you will see that these phrases stand successively for a
convention, an action and an aspiration.

The life of Mary Ann Evans falls for critical purposes into
three well-defined divisions: the early days of country life
with home and family and school; her career as a savant; and the
later years, when she performed her service as story-teller.
Unquestionably, the first period was most important in
influencing her genius. It was in the home days at Griff, the
school days at Nuneaton nearby, that those deepest, most
permanent impressions were absorbed which are given out in the
finest of her fictions. Hence came the primal inspiration which
produced her best. And it is because she drew most generously
upon her younger life in her earlier works that it is they which
are most likely to survive the shocks of Time.

The experiences of Eliot's childhood, youth and young womanhood
were those which taught her the bottom facts about middle-class
country life in the mid-century, and in a mid-county of England;
Shakspere's county of Warwick. Those experiences gave her such
sympathetic comprehension of the human case in that environment
that she became its chronicler, as Dickens had become the
chronicler of the lower middle-class of the cities. Unerringly,
she generalized from the microcosm of Warwickshire to the life
of the world and guessed the universal human heart. With utmost
sympathy, joined with a nice power of scrutiny, she saw and
understood the character-types of the village, when there was a
village life which has since passed away: the yeoman, the small
farmer, the operative in the mill, the peasant, the squire and
the parson, the petty tradesman, the man of the professions: the
worker with his hands at many crafts.

She matured through travel, books and social contact, her
knowledge was greatly extended: she came to be, in a sense, a
cultured woman of the world, a learned person. Her later books
reflected this; they depict the so-called higher strata of
English society as in "Middlemarch," or, as in "Romola," give an
historical picture of another time in a foreign land. The woman
who was gracious hostess at those famous Sunday afternoons at
the Priory seems to have little likeness to the frail, shy,
country girl in Griff--seems, too, far more important; yet it
may be doubted whether all this later work reveals such mastery
of the human heart or comes from such an imperative source of
expression as do the earlier n