the novel, as in other arts, and for some time the vogue has been growing for the conte as against the novel, and for the romantic novel of incident as against the realistic novel of character. Amid the problems and perplexities of the present we fly for relaxation to the Something-other-than-Here-and-Now, and we like to take it short. Both tendencies tell against George Eliot. There is a general tendency nowadays against taking intellectual nourishment in anything but small doses. The enormous growth of the magazines is at once a result and a cause of this. Tit-Bits completes what the Fortnightly Review began. It is indeed an Age of Tit-bits. The strenuous attention which the works of George Eliot demand is too much for minds accustomed to such intellectual food as the magazines now supply. The high seriousness of her art displeases the frivolous, and the tone of English Letters just now is distinctly frivolous.
George Eliot aimed and claimed to be a teacher. Her works were a conscious criticism of life. They gave the new feeling about life that seemed to be rendered necessary by the triumph of Darwinism in English speculation. During the 'seventies' there was a confident feeling, among those of us who came to our intellectual majority in those years, that Darwinism was to solve all the problems. This was doubtless due to the triumphant tone in which certain eminent professors of
