in the Mill on the Floss, and we find ourselves not unfrequently coming upon passages in the following tone;

"In writing the history of unfashionable families, one is apt to fall into a tone of emphasis which is very far from being the tone of good society, where principles and beliefs are not only of an extremely mo derate kind, but are always presupposed, no subjects being eligible but such as can be touched with a light and graceful irony. But then good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its dinner-engagements six weeks deep, its opera and its fairy ball-rooms; rides off its ennui on thoroughbred horses, lounges at the club, has to keep clear of crinoline vortices, gets its science done by Faraday, and its religion by the superior clergy who are to be met in the best houses: how. should it have time or need for belief and emphasis? But good society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very expensive production requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life. condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving under more or less oppression of carbonic acid; or else, spread over sheepwalks, and scattered in lonely houses and huts on the clayey or chalky corn-lands, where the rainy days look dreary. This wide national life is based entirely on emphasis-the emphasis of want, which urges it into all the activities necessary for the maintenance of good society and light irony: it spends its heavy years often in a chill, uncarpeted fashion, amidst family discord unsoftened by long corridors. Under such cir cumstances, there are many among its myriads of souls who have absolutely needed an emphatic belief: life in this unpleasurable shape demanding some solution even to unspeculative minds; just as you inquire into the stuffing of your couch when any thing galls you there, whereas eider-down and perfect French springs excite no question. Some have an emphatic belief in alcohol, and seek their ekstasis or outside standing-ground in gin; but the rest require something that good society calls enthusiasm,' something that will present motives in an entire absence of high prizes, something that will give patience and feed human love when the limbs achie with weariness, and human i looks are hard upon us something, clearly, that lies outside personal desires, that includes resignation for ourselves, and active love for what!! is not ourselves."

1

The tone of these comments, however much truth there may be in then, is bitter, and the manner of sarcasm which the author has adopted misleads her into inquendoes negatived by the higher parts of her own mind as when she intimates that" it is discontent with the uncomfortablenesses of life rather than T any positive yearning, which precipitates the sufferers some into excess, others into faith.This is unworthy of George Eliot. It is painful to see that the superficial satire in her other books seems to be sinking deeper. For even where it is best, she has not the skill to bring out without effort, and yet in full relief, the weak points of men, as the genius of satire

1

requires; and we cannot but feel painfully, that, like most able people who do what it is not their bent to do, she overdoes it, and breaks a butterfly on the wheel. How lightly and tauntingly Mr. Thackeray would have given us the following! how broadly ludicrous Mr. Dickens would have made it! but in George Eliot's hands it is neither broad fun nor indirect satire, but intellectual power commenting, with painfully minute analysis, on human foibles:

"It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the complexity introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilisation the sight of a fashionably-drest female in grief. From the sorrow of a Hottentot to that of a woman in large buckram sleeves, with several bracelets on each arm, an architectural bonnet, and delicate ribbon-strings-what a long series of gradations! In the enlightened child of civilisation the abandonment characteristic of grief is checked and varied in the subtlest manner, so as to present an interesting problem to the analytic mind. If, with a crushed heart, and eyes half-blinded by the mist of tears, she were to walk with a too devious step through a door-place, she might crush her buckram sleeves too, and the deep consciousness of this possibility produces a composition of forces by which she takes a line that just clears the doorpost. Perceiving that the tears are hurrying fast, she unpins her strings and throws them languidly backward-a touching gesture, indicative, even in the deepest gloom, of the hope in future dry moments when cap-strings will once more have a charm. As the tears subside a little, and with her head leaning back-> ward at the angle that will not injure her bonnet, she endures that terrible moment when grief, which has made all things else a weariness, has itself become weary; she looks down pensively at her bracelets, and adjusts their clasps with that pretty studied fortuity which would be gratifying to her mind if it were once more in a calm and healthy state."

