at the Priory seems to have little likeness to the frail, shy, country girl in Griff—­seems, too, far more important; yet it may be doubted whether all this later work reveals such mastery of the human heart or comes from such an imperative source of expression as do the earlier novels, “Adam Bede” and “The Mill on the Floss.”  For human nature is one and the same in Griff or London or Florence, as all the amplitude of the sky is mirrored in the dewdrop.  And although Eliot became in later life a more accurate reporter of the intellectual unrest of her day, and had probed deeper into the mystery and the burden of this unintelligible world, great novels are not necessarily made in that way and the majority of those who love her cleave to the less burdened, more unforced expression of her power.

In those early days, moreover, her attitude towards life was established:  it meant a wish to improve the “complaining millions of men.”  Love went hand in hand with understanding.  It may well be that the somberly grave view of humanity and of the universe at large which came to be hers, although strengthened by the positivistic trend of her mature studies, was generated in her sickly youth and a reaction from the narrow theologic thought with which she was then surrounded.  Always frail—­subject through life to distressing illness—­it would not be fair to ask of this woman an optimism of the Mark Tapley stripe.  In part, the grave outlook was physical, temperamental:  but also it was an expression of a swiftly approaching mood of the late nineteenth century.  And the beginning can be traced back to the autumn evenings in the big farmhouse at Griff when, as a mere child, she wrestled or prayed with what she called her sick soul.  That stern, upright farmer father of hers seems the dominant factor in her make-up, although the iron of her blood was tempered by the livelier, more mundane qualities of her sprightly mother, towards whom we look for the source of the daughter’s superb gift of humor.  Whatever the component parts of father and mother in her, and however large that personal variation which is genius, of this we may be comfortably sure:  the deepest in the books, whether regarded as presentation of life or as interpretation, came from the early Warwickshire years.

Gradually came that mental eclaircissement which produced the editor, the magazinist, the translator of Strauss.  The friendship with the Brays more than any one thing marks the external cause of this awakening:  but it was latent, this response to the world of thought and of scholarship, and certain to be called out sooner or later.  Our chief interest in it is due to the query how much it ministered to her coming career as creative author of fiction.

George Eliot at this period looked perilously like a Blue Stocking.  The range and variety of her reading and the severely intellectual nature of her pursuits justify the assertion.  Was this well for the novelist?