ovels, "Adam Bede" and "The Mill
on the Floss." For human nature is one and the same in Griff or
London or Florence, as all the amplitude of the sky is mirrored
in the dewdrop. And although Eliot became in later life a more
accurate reporter of the intellectual unrest of her day, and had
probed deeper into the mystery and the burden of this
unintelligible world, great novels are not necessarily made in
that way and the majority of those who love her cleave to the
less burdened, more unforced expression of her power.

In those early days, moreover, her attitude towards life was
established: it meant a wish to improve the "complaining
millions of men." Love went hand in hand with understanding. It
may well be that the somberly grave view of humanity and of the
universe at large which came to be hers, although strengthened
by the positivistic trend of her mature studies, was generated
in her sickly youth and a reaction from the narrow theologic
thought with which she was then surrounded. Always frail--subject
through life to distressing illness--it would not be
fair to ask of this woman an optimism of the Mark Tapley stripe.
In part, the grave outlook was physical, temperamental: but also
it was an expression of a swiftly approaching mood of the late
nineteenth century. And the beginning can be traced back to the
autumn evenings in the big farmhouse at Griff when, as a mere
child, she wrestled or prayed with what she called her sick
soul. That stern, upright farmer father of hers seems the
dominant factor in her make-up, although the iron of her blood
was tempered by the livelier, more mundane qualities of her
sprightly mother, towards whom we look for the source of the
daughter's superb gift of humor. Whatever the component parts of
father and mother in her, and however large that personal
variation which is genius, of this we may be comfortably sure:
the deepest in the books, whether regarded as presentation of
life or as interpretation, came from the early Warwickshire
years.

Gradually came that mental eclaircissement which produced the
editor, the magazinist, the translator of Strauss. The
friendship with the Brays more than any one thing marks the
external cause of this awakening: but it was latent, this
response to the world of thought and of scholarship, and certain
to be called out sooner or later. Our chief interest in it is
due to the query how much it ministered to her coming career as
creative author of