Transcribed from the 1884 William Blackwood and Sons edition by DavidPrice, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
BY THE LATE JOHN CROMBIE BROWN
FOURTH EDITION
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLXXXIV
All Rights reserved
The greater part of the following Essay was written several yearsago. It was too long for any of the periodicals to which the authorhad been in the habit of occasionally contributing, and no thought wasthen entertained of publishing it in a separate form. One day,however, during his last illness, the talk happened to turn on GeorgeEliot’s Works, and he mentioned his long-forgotten paper. One of the friends then present—a competent critic and high literaryauthority—expressed a wish to see it, and his opinion was so favourablethat its publication was determined on. The author then proposedto complete his work by taking p. viup‘Middlemarch’ and ‘Deronda’; and if any traceof failing vigour is discernible in these latter pages, the reader willbear in mind that the greater portion of them was composed when theauthor was rapidly sinking under a painful disease, and that the concludingparagraphs were dictated to his daughter after the power of writinghad failed him, only five days before his death.
It is a source of great gratification to the friends of the authorthat his little volume has already been so well received that the secondedition has been out of print for some time. In now publishinga third, they have been influenced by two considerations,—thecontinued demand for the book, and the favourable opinion expressedof it by “George Eliot” herself, which, since her lamenteddeath, delicacy no longer forbids them to make public.
In a letter to her friend and publisher, the late Mr John Blackwood,received soon after the appearance of the first edition, she writes,with reference to certain passages: “They seemed to me more penetratingand finely felt than almost anything I have read in the way of printedcomments on my own writings.” Again, in a letter to a friendof the author, p. viiishesays: “When I read the volume in the summer, I felt as if I hadbeen deprived of something that should have fallen to my share in neverhaving made his personal acquaintance. And it would have beena great benefit,—a great stimulus to me to have known some yearsearlier that my work was being sanctioned by the sympathy of a mindendowed with so much insight and delicate sensibility. It is difficultfor me to speak of what others may regard as an excessive estimate ofmy own work, but I will venture to mention the keen perception shownin the note on page 29, as something that gave me peculiar satisfaction.”
Once more. In an article in the ‘Contemporary Review’of last month, on “The Moral Influence of George Eliot,”by “One who knew her,” the writer says: “It happensthat the only criticism which we have heard mentioned as giving herpleasure, was a little posthumous volume published by Messrs Blackwood.”
With such testimony in its favour, it is hoped a third edition willnot be thought uncalled for.
March 1881.
“There is in man a higher than love of happiness: he can dowithout happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.”
Such may be regarded as the fundamental lesson which one of the greatteachers of our time has been labouring to impress upon the age. The truth, and the practical corollary from it,