it jars us much. In Adam Bede it runs lightly through all the "aside" chapters in the book, though very little interspersed with the direct delineations; but even here it is rather a style than a substance. Often it is only that observations themselves not ungenial and profound are clothed in the half-scornful language which Mr. Thackeray's success has induced so many light writers to adopt. For example, there is in the chapter which opens as follows nothing that is not genial and wise. But throughout the whole there runs a tone of bantering depreciation, -a "what a vulgar world it is we live in" sort of air, which has no justification either in the tenor of what is said, or the particular incident on which it is a comment :

"This Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan! I hear one of my lady readers exclaim. 'How much more edifying it would have been if you had made him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice! You might have put into his mouth the most beautiful things-quite as good as reading a sermon.'

Certainly I could, my fair critic, if I were a clever novelist, not obliged to creep servilely after nature and fact, but able to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, my characters would be entirely of my own choosing, and I could select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman, and put my own admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions."

This is, when read in its context, sarcasm quite out of its natural element, floundering like a fish out of water. Indeed, this foreign mannerism gives a certain air of laborious smartness to the chapters of comment in Adam Bede, which seems to us the only defect in that powerful book. But that which is only an external mannerism in the occasional commentary of Adam Bede, has grown into a rankling foreign substance