Tito keep his father's ring? Why indulge a foolish
sentiment, a piece of mere superstition, about an in-
animate object? And so Tito sells the ring, and with
it closes the bargain by which he sells his soul. There
is, indeed, a noble pressing forward to things that are`
before, and forgetting of things that are behind. George
Eliot is not attracted to represent a character in which
such an ardour is predominant, and the base forgetting
of things behind alarms and shocks her. We find it
hard to abstain from reading as autobiographical the
little group of eleven poems entitled "Brother and
Sister," while at the same time it is impossible to dis-
sociate them from some of the earlier scenes of "The
Mill on the Floss." These poems are heavy with the
tenderness of memory, filled with all the sweetness and
sadness of lost but unforgotten days, and overbowed with
the firmament of adult thought, and grief, and love:—

"The wide-arched bridge, the scented elder-flowers,
The wondrous watery rings that died too soon,
The echoes of the quarry, the still hours
With white robe sweeping-on the shadeless noon,

Were but my growing self, are part of me,
My present Past, my root of piety."

It is noted, as characteristic of Hetty's shallow nature, that in her dream of the future, the brilliant future of the Captain's wife, there mingles no thought of her second parents, no thought of the children she had helped to tend, of any youthful companion, any pet animal, any relic of her own childhood. "Hetty could have cast all her past life behind her, and never cared to be reminded of it again. I think she had no feeling at all towards the old house,

and did not like the Jacob's ladder and the long row of hollyhocks in the garden better than any other flowersperhaps not so well." Jubal, after his ardent pursuit of song through the world, would return to Lamech's home, "hoping to find the former things." Silas Marner would see once more the town where he was born, and Lantern Yard, where the lots had declared him guilty. But Hetty is like a plant with hardly any roots; "lay it over your ornamental flower-pot and it blossoms none the worse.

This is the life we mortals live.

And beyond life lies

We

And

death. Now it is not hard to face it. We have already
given ourselves up to the large life of our race.
have already died as individual men and women.
we see how the short space of joy, of suffering, and of
activity allotted to each of us urges to helpful toil, and
makes impossible for us the "glad idlesse" of the im-
mortal denizen of earth. This is the thought of "Jubal."
When the great artist returns to his early home, he is
already virtually deceased-he has entered into subjec-
tive existence. Jubal the maker of the lyre is beaten
with the flutes of Jubal's worshippers. This is tragic.
His apotheosis and his martyrdom are one. George
Eliot is not insensible to the anguish of the sufferer.
But a strenuous and holy thought comes to make
his death harmonious as his life. He has given his
gift to men. He has enriched the world. He is incor-
porate in

A strong persistent life
Panting through generations as one breath,
And filling with its soul the blank of death.

!

RGE

GEORGE ELIOT.

II.—" MIDDLEMARCH" AND DANIEL DERONDA.”

GREAT artists belong ordinarily to one of two chief classes the class of those whose virtue resides in breadth of common human sympathy, or of those who, excelling rather by height than breadth, attain to rare altitudes of human thought or human passion. For the one, the large table-land, with its wealth of various life, its substantial possessions, its corn, its shadow-casting trees, and lowing kine; for the other, the mountainsummit, its thrill, its prospect, its keen air, and its inspiration. To the one we look for record, and sane interpretation of the average experience of men ;. to the other, for discoveries and deliverances of the soul, for the quickening into higher life of our finest spiritual susceptibilities, and sometimes for the rescue of our best self from the incredulity, inertia, and encumbrances which gather about it in the ways of use and wont. And Art is justified of all her children. From the first

half of our century we could ill lose Scott, who represents in so distinguished a manner the class of artists who excel by breadth; we could ill lose Wordsworth or Shelley, who in different ways belongs each as distinctively to the other class. It will always be a question with such persons as love to settle points of precedence,

S

A

to which of these divisions of great creative natures the higher honour is due; and men will always decide the question in opposite ways, according to their respective types of character. The table-land may be an elevated one, not without undulations of gentle rise and fall; the mountain-summit may be a narrow apex, bald and bleak, unvisited by any feet save those of a few climbers whose sanity may well be doubted; but, on the other hand, it may be a Delectable Mountain-" Mount Marvel" or "Mount Clear"-on which the shepherds feed their flocks, and to which for a brief season mortal pilgrims graciously guided may repair.

However this point of precedence shall be decided, what we may set down for certain is that those rare artists who unite in themselves the excellences of both classes who are broad and who are also high-rank above all others in the hierarchy of art. Of such Shakspere may be considered the master and chief.

.

No

mount of passion-not that of the Prometheus of Eschylus or of Shelley-climbs to such a skyey eminence as that on which the agony of Lear is accomplished; no more mysterious isolation of youthful sorrow for ever allures and for ever baffles than that of Hamlet; nor has a speculative summit more serene or of wider vision been attained by foot of man than that of the great enchanter of the Tempest," who is Shakspere himself looking down, detached and yet tender, upon the whole of human experience. From Scott we obtain no Hamlet, no Prospero. But the world of Shakspere's creation includes with such figures as these a Henry V., a Benedick, a Bottom the weaver, a Toby Belch, and types enough to

populate a planet with varieties of common human nature, from the courtier to the clown.

Among artists who with Shakspere unite breadth of sympathy with power of interpreting the rarer and more intense experiences of the souls of men, George Eliot must be placed. The former is the side of her personality which belongs to prose, the latter is akin to poetry. Scott, who was a poet in the first stage of his great career, and wrote poetry admirable of its kind, naturally and rightly fell into the easier pace of a prose-writer ; and never attempting to use artificial wings, nor possessing wings by nature, he went hither and thither over the level surface of our earth, and left few things upon it unvisited. It was evident that even while engaged upon her incomparable prose works, George Eliot was haunted by a desire for a more purely ideal and impassioned order of creation; but verse is not her true medium of expression, and in "The Spanish Gypsy," while prosaic elements such as the semi-humorous passages remain, which are not assimilated by the work (all her rich prosaic powers thus counting for worse than nothing), her imagination, cut off from the allies which had been accustomed to reinforce it, falls at times painfully under the domination of ideas and of the intellect. There is an unrelieved intensity, a prolonged stress, in the poem, which although it is essentially moral, contracts the consciousness of the reader, until his gaze seems narrowing "into one precipitous crevice." In "Daniel Deronda," for the first time, the poetical side of George Eliot's genius obtains adequate expression, through the medium which is proper to her—that of