d need
when their present and particular work was done. Mill, being free from
the exaltations that make the artist, kept a truer balance. His famous
pair of essays on Bentham and Coleridge were published (for the first
time, so far as our generation was concerned) in the same year as _Adam
Bede_, and I can vividly remember how the 'Coleridge' first awoke in
many of us, who were then youths at Oxford, that sense of truth having
many mansions, and that desire and power of sympathy with the past, with
the positive bases of the social fabric, and with the value of
Permanence in States, which form the reputable side of all
conservatisms. This sentiment and conviction never took richer or more
mature form than in the best work of George Eliot, and her stories
lighted up with a fervid glow the truths that minds of another type had
just brought to the surface. It was this that made her a great moral
force at that epoch, especially for all who were capable by intellectual
training of standing at her point of view. We even, as I have said,
tried hard to love her poetry, but the effort has ended less in love
than in a very distant homage to the majestic in intention and the
sonorous in execution. In fiction, too, as the years go by, we begin to
crave more fancy, illusion, enchantment, than the quality of her genius
allowed. But the loftiness of her character is abiding, and it passes
nobly through the ordeal of an honest biography. 'For the lessons,' says
the fine critic already quoted, 'most imperatively needed by the mass of
men, the lessons of deliberate kindness, of careful truth, of unwavering
endeavour,--for these plain themes one could not ask a more convincing
teacher than she whom we are commemorating now. Everything in her aspect
and presence was in keeping with the bent of her soul. The deeply-lined
face, the too marked and massive features, were united with an air of
delicate refinement, which in one way was the more impressive because it
seemed to proceed so entirely from within. Nay, the inward beauty would
sometimes quite transform the external harshness; there would be moments
when the thin hands that entwined themselves in their eagerness, the
earnest figure that bowed forward to speak and hear, the deep gaze
moving from one face to another with a grave appeal,--all these seemed
the transparent symbols that showed the presence of a wise, benignant
soul.' As a wise, benignant soul George Eliot will still remain for a