leaves essences alone, only disappoints. The pretty quarrel, too, that is going on among the experts about the fundamentals of Darwinism has helped to discredit it. And with this discredit George Eliot, the literary voice of Darwinism, suffers too. The danger which I foresaw in 1879—'the risk of subordinating the eternal truths of art to what may be the temporary opinions of science'—has proved to be no illusory one.
Again our interests have turned from speculation, even from the bases of conduct, and are almost exclusively social. 'We are all socialists now'—since the Redistribution Act—and George Eliot has little to say on the Condition of England Question. And what little she does say, in Felix Holt for example, is not much in consonance with the feeling of to-day. Her dearest memories were of a time when old Leisure was still alive and social changes took place but slowly. Felix Holt the Radical is rather Felix Holt the Conservative; he is not even a Tory-Democrat. But the ineffectiveness of her social utterances was a sign that her heart was not in the social part of her work; we have no heart for anything else.
For all these reasons then the reputation of George Eliot is undergoing a kind of eclipse in this last decade of the nineteenth century. It is becoming safe to indulge in cheap sneers at the ineffectiveness of her heroes, at the want of élan in
