folks—­permeates the handling.  Moreover, while the romance has a happy issue, as a romance should according to Stevenson, if it possibly can, it does not differ in its view of life from so fatalistic a book as “The Mill on the Floss”; for circumstances change Silas; if the child Eppie had not come he might have remained a miser.  It was not his will alone that revolutionized his life; what some would call luck was at work there.  In “Silas Marner” the teaching is of a piece with that of all her representative work.

But when we reach “Romola” there is a change, debatable ground is entered upon at once.  Hitherto, the story-teller has mastered the preacher, although an ever more earnest soul has been expressing itself about Life.  Now we enter the region of more self-conscious literary art, of planned work and study, and confront the possibility of flagging invention.  Also, we leave the solid ground of contemporary themes and find the realist with her hang for truth, essaying an historical setting, an entirely new and foreign motive.  Eliot had already proved her right to depict certain aspects of her own English life.  To strive to exercise the same powers on a theme like “Romola” was a venturesome step.  We have seen how Dickens and Thackeray essayed romance at least once with ringing success; now the third major mid-century novelist was to try the same thing.

It may be conceded at the start that in one important respect this Florentine story of Savonarola and his day is entirely typical:  it puts clearly before us in a medieval romantic mis-en scene, the problem of a soul:  the slow, subtle, awful degeneration of the man Tito, with its foil in the noble figure of the girl Romola.  The central personality psychologically is that of the wily Greek-Italian, and Eliot never probed deeper into the labyrinths of the perturbed human spirit than in this remarkable analysis.  The reader, too, remembers gratefully, with a catch of the breath, the great scenes, two of which are the execution of Savonarola, and the final confrontation of Tito by his adoptive father, with its Greek-like sense of tragic doom.  The same reader stands aghast before the labor which must lie behind such a work and often comes to him a sudden, vital sense of fifteenth century Florence, then, as never since, the Lily of the Arno:  so cunningly and with such felicity are innumerable details individualized, massed and blended.  And yet, somehow it all seems a splendid experiment, a worthy performance rather than a spontaneous and successful creative endeavor:  this, in comparison with the fiction that came before.  The author seems a little over-burdened by the tremendousness of her material.  Whether it is because the Savonarola episode is not thoroughly synthetized with the Tito-Romola part:  or that the central theme is of itself fundamentally unpleasant—­or again, that from the nature of the romance, head-work had largely to supplant that genial draught upon the springs of