differing widely from the minuteness and coarseness of Tourguenief and Zola, in that they show a large element of the ideal interfused with the real.  This school is seldom coarse, vulgar or sensuous, does not mistake the depraved and beastly for the natural.  Its members delight in simple scenes, plain life, common joys; the scenes, life and joys which are open to every Englishman.  They have made use of the facts lying immediately about them, those with which they were the most familiar.  They have broken away from the traditional theories of life, the manners of books of etiquette and the rules of fashionable society, for the life which is natural and instinct with impulses of its own.  The life of the professions is described, local dialects and provincialisms appear, places and scenery are carefully painted, and the disagreeable and painful become elements in these novels, because common to humanity.

To this special theory of the novel, as it had been worked out by the English masters of prose-poetry, George Eliot added nothing essential.  Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, Miss Austen, Miss Mitford, Fielding and Richardson had preceded her along the way she was to follow.  Their methods became hers, she accepted their influence, and her work was done in the spirit they had so ably illustrated.  In one direction, however, she far surpassed any one of her masters, and gave to the novel a richness of power and fulness of aim it had not attained to with any of her predecessors.  George Eliot combined other methods with that of naturalism, not adhering rigidly to the purpose of painting life as it appears on the surface.  Not only from the pre-Raphaelites, but from such romanticists as Scott, did she learn much.  Past scenes became natural, and history was discovered to be a vast element in the thought of the present.  Scott’s power of reviving the past in all its romantic and picturesque features, which gave him such capacity for re-creating the life that had once passed away, was not possessed by George Eliot.  Still, if not a romancist, she realized how mighty is the shaping power of the past over the present.  For this reason, she endeavored to recast old scenes, to revive in living shapes the times that had gone by.  The living movements of the present, its efforts at reform, its cries for liberty, its searchings after a freer and purer life, also became a prominent element in her novels.  If in this tendency she somewhat enlarged upon the methods of her masters, yet she was quite in sympathy with many who came just before her, and with many more who were her contemporaries.  In another direction she kept along the way followed by many of her co-workers, and brought philosophy and socialistic speculation to the aid of the naturalistic method.  Indeed, she so far departed from that method, and from the soundest theories of art, as to become to some extent a doctrinaire.