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Here is George Eliot's picture: 'The stony street; the bitter north-east wind and darkness; and in the midst of them a tender woman thrust out from her husband's home in her thin nightdress, the harsh wind cutting her naked feet and driving her long hair away from her half-clad bosom, where the poor heart is crushed with anguish and despair. It is in these desperate straits that religion presents itself to her view in an entirely fresh guise.
This explains the paradox that the most popular, and most certainly the most praised of George Eliot's works, are the simpler and the shorter. Every one enjoys the Scenes of Clerical Life, short stories of a hundred pages each, with simple plots and a few characters in everyday life.
Eliot's voice, rather grave but with the ghost of a quiver in it which might have betokened some inward amusement, sounded above her head. Then, as she still struggled vainly to move the recalcitrant latch, he went on quietly: "Are you trying to run away from me or what?" Ann straightened herself and made a snatch at her fugitive dignity.
Kenn, a very high Anglican, is spoken of with all veneration; although, perhaps, "George Eliot's" opinion as to the efficiency of the high Anglican clergy may be gathered from the circumstance that when the Doctor interferes for the benefit of Maggie Tulliver, he not only fails to be of any use, but exposes himself to something like the same kind of gossip which had arisen from Mr.
There is a passage in Coleridge's Friend which seems to represent the outcome of George Eliot's teaching on most, and not the worst, of her readers: 'The tangle of delusions, says Coleridge, 'which stifled and distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; the parasite weeds that fed on its very roots have been plucked up with a salutary violence.
Diotima's might have been as disappointing as George Eliot's: but by no means must necessarily have been so. Aspasia's, sometimes counterfeited, ought to have been good. The continuity of literary history is a thing which deserves to be attended to, especially when there is an ever-growing tendency to confine attention to things modern albeit so soon to be antiquated!
"Alton Locke," read to-day, is felt to be too much the tract to bear favorable comparison with Eliot's "Felix Holt"; but it has literary power and noble sincerity. Kingsley is one of the first to feel the ground-swell of social democracy which was to sweep later fiction on its mighty tide.
The cause or purpose of a book, the thoughts it holds, its suggestiveness, its style, seem to me important points to bear in mind when reading or studying a work. You may be reading George Eliot's "Romola." Be sure, when the book ends, that you see somewhat the purpose for which it was written.
He was heading straight for Jim Eliot's drug store on the main corner and his idea was to buy a drink of chloroform and drink it and die right there on the spot. As Pupkin walked down the street, the whole thing was so vivid in his mind that he could picture it to the remotest detail.
Thus, Dickens is reflected in Charles Reade, Thackeray in Anthony Trollope and the Brontë sisters, and George Eliot's psychology finds artistic expression in George Meredith. To these social and moral and realistic studies we should add the element of romance, from which few of our modern novelist's can long escape.
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