X.

"I will sing you a new ballad" (he cries), "and I'll warrant it first-rate,Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate,The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips and chains,With fine old English penalties and fine old English pains;With rebel heads and seas of blood once hot in rebel veins:For all these things were requisite to guard the rich old gainsOf the fine old English Tory times;Soon may they come again!The good old times for cutting throats that cried out in their need,The good old times for hunting men who held their father's creed,The good old times when William Pitt, as all good men agreed,Came down direct from Paradise at more than railroad speed;Oh, the fine old English Tory times,When will they come again!In those rare days the press was seldom known to snarl or bark,But sweetly sang of men in power like any tuneful lark;Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds were in the dark;And not a man in twenty score knew how to make his mark.Oh, the fine old English Tory times,Soon may they come again!"

"I will sing you a new ballad" (he cries), "and I'll warrant it first-rate,Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate,

The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips and chains,With fine old English penalties and fine old English pains;With rebel heads and seas of blood once hot in rebel veins:For all these things were requisite to guard the rich old gainsOf the fine old English Tory times;Soon may they come again!

The good old times for cutting throats that cried out in their need,The good old times for hunting men who held their father's creed,The good old times when William Pitt, as all good men agreed,Came down direct from Paradise at more than railroad speed;Oh, the fine old English Tory times,When will they come again!

In those rare days the press was seldom known to snarl or bark,But sweetly sang of men in power like any tuneful lark;Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds were in the dark;And not a man in twenty score knew how to make his mark.Oh, the fine old English Tory times,Soon may they come again!"

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 ofTom Joneswas 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 itemin 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 ofthe 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, inprofessing to paint men as theyare, really paint men only as theyappearin 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 repudiationcouldmean, 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 whenScenes from Clerical Lifewere 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 ofBlackwood's Magazineon a certain autumn night in 1856, reading part of the MS. ofAmos 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 threeScenes from Clerical LifebeforeAdam Bedewas 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, deadnessand 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 fromJanet's Repentance, the third ofScenes from Clerical Lifeshow 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 whosuggests this remark is Janet Dempster, the heroine ofJanet'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 forher spirit and a practicable working theory for the rest of her active life, without somehow being reminded of the second scene in Mrs. Browning'sDrama 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:

"Pausing a moment on the outer edge,Where the supernal sword-glare cuts in lightThe dark exterior desert,—hast thou strengthBeloved, to look behind us to the gate?Eve—Have I not strength to look up to thy face?"

This story ofJanet's Repentanceoffers 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 changeof 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.,exeuntall but Prince Hal, who soliloquizes thus:

"I know you all, and will awhile upholdThe unyoked humor of your idleness:Yet herein will I imitate the sun,Who doth permit the base contagious cloudsTo smother up his beauty from the world,That, when he please again to be himself,Being wanted, he may be more wondered atBy breaking through the foul and ugly mistsOf vapors that did seem to strangle him.... So when this loose behaviour I throw offAnd pay the debt I never promised,By how much better than my word I am,By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,My reformation, glittering o'er my fault,Shall show more goodly and attract more eyesThan that which had no foil to set it off.I'll so offend to make offense a skill,Redeeming time when men think least I will."

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 gracereformation, 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-Tableseries, 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'sTheophrastus 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 ofAdam 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 thissame 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 ofAdam 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 ofAdam 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 throughAdam 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 inAdam Bede, who, as George Eliot records, was accustomedto 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 calledShy 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 comesquite 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 Phœbus 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-publishedReminiscencesI 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 onelifeis 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 hadalways 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 thatsymbolicHen."

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 throughoutAdam Bede. InJanet's Repentancedear 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 fromThe Mill on the Floss, in which I mayhave 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'sPrincess, 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 ofThe Mill on the Flossthan 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 inThe Vision of Poetspartly apply here:

"Lucretius, nobler than his mood!Who dropped his plummet down the broadDeep Universe, and said 'No God',Finding no bottom! He deniedDivinely the divine, and diedChief-poet on the Tiber-sideBy grace of God! His face is sternAs one compelled, in spite of scorn,To teach a truth he could not learn."

