perceives with a sad certainty of insight. To the egotist and sentimentalist, raging or moaning at the constitution of things, Nature seems cruel and Providence seems cruel; but she, looking at individuals in relation to the mighty external forces they obey or resist, sees that unselfishness is the condition both of usefulness and happiness, and that Providence has no pets.

But George Eliot has wide-ranging sympathies as well as large discourse of reason, delicious humor as well as affluent thought, a shaping and realizing power of imagination as well as manifold resources of observation and experience. Indeed, all her faculties and qualities are but the varying expression of one large, noble, and opulent nature. In depicting human life her power of characterization stoops to the humblest and rises to the loftiest types of human character. It ranges from Mrs. Poyser to Dorothea Brooke; from the frivolous Hetty to the superb Gwendolen; from the mentally imprisoned rustic worthies who gather at the alehouse in Ravenloe to the crowd of emancipated mechanics who fearlessly debate all questions in their London tavern club; from representatives of religious prudence, provident even in their hesitating trust in Providence, all the way up to such embodiments of the fervors and exaltations of religious genius as Dinah in "Adam Bede," and the Rev. Mr. Lyon in "Felix Holt," and Mordecai in "Daniel Deronda." Indeed, if George Eliot be not what is technically styled "a believer," she is incomparably skilful in exhibiting the interior moods of all classes of believers. The phenomena of the spiritual world, as reported in the experience of saints and martyrs, she has studied with more intentness than the phenomena of the material world; and her great powers are never more conspicuous than when, concentrating the full force of her sympathetic imagination, she records with soul-awakening eloquence the ecstasies and the agonies of lofty spirits, touched, either in approval or reproof, by the spirit of God.

In presenting this wide variety of character, George Eliot employs two methods of characterization, each of which is good of its kind. In the majority of her humble personages, whose minds are necessarily restricted to a few ideas and experiences, the characters are represented as fixed, and the object is to make every act and word logically true to their strongly conceived individualities. Many critics consider these characters as her best, and loudly beVOL. CXXIV. - NO. 254.

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wail her departure from that region of stagnant village life where she won her first laurels. But she also has the higher art of exhibiting character, not as grown, but as growing, and of indicating the most refined changes produced by external circumstances in the vital processes of its development. By the first method we are made acquainted with persons whose limitations have been reached, and of whom we can only say that they have lived; by the second, we become expectant witnesses of the acts of persons whose limitations are yet undetermined, and of whom we can only say that they are intensely living. We know what the mother of Felix Holt is from the beginning; we cannot tell what Gwendolen will be until the end. Still, whether George Eliot portrays character as grown or as growing, she ever appears on the scene as a looker-on, pouring forth a stream of remarks, wittily wise or tenderly wise, and all tending to the moral that individual life is subject to the laws of life, and that ignorance, caprice, self-will, and revolt will have a hard time of it whenever they come into impotent conflict with the constitution of things. As an apparently disinterested observer of her own creations and of the progress of her own devised story, she impresses the cultivated reader with a never-ceasing wonder at the singular closeness, applicability, compactness, and fertility of her thinking, whenever an occasion is offered or is seized to insinuate it into the substance of the narrative. This tendency of her mind has reached its height in "Daniel Deronda," which so overflows with thoughts that an ordinary novel-reader, dazzled by the blaze which is intended to enlighten him, is tempted to complain that he is impeded rather than assisted by the subtle meditation which is brought in to reinforce clear representation. A reference to the greatest creator and delineator of human character that the world has ever seen is always in point. Shakespeare is open to the objection that, considered strictly from the point of view of the dramatist, he laid upon his characters a heavy burden of superfluous thought, which retarded the action of the play, and at the same time added nothing to our knowledge of the dramatis persona. Whatever violation of the rules of dramatic art Shakespeare may have committed, and however superfluous much of his thinking may appear to dramatic critics, the great body of his readers could ill spare the undramatic thinking he so profusely poured into his dramas; but if we could imagine Shakespeare as a

writer of novels after the modern pattern, it is easy to conjecture that he would have retrenched some of the maxims of general wisdom which he put into the mouths of his characters to be spoken from the stage, and used them in commenting on his personages and on the incidents in which they appeared. He also might have been his own critic. George Eliot is no Shakespeare; but her simple presentation of Daniel Deronda as a character who, like Hamlet, speaks and acts for himself without any side explanations from the author of his being, might give rise to much of the same kind of criticism which has been profusely expended on Hamlet. There are almost as many Hamlets as there are professors who endeavor, each on his own hypothesis, to reconcile the contradictions of Hamlet's character. But suppose that Shakespeare had himself annotated Hamlet as George Eliot has annotated Daniel Deronda.

