_Castaway_. It was not such self-pity as wrung from Burns the cry to
life, 'Thou art a galling load, Along a rough, a weary road, To wretches
such as I;' nor such general sense of the woes of the race as made Keats
think of the world as a place where men sit and hear each other groan,
'Where but to think is to be full of sorrow, And leaden-eyed despairs.'
She was as far removed from the plangent reverie of Rousseau as from the
savage truculence of Swift. Intellectual training had given her the
spirit of order and proportion, of definiteness and measure, and this
marks her alike from the great sentimentalists and the sweeping
satirists. 'Pity and fairness,' as she beautifully says (iii. 317), 'are
two little words which, carried out, would embrace the utmost delicacies
of the moral life.' But hers is not seldom the severe fairness of the
judge, and the pity that may go with putting on the black cap after a
conviction for high treason. In the midst of many an easy flowing page,
the reader is surprised by some bitter aside, some judgment of intense
and concentrated irony with the flash of a blade in it, some biting
sentence where lurks the stern disdain and the anger of Tacitus, and
Dante, and Pascal. Souls like these are not born for happiness.

* * * * *

This is not the occasion for an elaborate discussion of George Eliot's
place in the mental history of her time, but her biography shows that
she travelled along the road that was trodden by not a few in her day.
She started from that fervid evangelicalism which has made the base of
many a powerful character in this century, from Cardinal Newman
downwards. Then with curious rapidity she threw it all off, and embraced
with equal zeal the rather harsh and crude negations which were then
associated with the _Westminster Review_. The second stage did not last
much longer than the first. 'Religious and moral sympathy with the