While it is true that the publication ofAdam Bedeenables us—as stated in the last lecture—to fix George Eliot as already at the head of English novel writers in 1859, I should add that the effect of the book was not so well defined upon the public of that day. The work was not an immediate popular success; and even some of the authoritative critics, instead of recognizing its greatness with generosity, went pottering about to find what existing authors this new one had most likely drawn her inspiration from.

ButThe Mill on the Floss, which appeared in April, 1860, together with some strong and generous reviews ofAdam Bede, which had meantime appeared inBlackwood's Magazineand in theLondon Times, quickly carried away the last vestige of this suspense, andThe Mill on the Flosspresently won for itself a popular audience and loving appreciation which appear to have been very gratifying to George Eliot herself. This circumstance alone would make the book an interesting one for our present special study; but the interest is greatly heightened by the fact—a fact which I find most positively stated by those who most intimately knew her—that the picture of girlhood which occupies so large a portion of the first part of the book, is, in many particulars, autobiographic. The title originally chosen for this work by George Eliot wasSister Maggie, from which we may judge the prominence she intended to give to the character of Maggie Tulliver. After the book wasfinished, however, this title was felt to be, for several reasons, insufficient. It was a happy thought of Mr. Blackwood's to call the bookThe Mill on the Floss; and George Eliot immediately adopted his suggestion to that effect. There is, too, a third reason why this particular work offers some peculiar contributions to the main lines of thought upon which these lectures have been built. As I go on to read a page here and there merely by way of recalling the book and the actual style to you, you will presently find that the interest of the whole has for the time concentrated itself upon the single figure of a little wayward English girl some nine years old, perhaps alone in a garret in some fit of childish passion, accusing the Divine order of things as to its justice or mercy, crudely and inarticulately enough yet quite as keenly after all as ourPrometheus, either according to Æschylus or Shelley. As I pass along rapidly bringing back to you these pictures of Maggie's girlish despairs, I beg you to recall the first scenes which were set before you from thePrometheus, to bear those in mind along with these, to note how Æschylus—whom we have agreed to consider as a literary prototype, occupying much the same relation to his age as George Eliot does to ours—in stretchingPrometheusupon the bare Caucasian rock and lacerating him with the just lightnings of outraged Fate, is at bottom only studying with a ruder apparatus the same phenomena which George Eliot is here unfolding before us in the microscopic struggles of the little English girl; and I ask you particularly to observe how, here, as we have so many times found before, the enormous advance fromPrometheusto Maggie Tulliver—from Æschylus to George Eliot—is summed up in the fact that while personality in Æschylus' time had got no further than theconception of a universe in which justice is the organic idea, in George Eliot's time it has arrived at the conception of a universe in which love is the organic idea; and that it is precisely upon the stimulus of this new growth of individualism that George Eliot's readers crowd up with interest to share the tiny woes of insignificant Maggie Tulliver, while Æschylus, in order to assemble an interested audience, must have his Jove, his Titans, his earthquakes, his mysticism, and the blackness of inconclusive Fate withal.

Everyone remembers a sense of mightiness in this opening chapter ofThe Mill on the Floss, where the great river Floss, thick with heavy-laden ships, sweeps down to the sea by the red-roofed town of St. Ogg's. Remembering how we found that the first personality described inAdam Bedewas that of a shepherd-dog, here, too, we find that the first prominent figures in our landscape are those of animals. The author is indulging in a sort of dreamy prelude of reminiscences, and in describing Dorlcote Mill, Maggie's home, says:

"The rush of the water and the booming of the mill bring a dreamy deafness which seems to heighten the peacefulness of the scene. They are like a great curtain of sounds shutting one out from the world beyond. And now there is the thunder of the huge covered wagon coming home with sacks of grain. That honest wagoner is thinking of his dinner getting sadly dry in the oven at this late hour; but he will not touch it until he has fed his horses—the strong, submissive, meek-eyed beasts, who, I fancy, are looking mild reproach at him from between their blinkers, that he should crack his whip at them in that awful manner, as if they needed that hint! See how they stretch their shoulders up the slope to the bridge, with all the more energy because they are so near home. Look at their grand, shaggy feet, that seem to grasp the firm earth, at the patient strength of their necks bowed under the heavy collar, at the mighty muscles of their struggling haunches! I should like well to hear them neigh over theirhardly-earned feed of corn, and see them, with their moist necks freed from the harness, dipping their eager nostrils into the muddy pond. Now they are on the bridge, and down they go again at a swifter pace, and the arch of the covered wagon disappears at a turning behind the trees."

