study and practice, of the novelist since the “Clerical Scenes”; constructive excellencies do not come by instinct.  “Adam Bede” is preeminently a book of belief, written not so much in ink as in red blood, and in that psychic fluid that means the author’s spiritual nature.  She herself declared, “I love it very much,” and it reveals the fact on every page.  Aside from its indubitable worth as a picture of English middle-class country life in an earlier nineteenth century than we know—­the easy-going days before electricity—­it has its highest claim to our regard as a reading in life, not conveyed by word of mouth didactically, but carried in scene and character.  The author’s tenderness over Hetty, without even sentimentalizing her as, for example, Dumas sentimentalizes his Camille, suggests the mood of the whole narrative:  a large-minded, large-hearted comprehension of humankind, an insistence on spiritual tests, yet with the will to tell the truth and present impartially the darkest shadows.  It is because George Eliot’s people are compounded with beautiful naturalness of good and bad—­not hopelessly bad with Hetty, nor hopelessly good with Adam—­that we understand them and love them.  Here is an element of her effectiveness.  Even her Dinah walks with her feet firmly planted upon the earth, though her mystic vision may be skyward.

With “Adam Bede” she came into her own.  The “Clerical Scenes” had won critical plaudits:  Dickens, in 1857 long settled in his seat of public idolatry, wrote the unknown author a letter of appreciation, so warm-hearted, so generous, that it is hard to resist the pleasure of quoting it:  it is interesting to remark that in despite the masculine pen-name, he attributed the work to a woman.  But the public had not responded.  With “Adam Bede” this was changed; the book gained speedy popularity, the author even meeting with that mixed compliment, a bogus claimant to its authorship.  And so, greatly encouraged, and stimulated to do her best, she produced “The Mill on the Floss,” a novel, which, if not her finest, will always be placed high on her list of representative fiction.

This time the story as such was stronger, there was more substance and variety because of the greater number of characters and their freer interplay upon each other.  Most important of all, when we look beyond the immediate reception by the public to its more permanent position, the work is decidedly more thoroughgoing in its psychology:  it goes to the very core of personality, where the earlier book was in some instances satisfied with sketch-work.  In “Adam Bede” the freshness comes from the treatment rather than the theme.  The framework, a seduction story, is old enough—­old as human nature and pre-literary story-telling.  But in “The Mill on the Floss” we have the history of two intertwined lives, contrasted types from within the confines of family life, bound by kin-love yet separated by temperament.  It is the deepest, truest of tragedy and we see that just