Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/170

164 vent her from doing amplest justice to the highest points of a sincere Christian, whether Churchman or Dissenter. Perhaps it seemed to her that such a one might be drawn best from the outside, and from an absolutely neutral point of view. In six weeks the story was finished, and sent by Lewes to Blackwood, as the work of "a friend who desired his good offices."

John Blackwood gave the tale all that anxious consideration which he used to bestow on every new contribution of promise. With his usual intuition he perceived that, if the work of a new hand, it contained the promise of uncommon success. Never one of those who think it wise to be chary of praise, and liking the story better the more he considered it, he wrote her many sympathetic and encouraging letters; and it was in reply to one of these (he having then no suspicion that his contributor was a woman) that she took for a signature the name by which henceforth she was identified in the world of letters, choosing George because it was Lewes's name, and Eliot as a fluent and euphonious accompaniment. "Mr Gilfil's Love-Story" and "Janet's Repentance" followed (all making their first appearance in the Magazine), and excited interest and speculation to a degree quite uncommon in the case of an anonymous writer treating of themes so level with ordinary life. When published in a collected form, the presentation copies brought acknowledgments from many whose praise was fame. Her old acquaintance Froude, completely mystified, did not know whether he was addressing his eulogy to "a young man or an old – a clergyman or a layman." Mrs Carlyle wrote one of her clever, unconventional, characteristic letters, and says she has conceived the writer in her mind as

"a man of middle age, with a wife, from whom he has got those beautiful feminine touches in his book a good many children, and a dog that he has as much fondness for as I have for my little Nero! For the rest, not just a clergyman, but brother or first cousin to a clergyman."

Dickens wrote her a letter which all his admirers will be glad of – not only warm and generous in appreciation, but most acute in piercing the veil of her incognito and pseudonym. He stood quite alone in his shrewd and confident guess: –

"I have observed what seemed to me such womanly touches in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so like a woman since the world began."

When John Blackwood came to town at this time, and called on Lewes, she consented to reveal herself to that genial friend and editor – titles almost synonymous in his case; for so warm was his sympathy with literary excellence, that the instances, if any, must be few where contributors whom he valued did not find in him a friend for life. It really might be said of him that the business aspect of the relation was the one least present to his mind. His good-fellowship would not let him preserve a formal attitude towards his associates. Next to his natural kin, he placed in affection those to whom he was bound by literary ties; he always seemed to regard his contributors as an unending Christmas-party, gathered together under the jovial auspices of the Magazine. His friendliness invariably tended to express itself in hospitality; he