s experience with Casaubon, and
that of Lydgate with Rosamond, is what the writer places before
us. Marriage is chosen simply because it is the modern spiritual
battleground, a condition for the trying-out of souls. The
greatness of the work lies in its breadth (subjective more than
objective), its panoramic view of English country life of the
refined type, its rich garner of wisdom concerning human motive
and action. We have seen in earlier studies that its type, the
chronicle of events as they affect character, is a legitimate
one: a successful genus in English-speaking fiction in hands
like those of Thackeray, Eliot and Howells. It is one accepted
kind, a distinct, often able, sympathetic kind of fiction of our
race: its worth as a social document (to use the convenient term
once more) is likely to be high. It lacks the close-knit plot,
the feeling for stage effect, the swift progression and the
sense of completed action which another and more favored sort of
Novel exhibits. Yet it may have as much chance of permanence in
the hands of a master. The proper question, then, seems to be
whether it most fitly expresses the genius of an author.

Perhaps there will never be general agreement as to this in the
case of "Middlemarch." The book is drawn from wells of
experience not so deep in Eliot's nature as those which went to
the making of "Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the Floss," It is
life with which the author became familiar in London and about
the world during her later literary days. She knows it well, and
paints it with her usual noble insistence upon truth. But she
knows it with her brain; whereas, she knows "The Mill on the
Floss" with her blood. There is surely that difference. Hence,
the latter work has, it would seem, a better chance for long
life; for, without losing the author's characteristic
interpretation, it has more story-value, is richer in humor
(that alleviating ingredient of all fiction) and is a better
work of art. It shows George Eliot absorbed in story-telling:
"Middlemarch" is George Eliot using a slight framework of story
for the sake of talking about life and illustrating by
character. Those who call it her masterpiece are not judging it
primarily as art-work: any more than those who call Whitman the
greatest American poet are judging him as artist. While it seems
necessary to make this distinction, it is quite as necessary to
bear down on the attraction of the character-drawing. That is a
tr