Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/95

speak to one's fellow-men' and make her work 'an instrument of culture.' And henceforward this motive was conscious with her, and in each of her creations she looks round for some idea which the fiction shall embody. The process begins with Silas Marner, which grew from the merest millet-seed of thought.' Of this she says: 'It sets—or is intended to set—in a strong light the remedial influences of pure, natural human relations.' And in Silas Marner the balance between artistic creation and philosophic construction is most evenly held of all her books, of which it is in a way the quintessence. Henceforth, however, the philosophic interest is predominant, and her words are intended more to point a moral than to adorn a tale. Romola has its moral summed up in the last words of the book, and in an elaborate letter to Mr. R. H. Hutton she avows her intention of expressing certain truths by the relations of Baldo and Baldassare, of Tito and his patrons, and seems to be chiefly interested in Romola herself as presenting a moral problem. The elaborate note on The Spanish Gypsy before referred to gives the motif of the work as the clashing of individual desires and hereditary claims. Middlemarch, as its Proem states, is a contribution towards the woman question, though its scale happily caused it to overflow into a study of provincial