tend to lucidity: thus, in the first sentence of 'Deronda' we find a glance mentioned as of a "dynamic quality" – an expression of which we (though not destitute of some tincture of dynamical instruction) have failed to this day to see the applicability. It is observable, too, that the human interest of her tales diminished, and latterly those readers were best pleased who enjoyed tasting the philosophy of the author more than following the story. But, like all great writers, she created her own public, and held it in firm allegiance to the end. We have heard a very experienced judge of literature affirm 'Middlemarch' to be not merely her greatest, but the greatest novel.
"No former book of mine," she says, "has been received with more enthusiasm, not even 'Adam Bede.' ... People seem so bent on giving supremacy to 'Middlemarch' that they are sure not to like any future book so well."
Jews and Jewesses, even rabbis and professors, expressed their admiration and gratitude for 'Deronda,' and we imagine that it met with Gentile appreciators no less ardent. "The success of the work at present," writes the author, "is greater than that of 'Middlemarch' up to the corresponding point of publication."
Her intense absorbing interest in human life was also the basis of the creed which, in default of other, George Eliot adopted. We have seen how she cast off her early and earnest belief: nothing which concerns her can be more interesting to the admirers of her works than to know what substitute she found for it, for her new opinions imbue all her writings, and form a necessary key to them. We will therefore endeavour to give some account of them.
It does not appear that philosophy had any share in inspiring the doubts which led her to abandon her former persuasions; but she must have acquired, immediately afterwards, fresh grounds for confidence in her new opinions from the friends with whom she was most intimately associated in London, and who had arrived at their conclusions from a direction entirely different. Their conclusions required them to accept nothing as fit to form part of a system, either of philosophy or religion, which is not based on fact and capable of being made apparent to the reason. They asserted, not that all else was non-existent, but that it was unknowable, and outside the region of inquiry or theory. Consequently they practically assumed this world as the be-all and the end-all of human existence. In its conditions, as interpreted by science, they found the beginnings, and traced the development, of man as we see him, and declined to consider any possibilities before or after as other than unscientific fancies. For them spirit, with its light of conscience, are evolutions, produced in immeasurably long process by the conditions of the material world, and the action and reaction on each other of the minds of its inhabitants. They find obvious the inference that the spirit thus earth-born will of necessity share the dissolution of the body – dust it is, and unto dust shall it return. Without denying the existence of an unknown cause, they do deny that the conception of it can be a proper basis of a practical religion. For them a deity has, in all ages, and with all peoples, been an invention of man's mind, stimulated by man's hopes and fears – as the Brocken Spectre is the immensely exaggerated shadow, cast on a cloud, of the spectator's own figure,