Remembering how we have agreed that the author's comments in the modern novel, acquainting us with such parts of the action as could not be naturally or conveniently brought upon the stage, might be profitably regarded as a development of certain well-known functions of the chorus in the Greek drama—we have here a quite palpable instance of the necessity for such development; how otherwise, could we be let into the inner emotions of farm-horses so genially as in this charming passage?

In Chapter II. we are introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Tulliver talking by the fire in the left-hand corner of their cosy English home, and I must read a page or two of their conversation before bringing Maggie on the stage, if only to show the intense individuality of the latter by making the reader wonder how such an individualism could ever have been evolved from any such precedent conditions as those of Mr. and Mrs Tulliver. "What I want, you know," said Mr. Tulliver,—

"What I want is to give Tom a good eddication—an eddication as'll be bread to him. That was what I was thinking of when I gave notice for him to leave th' academy at Ladyday. I mean to put him to a downright good school at Midsummer. The two years at th' academy 'ud ha' done well enough, if I'd meant to make a miller and farmer of him, for he's had a fine sight more schoolin' norIever got: all the learnin'myfather ever paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and the alphabet at th' other. But I should like Tom to be a bit of a schollard, so as he might be up to the tricks o' these fellows a stalk fine and write with a flourish. It 'ud be a help to me wi' these lawsuits, and arbitrations, andthings. I wouldn't make a downright lawyer o' the lad—I should be sorry for him to be a raskell—but a sort o' engineer, or a surveyor, or an auctioneer and vallyer, like Riley, or one o' them smartish businesses as are all profits and no out-lay, only for a big watch-chain, and a high stool. They're putty nigh all one, and they're not far off being even wi' the law,Ibelieve; for Riley looks Lawyer Wakem i' the face as hard as one cat looks another.He'snone frightened at him."Mr. Tulliver was speaking to his wife, a blonde comely woman, in a fan-shaped cap (I am afraid to think how long it was since fan-shaped caps were worn—they must be so near coming in again. At that time, when Mrs. Tulliver was nearly forty, they were new at St. Ogg's, and considered sweet things)."Well, Mr. Tulliver, you know best;I'veno objections. But hadn't I better kill a couple o' fowl and have th' aunts and uncles to dinner next week, so as you may hear what sister Glegg and sister Pullet have got to say about it? There's a couple o' fowlwantskilling!""You may kill every fowl i' the yard, if you like, Bessy; but I shall ask neither aunt nor uncle what I'm to do wi' my own lad," said Mr. Tulliver, defiantly."Dear heart!" said Mrs. Tulliver, shocked at this sanguinary rhetoric, "how can you talk so, Mr. Tulliver? But it's your way to speak disrespectful o' my family; and sister Glegg throws all the blame upo' me, though I'm sure I'm as innocent as the babe unborn. For nobody's ever heardmesay as it wasn't lucky for my children to have aunts and uncles as can live independent. However, if Tom's to go to a new school, I should like him to go where I can wash him and mend him; else he might as well have calico as linen, for they'd be one as yaller as th' other before they'd been washed half a dozen times. And then, when the box is goin' backards and forrards, I could send the lad a cake, or a pork-pie or an apple; for he can do with an extra bit, bless him, whether they stint him at the meals or no. My children can eat as much victuals as most, thank God."Mr. Tulliver paused a minute or two, and dived with both hands into his breeches pockets as if he hoped to find some suggestionthere. Apparently he was not disappointed, for he presently said "I know what I'll do. I'll talk it over wi' Riley: he's coming to-morrow t' arbitrate about the dam.""Well, Mr. Tulliver, I've put the sheets out for the best bed, and Kezia's got 'em hanging at the fire. They aren't the best sheets, but they're good enough for anybody to sleep in, be he who he will; for as for them best Holland sheets, I should repent buying 'em, only they'll do to lay us out in. An' if you was to die to-morrow, Mr. Tulliver, they're mangled beautiful, an' all ready, 'an smell o' lavender, as it 'ud be a pleasure to lay them out; an' they lie at the left-hand corner o' the big oaken chest, at the back—not as I should trust any body to look 'em out but myself."

