autiful girlhood in the pleasant Warwickshire
country, when she drove through the pleasant sweet-scented lanes and
enjoyed the lovely views that she has made immortal in her
books--these she dwelt upon, and with the touch of poetry that
redeemed the austerity of her nature she makes them live again,
even for us in an alien land. So, too, the English rustics live for
us in her pages with the same deathless force as the villagers in
Hardy's novels of Wessex life. And George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are
the two English writers who have made these villagers, with their
peculiar dialect and their insular prejudices, serve the purpose of
the Greek chorus in warning the reader of the fate that hangs over
their characters.

[Illustration: GEORGE ELIOT IN 1864 FROM THE ETCHING BY MR. PAUL
RAJON--DRAWN BY MR. FREDERICK BURTON--FROM THE FRONTISPIECE TO THE
FIRST EDITION OF "GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE," BY HER HUSBAND, J.W.
CROSS]

Of all English novelists, George Eliot was probably the best equipped
in minute and accurate scholarship. Trained as few college graduates
are trained, she was impelled for several years to take up the study
of German metaphysics. Her mind, like her face, was masculine in its
strength, and though she suffered in her youth from persistent
ill-health, she conquered this in her maturity and wrought with
passionate ardor at all her literary tasks. So keen was her conscience
that she often defeated her own ends by undue labor, as in the
preparation for _Romola_, whose historical background swamps the
story.

Above all she was a preacher of a stern morality. She laid down the
moral law that selfishness, like sin, corrodes the best nature, and
that the only happiness lies in absolute forgetfulness of self and in
working to make others happy. Thus all her books are full of little
sermons on life, preached with so much force that they cannot fail to
make a profound impression even upon the careless reader.

George Eliot impresses one as a very sad woman, with an eager desire
to recapture the lost religious faith of her happy, unquestioning
childhood and a still more passionate desire to believe in that
immortality which her cold agnostic creed rejected as illogical. It
was pitiful, this strong-minded woman reaching out for the things that
less-endowed women accept without question. It was even more pitiful
to see her, with her keen moral sense, violate all the conventions of
English law and society in order