y lie, the pleasant ending. She certainly did not in "The
Mill on the Floss": an element of its strength is its truth. The
book, broadly considered, moves slow, with dramatic accelerando
at cumulative moments; it is the kind of narrative where this
method is allowable without artistic sin. Another great
excellence is the superb insight into the nature of childhood,
boy and girl; if Maggie is drawn with the more penetrating
sympathy, Tom is finely observed: if the author never rebukes
his limitations, she states them and, as it were, lifts hands to
heaven to cry like a Greek chorus: "See these mortals love yet
clash! Behold, how havoc comes! Eheu! this mortal case!"

With humanity still pulling at her heart-strings, and conceiving
fiction which offered more value of plot than before, George
Eliot wrote the charming romance "Silas Marner," novelette in
form, modern romance in its just mingling of truth and
idealization: a work published the next year. She interrupted
"Romola" to do it, which is suggestive as indicating absorption
by the theme. This story offers a delightful blend of homely
realism with poetic symbolism. The miser is wooed from his
sordid love of gold by the golden glint of a little girl's hair:
as love creeps into his starved heart, heartless greed goes out
forever: before a soulless machine, he becomes a man. It is the
world-old, still potent thought that the good can drive out the
bad: a spiritual allegory in a series of vivid pictures carrying
the wholesomest and highest of lessons. The artistic and
didactic are here in happy union. And as nowhere else in her
work (unless exception be made in the case of "Romola") she sees
a truth in terms of drama. To read the story is to feel its
stage value: it is no surprise to know that several
dramatizations of the book have been made. Aside from its
central motive, the studies of homely village life, as well as
of polite society, are in Eliot's best manner: the humor of
Dolly Winthrop is of as excellent vintage as the humor of Mrs.
Poyser in "Adam Bede," yet with the necessary differentiation.
The typical deep sympathy for common humanity--just average
folks--permeates the handling. Moreover, while the romance has a
happy issue, as a romance should according to Stevenson, if it
possibly can, it does not differ in its view of life from so
fatalistic a book as "The Mill on the Floss"; for circumstances
change Silas; if the child Eppie had not come he might have