reason that a book like Pride and Prejudice, which teaches nothing directly, enlarges our sympathies more than Felix Holt.

George Eliot turned to scientific speculation to discover an interpretation of the universe; she moved in the thought of Comte, Herbert Spencer, and their critical disciple, George Henry Lewes ; and it is natural to find in her work "a complete and often half-paraded mastery of the newest philosophic and scientific thought." In spite of her deep fund of sympathy, pathos, poetry, and humour, she can discuss her characterisations as if she were studying a question in biology or physiology. She uses something like processes of induction and deduction (words dear to the heart of Herbert Spencer) as if she were arranging and analysing scientific data. We have seen already that the typical significance of her characters is in danger of overbalancing their individual value. She sometimes thinks of a class when she speaks of a person; and she is inclined to see the world in definitely divided segments or strata. Every character was for Dickens an individual entity, clearly distinguished from anybody else who walked the streets of London. For him a class of people was a heterogeneous collection of distinct individualities; for George Eliot it represented a body of similar units.

In conformity with the scientific bent of her mind George Eliot impresses upon us the inexorable law of consequences, which rules in every department of physical life. But her law of consequences is founded in an ethical imperative, not in an indifferent fatalism. The ethical law is, in the universe of George Eliot, as all-powerful as the law of gravitation, and as unavoidable. Remorse, degeneration of character, and even material loss, are meted out for transmission with the rigid and child-like sense of justice which animated the writers of the Old Testament. Her temper was essentially Hebraistic, and goodness was more to her than beauty. It may reasonably be doubted whether in the world, as we see it, justice works as impartially and with such unmistakable exactitude, whether the righteous is never forsaken and evil always hunts the wicked person to overthrow him. There is a curious naïveté in the whole impression George Eliot's novels convey, and the black and white beans scattered on the ground would not suggest for her, as for Browning's sage, a subdued and cheerful tone of silver grey :

"Hence the constant shade Cast on life's shine."

Both George Eliot and Mr. Thomas Hardy are filled with the consciousness of an inexorable law,

though in the case of Mr. Hardy justice is "careless of mankind"; but in neither does it detract from the wide and instinctive sympathy which inspires them when they write of the insignificant, the unsuccessful, and the outcast. Both are pessimists by a natural birthright, and both feel the goodness and the sadness of the world with an intensity which is given to few optimists.

The world has never produced a woman philosopher, if we except the indefinite figure of Hypatia; but George Eliot came near to being enrolled in the ranks of the world's thinkers. If, however, she was first by impulse a cultured thinker, she was not only this, for she possessed the fire of imagination and sympathy with life. It is her greatest achievement that in ethical and psychological significance and value she raised the standard of prose-fiction to a higher power; she gave it a new impulse and motive. The note of personal conviction, apparent in the work of Charlotte Brontë, is intense and continuous throughout the novels of George Eliot. Her scientific treatment of character is that close and accurate psychological analysis, consciously carried out, which succeeds the barely conscious though wonderful psychological sensitiveness of Thackeray, which was further developed by George Meredith. The suggestion that the future of

English fiction lies through George Eliot and George Meredith is, very possibly, less unlikely of fulfilment than most prophecies; and it is worth noticing that neither was wholly English, but rather Welsh by extraction.

THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT.

Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858; Adam Bede, 1859; The Mill on the Floss, 1860; Silas Marner, 1861; Romola, 1863; Felix Holt, 1866; Middlemarch, 1872; Daniel Deronda, 1876.

There are besides two short stories, The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob, poetry, and a volume of short studies, Impressions of Theophrastus Such.

CHAPTER XV

GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-1909).

George MereDITH completed almost a decade of life within the twentieth century, and it comes to us as a shock of surprise when we first learn that the publication of his earliest romances fell within George Eliot's great period, the few short years, 1858-61. He was born in 1828, and the formative period of his youth, when his powers of imagination and genius were growing to their maturity, lay far back in the middle of that Victorian era which is now rapidly receding from us. And yet Meredith belongs not so much to the middle of the last as the beginning of this century to our own time. If the men and women of his novels move in a mid-Victorian environment, the ideas which they embody or express, the motif underlying the novels, are often clearly anachronistic and premature; they belong to the last decade of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. George Meredith is a patent example of a man born out of due time; but fortunately the gift of many years enabled him to