between infinitude and billions when you have to consider the value of human experience? Will you say that since your life has a term of threescore years and ten, it was really a matter of indifference whether you were a cripple with a wretched skin disease, or an active creature with a mind at large for the enjoyment of knowledge, and with a nature which has attracted others to you?

For herself, she remained in the position described in one of her letters in 1860 (ii. 283): "I have faith in the work ing out of higher possibilities than the Catholic or any other Church has presented; and those who have strength to wait and endure are bound to accept no formula which their whole souls their intellect, as well as their emotions do not embrace with entire reverence. The highest calling and election is to do with out opium, and live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance." She would never accept the common op timism. As she says here: "Life, though a good to men on the whole, is a doubtful good to many, and to some not a good at all. To my thought it is a source of constant mental distortion to make the denial of this a part of religion to go on pretending things are better than they are."

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Of the afflicting dealings with the world of spirits, which in those days were comparatively limited to the untutored minds of America, but which since have come to exert so singular a fascination for some of the most brilliant of George Eliot's younger friends (see iii. 204), she thought as any sensible Philistine among us persists in thinking to this day:

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melancholy misguidance of men's minds from the true sources of high and pure emotion (iii. 161).

The period of George Eliot's productions was from 1856, the date of her first stories, down to 1876, when she wrote, not under her brightest star, her last novel of "Daniel Deronda." During this time the great literary influences of the epoch immediately preceding had not indeed fallen silent, but the most fruitful seed had been sown. Carlyle's "Sartor" (1833-4), and his "Miscellaneous Essays (collected, 1839.) were in all hands; but he had fallen into the terrible slough of his Prussian history (1858-65), and the last word of his evangel had gone forth to all whom it concerned. "In Memoriam," whose noble music and deep-browed thought awoke such new and wide response in men's hearts, was published in 1850. The second volume of "Modern Painters," of which I have heard George Eliot say, as of "In Memoriam that she owed much and very much to it, belongs to an earlier date still (1846), and when it appeared, though George Eliot was born in the same year as its author, she was still translating Strauss at Coventry. Mr. Browning, for whose genius she had such admiration, and who was always so good a friend, did indeed produce during this period some work which the adepts find as full of power and beauty as any that ever came from his pen. But Mr. Browning's genius has moved rather apart from the general currents of his time, creating character and working out motives from within, undisturbed by transient shadows from the passing questions and answers of the day.

too,

If it were another spirit aping Charlotte Brontë - if here and there at rare spots and among people of a certain temperament, or The romantic movement was then upon even at many spots and among people of all its fall. The great Oxford movement, temperaments, tricksy spirits are liable to rise which besides its purely ecclesiastical as a sort of earth-bubbles and set furniture in effects, had linked English religion once movement, and tell things which we either more to human history, and which was know already or should be as well without itself one of the unexpected outcomes of knowing I must frankly confess that I have the romantic movement, had spent its but a feeble interest in these doings, feeling my life very short for the supreme and awful original force, and no longer interested revelations of a more orderly and intelligible the stronger minds among the rising genkind which I shall die with an imperfect eration. The hour had sounded for the knowledge of. If there were miserable spirits scientific movement. In 1859 was pubwhom we could help - then I think we should lished the "Origin of Species," undoubtpause and have patience with their trivial-edly the most far-reaching agency of the mindedness; but otherwise I don't feel bound time, supported as it was by a volume of to study them more than I am bound to study new knowledge which came pouring in the special follies of a peculiar phase of human from many sides. The same period saw society. Others, who feel differently, and are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment for us as to whether anything bet

ter than bewilderment can come of it. At present it seems to me that to rest any fundamental part of religion on such a basis is a

the important speculations of Mr. Spencer, whose influence on George Eliot had from their first acquaintance been of a very decisive kind. Two years after the "Origin of Species" came Maine's " Ancient

Law," and that was followed by the accu- | far too humane a nature not to be deeply mulations of Mr. Tylor and others, exhib- moved by momentous events as they iting order and fixed correlation among passed. Yet her observations, at any rate great sets of facts which had hitherto lain in that cheerful chaos of general knowledge which has been called general ignorance. The excitement was immense. Evolution, development, heredity, adaptation, variety, survival, natural selection, were so many patent pass-keys that were to open every chamber.

