Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/300

288 mêmes que des chagrins, et cette espérance vous la ferait supporter." The passage on the roadside crucifix in Adam Bede ends thus : "No wonder man's religion has sorrow in it : no wonder he needs a suffering God!" The sentence reads like a quotation from Chateaubriand, but it is the quintessence of Feuerbach. In the same chapter of Deronda the lament of Francesca is quoted with repeated emphasis, and the moon is entangled among trees and houses. The figure occurs in the poem which Musset wrote against those very verses of Dante. A motto before the fifty-seventh chapter of Daniel Deronda comes very near the preface to Fiesco. Several candidates have felt that Mr. Brooke has purloined their speeches at the hustings. One of his good sayings points to France. "I want that sort of thing — not ideas, you know, but a way of putting them." The speechless deputy in the comedy says, "Ce n'est jamais les idées qui me manquent, c'est le style."

When she left Warwickshire, where Mr. Froude and Miss Martineau had been her friends and Emerson had shone for a moment, she was not dazzled by what she found in London. The discriminating judgment, the sense of proportion were undisturbed by reverence or enthusiasm for the celebrities of the day. The tone towards Macaulay and Mill is generally cold, and she shrinks from avowing the extent of her dislike for Carlyle. Dickens behaved well towards his lofty rival, but she feels his defects as keenly as his merits ; and she is barely just to Darwin and Lecky. A long ground-swell followed her breach with Miss Martineau. The admiration expressed for Mr. Ruskin — the Ruskin of 1858 — is flavoured with the opposite feeling ; and the opposite feeling towards Buckle is not flavoured with admiration ; for her artistic temper revolts against the abstraction of the average man and the yoke of statistics, with its attendant reliance on the efficacy of laws. George Eliot highly esteemed both the Newmans. She wished to be within hearing of the pulpit at Edgbaston. The Apologia breathed much life into her, and she points out the beauty of one passage ; but it is the writer's farewell to friends and no part of his