THE INNER LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT.
The Inner Life of George Eliot. By Charles Gardner. (Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons. 5s. net.)—Much shall be forgiven to Mr. Gardner, for he has loved much. To him George Eliot is an-ideal to be passionately followed ; she is the woman whose one stirring desire is to help the world outside her; her "real kinship is with the best of the old Hebrew prophets." He has loved her and studied her and made a real effort to set her on a pedestal from which no criticism shall avail to drag her down. But there is indeed much to be forgiven, for whatever may be George Eliot's true position in the ranks of writers and of moralists, her work has by now asserted itself as an acknowledged classic, an historical fact ; surely it is superfluous to fill almost a hundred and fifty pages with quotation and paraphrase, to expound her novels, and tell again the story of Tom and Maggie Tulliver. Moreover, it is very much open to question whether Mr. Gardner can bo justified in assuming that George Eliot's novels are for the most part auto- biography pure and simple, or in compiling his chapters on her early life and character almost entirely from the Mill on the Floss; or whether much of her shrewd, intimate understanding of the human mind may not rather be attributed to a gift of far- reaching imagination and to a wide experience of men and women.
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