Before Scenes from Clerical Life had ceased to run, in the latter part of the year 1857, George Eliot had already begun a novel more complete in form than any of the three tales which composed that series. Early in 1858, she made a visit to the Continent, and it was from Munich that a considerable portion of the MS. of her new book was sent to her publisher, Mr. Blackwood. This was Adam Bede, which she completed by the end of October, 1858.

It was brought out immediately in book form; George Eliot seemed desirous of putting the public to a speedier test than could be secured by running the story through successive numbers of the magazine, as usual; although the enthusiastic editor declared himself very willing to enrich the pages of Blackwood's with it. It was therefore printed in January, 1859.

I have already cited a letter from Marian Evans to Miss Henschel, in which she mentions the only two matters of fact connected in the most shadowy way as originals with the plot of Adam Bede. One of these is that in her girlhood, she had met an aunt of hers about sixty years old, who had in early life been herself a preacher. To this extent, and this only, is there any original for our beautiful snow-drop—Dinah Morris, in Silas Marner. Again, in the same letter, George Eliot mentions that this same aunt had told her of once spending a night in prison to comfort a poor girl who had murdered her own child, and that this incident lay in her mind for many years, until it became the germ of Adam Bede.

These are certainly but shadowy connections; yet, probably, the greatest works are built upon quite as filmy a relation to any actual precedent facts. A rather pretty story is told of Mrs. Carlyle, which, perhaps, very well illustrates this filmy relation. It is told that one evening she gave to Dickens a subject for a novel which she had indeed worked out up to the second volume, the whole subject consisting of a weaving together of such insignificant observations as any one must make of what goes on at houses across the street. For example,—Mrs. Carlyle observed of a house nearly opposite them that one day the blinds or curtains would be up or down; the next day a figure in a given costume would appear at the window, or a cab would drive, hastily or otherwise, to the door, a visitor would be admitted or rejected, etc; such bits of circumstances she had managed to connect with human characters in a subtle way which is said to have given Dickens great delight. She never lived, however, to finish her novel, thus begun.

This publication of Adam Bede, placed George Eliot decisively at the head of English novel-writers, with only Dickens for second, even; and thus enables us at this point fairly to do what the ages always do in order to get that notoriously clear view of things which comes with time, and time only, that is to brush away all small circumstances and cloudy non-essentials of time so as to bring before our minds the whole course of English fiction, from its beginning to the stage at which it is now pending with Adam Bede, as if it concerned but four names and two periods, to wit:

Richardson,} middle 18th century
Fielding.}

and

Dickens,} middle 19th century.
George Eliot.}

Now it was shown in the last lecture how distinctly the moral purpose of the English fiction represented by this upper group was announced, though we were obliged to record a mournful failure in realizing that announcement. Adam Bede gives us the firmest support for a first and most notable difference between these two periods of English fiction, that while the former professes morality yet fails beyond description, the latter executes its moral purpose to a practical degree of beneficence beyond its wildest hopes. Without now specifying the subtle revolutions which lie in Adam Bede, a single more tangible example will be sufficient to bring this entire difference before you. If I ask you to recall how it is less than fifty years ago that Charles Dickens was writing of the debtors' prisons with all the terrible earnest of one who had lived with his own father and mother in those unspeakable dens; if I recall to you what marvelous haste for proverbially slow England the reform thus initiated took upon itself, how it flew from this to that prison, from this to that statute, from this to that country, until now not only is no such thing as imprisonment for debt known to any of Dickens's readers, but with the customary momentum of such generous impulses in society, the whole movement in favor of debtors is clearly going too far and is beginning to oppress the creditor with part of the injustice it formerly meted out to the debtor; if, I say, I thus briefly recall to you this single instance of moral purpose carried into perfect practice, I typify a great and characteristic distinction between these two schools. For in point of fact what one may call an organic impracticability lay at the core of the moral scheme of Richardson and Fielding.