George Eliot's humour, which is very great, is not of the ironical or satirical kind. The covert meaning which aims at one thing while it appears to say another is not in her manner. Her danger in this respect is probably caricature, though at present there is but little real caricature in her writings. The sketches of farmers' life in the Mill on the Floss not unfrequently remind us in their somewhat too broad style of Miss Burney's sketches of vulgar shopkeepers in Evelina. The humour in which she excels most has nothing in it of the self-command and reticence which gives its edge to irony. The satirist just moves away sufficiently from the station at which for the moment his character is placed to show you how one-sided and shallow that character is; but he keeps on the mask of sympathy, though he allows you to see him smiling under it; and half the sting of his irony consists in his assuming that the weakness probed is too deeply rooted in human nature to mock at openly, though we

را

need not shut our eyes to it. There is nothing of this species of humour in the author of these books. She has a large share of that dramatic humour of which Shakespeare's is the model, which consists in a rapid and complete change of moral and intellectual latitude, in showing us the strangely different views of human things,-vulgar, contemplative, and practical,—which differently situated beings take. Of this kind of humour there is no more perfect specimen than the scene in which George Eliot enters into the unflinching (or as we might falsely say, indelicate) feeling of the uneducated towards Death, and the necessary accompaniments of Death, in telling us Lisbeth Bede's wishes about her husband's coffin and funeral.

"What art goin' to do?' asked Lisbeth.

coffin?'

Set about thy feyther's

No, mother,' said Adam; 'we 're going to take the wood to the village, and have it made there.'

Nay, my lad, nay,' Lisbeth burst out in an eager, wailing tone; thee wotna let nobody make thy feyther's coffin but thysen? Who'd make it so well? An' him as know'd what good work war, an 's got a son as is th' head o' the village, an' all Treddles'on too, for cleverness.' Very well, mother, if that's thy wish, I'll make the coffin at home; but I thought thee wouldstna like to hear the work going on.'

'An' why shouldna I like 't? It's the right thing to be done. An' what's likin' got to do wi't? It's choice o' mislikins is all I'n got i' this world. One mossel's as good as another when your mouth's out o' taste. Thee mun set about it now this mornin' fust thing. I wunna ha' nobody to touch the coffin but thee.'

Adam's eyes met Seth's, which looked from Dinah to him rather wistfully.

'No, mother,' he said, 'I'll not consent, but Seth shall have a hand in it too, if it's to be done at home. I'll go to the village this forenoon, because Mr. Burge 'ull want to see me, and Seth shall stay at home and begin the coffin. I can come back at noon, and then he can go.' Nay, nay,' persisted Lisbeth, beginning to cry, 'I'n set my heart on 't as thee shalt ma' thy feyther's coffin. Thee 't so stiff an' masterful, thee 't ne'er do as thy mother wants thee. Thee wast often angered wi' thy feyther when he war alive; thee must be the better to 'm now he's goen'. He'd ha' thought nothin' on 't for Seth to ma's coffin.””

And the same humour in a lighter vein is seen in the inimitable sketch of Tom's intercourse with his uncle Pullet in the Mill on the Floss:

"With Tom the interval had seemed still longer, for he had been seated in irksome constraint on the edge of a sofa directly opposite his uncle Pullet, who regarded him with twinkling gray eyes, and occasionally addressed him as Young sir.' 'Well, young sir, what do you learn at school?' was a standing question with uncle Pullet, whereupon Tom always looked sheepish, rubbed his hand across his face, and

answered, 'I don't know.' It was altogether so embarrassing to be seated tête-à-tête with uncle Pullet, that Tom could not even look at the prints on the walls, or the fly-cages, or the wonderful flower-pots; he saw nothing but his uncle's gaiters. Not that Tom was in awe of his uncle's mental superiority; indeed, he had made up his mind that he didn't want to be a gentleman farmer, because he shouldn't like to be such a thin-legged, silly fellow as his uncle Pullet-a molly-coddle, in fact. A boy's sheepishness is by no means a sign of over-mastering reverence; and while you are making encouraging advances to him under the idea that he is overwhelmed by a sense of your age and wisdom, ten to one he is thinking you extremely queer. The only consolation I can suggest to you is, that the Greek boys probably thought the same of Aristotle. It is only when you have mastered a restive horse, or thrashed a drayman, or have got a gun in your hand, that these shy juniors feel you to be a truly admirable and enviable character.. Now Mr. Pullet never rode any thing taller than a low pony, and was the least predatory of men, considering firearms dangerous, as apt to go off of themselves by nobody's particular desire. So that Tom was not without strong reasons when, in confidential talk with a chum, he had described uncle Pullet as a nincompoop, taking care at the same time to observe that he was a very rich fellow.'

