spirit into a great scene, she too often proceeds to exhaust the air which is the very life-breath of great actions, so that the reflective element in her books undermines the ground beneath the feet of her noblest characters. In Adam Bede she eventually justifies her hero's secularistic coldness of nature, and makes you feel that Dinah was an enthusiast who could not justify what she taught. In "Janet's Repentance," again, she expresses in a few sentences the relief with which the mind turns away from the search for convictions calculated to urge the mind to a life of beneficent self-sacrifice, to those acts of selfsacrifice themselves :

:

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 the 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.

There speaks the true George Eliot, and we may clearly say of her that in fiction it is her great aim, while illustrating what she believes to be the true facts and laws of human life, to find a fit stage for ideal feelings nobler than any which seem to her to be legitimately bred by these facts and laws. But she too often finds herself compelled to injure her own finest moral effects by the sceptical atmosphere with which she permeates them. She makes the high-hearted heroine of her Mill on the Floss all but yield to the physiological attraction of a poor sort of man of science. She makes the enthusiastic Dorothea in Middlemarch decline upon a poor creature like Ladislaw, who has earned her regard chiefly by being the object of Mr. Casaubon's jealousy. She takes religious patriotism for the subject of her last great novel, but is at some pains to show that her hero may be religious without any belief in God, and patriotic without any but an ideal country. This reflective vacuum, which she f pumps out behind all noble action, gives to the workings of her great imagination a general effect of supreme melancholy.

I should rank George Eliot second only in her own proper field-which is not the field of satire, Thackeray's field-to Sir Walter Scott, and second to him only because her imagination, though it

penetrates far deeper, had neither the same splendid vigour of movement, nor the same bright serenity of tone. Her stories are, on the whole, richer than Fielding's, as well as far nobler, and vastly less artificial than Richardson's. They cover so much larger a breadth and deeper a depth of life than Miss Austen's, that though they are not perhaps so exquisitely finished, they belong to an altogether higher kind of world. They are stronger, freer, and less Rembrandt-like than Miss Brontë's, and are not mere photographs of social man like Trollope's. They are patient and powerful studies of individual human beings, in an appropriate setting of social manners, from that of the dumbest provincial life to that of life of the highest self-knowledge. And yet the reflections by which they are pervaded, subtle and often wise as they are, to some extent injure the art of the pictures by their satiric tone, or if they do not do that, take superfluous pains to warn you, and how very doubtful and insecure is the spiritual footing on which the highest excellence plants its tread.

And this, too, is still more the fault of her poems, which in spite of an almost Miltonic stateliness, reflect too much the monotonous cadences of her own musical but over-regulated voice. The poems want inspiration, and the speculative melancholy, which only slightly injured her prose, predominates fatally in her verse. Throughout her poems she is always plumbing the deep waters for an anchorage and reporting "no soundings." The finest of her poems, "The Legend of Jubal," tries to affirm, indeed, that death, the loss of all conscious existence, is a sort of moral gain-as though the loss of self were the loss of selfishness, which it not only is

not, but never could be, since selfishness can only be morally extinguished in a living self, but the lesson is so obviously a moral gloss put on the face of a bad business, that there, at least, no anchorage is found. And in "The Spanish Gypsy" the speculative despair is even worse, while the failure of the imaginative portraiture is more conspicuous, because the portraiture itself is more ambitious. It will be by her seven or eight great fictions that George Eliot will live, not by her poems, and still less by her essays. But all these, one perhaps excepted, will long continue to be counted the greatest achievements of an Englishwoman's, and perhaps even of any woman's, brain.

THE IDEALISM OF GEORGE ELIOT AND

MR. TENNYSON

A WEEK in which we have had additions (Middlemarch and "The Last Tournament") to the permanent literature of England from both George Eliot and Mr. Tennyson,-indisputably the greatest literary artists of our own day, for however Mr. Browning may rival or surpass them in the field of imaginative thought and delineation, he cannot for a moment compare with them as mere artist,-seems to afford a natural occasion for comparing the merits of their similar but very divergent idealistic power and influence. Utterly different as they are in general effect, so different that some would regard any comparison between them as unmeaning,-there are enough points of likeness in the nature of their genius, and the subject-matter of their speculative faculty, to make the comparison one of very considerable interest, not without some definite results. The great superficial difference between the faculties of these two great writers I should say is this,— that while, of the two, George Eliot has far the wider range of perception, and therefore much richer materials for the dramatic delineation of character at her command, her feeling for individuality seldom rouses the poetic faculty within her,—