I think all reasoning and experience show that if you confront a man day by day with nothing but a picture of his own unworthiness, the final effect is, not to stimulate, but to paralyze his moral energy. The picture of the man becomes the head of a Gorgon. Now this was precisely what this early English fiction professed to do. It professed to show man exactly as he is; but although this profession included the good man as well as the bad man, and although there was some endeavor to relieve the picture with tints of goodness here and there, the final result was—and I fearlessly point any doubter to the net outcome from Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe down to Humphrey Clinker—the final result was such a portrayal as must make any man sit down before the picture in a miserable deep of contempt for himself and his fellows, out of which many spirits cannot climb at all, and none can climb clean.

On the other hand, the work of Dickens I have just referred to is a fair specimen of the way in which the later school of English fiction, while glozing no evil, showed man, not how bad he might be, but how good he might be; and thus, instead of paralyzing the moral energy, stimulated it to the most beneficent practical reform. I think it is Robert Browning who has declared that a man is as good as his best; and there is the subtlest connection between the right to measure a man's moral stature by the highest thing that he has done, rather than the lowest, on the one hand, and that new and beautiful inspiration which comes into one's life as one contemplates more and more instances of the best in human behavior, as these are given by a literature which thus lifts one up from day to day with the declaration that however commonplace a man may be, he yet has within himself the highest capabilities of what we have agreed to call the russet-coated epic. The George Eliot and Dickens school, in fact, do but expand the text of the Master when He urges His disciples: "Be ye perfect as I am perfect."

Let me now suggest a second difference between the two schools which involves an interesting coincidence and now specially concerns us. As between Richardson and Fielding, it has been well said (by whom I cannot now remember) that Fielding tells you the time of day, whilst Richardson shows you how the watch is made. As indicating Fielding's method of conducting the action rather by concrete dialogue and event, than by those long analytic discussions of character in which Richardson would fill whole pages with minute descriptions of the changing emotions of Clarissa upon reading a certain letter from Lovelace, pursuing the emotion as it were tear by tear, lachrymatim,—this characterization happily enough contrasts the analytic strength of Richardson with the synthetic strength of Fielding.

Now a strikingly similar contrast obtains as between George Eliot and Charles Dickens. Every one will recognize as soon as it is mentioned the microscopic analysis of character throughout George Eliot as compared with the rapid cartoon-strokes by which Dickens brings out his figures. But the antithesis cannot be left here as between George Eliot and Dickens; for it is the marvel of the former's art that, though so cool and analytic, it nevertheless sets before us perfect living flesh-and blood people by fusing the whole analytic process with a synthetic fire of the true poet's human sympathy.

And here we come upon a farther difference between George Eliot and Dickens of which we shall have many and beautiful examples in the works we have to study. This is a large, poetic tolerance of times and things which, though worthy of condemnation, nevertheless appeal to our sympathy because they once were closely bound with our fellow-men's daily life. For example, George Eliot writes often and lovingly about the England of the days before the Reform Bill, the careless, picturesque country-squire England; not because she likes it, or thinks it better than the England of the present, but with much the same feeling with which a woman looks at the ragged, hob-nailed shoes of her boy who is gone—a boy who doubtless was often rude and disobedient and exasperating to the last degree, but who was her boy.

