Whatever we may think of Thackeray’s matter, there is one point in which critics are agreed,—­that he is master of a pure and simple English style.  Whether his thought be sad or humorous, commonplace or profound, he expresses it perfectly, without effort or affectation.  In all his work there is a subtle charm, impossible to describe, which gives the impression that we are listening to a gentleman.  And it is the ease, the refinement, the exquisite naturalness of Thackeray’s style that furnishes a large part of our pleasure in reading him.

MARY ANN EVANS, GEORGE ELIOT (1819-1880)

In nearly all the writers of the Victorian Age we note, on the one hand, a strong intellectual tendency to analyze the problems of life, and on the other a tendency to teach, that is, to explain to men the method by which these problems may be solved.  The novels especially seem to lose sight of the purely artistic ideal of writing, and to aim definitely at moral instruction.  In George Eliot both these tendencies reach a climax.  She is more obviously, more consciously a preacher and moralizer than any of her great contemporaries.  Though profoundly religious at heart, she was largely occupied by the scientific spirit of the age; and finding no religious creed or political system satisfactory, she fell back upon duty as the supreme law of life.  All her novels aim, first, to show in individuals the play of universal moral forces, and second, to establish the moral law as the basis of human society.  Aside from this moral teaching, we look to George Eliot for the reflection of country life in England, just as we look to Dickens for pictures of the city streets, and to Thackeray for the vanities of society.  Of all the women writer’s who have helped and are still helping to place our English novels at the head of the world’s fiction, she holds at present unquestionably the highest rank.

LIFE.  Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans, known to us by her pen name of George Eliot, began to write late in life, when nearly forty years of age, and attained the leading position among living English novelists in the ten years between 1870 and 1880, after Thackeray and Dickens had passed away.  She was born at Arbury Farm, Warwickshire, some twenty miles from Stratford-on-Avon, in 1819.  Her parents were plain, honest folk, of the farmer class, who brought her up in the somewhat strict religious manner of those days.  Her father seems to have been a man of sterling integrity and of practical English sense,—­one of those essentially noble characters who do the world’s work silently and well, and who by their solid worth obtain a position of influence among their fellow-men.