know
their sorrows, and sympathize with their privations and labors. But
after a closer and more critical study of the novel I have come to see
merits that before escaped my eye. It is a study, a picture of humble
English life, painted by the hand of a master, to be enjoyed most by
people of critical discernment, and to be valued for its rare fidelity
to Nature. It is of more true historical interest than many novels which
are called historical,--even as the paintings of Rembrandt are more
truly historical than those of Horace Vernet, since the former painted
life as it really was in his day. Imaginative pictures are not those
which are most prized by modern artists, or those pictures which make
every woman look like an angel and every man like a hero,--like those of
Gainsborough or Reynolds,--however flattering they may be to those who
pay for them.

I need not dwell on characters so well known as those painted in "Adam
Bede." The hero is a painstaking, faithful journeyman carpenter,
desirous of doing good work. Scotland and England abound in such men,
and so did New England fifty years ago. This honest mechanic falls in
love with a pretty but vain, empty, silly, selfish girl of his own
class; but she had already fallen under the spell of the young squire of
the village,--a good-natured fellow, of generous impulses, but
essentially selfish and thoughtless, and utterly unable to cope with his
duty. The carpenter, when he finds it out, gives vent to his wrath and
jealousy, as is natural, and picks a quarrel with the squire and knocks
him down,--an act of violence on the part of the inferior in rank not
very common in England. The squire abandons his victim after ruining her
character,--not an uncommon thing among young aristocrats,--and the girl
strangely accepts the renewed attentions of her first lover, until the
logic of events compels her to run away from home and become a vagrant.
The tragic and interesting part of the novel is a vivid painting of the
terrible sufferings of the ruined girl in her desolate wanderings, and
of her trial for abandoning her infant child to death,--the inexorable
law of fate driving the sinner into the realms of darkness and shame.
The story closes with the prosaic marriage of Adam Bede to Dinah
Morris,--a Methodist preacher, who falls in love with him instead of his
more pious brother Seth, who adores her. But the love of Adam and Dinah
for one another is more spiritualized than is comm