Mr. Tulliver was speaking to his wife, a blonde comely woman, in a fan-shaped cap (I am afraid to think how long it was since fan-shaped caps were worn—they must be so near coming in again. At that time, when Mrs. Tulliver was nearly forty, they were new at St. Ogg's, and considered sweet things).

"Well, Mr. Tulliver, you know best;I'veno objections. But hadn't I better kill a couple o' fowl and have th' aunts and uncles to dinner next week, so as you may hear what sister Glegg and sister Pullet have got to say about it? There's a couple o' fowlwantskilling!"

"You may kill every fowl i' the yard, if you like, Bessy; but I shall ask neither aunt nor uncle what I'm to do wi' my own lad," said Mr. Tulliver, defiantly.

"Dear heart!" said Mrs. Tulliver, shocked at this sanguinary rhetoric, "how can you talk so, Mr. Tulliver? But it's your way to speak disrespectful o' my family; and sister Glegg throws all the blame upo' me, though I'm sure I'm as innocent as the babe unborn. For nobody's ever heardmesay as it wasn't lucky for my children to have aunts and uncles as can live independent. However, if Tom's to go to a new school, I should like him to go where I can wash him and mend him; else he might as well have calico as linen, for they'd be one as yaller as th' other before they'd been washed half a dozen times. And then, when the box is goin' backards and forrards, I could send the lad a cake, or a pork-pie or an apple; for he can do with an extra bit, bless him, whether they stint him at the meals or no. My children can eat as much victuals as most, thank God."

Mr. Tulliver paused a minute or two, and dived with both hands into his breeches pockets as if he hoped to find some suggestionthere. Apparently he was not disappointed, for he presently said "I know what I'll do. I'll talk it over wi' Riley: he's coming to-morrow t' arbitrate about the dam."

"Well, Mr. Tulliver, I've put the sheets out for the best bed, and Kezia's got 'em hanging at the fire. They aren't the best sheets, but they're good enough for anybody to sleep in, be he who he will; for as for them best Holland sheets, I should repent buying 'em, only they'll do to lay us out in. An' if you was to die to-morrow, Mr. Tulliver, they're mangled beautiful, an' all ready, 'an smell o' lavender, as it 'ud be a pleasure to lay them out; an' they lie at the left-hand corner o' the big oaken chest, at the back—not as I should trust any body to look 'em out but myself."

In the next chapter, Mr. Tulliver at night, over a cosy glass of brandy-and-water, is discussing with Riley the momentous question of a school for Tom. Mrs. Tulliver is out of the room upon household cares, and Maggie is off on a low stool close by the fire, apparently buried in a large book that is open on her lap, but betraying her interest in the conversation by occasionally shaking back her heavy hair and looking up with gleaming eyes when Tom's name is mentioned. Presently Maggie, in an agitated outburst on Tom's behalf, drops the book she has been reading. Mr. Riley picks it up, and here we have a glimpse at the kind of food which nourishes Maggie's infant mind. Mr. Riley calls out, "Come, come and tell me something about this book; here are some pictures—I want to know what they mean."

Maggie, with deepening color, went without hesitation to Mr. Riley's elbow, and looked over the book, eagerly seizing one corner, and tossing back her mane, while she said:

