INTRODUCTION.

LIKE most great artists of the world, George Eliot was peculiarly the product of her own time. The child of speculation and doubt, she voices in prose all the uneasy questions of the human soul which found such a bitter cry in the poetry of Arnold. Mill and Spencer, Darwin and Comte, the masters of rationalism, were her true mental sponsors; it is their doctrine she preaches, their guidance she accepts; and if we remember that this daughter of their adoption was born in one of the narrower houses of the older faith, we shall be less surprised at the tenacity with which she clings to her newer beliefs and the vehemence with which she inculcates them. To the desperation of a skeptic she added the zeal of a convert. More uncompromising than Matthew Arnold in discarding the accepted creed of her day, less sure than Browning of any personal faith with which to replace it, she is eminently the one great artist given to English literature by the scientific spirit of the Victorian age. And this, perhaps, is the best point of departure from which to make a study of her work, the point of view which is most likely to give us fruitful and luminous results.

Her life, so simple in its story, may be told almost in a paragraph. Mary Ann Evans (or Marian Evans, as she afterwards called herself, and as she was known

to her friends) was born at Arbury Farm, in Warwickshire, November 22, 1819. At the time of her birth, her father, Robert Evans, was forester and land-agent in charge of the estates of Mr. Francis Newdigate, of Arbury Hall. Four months afterwards the family removed to Griff, on the same property, where they remained for the next twenty years. Here Marian first went to school with her brother Isaac; and many of the impressions of this period of her life are preserved for us, it is said, in the characters of Maggie and Tom Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss. At the age of nine she was sent to a private school in Nuneaton, where she formed a close friendship with one of the teachers, a Miss Lewis, to whom many of her most intimate letters were afterwards addressed. She was next transferred to a similar school in Coventry, where she remained for three years. Among her companions she attained a distinction for seriousness beyond her years; she was devoted to her books, passionately fond of music, and even at that age a remarkable talker. Indeed, so charming was her conversation, that there is a tradition her school-fellows disputed for the pleasure of walking with her, until the teacher settled their differences by apportioning the coveted privilege among them daily in alphabetical rotation. At the age of sixteen she lost her mother (Christiana Pearson, Robert Evans's second wife), and thereafter assumed full control of her father's household. In the spring of 1841, when she was just of age, her brother Isaac married and brought his wife home to the house at Griff, and Marian removed with her father to Foleshill on the outskirts of Coventry. Here her education began in earnest. By a systematic course of reading and private study she laid the foundation of those

habits which were to make her one of the most broadly cultivated women of the century. She studied Latin and Greek with the master of the Grammar School; another tutor was secured in French, German, and Italian; while she undertook Hebrew by herself. Here, too, she made the acquaintance of Charles Bray and his wife, Caroline Hennell, who were soon to become her closest friends, and who with Charles Hennell were the first to give her mind its bent towards free thought. So pronounced did her rationalistic convictions become that a breach with her father was only avoided by her conceding to his wishes and so far compromising her views as to attend church service as usual.

In 1846 appeared George Eliot's first literary venture, a translation of Strauss's Life of Jesus, a careful and scholarly piece of work. In 1849, on the death of her father, she went abroad and remained nearly a year. Returning to England in the spring of 1850, she began to contribute to The Westminster Review, and in September was invited by John Chapman to assist him in the editorial conduct of the magazine, a task to which she devoted herself for two years. At this period, although she had the advantage of meeting many of the leading radicals and eager scientific speculators, whom Chapman was accustomed to bring about him in fortnightly gatherings at his house, George Eliot had little time for independent work. Her only productions were a translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, issued in 1854, and a number of critical essays contributed to The Westminster.

It was not in this sort of composition, however, that George Eliot was destined to reach her most effective

utterance. She is not happy as an essayist. She is at once too cold and too strenuous to touch lightly the foibles of her fellows. Her humor, so undoubted and so abundant, is lacking in that easy restraint, that final tolerance, which gives the keenest edge to irony. When evil and error are to be attacked, she loses her head and falls upon them with a bludgeon, quite forgetting how effective the rapier can be. As a consequence, her not infrequent excursions into the domain of satire are usually luckless and Quixotic. She is far too serious, her nature is far too deeply imbued with the tinge of her evangelical blood, ever to confront folly with a smile. She is the sister of Calvin and Knox, albeit so far astray from that fold. Her passion for righteousness hurried her into the forum, and filled her mouth with ponderous invectives against wrong. For the orthodox Christian, she is a priestess without an altar, a prophetess without a shrine; but the vestments of her holy office are never laid aside. That indolent regard with which such essayists as Montaigne and Lamb and Stevenson looked out upon the world was never hers; nor could she command the scorching sarcasm of Carlyle. So that her essays, with all their conscientious accuracy, are somewhat flat and pedantic.

Soon, however, she was to find the proper outlet for her powers in those remarkable novels which began with the Scenes from Clerical Life, in 1857, and ended with Daniel Deronda, in 1876. This unfolding of her genius was largely due to the encouragement and devoted care of the man with whom her name will always be inseparably connected. George Henry Lewes was one of the brilliant set by whom Mr. Chapman had been surrounded on The West