“THE IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH” appeared in 1879; and as “George Eliot” was then in her sixtieth year, it may be assumed that the essays in sequence which compose the volume represent her matured views of life and morals. Those who remember the great influence over her life exerted by George Henry Lewes may be surprised at the conservatism, both of style and thought, which controls, if it does not characterize, her writings as an essayist. In “The Impressions of Theophrastus Such,” as in the “Leaves from a Note Book,” and in her essays contributed to English reviews, she shows that unconsciously she is at bottom a “Low-Church” Englishwoman, governed by all the virtues which belong to good women in England through the heredity of a hundred generations of clean and virtuous lives.

  In the literary history of England and of civilization she belongs to a period of storm and stress when great contending forces met in a struggle which seemed full of promise or of menace, as those who viewed it were inspired by courage or depressed by timidity. In England, in 1849, when the death of her father threw her on her own resources, the intellectual development of the century, as it influenced men of such varying activities as Darwin, Carlyle, Cobden, and Bright, was being met by the marshaling of the great forces which were to precipitate the Empire in France and the Crimean War after it, as means of postponing the millenium of popular enfranchisement announced by the Hugos, the Mazzinis, and the Heckers,—Idealists who believed in progress at any cost of the profits of that inertia which calculates percentages upon the status quo, no matter what it is. In such periods of disturbance, visionaries, whose disorderly imagination frees itself from the restraints of judgment, set up as prophets of a new and fantastic social order, and the air grows thick with the evoes of their vaticination. Society is to be taken apart as a child takes apart its doll after discovering that its faculty of crying depends on pieces of pine and sheepskin and that it is stuffed with a very unsightly article of sawdust. The analytical faculty threatens the constructive—or at least seems to do so, until every abuse which the world was about to get rid of through the imperceptible processes of progress, is turned into a sacrosanct part of the Established Order and given sanctuary in whatever Holy of Holies orthodoxy has to offer. With Carlyle preaching Goethe’s “Elective Affinities,” and half a hundred aspiring prophets of a new dispensation of phalanxes and agapemones, announcing a “new order” under which virtue is to consist in having the largest number of passions and the greatest possible means of gratifying them, it is no wonder that English conservatism was able to shift its ground and take the aggressive. George Henry Lewes, who among English men of letters sympathized most strongly with Fourier’s theory that morals and the repressive philosophy founded on morals are a mistake, came into the life of Mary Ann Evans, then leading the life of a literary woman in London, and his influence over her was in one sense decisive.

  But Lewes himself was fundamentally a man of good impulses, and, in spite of the great intellectual disturbance of her time and of her own life, George Eliot retained il ben del intelletto,—that moral soundness which alone gives intellectual strength its value,—which in Dante’s hell is lost irretrievably not by those who err most, but by those who venture nothing. Born on an English farm, the daughter of an English middle-class family ambitious enough to educate her above the average of the time, she had ingrained into her in her girlhood the tradition of goodness for which the virtuous Englishwoman has stood ever since the study of her character made Shakespeare great. The accident of her acquaintance with a family which was impregnated with the German “transcendentalism,” then fashionable, turned her intellectually into “an extreme Radical,” but her radicalism was never that of a disordered intellect. She rose superior to her mistakes by force of the inherent nobility of character which enabled her to write “The Choir Invisible,”—without doubt, the noblest blank verse of the nineteenth century. Her “Scenes of Clerical Life,” which appeared in 1857, were written at the suggestion of Lewes with whom she had formed an association in 1854. She had begun her literary career in London as assistant editor of the Westminster Review, and her first work was that of an essayist; but Lewes discovered her talent as a novelist and persuaded her to develop it. “Adam Bede,” in which it is said she used her father as “a prototype of her hero,” followed “Scenes of Clerical Life” and established her place as one of the greatest novelists of the century. Her subsequent novels merely confirmed her title to the rank she had so easily taken, and at her death, December 22d, 1880, she had won for herself the approval not merely of English aristocratic conservatism, but of Puritanism itself. Her faults of judgment—and they were grave; her follies—and they were hers by infection from some of the most dangerous of all intellectual insanities—were wiped out by the strength of her sympathy for mankind. Much was given and forgiven her because she had loved much—with a love possible only for those who crucify passion that they may