[2] “Adam Bede,” i. 302. [3] “Adam Bede,” i. 219, 362.

But this conscientious fidelity has very serious drawbacks.  It seems as if the authoress felt herself under an obligation to give everything literally as it took place; to shut out nothing which is superfluous; to suppress nothing which is unfit for a work of fiction (for not only have we a report of Dinah Morris’s sermons, but the very words of the prayer which she put up for Hetty in the prison); to abridge nothing which is tiresome.  People and incidents are described at length, although they have little or nothing to do with the story.  We may mention as instances the detailed history and character which are given of Tom Tulliver’s tutor, the Reverend Walter Stelling, and the account of Mr. Poyser’s harvest-home, which, however good in itself, is utterly out of place between the crisis and the conclusion of the story.  But most especially we complain of the fondness which the authoress shows for exhibiting uninteresting and tiresome people in all their interminable tediousness; and if the morbid tone which we have already mentioned reminds us of a French school of novelists, her passion for photographing the minutest details of dullness reminds us painfully of those American ladies who contribute so largely to the literature of our railway-stalls, by flooding their boundless prairies of dingy paper with inexhaustible masses of blotchy type.  We quite admit the naturalness of the tradespeople and other small folks whom this writer has perhaps explored more deeply than any earlier novelist; but surely we have far too much of them.  It has indeed been said that we are spoiled by the activity of the present day for enjoying the faithful picture of what life was in country parishes and in little country towns fifty years ago; but we really cannot admit the justice of this attempt to throw the blame on ourselves.  Dullness, we may be sure, has not died out within the last half century, but is yet to be found in plenty; and, if times were dull fifty or a hundred years ago, the novelists of those days—­Scott and Fielding, and Smollett, and even Goldsmith in his simple tale—­did not make their readers groan under their dullness....

But are we likely to feel more kindly towards such people as those of whom we are now complaining, because all their triviality, and smallness, and tediousness are displayed at wearisome length on paper?  If some Dutch painters bestowed their skill on homely old women and boozy boors, there is no evidence that they were capable of better things, and their choice of subjects is no justification for one who certainly can do better.  Nor do we complain that we have an old woman or a coarse merrymaking occasionally, but that such things in their monotonous meanness fill whole rooms of “George Eliot’s” gallery; and, in truth, the real parallel to her is not to be found in the old Dutchmen who honestly painted what was before their eyes, but rather in the perverseness