It is because George Eliot knows this and reveals it with extraordinary clearness that her books have an especial value. Other qualities they have, of course, and very high qualities. But this is their proper and peculiar excellence, and the source, if I mistake not, of their strongest appeal to sanely thinking men. _The Man Who Understood Woman_ is the title of a recent clever trivial story. But of course such a man is a myth, an impostor, or a self-deluder. He makes a preposterous claim. Thackeray and Dickens, for example, made no such pretension. Some of their women are admirably drawn; they are very lovable, or very despicable, as the case may be; but they are not completely convincing. Thackeray comes nearer than Dickens, and George Meredith, I think, much nearer than either of the others. But in George Eliot we feel that we are listening to one who does understand. Her women, in their different types, reveal something of that thinking, willing, feeling other-half of humanity with whom man makes the journey of life. They do not cover all the possibilities of variation in the feminine, for these are infinite, but they are real women, and so they have an interest for real men. * * * * * Let us take it for granted that we know enough of the details of George Eliot’s life to enable us to understand and appreciate certain things in her novels. Such biographical knowledge is illuminating in the study of the works of any writer. The author of a book is not an algebraic quantity nor a strange monster, but a human being with certain features and a certain life-history. But, after all, the promotion of literary analysis is not the object of these chapters. Plain reading, and the pleasure of it, is what I have in mind. For that cause I love most of George Eliot’s novels, and am ready to maintain that they are worthy to be loved. And so, even if my “taken for granted” a few lines above should not be altogether accurate in these days of ignorant contempt of all that is “Victorian,” I may still go ahead to speak of her books as they are in themselves: strong, fine, rewarding pieces of English fiction: that is what they would remain, no matter who had written them. It must be admitted at once that they are not adapted to readers who like to be spared the trouble of thinking while they read. They do not belong to the class of massage-fiction, Turkish-bath novels. They require a certain amount of intellectual exercise; and for this they return, it seems to me, an adequate recompense in the pleasurable sense of quickened mental activity and vigour.