rical Scenes"
had won critical plaudits: Dickens, in 1857 long settled in his
seat of public idolatry, wrote the unknown author a letter of
appreciation, so warm-hearted, so generous, that it is hard to
resist the pleasure of quoting it: it is interesting to remark
that in despite the masculine pen-name, he attributed the work
to a woman. But the public had not responded. With "Adam Bede"
this was changed; the book gained speedy popularity, the author
even meeting with that mixed compliment, a bogus claimant to its
authorship. And so, greatly encouraged, and stimulated to do her
best, she produced "The Mill on the Floss," a novel, which, if
not her finest, will always be placed high on her list of
representative fiction.

This time the story as such was stronger, there was more
substance and variety because of the greater number of
characters and their freer interplay upon each other. Most
important of all, when we look beyond the immediate reception by
the public to its more permanent position, the work is decidedly
more thoroughgoing in its psychology: it goes to the very core
of personality, where the earlier book was in some instances
satisfied with sketch-work. In "Adam Bede" the freshness comes
from the treatment rather than the theme. The framework, a
seduction story, is old enough--old as human nature and
pre-literary story-telling. But in "The Mill on the Floss" we
have the history of two intertwined lives, contrasted types from
within the confines of family life, bound by kin-love yet
separated by temperament. It is the deepest, truest of tragedy
and we see that just this particular study of humanity had not
been accomplished so exhaustively before in all the annals of
fiction. As it happened, everything conspired to make the author
at her best when she was writing this novel: as her letters
show, her health was, for her, good: we have noted the stimulus
derived from the reception of "Adam Bede"--which was as wine to
her soul. Then--a fact which should never be forgotten--the tale
is carried through logically and expresses, with neither
paltering nor evasion, George Eliot's sense of life's tragedy.
In the other book, on the contrary, a touch of the fictitious
was introduced by Lewes; Dinah and Adam were united to make at
the end a mitigation of the painfulness of Hetty's downfall.
Lewes may have been right in looking to the contemporary
audience, but never again did Eliot yield to that form of the
literar