is stronger even than tradition, and creates for us a new world and a higher life.

Throughout these essays it is the social side of morality which is praised and commended. What will increase the altruistic spirit, what will widen sympathy and helpfulness, is regarded as truly ethical in its import. Ideal aims are brought to the level of present needs and the possibilities of human nature as it now exists.

Wide-reaching motives, blessed and glorious as they are, and of the highest sacramental virtue, have their dangers, like all else that touches the mixed life of the earth. They are archangels with awful brow and flaming sword, summoning and encouraging us to do the right and the divinely heroic, and we feel a beneficent tremor in their presence; but to learn what it is they summon us to do, we have to consider the mortals we are elbowing, who are of our own stature and our own appetites. . . . On the whole, and in the vast majority of instances, the action by which we can do the best for future ages is of the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for contemporaries. A sour father may reform prisons, but considered in his sourness he does harm.

In another essay, that entitled "Only Temper," the social side of morality is again presented. Especially does it appear in that on "Moral Swindlers." "Let us refuse to accept as moral," says George Eliot, "any political leader who should allow his conduct in relation to great issues to be determined by egoistic passion, and boldly say that he would be less immoral even though he were as lax in his personal habits as Sir Robert Walpole, if at the same time his sense of the public welfare were supreme in his mind, quelling all pettier impulses beneath a magnanimous impartiality." George Elict is almost without exception sound and just in her moral judgments, but here her theories have made her overlook the true conditions of a moral life.

Seeing that Morality and Morals under their alias of Ethics are the subject of voluminous discussion, and their true basis a pressing matter of dispute-seeing that the most famous book ever written on Ethics, and forming a chief study in our colleges, allies ethical with political science, or that which treats of the constitution and prosperity of States, one might expect that educated men would

find reason to avoid a perversion of language which lends itself to no wider view of life than that of village gossips. Yet I find even respectable historians of our own and of foreign countries, after showing that a king was treacherous, rapacious, and ready to sanction gross breaches in the administration of justice, end by praising him for his pure moral character, by which one must suppose them to mean that he was not lewd nor debauched, not the European twin of the typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as passing his life in chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls. And since we are sometimes told of such maleficent kings that they were religious, we arrive at the curious result that the most serious wide-reaching duties of man lie quite outside both Morality and Religion - the one of these consisting in not keeping mistresses (and perhaps not drinking too much), and the other in certain ritual and spiritual transactions with God which can be carried on equally well side by side with the basest conduct toward men. With such a classification as this, it is no wonder, considering the strong re-action of language on thought, that many minds, dizzy with indigestion of recent science and philosophy, are fain to seek for the grounds of social duty; and without entertaining any private intention of committing a perjury which would ruin an innocent man, or seeking gain by supplying bad preserved meats to our navy, feel themselves speculatively obliged to inquire why they should not do so, and are inclined to measure their intellectual subtlety by their dissatisfaction with all answers to this "Why?"

It would be quite impossible for George Eliot to write an essay without some fresh thought or some new suggestion. To those who admire her genius and are in sympathy with her teachings this volume will have a special interest. Its few essays which touch upon moral or speculative subjects are of the utmost value as interpretations of her life and thought.

All her essays, the later as the earlier, are mainly of interest as aids to an understanding of her philosophy. Nothing is worthless which helps us clearly to compre. hend an original mind.

XIX.

THE ANALYTIC METHOD.

GEORGE ELIOT'S literary method was that of

Her

Fielding and Thackeray, both of whom evidently influenced her manner. Their realism, and especially their method of comment and moral observation, she made her own. She had little sympathy with the romanticism of Scott or the idealism of Dickens. moral aims, her intense faith in altruism, kept her from making her art a mere process of photographing nature. Nature always had a moral meaning to her, a meaning in reference to man's happiness and health of soul; and that moral bearing of all human experiences gave dignity and purpose to her art.

It was the method of Scott to present the romantic, picturesque and poetic side of life. He was not untrue to nature, but he cared more for beauty and sentiment than for fact. He sometimes perverted the historic incidents he made use of, but he caught the spirit of the time with which he was dealing with absolute fidelity. In this capacity for historic interpretation he surpassed George Eliot, who had not his instinctive insight into the past. Scott had no theory about the past, no philosophy of history was known to him; but above all novelists he had the power to see by the light of other days, and to make the dead times live again. Not George Eliot and not Thackeray was his rival in this historic insight and poetic power of interpretation; and his superior success was due not only to his peculiar genius but also to his romanticism. Scott failed where

George Eliot succeeded, in giving an intellectual interpretation of life. With certain social and moral tendencies he was clearly at home. On its side of adventure and social impulse and craving for a wider life, as a single instance of his power, he was a true interpreter of the age of Elizabeth. Its deeper spirit, its intellectual movements, he did not, and could not, bring within the range of his story. It was here George Eliot was superior, as is abundantly shown in Romola. The thoughtful aspects of Florentine life she truthfully presented; but its more romantic elements it needed a Scott to make living and real. In The Spanish Gypsy there is very little of genuine interpretation. Certain local features may be accurate, but the spirit of the time is not there; the characters are not such as that age and country developed. Scott, with all his romanticism, would have introduced reality into such an historic picture.

Within her own lines of power George Eliot is much greater than Scott, who could not have written Adam Bede or Middlemarch, or brought out what is best in those works. Adventure was necessary to Scott; he could not have transfigured the plain and homely with beauty as George Eliot has done. Where she is at her best, as in the simple scenes of Silas Marner, there is a charm, pathos and sympathy in her work which must endear it to all hearts. That peculiar power Scott did not have; yet it would be most difficult to decide which is the truer to nature. Genuine art, it is true, has its foundation in the realities of human experience; but those realities are not always best interpreted by the methods of realism. In his own province Scott was truer to nature than George Eliot was in the same field, as may be seen at once by comparing The Spanish Gypsy with Ivanhoe, or any of Scott's novels dealing with the medieval and feudal ages. He took the past into himself, caught its spirit, reflected it in its wholeness. In this he was a genuine realist, and all the more

faithful to reality because he did not accept realism as a theory.

In comparing George Eliot with Dickens, it must first of all be noted that each is the superior of the other in his own special province. Dickens has more imagination; he appeals to more universal sentiments, touches a wider circle of experiences, captivates his readers with a resistless interest and tenderness of spirit. His characters are unreal, mere caricatures often, mere puppets. Yet he had an imagination of marvellous power, so that his characters appeared to his own mind as if real, and he describes them as if they actually stood before him, making them intensely real to his readers. Many of his persons never lived, never could have lived; yet they are types or certain traits of character made living and brought out into a distinctive existence. What those traits of character are he makes all the more apparent by this method.

Dickens had not a fine literary taste, he had no clear insight into some of the purer human sentiments, he was grossly untrue and false in many of his pictures. Yet all in all, with his many faults, it is to be said that his idealism, which was not of a high type, made him a true interpreter of life. If his characters are less faithfully drawn than George Eliot's, his insight into some of the sentiments and emotions was truer. His pictures may be false in some particulars, but he has given them the true spirit with which they should be animated.

In thoughtful fidelity to the facts of life, George Eliot surpasses Scott or Dickens. Scott by his insight, Dickens by his imagination, were able to do what she could not; but they put little thought into their work. They did not think about what life meant; she did. They worked instinctively, she thoughtfully. Her characters are more often to be met with than theirs ; and there is a freshness, a wholesomeness, about them theirs do not have. She is more simple and refined