A keen insight into this remarkable combination of the poetic tolerance with the sternness of scientific accuracy possessed by this remarkable woman—the most remarkable of all writers in this respect, we should say, except Shakspeare—is offered us in the opening lines of the first chapter of her first story, Amos Barton. (I love to look at this wonderful faculty in its germ). The chapter begins: "Shepperton Church was a very different looking building five-and-twenty years ago.... Now there is a wide span of slated roof flanking the old steeple; the windows are tall and symmetrical; the outer doors are resplendent with oak graining, the inner doors reverentially noiseless with a garment of red baize;" and we have a minute description of the church as it is. Then we have this turn in the next paragraph, altogether wonderful for a George Eliot who has been translating Strauss and Feuerbach, studying physics, Comtism and the like among the London agnostics, a fervent disciple of progress, a frequent contributor to the Westminster Review; "Immense improvement! says the well-regulated mind, which unintermittingly rejoices in the new police ... the penny-post, and all guaranties of human advancement, and has no moments when conservative reforming intellect takes a nap, while imagination does a little Toryism by the sly, revelling in regret that dear old brown, crumbling, picturesque inefficiency is everywhere giving place to spick-and-span, new-painted, new-varnished efficiency, which will yield endless diagrams, plans, elevations and sections, but alas! no picture. Mine, I fear is not a well-regulated mind: it has an occasional tenderness for old abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over the days of nasal clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for the departed shades of vulgar errors." And it is worth while, if even for an aside, to notice in the same passage how this immense projection of herself out of herself into what we may fairly call her antipodes, is not only a matter of no strain, but from the very beginning is accompanied by that eye-twinkle between the lines which makes much of the very ruggedest writing of George Eliot's like a Virginia fence from between whose rails peep wild roses and morning-glories.

This is in the next paragraph where after thus recalling the outside of Shepperton church, she exclaims: "Then inside what dear old quaintnesses! which I began to look at with delight even when I was so crude a member of the congregation that my nurse found it necessary to provide for the reinforcement of my devotional patience by smuggling bread and butter into the sacred edifice." Or, a few lines before, a still more characteristic twinkle of the eye which in a flash carries our thoughts all the way from evolution to pure fun, when she describes the organ-player of the new Shepperton church as a rent-collector "differentiated by force of circumstances into an organist." Apropos of this use of the current scientific term "differentiation," it is worth while noting, as we pass, an instance of the extreme vagueness and caprice of current modern criticism. When George Eliot's Daniel Deronda was printed in 1876, one of the most complacent English reviews criticized her expression "dynamic power of" a woman's glance, which occurs in her first picture of Gwendolen Harleth, as an inappropriate use of scientific phraseology; and was immediately followed by a chorus of small voices discussing the matter with much minute learning, rather as evidence of George Eliot's decline from the proper artistic style. But here, as you have just seen, in the very first chapter of her first story, written twenty years before, scientific "differentiation" is made to work very effectively; and a few pages further on we have an even more striking instance in this passage: "This allusion to brandy-and-water suggested to Miss Gibbs the introduction of the liquor decanters now that the tea was cleared away; for in bucolic society five-and-twenty-years ago, the human animal of the male sex was understood to be perpetually athirst, and 'something to drink' was as necessary a 'condition of thought' as Time and Space." Other such happy uses of scientific phrases occur indeed throughout the whole of these first three stories, and form an integral part of that ever-brooding humor which fills with a quiet light all the darkest stories of George Eliot.

But now, on the other hand, it is in strong contrast that we find her co-laborer Dickens, always growing furious (as his biographer describes), when the ante-reform days are mentioned, those days of rotten boroughs, etc., when, as Lord John Russell said, "a ruined mound sent two representatives to Parliament, three niches in a stone wall sent three representatives to parliament, and a park where no houses were to be seen sent two representatives to Parliament." While George Eliot is indulging in the tender recollections of picturesqueness, etc., just given, Dickens is writing savage versions of the old ballad, The Fine Old English Gentleman, in which he fiercely satirizes the old Tory England:

In a word, the difference between Dickens' and George Eliot's powers is here typified: Dickens tends toward the satiric or destructive view of the old times; George Eliot, with an even more burning intolerance of the essential evil, takes, on the other hand, the loving or constructive view. It is for this reason that George Eliot's work, as a whole, is so much finer than some of Dickens'. The great artist never can work in haste, never in malice, never in even the sub-acid satiric mood of Thackeray; in love, and love only, can great work, work that not only pulls down, but builds, be done; it is love, and love only, that is truly constructive in art.