after 1848, seldom show that energy of sympathy of which we have been speaking, and these observations illustrate our point. We can hardly think that anything was ever said about the great civil war in America, so curiously far fetched as the following reflection: "My best consola. tion is that an example on so tremendous George Eliot's novels, as they were the a scale of the need for the education of imaginative application of this great influx mankind through the affections and sentiof new ideas, so they fitted in with the ments, as a basis for true development, moods which those ideas had called up. will have a strong influence on all think "My function,” she said (iii. 330), " is that ers, and be a check to the arid narrow anof the æsthetic, not the doctrinal teacher-tagonism which in some quarters is held the rousing of the nobler emotions which to be the only form of liberal thought" make make mankind desire the social (ii. 335). right, not the prescribing of special meas- In 1848, as we have said, she felt the ures, concerning which the artistic mind, hopes of the hour in all their fulness. however strongly moved by social sym- To a friend she writes (i. 179): “You and pathy, is often not the best judge." Her Carlyle (have you seen his article in last influence in this direction over serious week's Examiner ?) are the only two peoand impressionable minds was great in-ple who feel just as I would have them deed. The spirit of her art exactly har-who can glory in what is actually great monized with the new thoughts that were and beautiful without putting forth any shaking the world of her contemporaries. cold reservations and incredulities to save Other artists had drawn their pictures their credit for wisdom. I am all the with a strong ethical background, but she more delighted with your enthusiasm begave a finer color and a more spacious air cause I didn't expect it. I feared that to her ethics, by showing the individual you lacked revolutionary ardor. But no passions and emotions of her characters, -you are just as sans culottish and rash their adventures and their fortunes, as as I would have you. You are not one of evolving themselves from long series of those sages whose reason keeps so tight antecedent causes, and bound up with a rein on their emotions that they are too many widely operating forces and distant constantly occupied in calculating conseevents. Here, too, we find ourselves in quences to rejoice in any great manifestathe full stream of evolution, heredity, sur-tion of the forces that underlie our everyvival, and fixed inexorable law. day existence.

This scientific quality of her work may be considered to have stood in the way of her own aim. That the nobler emotions roused by her writings tend to "make mankind desire the social right," is not to be doubted; but we are not sure that she imparts peculiar energy to the desire. What she kindles is not a very strenuous, aggressive, and operative desire. The sense of the iron limitations that are set to improvement in present and future by inexorable forces of the past, is stronger in her than any intrepid resolution to press on to whatever improvement may chance to be within reach if we only make the attempt. In energy, in inspiration, in the kindling of living faith in social effort, George Sand, not to speak of Mazzini, takes a far higher place.

It was certainly not the business of an artist to form judgments in the sphere of practical politics, but George Eliot was

"I thought we had fallen on such evil days that we were to see no really great movement - that ours was what St. Simon calls a purely critical epoch, not at all an organic one; but I begin to be glad of my date. I would consent, however, to have a year clipt off my life for the sake of witnessing such a scene as that of the men of the barricades bowing to the image of Christ, who first taught fraternity to men.' One trembles to look into every fresh newspaper lest there should be something to mar the picture; but hitherto even the scoffing newspaper critics have been compelled into a tone of genuine respect for the French people and the Provisional Government. Lamartine can act a poem if he cannot write one of the very first order. I hope that beautiful face given to him in the pictorial newspaper is really his: it is worthy of an aureole. I have little patience with peo

ple who can find time to pity Louis disregard of the past, very irreverent and Philippe and his moustachioed sons. impious. Mill had the same feeling when Certainly our decayed monarchs should he disgusted his father by standing up for be pensioned off: we should have a hos- Wordsworth, on the ground that Wordspital for them, or a sort of zoological worth was helping to keep alive in human garden, where these worn-out humbugs nature elements which utilitarians and in. may be preserved. It is but justice that novators would need when their present we should keep them, since we have and particular work was done. Mill, bespoiled them for any honest trade. Let ing free from the exaltations that make them sit on soft cushions, and have their the artist, kept a truer balance. His dinner regularly, but, for heaven's sake, famous pair of essays on Bentham and preserve me from sentimentalizing over a Coleridge were published (for the first time, pampered old man when the earth has so far as our generation was concerned) its millions of unfed souls and bodies. in the same year as "Adam Bede," and Surely he is not so Ahab like as to wish I can vividly remember how the "Colethat the revolution had been deferred till ridge" first awoke in many of us, who his son's days: and I think the shades of were then youths at Oxford, that sense of the Stuarts would have some reason to truth having many mansions, and that complain if Bourbons, who are so little desire and power of sympathy with the better than they, had been allowed to past, with the positive bases of the social reign much longer." fabric, and with the value of permanence

The hopes of '48 were not very accu-in States, which form the reputable side rately fulfilled, and in George Eliot they never came to life again. Yet in social things we may be sure that undying hope is the secret of vision.

