onnas, saints, and
such like pictures which fill the churches of Italy and Spain, works of
the old masters, are now chiefly prized for their grace of form and
richness of coloring,--exhibitions of ideal beauty, charming as
creations, but not such as we see in real life; George Eliot's novels,
on the contrary, are not works of imagination, like the frescos in the
Sistine Chapel, but copies of real life, like those of Wilkie and
Teniers, which we value for their fidelity to Nature. And in regard to
the passion of love, she does not portray it, as in the old-fashioned
novels, leading to fortunate marriages with squires and baronets; but
she generally dissects it, unravels it, and attempts to penetrate its
mysteries,--a work decidedly more psychological than romantic or
sentimental, and hence more interesting to scholars and thinkers than to
ordinary readers, who delight in thrilling adventures and exciting
narrations.

The "Scenes of Clerical Life" were followed the next year by "Adam
Bede," which created a great impression on the cultivated mind of
England and America. It did not create what is called a "sensation." I
doubt if it was even popular with the generality of readers, nor was the
sale rapid at first; but the critics saw that a new star of
extraordinary brilliancy had arisen in the literary horizon. The unknown
author entered, as she did in "Janet's Repentance," an entirely new
field, with wonderful insight into the common life of uninteresting
people, with a peculiar humor, great power of description, rare felicity
of dialogue, and a deep undertone of serious and earnest reflection. And
yet I confess, that when I first read "Adam Bede," twenty-five years
ago, I was not much interested, and I wondered why others were. It was
not dramatic enough to excite me. Many parts of it were tedious. It
seemed to me to be too much spun out, and its minuteness of detail
wearied me. There was no great plot and no grand characters; nothing
heroic, no rapidity of movement; nothing to keep me from laying the book
down when the dinner-bell rang, or when the time came to go to bed. I
did not then see the great artistic excellence of the book, and I did
not care for a description of obscure people in the Midland Counties of
England,--which, by the way, suggests a reason why "Adam Bede" cannot be
appreciated by Americans as it is by the English people themselves, who
every day see the characters described, and hear their dialect, and