BEFORE I understood the Latin character as well as I do now from having lived among a Latin people, it had often seemed strange to me that George Eliot, the writer whom we English regard as one of the greatest novelists our country has produced, should be so little known, and even when known should be so little appreciated, in France and Italy, and especially in the latter country. But on considering the matter more profoundly, I came to the conclusion that it is George Eliot's distinctly and radically English character that has made her thus unpalatable to Latin minds. Freethinker, Mazzinian, positive idealist though she was, according to all the successive phases of her development, George Eliot nevertheless remained all her life true to her race, her hereditary bias, and was au fond a Puritan of Puritan England; an earnest, uncompromising adherent to the views that have moulded the English character and have made it what it is in its strength and in its weakness. She is too desperately, too uniformly serious to attract instinctively the lighter souls of the glad and sunny south. She is the product of a country of grey skies and heavy atmospheres, and even her humour, so constant and abundant, is sad in its origin, and often nearer to tears than to laughter. To read her novels is not to find in them the recreation in search of which readers usually turn to works of fiction. It is therefore a surprise as well as a pleasure to come across a book about George Eliot written by

an Italian, and written, moreover, in a spirit of most devout admiration tempered by a cultivated critical faculty. The author is Signor Gaetano Negri, at one time Syndic of Milan. He is not entirely new to literature, having published some clever thoughtful essays and a very able study on Prince Bismarck.

Signor Negri begins his book by "putting his hands in front of him," to use an Italian expression— that is to say, by anticipating the objections which he knows his countrymen will make. He says he is aware that this author is not popular outside of England, and is almost unknown in his native land; and this

Although modern thought has worthy representative. In her vast never had a more complete or more and lucid intellect, German criticism, French positivism, and English rationalism, in which she was successively trained, were dominated and directed by an active spirit of tolerance, of love, and of compassion, and the outcome is an individuality profoundly original. Her art, like her reason, perfectly balanced, trained to the purest realism, is as far removed from the crudeness now too bitter and again too finespun of the French, as it is from the formless nebulosity of the Russian

writers. She also looks at life with a

microscope to discover the fibres of which it is composed; but she does not use clouded glasses, and therefore she sees and reproduces perfect images. Science and poetry unite in her to teach us a moral based upon love and tolerance, a moral which, instead of repudiating modern thought, is deduced from it as a logical consequence. This is the reason of the originality of this powerful writer, the reason of

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turbed, can discover the portion of truth which lies beneath the very opinions and illusions which it dissolves-how it is, therefore, supremely tolerant and respectful, and how it can succeed in replacing upon a secure basis duty and virtue." Signor Negri's chapter on the "Art of George Eliot" is important, new, and suggestive in many points; and where it is not absolutely new in idea it is new in the mode of presentation, from the fact that these opinions are put forward in another language, which means through the medium of another mode of regarding and judging-for diversity of language implies more than mere difference of speech it involves a different method of viewing life. Every language that we learn opens out and adds a new world to comprehension. The key-note of George Eliot's art Signor Negri qualifies as essentially realistic, or, as he puts it, veristic-a word which it would be well if we could introduce into the English language, the term realistic having, as our critic says, been of late so terribly abused:

our

"The realism of George Eliot is perfect and sincere it is the realism of an observer who approaches life, proposing to reproduce it without foregone conclusions and without preconceptions, without any intention to force in any sense the bearing and significance of facts; of an observer who is inspired by a profound and disinterested sympathy with the truth. It is an artistic realism which leans upon a scientific conception of life and of the world, which takes for its point of departure the conviction that all things here below are composed of the most slender elements, of which the sum and the action produce the greatest results; that nothing therefore is unworthy of study; that, on the contrary, criticism and analysis which enter into intimate companionship with things and reveal their minutest parts, are of far greater

value than sublime generalisation, only too often inflated with wind. . .. Her art is in the highest degree positive ; because as science admits no conception a priori which cannot be proved by conclusions, so this art admits no ideality based upon air, no reception of phantoms of the brain, and places its creative faculty in the discovery and reproduction of the relations which exist between things. The deeper, the more essential, the more intimate the relations which the poet discovers in realities and reproduces by the power of his art, the more is he worthy of that name, and the finer and the more efficacious will be his work."

After quoting George Eliot's profession of artistic faith, if so we may call it, placed in the opening chapters of Adam Bede,' Signor Negri goes on to say :—

แ This is the first profession of realism in art which was ever made, and it remains the most just and the most persuasive. Realism during the last thirty years has strangely deviated from its fundamental principles: it has become rhetorical; it has become idealism upside down-the idealism of ugliness, vice, and crime. world having been accustomed to find

The

the ideal in the beautiful and the good-finding itself confronted by a representation entirely antithetic to both one and the other-falls into the delusion that this is the reality, and takes for the expression of it that which is nothing but the effect of distorted vision. This illusion is aided by the minute care taken by modern narrators to describe the surroundings, the places, and the objects in which their fantastic personages live and move. . . . The descriptions in modern romances are masses which take away the breath of the most devout and patient reader; they seem at times like the catalogues of upholsterers and appraisers. With this photographic reproduction of the environment, the writer makes his readers believe that the drama which he places among them, the persons and the sentiments, are also real; but they are often nothing of the kind, not being based on psychological analysis

of the human mind, which is objective and therefore scientific. Their personages are artificial, fabricated with extreme instincts and passions-they are, in short, symbols destined to represent the preconceptions and prejudices of the writers-now they roll in the mire, now they are volatilised into an acrid and artificial perfume; but for the truly human nature, the nature which answers to the voice of our own consciousness, we look in vain. George Eliot has been wonderfully faithful to the programme she set herself she has really represented the world and mankind as they are, in all their reality, without making them either more attractive or more repulsive than the truth. Even when her personages are essentially mediocre, they interest us profoundly, because it is always an interesting spectacle to see a man, however mean in soul and intellect, struggling with the thousand obstacles and difficulties of life.