There is a passage in Coleridge's "Friend" which seems to represent the outcome of George Eliot's teaching on most, and not the worst, of her readers: "The tangle of delusions," says Coleridge, "which stifled and distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; the parasite weeds that fed on its very roots have been plucked up with a salutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant care, the grad ual improvement, the cautious and unhazardous labors of the industrious though contented gardener to prune, to strengthen, to engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the slug and the caterpillar." Coleridge goes further than George Eliot, when he adds the exhortation, "Far be it from us to undervalue with light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence to which the blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext."

of all conservatisms. This sentiment and conviction never took richer or more mature form than in the best work of George Eliot, and her stories lighted up with a fervid glow the truths that minds of another type had just brought to the surface. It was this that made her a great moral force at that epoch, especially for all who were capable by intellectual training of standing at her point of view. We even, as I have said, tried hard to love her poetry, but the effort has ended less in love than in a very distant homage to the majestic in intention and the sonorous in execution. In fiction, too, as the years go by, we begin to crave more fancy, illusion, enchantment, than the quality of her genius allowed. But the loftiness of her character is abiding, and it passes nobly through the ordeal of an honest biography. "For the lessons," says the fine critic already quoted, "most imperatively needed by the mass of men, the lessons of delib erate kindness, of careful truth, of unwa vering endeavor, — for these plain themes one could not ask a more convincing teacher than she whom we are commem. orating now. Everything in her aspect and presence was in keeping with the bent of her soul. The deeply lined face, the too marked and massive features, were united with an air of delicate refinement, which in one way was the more im

George Eliot disliked vehemence more and more as her work advanced. The word "crudity," so frequently on her lips, stood for all that was objectionable and distasteful. The conservatism of an artis-pressive because it seemed to proceed so tic moral nature was shocked by the seeming peril to which priceless moral elements of human character were exposed by the energumens of progress. Their impatient hopes for the present appear to her rather unscientific; their VOL. XLIX. 2531

LIVING AGE.

entirely from within. Nay, the inward beauty would sometimes quite transform the external harshness; there would be moments when the thin hands that entwined themselves in their eagerness, the earnest figure that bowed forward to speak

sips her tea at the table, reviewing with a severely critical eye her forces ranged ready for cooking on the long dresser in sight of the yard. But on the whole they bear the ordeal of her scrutiny remarkably well. The fowls are certainly white and plump enough now, whatever they may have been before her skilful stuffing and trussing. The bundle of asparagus has a beautiful blue-green bloom that tells of its very recent arrival from the garden, and the pared potatoes under water have not an eye left to offend hers. As for the shelled peas they could scarcely have been more of a size had they all come out

AUTHOR OF "GIDEON'S ROCK," "THE HIGH MILLS," of one pod. The eyes of the silver-grey

ETC.

CHAPTER VI.

SOPHIE JOLLiffe.

MRS. JOLLIFFE, who was the only member of either partner's household who professed a dislike for the brewery, declared the house had been built with a direct view to the discomfort and inconvenience of its inmates.

Her chief objection to it was that the business offices had been built in the very centre of the ground floor, on each side the once spacious hall of the old manorhouse. The front entrance was therefore all but useless to the family during business hours, and unless in some special haste, the ladies went round to the town through the orchard and garden at the back.

All day the front door was understood to belong to the business premises, and to be used by the family or visitors to the family by favor. Private callers knew this, and came with a knock of apologetic | gentleness, and glided down the passage past the offices, with the air of trespass

ers.

But in the evening the household, as though in revenge for having been so shut in upon itself all day, breaks out and invades the brewery premises without ceremony. Servants take their work or enjoy their romp in the silent yards, blow the yeast about in the stallion room, make use of the clean casks for seats, or shoe-cleaning tables, or any purpose they like.

Windows, like so many awakening eyes, open all over the house, letting the inner brightness, concealed all day, peep out in the glow of rich old furniture, gilt pictureframes, quaint coloring of porcelain vases, a glow of well-bound books, rich-hued curtains, flowers, ethereal azaleas or dazzling cluster of Vanthol tulips.

salmon are as bright as though it still retained life enough to resent the uncomfortable curl in which its body is tied.

The front door is thrown open, and a bright carpet laid down from it to the warm and cheerful interior of the house.

This pleasant change in the Pelican's aspect had just taken place when the new manager arrived, on the evening of the Saturday Jolliffe had given notice of his coming.

Not that business was quite over yet but as it was time it should have been over, the household had in a manner taken possession.

Mr. Jolliffe was still busy in his private office, which although furnishnd with the very strictest view to business, was also the most comfortable room in the house. Its leather-covered chairs, so solid and sober-looking, had a sly luxuriousness of their own no one suspected till seated a little while. The low, broad-topped fender had a power of inviting and drawing the feet to the fire which always burnt there summer and winter, for the deep bay win dow, with its wire blinds below meeting its Venetian blinds above, let in but a subdued sunshine, that never alone rendered the room warm enough for Jolliffe.

The long, low, leather-covered table had now piles of half-crowns, and piles of coppers, and rouleaus of gold, and little hil locks of sixpences and smaller silver. There were also letters, bills, lush new swan-quills in generous profusion and picturesque disorder. The miniature sacks containing specimens of malt, were as neatly made and tied up, and the tiny squares of dried hops as sharply and neatly cut, as though they had been presented for the Pelican's inspection by merchants from fairyland.

Jolliffe was short and stout, fair and florid, blue and sanguine of eye, silverThe kitchen door is now open and cook | haired. He had fresh-looking lips that