And here it seems profitable to contrast George Eliot's peculiar endowment as shown in these first stories, with that of Thackeray. Thackeray was accustomed to lament that "since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost powers a man.... Society will not tolerate the natural in art." Under this yearning of Thackeray's after the supposed freedom of Fielding's time, lie at once a short-coming of love, a limitation of view and an actual fallacy of logic, which always kept Thackeray's work below the highest, and which formed the chief reason why I have been unable to place him here, along with Dickens and George Eliot. This short-coming and limitation still exist in our literature and criticism to such an extent that I can do no better service than by asking you to examine them. And I think I can illustrate the whole in the shortest manner by some considerations drawn from that familiar wonder of our times, the daily newspaper. Consider the printed matter which is brought daily to your breakfast table. The theory of the daily paper is that it is the history of the world for one day; and let me here at once connect this illustration with the general argument by saying that Thackeray and his school, when they speak of drawing a man as he is—of the natural, etc., in art—would mean drawing a man as he appears in such a history as the daily newspaper gives us. But let us test this history: let us examine, for instance, the telegraphic column in the morning journal. I have made a faithful transcript on the morning of this writing of every item in the news summary, involving the moral relation of man to man; the result is as follows: one item concerning the assassination of the Czar; the recent war with the Boers in Africa; the quarrel between Turkey and Greece; the rebellion in Armenia; the trouble about Candahar; of a workman in a lumber-camp in Michigan, who shot and killed his wife, twenty-two years old, yesterday; of the confession of a man just taken from the West Virginia penitentiary, to having murdered an old man in Michigan, three years ago; of the suicide of Mrs. Scott at Williamstown, Mississippi; of the killing of King by Clark in a fight in Logan county, Kentucky, on Sunday; of how, about 10 o'clock last night, a certain John Cram was called to the door of his house, near Chicago, and shot dead by William Seymour; of how young Mohr, thirteen years of age, died at the Charity Hospital, in Jersey City, yesterday, from the effects of a beating by his father; of how young Clasby was arrested at Richmond, Virginia, for stealing letters out of the mail bag; of how the miners of the Connellsville, Pennsylvania, coke regions, the journeyman bakers of Montreal, Canada, the rubber-workers of New Brunswick, New Jersey, and the Journeyman Tailors' Union in Cincinnati, are all about to strike; and finally, of how James Tolen, an insane wife-murderer, committed suicide in Minnesota, yesterday, by choking himself with a twisted sheet. These are all the items involving the moral relations of man to man contained in the history of the world for Tuesday, March 22d, 1881, as given by a journal noted for the extent and accuracy of its daily collection.

Now suppose a picture were drawn of the moral condition of the United States from these data: how nearly would it represent the facts? This so-called "history of the world for one day," if you closely examine it, turns out to be, you observe, only a history of the world's crimes for one day. The world's virtues do not appear. It is true that Patrick Kelly murdered his wife yesterday; but then how many Kellys who came home, tired from work, and found the wife drunk and the children crying for bread, instead of murdering the whole family, with a rugged sigh drew the beastly woman's form into one corner, fumbled about the poor, dirty cupboard in another for crusts of bread, fed the crying youngsters after some rude fashion, and finally lay down with dumb heaviness to sleep off the evil of that day. It is true that Jones, the bank clerk, was yesterday exposed in a series of defalcations; but how many thousands of bank clerks on that same day resisted the strongest temptations to false entries and the allurements of private stock speculations. It is true that yesterday Mrs. Lighthead eloped with the music-teacher, leaving six children and a desolate husband; but how many thousands of Mrs. Heavyhearts spent the same day in nursing some drunken husband, who had long ago forfeited all love; how many Milly Bartons were darning six children's stockings at five o'clock of that morning; nay, what untold millions of faithful women made this same day a sort of paradise for husband and children. And finally, you have but to consider a moment that if it lay within the power of the diligent collector of items for the Associated Press despatches to gather together the virtuous, rather than the criminal actions of mankind, the virtuous would so far exceed the criminal as that no journal would find columns enough to put them in, so as to put a wholly different complexion upon matters. Now the use of this newspaper illustration in my present argument is this: I complain that Thackeray, and the Fielding school, in professing to paint men as they are, really paint men only as they appear in some such necessarily one-sided representations as the newspaper history just described. And it is perfectly characteristic of the inherent weakness of Thackeray that he should so utterly fail to see the true significance underlying society's repudiation of his proposed natural picture. The least that such a repudiation could mean, would be that even if the picture were good in Fielding's time, it is bad now. It is beautiful, therefore, remembering Thackeray's great influence at the time when Scenes from Clerical Life were written, to find a woman, George Eliot, departing utterly out of that mood of hate or even of acidulous satire in which Thackeray so often worked, and in which, one may add, the world is seldom benefited, however skillful the work may be, departing from all that, deftly painting for us these pathetic Milly Bartons, and Mr. Gilfils, and Janet Dempsters, and Rev. Tryans, and arranging the whole into a picture which becomes epic because it is filled with the struggles of human personalities, dressed in whatever russet garb of clothing or of circumstances.

