WORKS OF GEORGE ELIOT.  These are conveniently divided into three groups, corresponding to the three periods of her life.  The first group includes all her early essays and miscellaneous work, from her translation of Strauss’s Leben Jesu, in 1846, to her union with Lewes in 1854.  The second group includes Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner, all published between 1858 and 1861.  These four novels of the middle period are founded on the author’s own life and experience; their scenes are laid in the country, and their characters are taken from the stolid people of the Midlands, with whom George Eliot had been familiar since childhood.  They are probably the author’s most enduring works.  They have a naturalness, a spontaneity, at times a flash of real humor, which are lacking in her later novels; and they show a rapid development of literary power which reaches a climax in Silas Marner.

The novel of Italian life, Romola (1862-1863), marks a transition to the third group, which includes three more novels,—­Felix Holt (1866), Middlemarch (1871-1872), Daniel Deronda (1876), the ambitious dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy (1868), and a collection of miscellaneous essays called The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879).  The general impression, of these works is not so favorable as that produced by the novels of the middle period.  They are more labored and less interesting; they contain much deep reflection and analysis of character, but less observation, less delight in picturing country life as it is, and very little of what we call inspiration.  We must add, however, that this does not express a unanimous literary judgment, for critics are not wanting who assert that Daniel Deronda is the highest expression of the author’s genius.

The general character of all these novels may be described, in the author’s own term, as psychologic realism.  This means that George Eliot sought to do in her novels what Browning attempted in his poetry; that is, to represent the inner struggle of a soul, and to reveal the motives, impulses, and hereditary influences which govern human action.  Browning generally stops when he tells his story, and either lets you draw your own conclusion or else gives you his in a few striking lines.  But George Eliot is not content until she has minutely explained the motives of her characters and the moral lesson to be learned from them.  Moreover, it is the development of a soul, the slow growth or decline of moral power, which chiefly interests her.  Her heroes and heroines differ radically from those of Dickens and Thackeray in this respect,—­that when we meet the men and women of the latter novelists, their characters are already formed, and we are reasonably sure what they will do under given circumstances.  In George Eliot’s novels the characters develop gradually as we come to know them.  They go from