The Arkansaw traveler., 1885-05-02
FOR woRsHrppERs ONLY.
.fLoudon World.l


 The werk is apparently intended for the ot worshippers only. The most remarkable novelist among women of the century had from the first many admirers. Of these there was always an inner circle, to which but comparative few, after toilsome process of initiation, were admitted. To members of this eso- teric band George Eliot's books were not only literature, but philosophy, religion, history, and all the ologies compounded into mystical unity. When the casual, the secular, the uninstructed reader men, tioned to one of the elect particular novel of George Eliot's with appreciation. the apostle heaved sigh, smiled smile of infinite sadness and contempt, then looked scorniully incredulous, and either changed the subject or sank into superb silence. The writings of George Eliot were in fact to her votaries much what Suffolk punches were to the gentlemen who gave David Copperheld his first fall in life, by supplanting him on the box seat of the coach" wittles and drink, lodging, wife, and children, reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, snuff, tobacker, and sleep" The author was nothing less than present divinity. The most trivial utterances, the most commonplace or incomprehensible thoughts or words, the best or the poorest descriptions of natural scenery, were full of subtle sym bolism, and had an inner meaning, which were only to be apprehended by the illu- minated eye of faith. To all such per- sons, to every one who has seen in the author of Adam Bede not merely a gifted writer of fiction, but a paragon among fetishes, the Life now published will be absolutely above criticism, and will send them, as we observe it has al- ready done, into paroxysms of groveling idolatry or hishfalutin panegyric. It is essentially biography of the cloister, in- tended for worshippers only, to be appre- ciated at its true worth by those to whom George Eliot is nine-,enths spiritual teacher and only one-tenth novelist
 Others will be struck with astonishment and disappointment by the fact that what is probably the fullest account of George Eliot's life we shall ever have should be from beginning to end almost destitute of human interest. Never did the cur rent of any existence flow on more evenly, more monotonously, in a channel mar rower, with surface more smugly smil- ing. rippled by so Jew breezes, darkened by so few clouds, as through the 200 or 400 pages of which this book consists
 MT. Cross does not even attempt to paint a picture, still less to adorn tale or point a moral. He does not suffer us to sus. Pect that the placidity of this pilgrimage of threescore years and one had ever been ruffied What is presented to us is not a woman of hopes and passions resembling those of ordinary humanity, but an inn personal aggregate of attributes. We read the record, scarcely of feelings or instincts, but of qualities; not mutually connected or grouped into living and breathing whole by any feshy link, any prevailing tie of nature. Religion, devo- ton, the despondency and the exaltation. which are the vicissitudes belonging to each ;physical, ethica', and psychological science, scientific analysis, commercial
 shrewdness, practical common sense, in- tellectual insight, literary accomplish
 ments, the musician, the lipguist, the stu dent, the centre of an awe-stricken throng of visitors, whose drawing-room was on Sunday afternoon haly of holies-all this we are permitted to gaze upon; but ot the woman, the wife, the human being, we do not catch glimpse. In George Eliot's novels there is an habitual under current of humor and wit yelling up to the surface. In the extracts from her letters given here there is no scintilla of playfulness or lightness nothing to show that the writer of them was not a frigid, pompous, passionless pedant. The most severe and recondite passages of Romo- la are easy reading comp ared with much
 of the correspondence and extracts from tho meagre diaries given here. The cir cumstances under which George Eliots different novels appeared, the pretenders to the authorship of them, the prices which she received, the letters in which such copies of her works as she presented were acknowledged-nothing, of course, could be more interesting than the &C., count of these. But the record of every- thing else will be, save to the worshipper, as flat, proftless, and monotonous as the narrative of George Eliot's Italian trip in the second volume, which it is difficult te believe that even a worshipper can enjoy.
 There are certain definite conclusions, neither unintsresting nor unimportant in themselves, at which these volumes ius- tify us in arriving. It is clear, in the first place, that George Eho. had an invincible tendency toward scientific terminolopy and imagery from the first, and also that, as was stated some years ago in these columns, though the statement was contradicted at the time, Mir. Herbert Spencer was one of her educating inf1u- ences. When young lady of nineteen years of age writes to an intimate friend that her misd, "never of the most highly organized genius, is more than usually chaotic, and is rather like a stratum of conglomerated fragments that show here a jaw and rib of some ponderous quadru- ped, there delicate alto yelevo of some fern-like plant, tiny shells, and m mysterious nondescripts encrusted and united with some unvaried and uninteresting but use full stone," one need not be surprised at the jargon which makes whole pages of Daniel Deronda unintelligible to per- sons who have been educated in the pre- scientific age. Secondly, it is clear that