Those who were at my first lecture on George Eliot will remember that we found the editor of Blackwood's Magazine on a certain autumn night in 1856, reading part of the MS. of Amos Barton, in his drawing-room to Thackeray, and remarking to Thackeray, who had just come in late from dinner, that he had come upon a new author who seemed uncommonly like a first-class passenger; it is significantly related that Thackeray said nothing, and evinced no further interest in it than civilly to say, sometime afterward, that he would have liked to hear more of it. In the light of the contrast I have just drawn, Thackeray's failure to be impressed seems natural enough, and becomes indeed all the more impressive, when we compare it with the enthusiastic praise which Charles Dickens lavished upon this same work in the letter which you will remember I read from him.

And here I come upon a further contrast between George Eliot and Dickens which I should be glad now to bring out as clearly appearing in these first three Scenes from Clerical Life before Adam Bede was written.

This is her exquisite modernness in that intense feeling for personality, which I developed with so much care in my first six lectures, and her exquisite scientific precision in placing the personalities or characters of her works before the reader.

All the world knows how Dickens puts a personality on his canvas: he always gives us a vividly descriptive line of facial curve, of dress, of form, of gesture and the like, which distinguishes a given character. Whenever we see this line we know the character so well that we are perfectly content that two rings for the eyes, a spot for the nose and a blur for the body may represent the rest; and we accept always with joy the rich mirthfulness or pathetic matter with which Dickens manages to invest such hastily drawn figures. George Eliot's principle and method are completely opposite; at the time of her first stories which we are now considering they were unique; and the quietness with which she made a real epoch in all character-description is simply characteristic of the quietness of all her work. She showed for the first time that without approaching dangerously near to caricature as Dickens was often obliged to do, a loveable creature of actual flesh and blood could be drawn in a novel with all the advantage of completeness derivable from microscopic analysis, scientific precision, and moral intent; and with absolutely none of the disadvantages, such as coldness, deadness and the like, which had caused all sorts of meretricious arts to be adopted by novelists in order to save the naturalness of a character.