The only alleviating circumstance in a tête-à-tête with uncle Pullet was that he kept a variety of lozenges and peppermint-drops about his person, and when at a loss for conversation, he filled up the void by proposing a mutual solace of this kind.

Do you like peppermints, young sir? required only a tacit answer when it was accompanied by a presentation of the article in question."

There is also in George Eliot abundance of what always accompanies dramatic humour, we mean, a great fertility in illustrative analogies which go to the very heart of a one-sided view of any question. Of this Mrs. Poyser's justly-admired wit is the most obvious example. When, for instance, she wishes to impress upon Dinah that her village convert's piety is an artificial result of her own personal influence, and cannot outlast her absence a day, what can be more felicitous than her simile? "There's that Bessy Cranage, she'll be flaunting in new finery three weeks after you're gone, I'll be bound: she'll no more go on in her new ways without you than a dog 'ull stand on its hind legs when nobody's looking."

But while George Eliot's imagination is opulent enough in its power of dramatic sympathy, in a capacity for easily migrating from one moral latitude to another, and also fertile enough in illustration of any view, or any character it once grasps, we see in the third volume of the Mill on the Floss that there is no proportionate power of indirectly portraying character by the side-lights and shadows of easy general conversation,---a power which generally distinguishes feminine novelists. In the

picture of life as it passed in St. Ogg's drawing-rooms, she falls so much below herself that we see at t once it is not her natural field of art. With all her ith all her subtlety and intellectual power, which is obviously great, and her humour, which is greater, she falls far short of many who are greatly her inferiors in genius in her attempt to delineate character through this tranquil play of educated social intercourse. Take up almost any scene in Mr. Oursigake Thackeray and Mr. Trollope, and you will find a conversation in which, without any formal discussion, every character seems acter se to be answering by some slight modification in its own tone to the chords struck by the others. This sort of play of character is mainly a fruit of social education. The type of mind in the uncultivated classes, whom George Eliot has made her chief study, is much stiffer and more monotonous. The latter change with the changes in their own mood, but do not suffer the same subtle modifications of tone and feeling from social influences, which you perceive in educated life. George Eliot has but little skill in delineating this social phenomenon. Her imagination requires a distinct conception of the mood, or thought, or a ing to be seized before seizing it. There is nothing of that easy modulation, which comes by instinct rather than by imagination, in the conversation of her educated people, but which constitutes es half its c its charm, and which the modern novelist so wide a field for indirect portraiture. Among Miss Austen's scenes, for instance, George Eliot might perhaps have written those between people of a totally different social essence, as, for example, the humorous scenes between the Miss Steeles and the Miss Dashwoods in Sense and Sensibility. But the third volume of the Mill on the Floss seems to show that the delicatelydelineated play of feeling between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, or between Emma and Jane Fairfax in Emma, would have been quite out of her sphere. Indeed, there are probably no two more different types of genius than that which excels in indirect and that which excels in direct delineation. And the author of Adam Bede, like Sir Walter Scott, is always most successful with the broadest and simplest modes in which human character expresses itself. In short, for masculine composure and range of sympathy, for strength of grasp in dealing with universal human feelings, for skill in habitually realising to us that individual differences of character are engrafted on a fu fundamental community of nature, she has no rival among the literary artists of the present day. And though it is in part a logical consequence of these great gifts, yet, as we have shown, it is exceptional enough to deserve separate notice, and adds indefinitely to the charm they exercise, that she has a keen sense of that infinite hunger of the spirit which