"Oh, I'll tell you what that means. It's a dreadful picture, isn't it? But I can't help looking at it. That old woman in the water's a witch—they've put her in to find out whether she's a witch or no, and if she swims she's a witch, and if she's drowned—andkilled, you know—she's innocent, and not a witch, but only a poor silly old woman. But what good would it do her then, you know, when she was drowned? Only, I suppose, she'd go to heaven, and God would make it up to her. And this dreadful blacksmith, with his arms akimbo, laughing—oh, isn't he ugly? I'll tell you what he is. He's the devil,really," (here Maggie's voice became louder and more emphatic), "and not a right blacksmith; for the devil takes the shape of wicked men, and walks about and sets people doing wicked things, and he's oftener in the shape of a bad man than any other, because, you know, if people saw he was the devil, and he roared at 'em, they'd run away, and he couldn't make 'em do what he pleased."Mr. Tulliver had listened to this exposition of Maggie's with petrifying wonder."Why, what book is it the wench has got hold on?" he burst out, at last."The History of the Devil, by Daniel Defoe; not quite the right book for a little girl," said Mr. Riley. "How came it among your books, Tulliver?"Maggie looked hurt and discouraged, while her father said, "Why, it's one o' the books I bought at Partridge's sale. They was all bound alike—it's a good binding, you see—and I thought they'd be all good books. There's Jeremy Taylor'sHoly Living and Dyingamong 'em; I read in it often of a Sunday," (Mr. Tulliver felt somehow a familiarity with that great writer because his name was Jeremy), "and there's a lot more of 'em, sermons mostly, I think; but they've all got the same covers, and I thought they were all o' one sample, as you may say. But it seems one mustn't judge by th' outside. This is a puzzling world.""Well," said Mr. Riley, in an admonitory patronizing tone, as he patted Maggie on the head, "I advise you to put by theHistory of the Devil, and read some prettier book. Have you no prettier books?""Oh, yes," said Maggie, reviving a little in the desire to vindicate the variety of her reading; "I know the reading in this book isn't pretty, but I like to look at the pictures, and I make stories to the pictures out of my own head, you know. But I've gotÆsop's Fables, and a book about kangaroos and things, and thePilgrim's Progress."..."Ah! a beautiful book," said Mr. Riley: "you can't read a better.""Well, but there's a great deal about the devil in that," said Maggie, triumphantly, "and I'll show you the picture of him in his true shape, as he fought with Christian."Maggie ran in an instant to the corner of the room, jumped on a chair, and reached down from the small bookcase a shabby old copy of Bunyan, which opened at once, without the least trouble of search, at the picture she wanted."Here he is," she said, running back to Mr. Riley, "and Tom colored him for me with his paints when he was at home last holidays—the body all black, you know, and the eyes red, like fire, because he's all fire inside, and it shines out at his eyes.""Go, go!" said Mr. Tulliver, peremptorily, beginning to feel rather uncomfortable at these free remarks on the personal appearance of a being powerful enough to create lawyers; "shut up the book, and let's hear no more o' such talk. It is as I thought—the child 'ull learn more mischief nor good wi' the books. Go—go and see after your mother."

Mr. Tulliver had listened to this exposition of Maggie's with petrifying wonder.

"Why, what book is it the wench has got hold on?" he burst out, at last.

"The History of the Devil, by Daniel Defoe; not quite the right book for a little girl," said Mr. Riley. "How came it among your books, Tulliver?"

Maggie looked hurt and discouraged, while her father said, "Why, it's one o' the books I bought at Partridge's sale. They was all bound alike—it's a good binding, you see—and I thought they'd be all good books. There's Jeremy Taylor'sHoly Living and Dyingamong 'em; I read in it often of a Sunday," (Mr. Tulliver felt somehow a familiarity with that great writer because his name was Jeremy), "and there's a lot more of 'em, sermons mostly, I think; but they've all got the same covers, and I thought they were all o' one sample, as you may say. But it seems one mustn't judge by th' outside. This is a puzzling world."

"Well," said Mr. Riley, in an admonitory patronizing tone, as he patted Maggie on the head, "I advise you to put by theHistory of the Devil, and read some prettier book. Have you no prettier books?"

"Oh, yes," said Maggie, reviving a little in the desire to vindicate the variety of her reading; "I know the reading in this book isn't pretty, but I like to look at the pictures, and I make stories to the pictures out of my own head, you know. But I've gotÆsop's Fables, and a book about kangaroos and things, and thePilgrim's Progress."...

"Ah! a beautiful book," said Mr. Riley: "you can't read a better."

"Well, but there's a great deal about the devil in that," said Maggie, triumphantly, "and I'll show you the picture of him in his true shape, as he fought with Christian."

