and more in love with French methods--with the delicate clearness of
short phrases in which every word tells; with the rejection of all
intellectual ambulations round about a subject. To the fanatics of this
modern method the style of George Eliot appears strange, impossible. It
does not occur to them that her method has virtues which lack to theirs.
They may give us a little laboured masterpiece of art in which the vital
principle is wanting. George Eliot was great because she gave us passages
from life as it was lived in her day which will be vital so long as they
are sympathetically read.

George Eliot can be simple enough when she goes straight forward with her
narrative, as, for instance, in the scene of Milly Barton's death; then
her English is clear and sweet for she writes from the heart. But take
the opening chapter of the same story, and then you find her
philosophical Latinity in full swing: the curious and interesting thing
being that this otherwise ponderous work, which is quite of a sort to
alarm a Frenchman, is entirely suffused by humour, and enshrines moreover
the most charming character studies.

These lively and acute portraits drawn from English country life give its
abiding value to George Eliot's work. Take the character of Mr. Pilgrim
the doctor who 'is never so comfortable as when relaxing his professional
legs in one of those excellent farmhouses where the mice are sleek and
the mistress sickly;' or of Mrs. Hackit, 'a thin woman with a chronic
liver complaint which would have secured her Mr. Pilgrim's entire regard
and unreserved good word, even if he had not been in awe of her tongue.'

Or take Mrs. Patten, 'a pretty little old woman of eighty, with a close
cap and tiny flat white curls round her face,' whose function is
'quiescence in an easy-chair under the sense of compound interest