stly for the natural. Its members delight in simple scenes, plain
life, common joys; the scenes, life and joys which are open to every
Englishman. They have made use of the facts lying immediately about them,
those with which they were the most familiar. They have broken away from
the traditional theories of life, the manners of books of etiquette and the
rules of fashionable society, for the life which is natural and instinct
with impulses of its own. The life of the professions is described, local
dialects and provincialisms appear, places and scenery are carefully
painted, and the disagreeable and painful become elements in these novels,
because common to humanity.

To this special theory of the novel, as it had been worked out by the
English masters of prose-poetry, George Eliot added nothing essential.
Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, Miss Austen, Miss Mitford, Fielding and Richardson
had preceded her along the way she was to follow. Their methods became
hers, she accepted their influence, and her work was done in the spirit
they had so ably illustrated. In one direction, however, she far surpassed
any one of her masters, and gave to the novel a richness of power and
fulness of aim it had not attained to with any of her predecessors. George
Eliot combined other methods with that of naturalism, not adhering rigidly
to the purpose of painting life as it appears on the surface. Not only from
the pre-Raphaelites, but from such romanticists as Scott, did she learn
much. Past scenes became natural, and history was discovered to be a vast
element in the thought of the present. Scott's power of reviving the past
in all its romantic and picturesque features, which gave him such capacity
for re-creating the life that had once passed away, was not possessed by
George Eliot. Still, if not a romancist, she realized how mighty is the
shaping power of the past over the present. For this reason, she endeavored
to recast old scenes, to revive in living shapes the times that had gone
by. The living movements of the present, its efforts at reform, its cries
for liberty, its searchings after a freer and purer life, also became a
prominent element in her novels. If in this tendency she somewhat enlarged
upon the methods of her masters, yet she was quite in sympathy with many
who came just before her, and with many more who were her contemporaries.
In another direction she kept along the way followed by many of her
co-workers, and brought philoso