aspect. Were he concerned, his wrath might even get the better of his self-control, and draw him into the fracas, his sense of shame being for the nonce in abeyance.

And here let us pause for a moment to consider one curious thing about George Eliot's humor. It is not likely that any one of those present at Mr. Tulliver's dinner-table thought of the scene as in any way humorous. Mrs. Holt, when she presented herself before the "three Mr. Transomes," had not the slightest suspicion of cutting a ridiculous figure. Certainly those good fellows assembled at the Rainbow, discoursing of red Durhams and ghos'es, were not intentionally humorous. On the contrary, they were all dead serious-dead serious and caustic. Joshua Rann did not conceive of himself as funny. It seems to be this very unawareness that constitutes part of the humor. Often the humor is not as much in the thing said as in the curious mental processes which it reveals. In some of these disclosures, especially in The Mill on the Floss, as I have already said, the attitude of the author is decidedly ironic. Consider the deep ironic significance of that speech of Mrs. Tulliver's:

"There's no woman strives more for her children, and I'm sure, at scouring-time this Lady Day as I've had all the bed-hangings taken town, I did as much as the two gells put together; and there's this last elder-flower wine I've made-beautiful! I always offer it along with the sherry, though sister Glegg will have it I'm so extravagant; and as for liking to have my clothes tidy, and not go a fright about the house, there's nobody in the parish can say anything against me in respect to backbiting and making mischief, for I don't wish anybody any harm; and nobody loses by sending me a pork-pie, for my pies are fit to show with the best of my neighbors; and the linen's so in order, as if I was to die to-morrow I shouldn't be ashamed. A woman can do no more than she can."

The unenlightened mind-its curious mechanism and its strange fogginess seems to have come under George Eliot's close observation. Indeed, she seems to have bent her keen intellect to a special study of that phenomenon. In The Mill on the Floss, she has portrayed most skillfully the workings of the feeble mind under misfortune, -its bewilderment, its absorption

in narrow griefs, its unapprehension of the deeper pathos. There is something pathetic about Mrs. Tulliver's mental feebleness,her anxiety to acquit herself of undutifulness; her poor, piteous inane defense, “and I did say to him times and times, 'Whatever you do, don't go to law'-and what more could I do?"; her childish wail, "I never thought it 'ud be so for worse as this"; her stupid persistence in saying the wrong thing; her bewilderment in this empty life, now that "the objects among which her mind had moved complacently were all gone," now that "all the little hopes, and schemes, and speculations, all the pleasant little cares about her treasures which had made the world quite comprehensible to her for a quarter of a century, since she had made her first purchase of the sugar-tongs, has been suddenly snatched away from her." But the most humorous and complete exhibition of poor Mrs. Tulliver's lack of mental faculty we have in her determination to seek an interview with Mr. Wakem. "Imagine," our author says, "a truly respectable and amiable hen, by some portentous anomaly, taking to reflection and inventing combinations by which she might prevail on Hodge not to wring her neck, or send her and her chicks to market; the result could hardly be other than cackling and fluttering Mrs. Tulliver, seeing that everything had gone wrong, had begun to think that she had been too passive in life; and that, if she had applied her mind to business, and taken a strong resolution now and then, it would have been all the better for her and her family." Then follows a résumé of Mrs. Tulliver's train of reasoning: "The attorney might be a very reasonable man-why not? He had married a Miss Clint, and at the time Mrs. Tulliver had heard of the marriage, the summer when she wore her blue satin spencer, and had not yet any thoughts of Mr. Tulliver, she knew no harm of Wakem. And certainly towards herself-whom he knew to have been a Miss Dodson-it was out of all possibility that he could entertain anything but goodwill, when it was once brought home to his observation that she, for her part, had never wanted to go to law, and indeed was at present disposed to take Mr. Wakem's view of all subjects rather than her husband's. In fact, if that attorney saw a respectable matron like herself disposed to 'give him good words,'

why shouldn't he listen to her representations? For she would put the matter clearly before him, which had never been done yet. And he would never go and bid for the mill on purpose to spite her, an innocent woman, who thought it likely enough that she had danced with him in her youth at Darleigh's, for at those big dances she had often and often danced with young men whose names she had forgotten."

