There is not so much object here in discussing the much discussed
question of the merits and defects of "George Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans or
Mrs. Cross) as a novelist, as there is in pointing out her relations to
this general movement. She began late, and almost accidentally; and
there is less unity in her general work than in some others here
mentioned. Her earliest and perhaps, in adjusted and "reduced"
judgments, her best work--_Scenes of Clerical Life_ (1857-1858), _Adam
Bede_ (1859), _The Mill on the Floss_ (1860), _Silas Marner_
(1861)--consists of very carefully observed and skilfully rendered
studies of country life and character, tinged, especially in _Adam Bede_
and _The Mill on the Floss_, with very intense and ambitious colours of
passion. The great popularity of this tempted her into still more
elaborate efforts of different kinds. Her attempt in quasi-historical
romance, _Romola_ (1865), was an enormous _tour de force_ in which the
writer struggled to get historical and local colour, accurate and
irreproachable, with all the desperation of the most conscientious
relater of actual history. _Felix Holt the Radical_ (1866), _Middle
March_ (1872), and _Daniel Deronda_ (1876) were equally elaborate
sketches of modern English society, planned and engineered with the
same provision of carefully laboured plot, character, and phrase.
Although received with enthusiasm by the partisans whom she had created
for herself, these books have seemed to some _over_-laboured, and if not
exactly unreal, yet to a certain extent unnatural. But the point for us
is their example of the way in which the novel--once a light and almost
frivolous thing--had come to be taken with the utmost seriousness--had
in fact ceased to be light literature at all, and begun to require
rigorous and elaborate training and preparation in the writer, perhaps
even something of the athlete's processes in the reader. Its state may
or may not have advanced in grace _pari passu_ with the advance in