IV

GEORGE ELIOT

FEW, if any, luminaries in the bright galaxy of modern English novelists outshine that peculiar and vivid orb the splendor of which still burns steadily across "the dark background and abysm of time," though the glory of Trollope, Lytton, Kingsley, Reade, Scott, and even Dickens and Thackeray seems to wane through the passing decades which have quenched so many lesser lights. On the night of December 22, 1880, George Eliot conquered "the fever called living," and entered into her rest, only a few months after the literary Grundies were convulsed with astonishment at the announcement of the marriage of this eminent woman with Mr. J. W. Cross, a London banker, formerly resident in New York. It has been stated that Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans was the daughter of a poor clergyman who at one time was attached to the

Church of England, but eventually became a Presbyterian minister. It has been declared, also, that she was adopted in early life by another clergyman of considerable wealth, who afforded her opportunities for securing a first-class education. These statements are entirely inaccurate. The facts of her early life are little known, and she herself was characterized by the reticence. of genius concerning her own biographical data.

Mary Ann Evans was born at Arbury Farm, in Warwickshire, England, November 22, 1819. She remained in the parental home, first at Griff, on the same estate, and afterward at Coventry, until 1849. Her father, Robert Evans, was a land agent and surveyor, and served for many years as agent for the estates of more than one old Warwickshire family. In the Midlands he is still held in kind remembrance as a man of sterling probity and uprightness of conduct. Undoubtedly this father was the prototype of more than one admirable character in the stories of his gifted daughter.

George Eliot's early years were passed in the regions haunted by the memories of Shakespeare. Though it is not clear just. how or where her education was obtained, she seems to have received very careful and adequate mental training. Leaving home, she came to London while yet a young woman, and devoted herself to serious literature. She became associated with John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, George Henry Lewes, John Chapman, and other writers in the Westminster Review, and in time came to sustain an editorial connection with that publication. In her twenty-sixth year she published a translation of Strauss's famous Life of Jesus, her first important work. Eight years later appeared her translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity. The dialectic nature of the products of her pen introduced her to the philosophic society of that period, of which she soon became a leading member. It is a question whether the abstruse studies in which she engaged were of any great advantage to her in her equipment as a novelist, though

doubtless in mental poise and accuracy in the use of language she was steadied and guided by the discipline which she received in her philosophic researches.

Such a genius as Miss Evans possessed could not long remain in the thralls of pure didacticism, and at the suggestion of Herbert Spencer she entered the field of the novelist. The nom de plume "George Eliot" she employed for the first time when her initial work of fiction was sent to Blackwood's Magazine. The manuscript of this book, Scenes of Clerical Life, was dispatched anonymously to the editor of Blackwood's, who at once accepted it, believing that he discovered in it the first fruits of an unusual and superior ability. George Henry Lewes acted as Miss Evans's agent and adviser in this transaction, and about the same time began that intimate association and literary companionship which was to terminate only with the death of Lewes, in 1878. Even at this day it is difficult to believe that the circumstances and events of a peculiar professional life, depicted with such rare

skill, pathos, and fidelity, were not at some time included in the writer's personal experience. This earliest book of stories revealed in George Eliot the possession of that loftiest attribute of genius, the power of self-effacement and the projection of the author's mind with intensest sympathy into her own imaginative creations, until they become as real and vital as their antitypes of flesh and blood. This gift is sometimes called the dramatic instinct, and is disclosed in its perfection by Shakespeare, and in a scarcely less degree, though in an almost wholly subjective relation, by Browning, and, notwithstanding the eccentric manner of its presentation, in another realm by George Meredith. Of the work of an author endowed with the dramatic instinct in its highest form the delighted reader might say, as Emerson remarked of Montaigne's essays, "Cut these words, and they would bleed." It is hardly possible to illustrate our meaning by any passage wrenched from its connection, unless it be one which, with its context, is familiar to the reader and in