A couple of brief expressions from Janet's Repentance, the third of Scenes from Clerical Life show how intensely George Eliot felt upon this matter. At the end of Chapter X of that remarkable story, for instance, she says: "Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and work the life-and-death struggles of separate human beings." And again in Chapter XXII: "Emotion, I fear, is obstinately irrational: it insists on caring for individuals; it absolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative view of human anguish, and to admit that thirteen happy lives are a set-off against twelve miserable lives," leaving "a clear balance on the side of satisfaction.... One must be a great philosopher," she adds, sardonically, "to have emerged into the serene air of pure intellect in which it is evident that individuals really exist for no other purpose than that abstractions may be drawn from them:" (which is dangerously near, by the way, to a complete formula of the Emersonian doctrine which I had occasion to quote in my last lecture.) She continues: "And so it comes to pass that for the man who knows sympathy because he has known sorrow, that old, old saying, about the joy of angels over the repentant sinner out-weighing their joy over the ninety-nine just, has a meaning that does not jar with the language of his own heart. It only tells him that for angels too there is a transcendent value in human pain which refuses to be settled by equations; ... that for angels too the misery of one casts so tremendous a shadow as to eclipse the bliss of ninety-nine." The beautiful personality who suggests this remark is Janet Dempster, the heroine of Janet's Repentance; a tall, grand, beautiful girl who has married the witty Lawyer Dempster, and who, after a bitter married life of some years in which Dempster finally begins amusing himself by beating her, has come to share the customary wine decanter at table, and thus by insensible degrees to acquire the habit of taking wine against trouble. Presently a terrible catastrophe occurs; she is thrust out of doors barefooted at midnight, half clad, by her brutal husband, and told never to return. Finding lodgement with a friend next day, a whirlwind of necessity for complete spiritual re-adjustment shakes her. "She was sick," says George Eliot, "of that barren exhortation, 'Do right and keep a clear conscience and God will reward you, etc.' She wanted strength to do right;" and at this point the thought of Tryan, an unorthodox clergyman who had made a great stir in the village and whom she had been taught to despise, occurs to her. "She had often heard Mr. Tryan laughed at for being fond of great sinners; she began to see a new meaning in those words; he would perhaps understand her helplessness. If she could pour out her heart to him!" Then here we have this keen glimpse into some curious relations of personality. "The impulse to confession almost always requires the presence of a fresh ear and a fresh heart; and in our moments of spiritual need the man to whom we have no tie but our common nature seems nearer to us than mother, brother or friend. Our daily, familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds; and those who sit with us at the same hearth are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good." Nor can I ever read the pathetic scene in which Janet secures peace for her spirit and a practicable working theory for the rest of her active life, without somehow being reminded of the second scene in Mrs. Browning's Drama of Exile, prodigiously different as that is from this in all external setting:—the scene where the figures of Adam and Eve are discovered at the extremity of the sword-glare, flying from Eden, and Adam begins:

This story of Janet's Repentance offers us, by the way, a strong note of modernness as between George Eliot and Shakspeare. Shakspeare has never drawn, so far as I know, a repentance of any sort. Surely, in the whole range of our life, no phenomenon can take more powerful hold upon the attention of the thinker than that of a human spirit suddenly, of its own free-will, turning the whole current of its love and desire from a certain direction into a direction entirely opposite; so that from a small spiteful creature, enamored with all ugliness, we have a large, generous spirit, filled with the love of true love. In looking upon such a sight one seems to be startlingly near to the essential mystery of personality—to that hidden fountain of power not preceded, power not conditioned, which probably gives man his only real conception of Divine power, or power acting for itself. It would be wonderful that the subtleties of human passion comprehended in the situation of repentance had not attracted Shakspeare's imagination, if one did not remember that the developing personality of man was then only coming into literature. The only apparent change of character of this sort in Shakspeare which I recall is that of the young king Henry V. leaving Falstaff and his other gross companions for the steadier matters of war and government; but the soliloquy of Prince Hal in the very first act of King Henry IV. precludes all idea of repentance here, by showing that at the outset his heart is not in the jolly pranks, but that he is calculatingly ambitious from the beginning; and his whole apparent dissipation is but a scheme to enhance his future glory. In the first act of Henry IV. (first part), when the plot is made to rob the carriers, at the end of Scene II., exeunt all but Prince Hal, who soliloquizes thus:

Here the stream of his love is from the beginning and always towards ambition; there is never any turn at all, and Prince Hal's assumption of the grace reformation, as applied to such a career of deliberate acting, is merely a piece of naÏve complacency.

Let us now go further and say that with this reverence for personality as to the ultimate important fact of human existence, George Eliot wonderfully escapes certain complexities due to the difference between what a man is, really, and what he seems to be to his fellows. Perhaps I may most easily specify these complexities by asking you to recall the scene in one of Dr. Holmes' Breakfast-Table series, where the Professor laboriously expounds to the young man called John that there are really three of him, to wit: John, as he appears to his neighbors; John, as he appears to himself; and John, as he really is.