"This supremely impersonal and objective art, which never detaches itself from the truth, but clings to it and probes it with all its strength, is accompanied in George Eliot by a philosophy of life and the world which is in truth its primal origin. We have seen in her life how our writer passed from asceticism to criticism, and thence to positivism; and she remained during the rest of her intellectual career an immovable positivist. From the moment that the reality of human cognition revealed itself to her, that conception never left her. No one ever felt more strongly than she how man is held by insuperable barriers within the bounds of the world of phenomena. The reason which believes that it can pass beyond them is the victim of an illusion: one may take the leap, but one falls back to the place from whence one sprang. Man cannot pass outside the cycle of second causes: it is an inexorable law of his intelligence. This philosophy produced upon George Eliot the effect that it must always produce when we do not mix with it our own passions and interests-that is to say, that of rendering us supremely intelligent and tolerant of the beliefs and opinions professed by others.

For her these were phenomena worthy of deep and respectful study, like all other real things. She was only impatient of hypocrisy which is conscious falsehood. For polemic she substituted the observation of a naturalist. It was thus that the romances of the translator of Strauss are the most moving and eloquent demonstrations of the greatness and the efficacy of the religious sentiment. It is not only the right but the duty of every man to say that what he believes is the truth; but intolerance is the proof of complete blindness to the nature of the philosophical and religious problem. Nor is this all. All philosophies and all religions must, in spite of their diversity of form, have a common basis, and this is the feeling of the dependence in which the individual, and the world as it reveals itself to us, are found in relation to the superior order of things, which, however it may assume diverse names-God, humanity, future life, progress-is always at the same time real and inscrutable, and always exacts the co-ordination of the will of the individual with the development of social life; its subordination, therefore, to a complex group of obligations, of duties and of responsibilities. All George Eliot's thought, thought in its essence profoundly religious, is inspired by this intuitive perception of a necessary subordination, and it is upon this intuitive perception that she has regulated her life and built her philosophy, her science, her art. In George Eliot's earlier romances, 'Adam Bede' and 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' the religious question is directly treated as it were; but in the later novels there is no personage who offers, like Dinah Morris or Mr Tryon, the spectacle of the religious sentiment reduced to its purest essence and purified from all dogmatism. Even Rufus Lyon in Felix Holt' is drawn with a touch of irony, and goes to prove how doctrinary tendencies trouble even the purest inspirations and diminish the efficacy of example. For this is really George Eliot's fundamental creed, the complete separation of science and religion, and the reduction of the latter to the intuitive perception of the depen

dence of the individual upon the whole, to a sense of reverence towards an unknown Absolute, to which is necessarily subordinated every manifestation of daily life, a dependence and reverence which become the strongest corrective to individual egotism. . . . For George Eliot, therefore, the essence of morality is the struggle against egotism. . The necessity of things is for her the strongest of moral forces, because the egotist, the man of hard and narrow soul, who gives to his own individuality a value absolutely dominant and incompatible with the truth of things, finishes by rushing to ruin, and by producing disaster to those very selfish interests which he has so much at heart. The egotist lives in a false world, seeing it in a glass which distorts every object, is the victim of illusion, and can never attain happiness, because he seeks it where it is not to be found. This is the supreme teaching of George Eliot's writings. They are, therefore, a real code of positive morality, because in them is demonstrated how morality has in the world the unfailing sanction of necessity. And as this teaching is given to us with insuperable evidence and corroborated by observation and analysis, the books of this distinguished woman furnish perhaps the most wholesome and interesting reading in contemporary literature."

From this extract, which has unavoidably become rather long, it is plain that the Italian critic contemplates the author under his consideration rather from a moral than from an artistic point of view, a standpoint all the more extraordinary from an Italian, as Italians are apt to regard art first, and morality as very much of a secondary consideration. Accord ing to Signor Negri, George Eliot did not desire art for art's sake, nor apparently does he, for he declares that he finds the art of "Madame Bovary" wearisome, because he learns nothing from it. This is strange; for we have the testimony of Flaubert's own words

that he desired in this novel to show the evils of the very same form of wrong-thinking combated by George Eliot-the cultivation, namely, of ideas and desires incompatible with the surroundings in which we find ourselves. True, Maggie Tulliver's ambition is noble while Emma Bovary's is base; still they both failed because they struggled against the environments in which they found themselves, and therefore they are both in a sense mentally allied. Consequently, Flaubert's work should set us thinking quite as much and as deeply as George Eliot's, for in truth egotism is the theme of both.

The infinite variety of George Eliot's works strikes her Italian critic, as it must strike all students of her writings; still, even in the variety there is a certain

sameness.

Signor Negri goes to the length of drawing from George Eliot's works the conclusion that she would perhaps, if she could have lived her life over again, have remained like Mary Garth within the narrow circle of her early surroundings. In that case, however, he himself admits, “The world would have lost George Eliot-one of the purest, the most original, and the most eloquent of novelists." The conservative tendency that pervades the novelist's work is strongly felt by her Italian critic, and a little astonishes him. He points out how obviously she prefers Adam Bede to Felix Holt. She had no faith, it would appear, in parliamentary or legislative reform; her faith was all placed in the work and in the progress of individual man. Signor Negri considers that she never speaks of the past save with respect. The English student of this great writer may be permitted to doubt whether she considers the condi