because with all his psychologist's methods he dealt with a world and complications largely of his own creation. But for George Eliot there is none but a latterhalf-of-the-nineteenth-century audience; it is not too much to say that no other would know what her later books meant. This very fact increases the probability of a strong revival of interest in her work; we may read her less at the moment, but I question whether the public capable of reading her with full understanding is not greater now than at the time of say "Middlemarch," which, in spite of Mr. Harrison's somewhat extraordinary remarks on its dealing with a set of provincials, has succeeded like perhaps no other book in reproducing a certain sense of intricacy of motive, of different threads pulling different ways, of the pressure of a highly sophisticated civilization, which every year grows more characteristic of life. Lydgate, for example, is probably more typical of the intellectual tragedy of modern life to-day than he was twenty years ago.

In this time of specialization and the invention of divisions on fine lines, I am surprised that no one has called George Eliot a 66 psychological realist" or "realistic psychologist." She did for that side of her contemporary human beings what the ordinary realistic novelist (if there is one) supposes himself to want to do for their outer life. She applied what her eulogists rightly enough called "an extraordinary knowledge of the human heart" to giving a reproduction, so true as sometimes to be startling, of human thought and motive of the kind that can be so analyzed and so set forth. If this sentence sounds like an utterance of Bunsby, and any reader thinks it a meaningless limitation, let him imagine her creating Colonel Newcome, or Becky Sharp, or Lord Kew, or George Warrington (to go to only one writer for characters), and he will understand why I write it. Within that limitation she worked with a positive mastery—such a mastery that it is impossible to turn back to even her most familiar book without increasing wonder at it; and I cannot think either that she has been overpraised by her own generation or will be among the neglected authors of the next.

CIVILIZATION is so apt to put its head down and rush ahead with its eyes shut that it does it good to have someone rap it smartly on the nose now and then, and tell it to look up and take notice what it is about and whither bound. It gets many such raps, and takes such momentary notices, some of which it swiftly concludes to be false alarms and downs its head again and butts along as before. But occasionally somebody's "Whoa!" is effectual, and the "Gee!" or "Haw!" that follows has a perceptible influence in changing the direction of the monster's

course.

Somewhat in the nature of such an admonition was the paper lately read by Professor Flinders Petrie before the British Association, in which he warned the wise men of Great Britain that civilization was a progressive growth which must develop naturally, and that the results of one sort of civilization cannot often be grafted with impunity upon the stem of another. Professor Petrie says that it is not possible, for example, to make Englishmen out of Egyptians by teaching them to read and write and cipher. The general impression in England and America is that reading, writing, and arithmetic are elements of civilization, and that the introduction of them is a sure precursor of increased intelligence and power. That may be true here and in England (though it is not undisputed), but it seems that it is not generally true in Egypt. Dr. Petrie, who is an accomplished Egyptologist, declares that in every instance that has come to his notice, the Egyptian who has had reading and writing thrust upon him has acquired them at the cost of health and intelligence, and has turned out to be half-witted and incapable of taking care of himself. Teaching of that sort does not develop the ordinary Egyptian, but stunts and eventually kills him. Dr. Petrie declares that the civilization of Europe is a curse to peoples who have not the stuff in them to endure it, and who have not been educated up to it by centuries of training. "No change," he says, "is legitimate or beneficial to the real character of a people except what flows from conviction and the natural growth of the mind. To the feebler races our

civilization, developed in a cold country, amid one of the hardest, least sympathetic, and most self-denying and calculating peoples in all the world, is death; we make a dead-house and call it civilization. Scarcely a single race can bear the contact and the burden. And then we talk complacently about the mysterious decay of savages before white men." What Professor Petrie would have of his countrymen is that they shall stop trying to force the European system of civilization on peoples which have not had a European development, and try instead to aid the development of such peoples on the lines of such progress as they have made already. He would check the intellectual forcing process which is death to them, and give them something which may lead to fuller life. What his deliverance will be worth when the critics and reviewers get through with it we shall presently see. It seems to be aimed at missionaries as much as at any one else, and no suggestion of an imperfection in missionary methods is likely to get off either in England or America without thorough discussion. But whatever injustice it may do to discreet individuals, it seems a deliverance with sense in it, not too novel to be appreciated, but an authoritative expression of ideas that most of us of this generation have turned over in our own minds. Our civilization often seems too hard, not only for peoples who have not had our training, but for a good many of us who were born and brought up to it.

The stoutest of us are glad to take to the woods from time to time and renew our strength. We know the strain of our own system; we recognize its inconsistencies and hypocrisies as well as its great power and the amazing results of its activity. but we know that it is mighty hard work and abounds over-much in "hustling." Our way seems the way to succeed, but we are not so infatuated with its advantages as not sometimes to suspect that there are other and less strenuous ways, whereby people who do not get on so fast as we may have more fun on the road. Our way is ours and must continue to be ours, for no other would satisfy us; but as for all those other and perhaps lazier peoples, ah, good missionaries who go out to help them, be easy with them, and pray do not try to make them too much like us. Get our standards somewhat out of your heads for the time! Try to distinguish between what is truly Christian and what is merely European or American! Instead of endeavoring to make the poor heathen precisely like us, will you not rather steer them toward the likeness of what we should be if we were a good deal more like them? If they can learn our virtues, such as they are, and a little of our knowledge, and escape the responsibilities that come of having our power and our complicated consciences, what comfortable and pleasant folks they may become, and what a refreshment it will be for us to go and dwell with them awhile from time to time when we are tired.