this particular study of humanity had not been accomplished so exhaustively before in all the annals of fiction.  As it happened, everything conspired to make the author at her best when she was writing this novel:  as her letters show, her health was, for her, good:  we have noted the stimulus derived from the reception of “Adam Bede”—­which was as wine to her soul.  Then—­a fact which should never be forgotten—­the tale is carried through logically and expresses, with neither paltering nor evasion, George Eliot’s sense of life’s tragedy.  In the other book, on the contrary, a touch of the fictitious was introduced by Lewes; Dinah and Adam were united to make at the end a mitigation of the painfulness of Hetty’s downfall.  Lewes may have been right in looking to the contemporary audience, but never again did Eliot yield to that form of the literary lie, the pleasant ending.  She certainly did not in “The Mill on the Floss”:  an element of its strength is its truth.  The book, broadly considered, moves slow, with dramatic accelerando at cumulative moments; it is the kind of narrative where this method is allowable without artistic sin.  Another great excellence is the superb insight into the nature of childhood, boy and girl; if Maggie is drawn with the more penetrating sympathy, Tom is finely observed:  if the author never rebukes his limitations, she states them and, as it were, lifts hands to heaven to cry like a Greek chorus:  “See these mortals love yet clash!  Behold, how havoc comes!  Eheu! this mortal case!”

With humanity still pulling at her heart-strings, and conceiving fiction which offered more value of plot than before, George Eliot wrote the charming romance “Silas Marner,” novelette in form, modern romance in its just mingling of truth and idealization:  a work published the next year.  She interrupted “Romola” to do it, which is suggestive as indicating absorption by the theme.  This story offers a delightful blend of homely realism with poetic symbolism.  The miser is wooed from his sordid love of gold by the golden glint of a little girl’s hair:  as love creeps into his starved heart, heartless greed goes out forever:  before a soulless machine, he becomes a man.  It is the world-old, still potent thought that the good can drive out the bad:  a spiritual allegory in a series of vivid pictures carrying the wholesomest and highest of lessons.  The artistic and didactic are here in happy union.  And as nowhere else in her work (unless exception be made in the case of “Romola”) she sees a truth in terms of drama.  To read the story is to feel its stage value:  it is no surprise to know that several dramatizations of the book have been made.  Aside from its central motive, the studies of homely village life, as well as of polite society, are in Eliot’s best manner:  the humor of Dolly Winthrop is of as excellent vintage as the humor of Mrs. Poyser in “Adam Bede,” yet with the necessary differentiation.  The typical deep sympathy for common humanity—­just average