out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano.  They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed.  Yet these commonplace people—­many of them—­bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows, and their sacred joys; their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they have mourned over the irreclaimable dead.  Nay, is there not a pathos in their very insignificance,—­in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which they share?

Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.  In that case, I should have no fear of your not caring to know what further befell the Rev. Amos Barton, or of your thinking the homely details I have to tell at all beneath your attention.

In her hands the novel becomes the means of recording the history of those whom no history takes note of, and of bringing before the world its unnamed and unnoted heroes.  Professor Dowden says her sympathy spreads with a powerful and even flow in every direction.  In this effort she has been eminently successful; and her loving sympathy with all that is human; her warm-hearted faith in the weak and unfortunate; the graciousness of her love for the common souls who are faithful and true in their way and in their places, will excuse much greater literary faults than any into which she has fallen.  The sincere and loving humanity of her books gives them a great charm, and an influence wide-reaching and noble.

No one of her imitators and successors has gained anything of like power which is given to her novels by her intense sympathy with her characters.  Others have described ignorant and coarse phases of life as something to look at and study, but not to bring into the heart and love.  George Eliot loves her characters, has an intense affection for them, pours out her motherliness upon them.  Not so Daudet or James or Howells, who study crude life on the surface, and because it is the fashion.  There is no heart-nearness in their work, little of passionate human desire to do justice to phases of life hitherto neglected.  She has in this regard the genius of Scott and Hugo, who live in and with their characters, and so make them living and real.  She identifies herself with the life she describes, and never looks at it from without, with curious and cold and critical gaze, simply for the sake of making a novel.