If so, well and good.  If not, whatever of place or power may be mine, I am among the world’s failures, having missed the goal.  This view, steadily to be encountered in all her fiction, gives it the grave quality, the deep undertone and, be it confessed, at times the almost Methodistic manner, which mark this woman’s worth in its weakness and its notable strength.  In her early days, long before she made fiction, she was morbidly religious; she became in the fulness of time one of the intellectually emancipated.  Yet, emotionally, spiritually, she remained to the end an intensely religious person.  Conduct, aspiration, communion of souls, these were to her always the realities.  If Thackeray’s motto was Be good, and Dickens’, Do good, Eliot’s might be expressed as:  Make me good!  Consider for a moment and you will see that these phrases stand successively for a convention, an action and an aspiration.

The life of Mary Ann Evans falls for critical purposes into three well-defined divisions:  the early days of country life with home and family and school; her career as a savant; and the later years, when she performed her service as story-teller.  Unquestionably, the first period was most important in influencing her genius.  It was in the home days at Griff, the school days at Nuneaton nearby, that those deepest, most permanent impressions were absorbed which are given out in the finest of her fictions.  Hence came the primal inspiration which produced her best.  And it is because she drew most generously upon her younger life in her earlier works that it is they which are most likely to survive the shocks of Time.

The experiences of Eliot’s childhood, youth and young womanhood were those which taught her the bottom facts about middle-class country life in the mid-century, and in a mid-county of England; Shakspere’s county of Warwick.  Those experiences gave her such sympathetic comprehension of the human case in that environment that she became its chronicler, as Dickens had become the chronicler of the lower middle-class of the cities.  Unerringly, she generalized from the microcosm of Warwickshire to the life of the world and guessed the universal human heart.  With utmost sympathy, joined with a nice power of scrutiny, she saw and understood the character-types of the village, when there was a village life which has since passed away:  the yeoman, the small farmer, the operative in the mill, the peasant, the squire and the parson, the petty tradesman, the man of the professions:  the worker with his hands at many crafts.

She matured through travel, books and social contact, her knowledge was greatly extended:  she came to be, in a sense, a cultured woman of the world, a learned person.  Her later books reflected this; they depict the so-called higher strata of English society as in “Middlemarch,” or, as in “Romola,” give an historical picture of another time in a foreign land.  The woman who was gracious hostess at those famous Sunday afternoons