THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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Her middle-class birth also makes her a representative of a numerous class of Englishmen. The well-to-do farmer, the intelligent artisan and tradesman, form the bulk of her characters. The very aristocratic or the very poor, enter upon her pages but as supernumeraries. In this she is in perfect sympathy with her age. The great struggles of the century have been to emancipate the middle class and place them, socially, mentally, and politically, on a level with the highest. They have become in reality the ruling power in England.

In looking at her life, we see, then, a child of middle-class parents, born and bred in Middle England among a rural old-fashioned people, and surrounded by conservative influences. Upon this foundation of conservatism is engrafted a capability of intense feeling. She says of herself: “I can never live long without enthusiasm in some form or another.” This capability for feeling is the main element of a religious character, if, as Adam Bede says, “ Religion’s something else besides notions and doctrines. It isn’t notions set people doing the right thing, it’s feelings.” With this emotion, there was in her mind, as in Dorothea’s, “a current into which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow—the reaching forward of the whole consciousness toward the fullest truth, the least partial good.” “She yearned toward the perfect right, that it might make a throne within her, and rule her errant will. The keystone of the intel­lectual faculties is the reason, and George Eliot had a thoroughly logical mind. In one of her letters she speaks of a book that is full of “ wit ” to her. “ It gives me that exquisite kind of laughter that comes from the gratification of the reasoning facul­ties.” This book—Mr. Hennel’s Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity—was the awakener of her skepticism. It expressed the reaction of reason against the arbi­trary or miraculous system of explaining the facts in the New Testament. He attempted to show that, leaving out of account miraculous agencies, Christ’s life could be explained in a logical way. His proof in detail is not conclusive to us, but its significance lay in the fact that men were beginning to dare to apply reason to the fundamental facts of Christianity. George Eliot expressed this daring when she said: “ To fear the exam­ination of any proposition appears to me an intellectual and moral palsy, that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever. For my part, I wish to be among the ranks of that glorious crusade that is seeking to set Truth’s Holy Sepulchre free from a usurped domination.” Carlyle was the leader in this crusade that fear­lessly said: “Two and two make four, in religion and society, as well as mathematics.” Her logical faculty is as strong an element in her as her emotions, and her life from this on is a struggle between religious feelings and intellectual skepticism. Of other writers in this era, Tennyson mirrors the same struggle in “In Memoriam,” and Mat­thew Arnold in his futile attempts to be an agnostic. It was truly the, “ Strum und Drang ” period, and these men and women of the time were tossed about between the buffets of dogmatism and skepticism till their poor weather-beaten boats were almost unseaworthy.

George Eliot’s life in London as Mr. Chapman’s assistant on the “Westminster Review,” and her union with Mr. Lewes strengthened her skepticism, and, at least out­wardly, identified herwith positivism. Let us next consider how far she agreed with the main ideas of Comte’s theory. She believed there was a law governing human society; that nothing came by chance; that every event had its logical cause in preceding events; that every act had its reason in the nature of the individual. Mr. Irwine says in Adam Bede:—“A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legit­imate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.”

In the delineation of her principal characters, she follows a natural law and not a false criterion of perfection. “ The blessed work of helping the world forward, hap­pily does not wait to be done by perfect men; and I should imagine that neither Luther nor John Bunyan, for example, would have satisfied the modern demand for an ideal hero, who believes nothing but what is true, feels nothing but what is exalted ( 19 )