Maggie ran in an instant to the corner of the room, jumped on a chair, and reached down from the small bookcase a shabby old copy of Bunyan, which opened at once, without the least trouble of search, at the picture she wanted.

"Here he is," she said, running back to Mr. Riley, "and Tom colored him for me with his paints when he was at home last holidays—the body all black, you know, and the eyes red, like fire, because he's all fire inside, and it shines out at his eyes."

"Go, go!" said Mr. Tulliver, peremptorily, beginning to feel rather uncomfortable at these free remarks on the personal appearance of a being powerful enough to create lawyers; "shut up the book, and let's hear no more o' such talk. It is as I thought—the child 'ull learn more mischief nor good wi' the books. Go—go and see after your mother."

And here are further various hints of Maggie's ways in which we find clues to many outbursts of her later life.

"It was a heavy disappointment to Maggie that she was not allowed to go with her father in the gig when he went to fetch Tom home from the academy; but the morning was too wet, Mrs. Tulliver said, for a little girl to go out in her best bonnet. Maggie took the opposite view very strongly; and it was a direct consequence of this difference of opinion that, when her mother was in the act of brushing out the reluctant black crop, Maggie suddenly rushed from under her hands and dipped her head in a basin of water standing near, in the vindictive determination that there should be no more chance of curls that day."Maggie, Maggie," exclaimed Mrs. Tulliver, sitting stout and helpless with the brushes on her lap, "what is to become of you if you're so naughty? I'll tell your aunt Glegg and your aunt Pullet when they come next week, and they'll never love you any more. Oh dear, oh dear, look at your clean pinafore, wet from top to bottom. Folks 'ull think it's a judgment on me as I've got such a child—they'll think I've done summat wicked."Before this remonstrance was finished Maggie was already out of hearing, making her way toward the great attic that ran underthe old high-pitched roof, shaking the water from her black locks as she ran, like a Skye terrier escaped from his bath. This attic was Maggie's favorite retreat on a wet day, when the weather was not too cold; here she fretted out all her ill-humors, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors and the worm eaten shelves, and the dark rafters festooned with cobwebs; and here she kept a Fetish which she punished for all her misfortunes. This was the trunk of a large wooden doll, which once stared with the roundest of eyes above the reddest of cheeks, but was now entirely defaced by a long career of vicarious suffering. Three nails driven into the head commemorated as many crises in Maggie's nine years of earthly struggle, that luxury of vengeance having been suggested to her by the picture of Jael destroying Sisera in the old Bible. The last nail had been driven in with a fiercer stroke than usual, for the Fetish on that occasion represented aunt Glegg."

"Maggie, Maggie," exclaimed Mrs. Tulliver, sitting stout and helpless with the brushes on her lap, "what is to become of you if you're so naughty? I'll tell your aunt Glegg and your aunt Pullet when they come next week, and they'll never love you any more. Oh dear, oh dear, look at your clean pinafore, wet from top to bottom. Folks 'ull think it's a judgment on me as I've got such a child—they'll think I've done summat wicked."

Before this remonstrance was finished Maggie was already out of hearing, making her way toward the great attic that ran underthe old high-pitched roof, shaking the water from her black locks as she ran, like a Skye terrier escaped from his bath. This attic was Maggie's favorite retreat on a wet day, when the weather was not too cold; here she fretted out all her ill-humors, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors and the worm eaten shelves, and the dark rafters festooned with cobwebs; and here she kept a Fetish which she punished for all her misfortunes. This was the trunk of a large wooden doll, which once stared with the roundest of eyes above the reddest of cheeks, but was now entirely defaced by a long career of vicarious suffering. Three nails driven into the head commemorated as many crises in Maggie's nine years of earthly struggle, that luxury of vengeance having been suggested to her by the picture of Jael destroying Sisera in the old Bible. The last nail had been driven in with a fiercer stroke than usual, for the Fetish on that occasion represented aunt Glegg."

But a ray of sunshine on the window of the garret proves too much for her; she dances down stairs, and after a wild whirl in the sunshine with Yap the terrier goes up into the mill for a talk with Luke the miller.

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