GEORGE ELIOT.

GEORGE ELIOT is the pseudonym

under which Marion Evans won unique

fame in literature. She was born near Nuneaton in Warwickshire, England, in 1820. She was well educated, and after her mother's death, when she was only sixteen, she kept house for her father, a land agent. When he removed to Coventry she studied German, Italian and music, of which she was passionately fond. Always retiring in disposition, she made friends with difficulty, but when the shy girl had done so, the results proved startling and far-reaching. Under the influence of the Brays of Coventry, she broke away from the Evangelical faith in which she had been trained, and translated from the German Strauss's "Life of Jesus." Her father was greatly offended, and her brother completely estranged. On her father's death she went to Geneva for further study, and on her return to England she resided with Mr. Chapman, editor of the Westminster Review. To this review she contributed learned articles, and also made more translations. She was brought in contact with some of the free-thinkers of the time, and among them with George Henry Lewes, the biographer of Goethe. This new influence changed the current of her life. She went to live with Lewes as his wife, though the law did not allow her that name, and there was no formal ceremony of marriage, civil or religious. Mr. Lewes had already been married, but his wife, who had been forgiven for adultery and taken back, had repeated the offence. Under English law there was no remedy because the first offence had been condoned. This is Lewes's story, which Marian Evans believed, but Mrs. Lewes

gave a different version of the case. In course of time the London world, which had severely condemned Lewes and his new consort, found that they lived in harmony and mutual helpfulness, and practically restored them to its favor. They lived together for nearly a quarter of a century till Mr. Lewes's death in 1878. In May, 1880, George Eliot, then sixty years of age, was formally married to John W. Cross, an old friend, but she died suddenly before the close of that year. Mr. Cross published her biography. Many others have discussed her career and works.

Lewes, who was an industrious author, was the first to recognize the real bent of his wife's genius, and under the stimulus of his encouragement she wrote "Scenes of Clerical Life." They were published in Blackwood's Magazine and met with popular approval. Her first years with Mr. Lewes were a period of struggle, almost to penury, but her grea success came with the publication of "Adam Bede." Henceforth the pecuniary returns from her work were enormous. The later novels were "The Mill on the Floss," "Silas Marner," "Romola," "Felix Holt," "Middlemarch," and "Daniel Deronda." Her "Spanish Gypsy" and other poems are of less importance. Her "Letters" are stilted in style and give little insight into her own personality.

George Eliot was wisely directed by her husband to the novel as the most available form for conveying her views on life. Though her intellect had rejected the dogma of Christianity, her nature had been so steeped in its self-sacrificing spirit, that her stories reveal it. In her earlier books her moral earnestness led her to add to the story much unnecessary preaching, and the influence of Thackeray caused her to introduce some social satire. But in the later ones sober philosophy prevails. Her first attempts to depict life were in drawing characters that had been familiar to her youth. Her efforts resulted in a distinct advance in the novel of character. She exhibits the real complexity of life, making no character absolutely good or evil, but showing the curious mingling of their diverse elements. From her own experience she had acquired a comprehension of weakness and an understanding of the tragedies of common lives.

"Adam Bede" was the first adequate literary report of the spirit of Methodism. The Quaker preacher, Dinah Morris, was drawn from the author's aunt. Similar sketches of provincial life in the midland counties are found in "Silas Marner" and the more tragic "Mill on the Floss," in which Maggie Tulliver's happiness is ruined by her brother's cruel uprightness and by her own affectionate trustfulness. The greatest of her works is "Middlemarch," a pathetic story of failure. The scholar Casaubon never finishes the work of his life and disappoints the wife who had looked up to his superior attainments. "Romola," her only historical novel, treats of Florence in Savonarola's times, but while the preaching monk is accurately portrayed the interest lies with the other characters. In "Daniel Deronda" she departs so far from her usual practice as to present a faultless hero, in an effort to produce interest on behalf of the Jews and their aspirations as a race. But the work, in spite of some excellent characters, has not retained general interest. "Felix Holt" is the least worthy of her novels, though it returns to English ground, on which she had won her fame.