If Mrs. Tulliver as the victim of adversity is pathetic, she is still more pathetic as the mother of Maggie. That she should have been the mother of so extraordinary a child was her misforShe felt it herself. She bewailed her lot. The girl was brown-skinned. The mother could conceive only of a fairskinned child. The girl's hair would not curl. Curled hair alone was the mother's criterion of beauty. It was a deep grievance that the she should have had "but one gell, and her so comical." She verily believed that the child was "half an idiot in some things," because when sent upstairs to fetch anything, she sometimes forgot what she was gone for and would perhaps sit down on the floor in the sunshine and plait her hair and sing to herself llke a Bedlam creature, all the while the mother was waiting for her downstairs. (Mrs. Tulliver did not herself indulge in day-dreams.) The child was not fond of patchwork, saw no sense in "tearing things to pieces to sew 'em together again." The mother would have her sit and sew, "like a little lady." Certainly she was incorrigible, this child of whom Aunt Glegg prophesied evil and in whom there were to be discerned none of the Dodson traits,-"There isn't a bit of our family in her."

That Mrs. Tulliver was mother of so extraordinary a child was Maggie's misfortune likewise. It was hard that the child must suffer because of her mother's imbecility; she must be vexed with falling locks, because her mother would have her hair curl; she must suffer ignominy, because her mother could not take a humorous view of the shorn locks, and had not the wit to perceive the motive which prompted the hair-cutting trick; she must be denied the joy of going in the gig with her father when he went to fetch Tom from the academy, because the day was too wet for a little girl to go out in her best bonnet (the stupidity of it!); she

must bear injustice and depreciation (is depreciation ever good for one?), because the mother lacked the mental calibre requisite for the discernment of what the more enlightened beheld as the promise of uncommon personal and spiritual beauty.

Doubtless more children suffer from being the offspring of incapable mothers-incapable with the Mrs. Tulliver kind of incapability—than the world has any knowledge of. Such cases represent conditions which cannot very well be remedied, and which do not come under the observation of social and philanthropic workers. And, after all, it is difficult to say which is the more deplorable, a mother's inability to recognize in her child rare and exceptional qualities, or a mother's blindness to her child's weakness and defects; it is difficult to say which mother is doing her child the greater injustice, she who is stupidly blind, or she who is foolishly blind. Stupidity, oftener than not, is the basic defect in both mothers. Hence the great need of the fullest intellectual development.

In Maggie's case, the reality of the situation is indisputable; yet one cannot help asking, as one often asks concerning the experiences of real life, was all the trial needful, the chilhood vexations, the fault-finding, the depreciation, the girlhood loneliness and privation, the sordidness and dreariness? We are told that "she rebelled against her lot, she fainted under its loneliness, and fits even of anger and hatred towards her father and mother, who were so unlike what she would have them to be-towards Tom, who checked her, and met her thought and feeling always by some thwarting difference-would flow over her affections and conscience like a lava stream, and frighten her with a sense that it was not difficult for her to become a demon." Can we say that the fondness and indulgence she longed for would not have been good for her? Can we declare that a gratification of all her eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad, a satisfying of all her blind, unconscious yearnings for content and happiness, would have hindered her soul's growth? Why should life be so full of struggle, so full of that conflict between the outward and the inward, and so dimmed and saddened by those painful collisions which come of it? We are told that the little girl Maggie instinctively behaved as if she were quite un

"

conscious of Philip's deformity; that "her own keen sensitiveness and experience of family criticism sufficed to teach her this as well as if she had been directed by the most finished breeding. I am inclined to believe that her own keen sensitiveness would have sufficed, even had there been no experience of criticism, for Maggie's instincts (not in matters of self-interest, but in whatever pertains to the spirit) were swift and unerring. It was indeed this extraordinary spiritual development that constituted Maggie's exceptionalness and lovableness.

One can easily imagine the glorious creature Maggie would have been, if her need of some tender, demonstrative love, her thirst for all knowledge, her love of beauty, had been satisfied; it is easy to imagine the blossoming out of her soul. "You were so full of life when you were a child," Philip Wakem said to her at one of their meetings in the Red Deeps, remonstrating against her effort to gain resignation through privation. "I thought you would be a brilliant woman-all wit and bright imagination. And it flashes out in your face still, until you draw that veil of dull quiescence over it." Even in spite of the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart, in spite of the sordid tasks, the weary, joyless hours, the privation of all pleasant things, her graces of body and mind became more and more apparent. perhaps, after all, we have no occasion to bewail her lot, though the question arises, Do people really grow good through suffering?

So

And Tom Tulliver-what shall we say of him? In literary critticism, Tom, I think, has had rather more than his share of praise. Leslie Stephen pronounces him one of the most successful of George Eliot's male characters-most successful because most masculine. Tom does indeed possess some sterling qualities, such as integrity, uprightness, strength of purpose, pride, sense of duty. In his devotion to business, as well as in the practicality of his mind,-also in his unimaginativeness, he is quite the modern youth. Certainly Tom Tulliver is not remarkable for depth of tenderness, or for warmth of temperament. We are told that he was one of those whose minds are strongly marked with the positive and negative (negative, notice, as well as positive) qualities that create severity (a significant remark):