e satisfied not to touch
upon the question of their accuracy and fidelity as pictures of manners
and customs. He can only say that they bear strong internal evidence of
truthfulness. If he is a great admirer of George Eliot, he will indeed
be tempted to affirm that they _must_ be true. They offer a
completeness, a rich density of detail, which could be the fruit only of
a long term of conscious contact,--such as would make it much more
difficult for the author to fall into the perversion and suppression of
facts, than to set them down literally. It is very probable that her
colors are a little too bright, and her shadows of too mild a gray, that
the sky of her landscapes is too sunny, and their atmosphere too
redolent of peace and abundance. Local affection may be accountable for
half of this excess of brilliancy; the author's native optimism is
accountable for the other half. I do not remember, in all her novels, an
instance of gross misery of any kind not directly caused by the folly of
the sufferer. There are no pictures of vice or poverty or squalor. There
are no rags, no gin, no brutal passions. That average humanity which she
favors is very _borne_ in intellect, but very genial in heart, as a
glance at its representatives in her pages will convince us. In "Adam
Bede," there is Mr. Irwine, the vicar, with avowedly no qualification
for his profession, placidly playing chess with his mother, stroking his
dogs, and dipping into Greek tragedies; there is the excellent Martin
Poyser at the Farm, good-natured and rubicund; there is his wife,
somewhat too sharply voluble, but only in behalf of cleanliness and
honesty and order; there is Captain Donnithorne at the Hall, who does a
poor girl a mortal wrong, but who is, after all, such a nice,
good-looking fellow; there are Adam and Seth Bede, the carpenter's sons,
the strongest, purest, most discreet of young rustics. The same broad
felicity prevails in "The Mill on the Floss." Mr. Tulliver, indeed,
fails in business; but his failure only serves as an offset to the
general integrity and prosperity. His son is obstinate and wilful; but
it is all on the side of virtue. His daughter is somewhat sentimental
and erratic; but she is more conscientious yet. Conscience, in the
classes from which George Eliot recruits her figures, is a universal
gift. Decency and plenty and good-humor follow contentedly in its train.
The word which sums up the common traits of our author's various gro