Had not this distinguished woman been so renowned for her fiction she would have been remarkable for her learning. In appearance she was slender and delicate, with a long, plain, grief-stricken face, a look of restrained power, and a personality at once magnetic and commanding. Her genius enabled her not merely to reflect the image of English society seventy years ago, but to indicate the hopes and desires of the best thinkers of her time.

ROMOLA AND HER FATHER.

THE Voice came from the farther end of a long, spacious room surrounded with shelves, on which books and antiquities were arranged in scrupulous order. Here and there, on separate stands in front of the shelves, were placed a beautiful feminine torso; a headless statue, with an uplifted muscular arm wielding a bladeless sword; rounded, dimpled, infantine limbs severed from the trunk, inviting the lips to kiss the cold marble; some well-preserved Roman busts, and two or

three vases of Magna Græcia. A large table in the centre was covered with antique bronze lamps and small vessels in dark pottery. The color of these objects was chiefly pale or sombre; the vellum bindings, with their deep-ridged backs, gave little relief to the marble livid with long burial; the once splendid patch of carpet at the farther end of the room had long been worn to dimness; the dark bronzes wanted sunlight upon them to bring out their tinge of green, and the sun was not yet high enough to send gleams of brightness through the narrow windows that looked on the Via de' Bardi.

The only spot of bright color in the room was made by the hair of a tall maiden of seventeen or eighteen, who was standing before a carved leggio, or reading-desk, such as is often seen in the choirs of Italian churches. The hair was of a reddish gold color, enriched by an unbroken small ripple, such as may be seen in the sunset clouds on grandest autumnal evenings. It was confined by a black fillet above her small ears, from which it rippled forward again, and made a natural veil for her neck above her square-cut gown of black rascia, or serge. Her eyes were bent on a large volume placed before her; one long white hand rested on the reading-desk, and the other clasped the back of her father's chair.

The blind father sat with head uplifted and turned a little aside towards his daughter, as if he were looking at her. His delicate paleness, set off by the black velvet cap which surmounted his drooping white hair, made all the more perceptible the likeness between his aged features and those of the young maiden, whose cheeks were also without any tinge of the rose. There was the same refinement of brow and nostril in both, counterbalanced by a full though firm mouth and powerful chin, which gave an expression of proud tenacity and latent impetuousness; an expression carried out in the backward poise of the girl's head, and the grand line of her neck and shoulders. It was a type of face of which one could not venture to say whether it would inspire love or only that unwilling admiration which is mixed with dread; the question must be decided by the eyes, which often seem charged with a more direct message from the soul. But the eyes of the father had long been silent, and the eyes of the daughter

were bent on the Latin pages of Politian's Miscellanea, from which she was reading aloud at the eightieth chapter, to the following effect:

"There was a certain nymph of Thebes named Chariclo, especially dear to Pallas; and this nymph was the mother of Teiresias. But once when, in the heat of summer, Pallas, in company with Chariclo, was bathing her disrobed limbs in the Heliconian Hippocrene, it happened that Teiresias, coming as a hunter to quench his thirst at the same fountain, inadvertently beheld Minerva unveiled, and immediately became blind. For it is declared in the Saturnian laws that he who beholds the gods against their will shall atone for it by a heavy penalty. . . . When Teiresias had fallen into this calamity, Pallas, moved by the tears of Chariclo, endowed him with prophecy and length of days, and even caused his prudence and wisdom to continue after he had entered among the shades, so that an oracle spake from his tomb; and she gave him a staff, wherewith, as by a guide, he might walk without stumbling. . . . And hence Nonnus, in the fifth book of the Dionysiaca, introduces Actæon exclaiming that he calls Teiresias happy, since, without dying, and with the loss of his eyesight merely, he had beheld Minerva unveiled, and thus, though blind, could for evermore carry her image in his soul."

At this point in the reading the daughter's hand slipped from the back of the chair and met her father's, which he had that moment uplifted; but she had not looked round, and was going on, though with a voice a little altered by some suppressed feeling, to read the Greek quotation from Nonnus, when the old man said:

Stay, Romola; reach me my own copy of Nonnus. It is a more correct copy than any in Poliziano's hands, for I made emendations in it which have not yet been communicated to any man. I finished it in 1477, when my sight was fast failing me."

Romola walked to the farther end of the room, with the queenly step which was the simple action of her tall, finelywrought frame, without the slightest conscious adjustment of herself.