o
written fiction, and it was at his suggestion that his wife undertook
story writing. Her _Scenes of Clerical Life_ were contributed to
_Blackwood's Magazine_ for 1857, and published in book form in the
following year. _Adam Bede_ followed in 1859, the _Mill on the Floss_
in 1860, _Silas Marner_ in 1861, _Romola_ in 1863, _Felix Holt_ in
1866, and _Middlemarch_ in 1872. All of these, except _Romola_, are
tales of provincial, and largely of domestic, life in the midland
counties. _Romola_ is a historical novel, the scene of which is
Florence, in the 15th century, the Florence of Macchiavelli and of
Savonarola. George Eliot's method was very different from that of
Thackeray or Dickens. She did not crowd her canvas with the swarming
life of cities. Her figures are comparatively few, and they are
selected from the middle-class families of rural parishes or small
towns, amid that atmosphere of "fine old leisure," whose disappearance
she lamented. Her drama is a still life drama, intensely and
profoundly inward. Character is the stuff that she works in, and she
deals with it more subtly than Thackeray. With him the tragedy is
produced by the pressure of society and its false standards upon the
individual; with her, by the malign influence of individuals upon one
another. She watches "the stealthy convergence of human fates," the
intersection at various angles of the planes of character, the power
{279} that the lower nature has to thwart, stupefy, or corrupt the
higher, which has become entangled with it in the mesh of destiny. At
the bottom of every one of her stories, there is a problem of the
conscience or the intellect. In this respect she resembles Hawthorne,
though she is not, like him, a romancer, but a realist.

There is a melancholy philosophy in her books, most of which are tales
of failure or frustration. The _Mill on the Floss_ contains a large
element of autobiography, and its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is,
perhaps, her idealized self. Her aspirations after a fuller and nobler
existence are condemned to struggle against the resistance of a narrow,
provincial environment, and the pressure of untoward fates. She is
tempted to seek an escape even through a desperate throwing off of
moral obligations, and is driven back to her duty only to die by a
sudden stroke of destiny. "Life is a bad business," wrote George
Eliot, in a letter to a friend, "and we must make the most of it."
_Adam Bede_ is, in co