University of Virginia Library

It was once said of a very charming and high-minded woman that to know her
was in itself a liberal education; and we are inclined to set an almost equally
high value on an acquaintance with the writings of “George Eliot.” For those
who read them aright they possess the faculty of educating in its highest sense,
of invigorating the intellect, giving a healthy tone to the taste, appealing to the
nobler feelings of the heart, training its impulses aright, and awakening or developing
in every mind the consciousness of a craving for something higher than
the pleasures and rewards of that life which only the senses realize, the belief in
a destiny of a nobler nature than can be grasped by experience or demonstrated
by argument. On those readers who are able to appreciate a lofty independence
of thought, a rare nobility of feeling, and an exquisite sympathy with the joys
and sorrows of human nature, “George Eliot's” writings can not fail to exert an
invigorating and purifying influence, the good effects of which leaves behind it
a lasting impression.

“George Eliot,” or whoever he or she may be, has a wonderful power in giving
an air of intense reality to whatever scene is presented, whatever character
is portrayed.

She resembles Shakespeare in her power of delineation. It is from this characteristic
action on the part of each of the members of the dramatis personœ that
we feel not only an interest, even and consistent throughout, but also an admiration
for “George Eliot” above all other writers.

Few women—no living woman indeed—have so much strength as “George
Eliot,” and, more than that, she never allows it to degenerate into coarseness.
With all her so-called “masculine” vigor, she has a feminine tenderness, which
is nowhere shown more plainly than in her descriptions of children.

She looks out upon the world with the most entire enjoyment of all the good
that there is in it to enjoy, and with an enlarged compassion for all the ill that
there is in it to pity. But she never either whimpers over the sorrowful lot of
man, or snarls and chuckles over his follies and littlenesses and impotence.

Her acquaintance with different phases of outward life, and the power of analyzing
feeling and the working of the mind, are alike wonderful.

“George Eliot's” novels belong to the enduring literature of our country—
durable, not for the fashionableness of its pattern, but for the texture of its stuff.