In George Eliot's Theophrastus Such, one finds explicit mention of the trouble that had been caused to her by two of these: "With all possible study of myself," she says in the first chapter ... "I am obliged to recognize that while there are secrets in one unguessed by others, these others have certain items of knowledge about the extent of my powers and the figure I make with them which, in turn, are secrets unguessed by me.... Thus ... O fellow-men! if I trace with curious interest your labyrinthine self-delusions ... it is not that I feel myself aloof from you: the more intimately I seem to discern your weaknesses the stronger to me is the proof I share them.... No man can know his brother simply as a spectator. Dear blunderers, I am one of you."

Perhaps nothing less than this underlying reverence for all manner of personality could have produced this first chapter of Adam Bede. "With this drop of ink," she says at starting, "I will show you the roomy work-shop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the 18th of June, in the year of our Lord 1799." I can never read this opening of the famous carpenter's shop without indulging myself for a moment in the wish that this same marvellous eye might have dwelt upon a certain carpenter's shop I wot of, on some 18th of June, in the year of our Lord 25. What would we not give for such a picture of the work-shop of that master-builder and of the central figure in it as is here given us of the old English room ringing with the song of Adam Bede. Perhaps we could come upon no clearer proof of that modernness of personality which I have been advocating than this very fact of our complete ignorance as to the physical person of Christ. One asks one's self, how comes it never to have occurred to St. Matthew, nor St. Mark, nor St. Luke, nor St. John to tell us what manner of man this was—what stature, what complexion, what color of eye and hair, what shape of hand and foot. A natural instinct arising at the very outset of the descriptive effort would have caused a modern to acquaint us with these and many like particulars.

It is advancing upon the same line of thought to note that, here, in this opening of Adam Bede, not only are the men marked off and differentiated for our physical eye, but the very first personality described is that of a dog, and this is subtly done: "On a heap of soft shavings a rough gray shepherd-dog had made himself a pleasant bed, and was lying with his nose between his fore-paws, occasionally wrinkling his brows to cast a glance at the tallest of the five workmen, who was carving a shield in the centre of a wooden mantel-piece." This dog is our friend Gyp, who emerges on several occasions through Adam Bede. Gyp is only one of a number of genuine creations in animal character which show the modernness of George Eliot and Charles Dickens, and make them especially dear. How, indeed, could society get along without that famous cock in Adam Bede, who, as George Eliot records, was accustomed to crow as if the sun was rising on purpose to hear him! And I wish here to place upon the roll of fame, also, a certain cock who entered literature about this time in a series of delicious papers called Shy Neighborhoods. In these Charles Dickens gave some account, among many other notable but unnoted things, of several families of fowls in which he had become, as it were, intimate during his walks about outlying London. One of these was a reduced family of Bantams whom he was accustomed to find crowding together in the side entry of a pawnbroker's shop. Another was a family of Dorkings, who regularly spent their evenings in somewhat riotous company at a certain tavern near the Haymarket, and seldom went to bed before two in the morning.

My particular immortal, however, was a member of the following family: I quote from Dickens here:—"But the family I am best acquainted with reside in the densest parts of Bethnal-Green. Their abstraction from the objects amongst which they live, or rather their conviction that those objects have all come into existence into express subservience to fowls has so enchanted me that I have made them the subject of many journeys at divers hours.... The leading lady" is "an aged personage afflicted with a paucity of feather and visibility of quills that give her the appearance of a bundle of office pens. When a railway goods-van that would crush an elephant comes round the corner, tearing over these fowls, they emerge unharmed from under the horses perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a passing property in the air which may have left something to eat behind it. They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and saucepans, and fragments of bonnets as a kind of meteoric discharge for fowls to peck at.... Gaslight comes quite as natural to them as any other light; and I have more than a suspicion that in the minds of the two lords, the early public-house at the corner has superseded the sun. They always begin to crow when the public-house shutters begin to be taken down: and they salute the Pot-boy when he appears to perform that duty as if he were Phoebus in person." And alongside these two cocks I must place a hen whom I find teaching a wise and beautiful lesson to the last man in the world you would suspect as accessible to influences from any such direction. This was Thomas Carlyle. Among his just-published Reminiscences I find the following entry from the earlier dyspeptic times, which seems impossible when we remember the well-known story—true, as I know—how, after Thomas Carlyle and his wife had settled at Chelsea, London, and the crowing of the neighborhood cocks had long kept him in martyrdom, Mrs. Carlyle planned and carried out the most brilliant campaign of her life, in the course of which she succeeded in purchasing or otherwise suppressing every cock within hearing distance. But this entry is long before.