Passing from this general consideration of George Eliot's genius to the work immediately under review, the first thing that strikes a careful reader is a certain clumsiness in its construction. Many of the misconceptions regarding the purpose of the book are due to the fact that, in the two introductory chapters, Gwendolen is at once introduced to us as glorying in her pride of beauty, and in her power of domination, a mood of mind which even the news of the financial ruin of her family does not materially alter. Then follow eighteen explanatory chapters, giving the previous history of Gwendolen and Deronda, up to the time they accidentally met at Leubronn, and the necklace which she had pawned was restored to her by this intruding stranger. A vital point in the story - the fact that Deronda had rescued Mirah from suicide, had placed her with the Meyricks, had heard her pathetic narrative, and had been strangely impressed by such an entirely novel example of guileless maidenhood, before he saw Gwendolen at the gaming-table is a fact generally overlooked by readers, owing to the method which the author has adopted of beginning her novel, as it were, in the middle. George Eliot is understood to be a writer who never reads any reviews of her books, and undertakes the task of being her own critic. We think that, on the whole, she is her best critic. In the explanatory headings of many of her chapters, intended to give the clew to her meaning, she imitates very happily the quaint, stately, and picturesque diction of English prose-writers, two centuries or two cen

turies and a half old, reproducing the style of Hooker or Burton or Sir Thomas Browne as felicitously as Scott reproduced the style of the Elizabethan dramatists in his frequent quotations from an imaginary “Old Play." But the starched sentences placed at the head of the first chapter of "Daniel Deronda," the object of which is to explain why she does not begin at the natural beginning of the story, are pedantic and heavy, giving no adequate idea of her usual skill in this kind of imitation. She certainly had at hand, in Spenser's letter to Raleigh, expounding the design of the "Faery Queene," a sentence pat to her purpose. A historiographer, says Spenser, "discourseth of affairs orderly, as they were done, accounting as well the times as the actions: but a poet thrusteth into the middest, even where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to things forepast, and divining of things to come, maketh a pleasing analysis of all." In addition to the ingenious and elaborate obscurity of the heading of the first chapter, the first sentence in the chapter itself contained a word which seemed to most novelreaders portentously scientific, and which has enabled gentle dulness to indulge in many a feeble joke. "What," the author asks in reference to Gwendolen, "what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance?" If the mild scoffers at this terrible word will intermit their innocently malicious giggling for a few minutes, and turn to their dictionaries for the information they so evidently need, they will not only ascertain the meaning of dynamic, but understand why the term is specially applicable to the genius of the author who sees fit to use it.

Casting aside such obvious objections to "Daniel Deronda," and coming directly to the question whether the novel indicates a decline in George Eliot's power of creating character, and of vividly imagining scenes and incidents in which character finds adequate expression, we are inclined to think that it shows a palpable advance on her previous works. Of course it is hopeless to argue against those who consider her genius limited to the representation of the rustic English life pictured in "Silas Marner," or the provincial town life so delightfully portrayed in "Middlemarch." Such persons are so confirmed in their just admiration of these that they resent her abandoning the secure field, which she has made her own, for the new regions which she seems ambitious

to occupy. They are not affected by the argument that the author may naturally be reluctant to go on repeating herself. Indeed, they have something of the feeling of the boy who, having taken an extravagant liking for one juvenile story, insisted that his uncles, aunts, and cousins, if they desired to make him a present of a book, should select that particular tale, because, he said, he knew that to be good, and was uncertain as to the interest of any others. But the hopeful sign in "Daniel Deronda " is, that the range of George Eliot's genius has not yet reached its term, that her vigorous faculties show no symptoms of decay in their present exercise on new phases of human life and human character, that the power which delighted us in her previous novels is independent of circumstance and locality, and that she will hereafter produce works as different from "Daniel Deronda " as "Daniel Deronda " is from "Adam Bede."

The special admirers of George Eliot, those who think her genius is confined to the reproduction in vivid forms of the rustic life of that portion of England in which she happened to pass her youth, must admit that in the present work she has shown almost equal power in depicting the life of the gentry and of the upper middle classes of provincial England. The general tone of the society is finely indicated, while every individual in it is distinguished from the rest by some subtle stroke of characterization. In the first book, Mrs. Davilow and her daughters, Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne, Rex Gascoigne, Anna Gascoigne, the Arrowpoints, Lord Brackinshaw, are made as well known to the reader as to Gwendolen, the heroine. Passing to the city, what an image of domestic life is presented in the household of Mrs. Meyrick and her daughters? Some readers may be intolerant of Mordecai the Jew; but nobody can fail to enjoy the exquisite humor exhibited in delineating the Jewish family of the Cohens, including Cohen himself, his wife, his mother, his astonishing little son, Jacob, and his hardly less astonishing little daughter, Adelaide Rebekah. Sir Hugo Mallinger and Lady Mallinger, Mr. Bult, Mr. Vandernoodt, Mr. Lush, not to mention others who move more or less in what is called London society, are as real as any persons we daily meet in the street. The perfection of characterization in all these persons, whether they are honest or dishonest, is unmarred by a single touch of caricature. The representation is bold and distinct; but