The Essays of "George Eliot"   By: George Eliot (1819-1880)

THE ESSAYS OF “GEORGE ELIOT.”

COMPLETE.

COLLECTED AND ARRANGED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION ON HER “ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES,”

BY NATHAN SHEPPARD,

EDITOR OF “CHARACTER READINGS FROM GEORGE ELIOT,” AND “THE DICKENS READER;” AND AUTHOR OF “SHUT UP IN PARIS.”

NEW YORK: FUNK & WAGNALLS, PUBLISHERS, 10 AND 12 DEY STREET.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by FUNK & WAGNALLS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C.

CONTENTS.

PREFACE, 5 “GEORGE ELIOT’S” ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES, 7 I.—CARLYLE’S LIFE OF STERLING, 25 II.—WOMAN IN FRANCE, 31 III.—EVANGELICAL TEACHING, 64 IV.—GERMAN WIT, 99 V.—NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE, 141 VI.—SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS, 178 VII.—WORLDLINESS AND OTHER WORLDLINESS, 205 VIII.—THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM, 257 IX.—THE GRAMMAR OF ORNAMENT, 272 X.—FELIX HOLT’S ADDRESS TO WORKINGMEN, 275

PREFACE.

Since the death of George Eliot much public curiosity has been excited by the repeated allusions to, and quotations from, her contributions to periodical literature, and a leading newspaper gives expression to a general wish when it says that “this series of striking essays ought to be collected and reprinted, both because of substantive worth and because of the light they throw on the author’s literary canons and predilections.” In fact, the articles which were published anonymously in The Westminster Review have been so pointedly designated by the editor, and the biographical sketch in the “Famous Women” series is so emphatic in its praise of them, and so copious in its extracts from one and the least important one of them, that the publication of all the Review and magazine articles of the renowned novelist, without abridgment or alteration, would seem but an act of fair play to her fame, while at the same time a compliance with a reasonable public demand.

Nor are these first steps in her wonderful intellectual progress any the less, but are all the more noteworthy, for being first steps. “To ignore this stage,” says the author of the valuable little volume to which we have just referred—“to ignore this stage in George Eliot’s mental development would be to lose one of the connecting links in her history.” Furthermore, “nothing in her fictions excels the style of these papers.” Here is all her “epigrammatic felicity,” and an irony not surpassed by Heine himself, while her paper on the poet Young is one of her wittiest bits of critical analysis.

Her translation of Status’s “Life of Jesus” was published in 1840, and her translation of Feuerbach’s “Essence of Christianity” in 1854. Her translation of Spinoza’s “Ethics” was finished the same year, but remains unpublished. She was associate editor of The Westminster Review from 1851 to 1853. She was about twenty seven years of age when her first translation appeared, thirty three when the first of these magazine articles appeared, thirty eight at the publication of her first story, and fifty nine when she finished “Theophrastus Such.” Two years after she died, at the age of sixty one. So that George Eliot’s literary life covered a period of about thirty two years.