"Another morning, what was wholesome and better, happening to notice, as I stood looking out on the bit of green under my bedroom window, a trim and rather pretty hen actively paddling about and picking up what food might be discoverable, 'See,' I said to myself; "look, thou fool! Here is a two-legged creature with scarcely half a thimbleful of poor brains; thou call'st thyself a man with nobody knows how much brain, and reason dwelling in it; and behold how the one life is regulated and how the other! In God's name concentrate, collect whatever of reason thou hast, and direct it on the one thing needful.' Irving, when we did get into intimate dialogue, was affectionate to me as ever, and had always to the end a great deal of sense and insight into things about him, but he could not much help me; how could anybody but myself? By degrees I was doing so, taking counsel of that symbolic Hen."

In George Eliot all the domestic animals are true neighbors and are brought within the Master's exhortation: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," by the tenderness and deep humor with which she treats them. This same Gyp, who is honored with first place among the characters described in the carpenter's shop, is continually doing something charming throughout Adam Bede. In Janet's Repentance dear old Mr. Jerome comes down the road on his roan mare, "shaking the bridle and tickling her flank with the whip as usual, though there was a perfect mutual understanding that she was not to quicken her pace;" and everywhere I find those touches of true sympathy with the dumb brutes, such as only earnest souls or great geniuses are capable of.

Somehow—I cannot now remember how—a picture was fastened upon my mind in childhood, which I always recall with pleasure: it is the figure of man emerging from the dark of barbarism attended by his friends the horse, the cow, the chicken and the dog. George Eliot's animal-painting brings always this picture before me.

In April, 1860, appeared George Eliot's second great novel, The Mill on the Floss. This book, in some respects otherwise her greatest work, possesses a quite extraordinary interest for us now in the circumstance that a large number of traits in the description of the heroine, Maggie Tulliver, are unquestionably traits of George Eliot herself, and the autobiographic character of the book has been avowed by her best friends. I propose, therefore, in the next lecture, to read some passages from The Mill on the Floss, in which I may have the pleasure of letting this great soul speak for herself with little comment from me, except that I wish to compare the figure of Maggie Tulliver, specially, with that of Aurora Leigh, in the light of the remarkable development of womanhood, both in real life and in fiction, which arrays itself before us when we think only of what we may call the Victorian women; that is, of the queen herself, Sister Dora, Florence Nightingale, Ida in Tennyson's Princess, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte and her sisters, Mrs. Browning, with her Eve and Catarina and Aurora Leigh, and George Eliot, with her creations. I shall thus make a much more extensive study of The Mill on the Floss than of either of the four works which preceded it. It is hard to leave Adam Bede, and Dinah Morris and Bartle Massey, and Mrs. Poyser, but I must select; and I have thought this particularly profitable because no criticism that I have yet seen of George Eliot does the least justice to the enormous, the simply unique equipment with which she comes into English fiction, or in the least prepares the reader for those extraordinary revolutions which she has wrought with such demure quietness that unless pointed out by some diligent professional student, no ordinary observer would be apt to notice them. Above all have I done this because it is my deep conviction that we can find more religion in George Eliot's words than she herself dreamed she was putting there, and a clearer faith for us than she ever formulated for herself; a strange and solemn result, but one not without parallel; for Mrs. Browning's words of Lucretius in The Vision of Poets partly apply here: