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166 finement of enthusiasm, the power of charm, which individualise Dinah. Whether that highly pitched nature was true to itself in consenting to marry the stalwart Adam, we will not undertake to say. No doubt, the later scenes are among the best in the book; no doubt, the reader, not being himself a religious enthusiast, approves of this pretty devout woman turning out to be "not too bright and good for human nature's daily food" – and a reader's content is a legitimate aim in art: nevertheless, we are not sure that this pleasing end is not gained by some sacrifice of identity in the heroine; we are not sure that young Mrs Bede is exactly the same person as Dinah Morris, or has not undergone some declination from that spiritual creature. However that may be, this consummation was early decreed by the author. Lewes, after hearing the opening of the book, suggested that Dinah should marry Adam. It was an obvious enough suggestion, from a plot-making point of view, and was at once accepted; so that from the third chapter the story bent itself to that comfortable catastrophe.

The artistic value of George Eliot's religious experiences in enabling her to create this her highest character, and many others in that and later novels, is at least as notable as in the Clerical series. Without this element no picture of working life would be true; it is in that class to which existence is so earnest, in which its evils are so strongly present, and in which reason is but a weak check on impulse, that the religious sentiment is most powerful and contagious. But it is an element very difficult to introduce and to blend harmoniously with the others; and the excellence of the result is in this case proportionate to the power demanded, for extraordinary force is thus given to the pictures of artisan and peasant life. In dealing with the more worldly aspect of these, the experiences of her early home are no less important. Her father's daughter, when moving amidst the details of the carpenter's shop, of the farm, of the dairy, was on familiar ground. While keeping house for Robert Evans, she had herself had butter on her mind, and had learned the difficulty of making a farm pay; she had studied from the life the labourers of the field and the cow-shed; she had witnessed the amenities and appreciated the joys of a harvest-supper. Bartle Massey, the schoolmaster, too quaint and animated a character not to have had some grains of reality, may have often looked in for a gossip at Griff; and it must have been recollection, too, that supplied the outward signs of a healthy old age in the elder Martin Poyser. Mrs Poyser, the next best after Dinah, we take it, of her characters, owed her distinctive wit mostly to imagination: the many sagacious apothegms of that practical woman are the golden coinage of her creator's brain.

It seems now merely a matter of course that an immense extension of reputation should have at once followed on the publication of 'Adam Bede,' which took place in February 1859. In March, Blackwood wrote to tell her she was "a popular author as well as a great author." Bulwer, whose opinion she thought much of, wrote to Blackwood a letter about the book, which, as might be expected from him, was generously appreciative. "The success," she says, "has been triumphantly beyond anything I had dreamed of." The