element of choice in these entrance requirements, which allowed a limited election of studies to secondary pupils, became national tendencies primarily through President Eliot’s potent influence. As chairman of a national Committee of Ten (1890) on secondary school studies, he urged the abandonment of brief disconnected “information” courses, the correlation of subjects taught, the equal rank in college requirements of subjects in which equal time, consecutiveness and concentration were demanded, and a more thorough study of English composition; and to a large degree he secured national sanction for these reforms and their working out by experts into a practicable and applicable system. He laboured to unify the entire educational system, minimize prescription, cast out monotony, and introduce freedom and enthusiasm; and he emphasized the need of special training for special work. He was first to suggest (1894) co-operation by colleges in holding common entrance examinations throughout the country, and it was largely through his efforts that standards were so approximated that this became possible. He contended that secondary schools maintained by public funds should shape their courses for the benefit of students whose education goes no further than such high schools, and not be mere training schools for the universities. His success as administrator and man of affairs and as an educational reformer made him one of the great figures of his time, in whose opinions on any topic the deepest interest was felt throughout the country. In November 1908 he resigned the presidency of Harvard, and retired from the position early in 1909, when he was succeeded by Professor Abbott Lawrence Lowell. In December 1908 he was elected president of the National Civil Service Reform League.
His writings include The Happy Life (1896); Five American Contributions to Civilization, and Other Essays and Addresses (1897); Educational Reform, Essays and Addresses 1869–1897 (1898); More Money for the Public Schools (1903); Four American Leaders (1906), chapters on Franklin, Washington, Channing and Emerson; University Administration (1908); and with F. H. Storer, a Compendious Manual of Qualitative Chemical Analysis (Boston, 1869; many times reissued and revised). His annual reports as President of Harvard were notable contributions to the literature of education in America, and he delivered numerous public addresses, many of which have been reprinted.
See “President Eliot’s Administration,” by different hands, a summary of his work at Harvard in 1869–1894, in The Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, vol. 2, pp. 449–504 (Boston, Mass., 1894); and E. Kuhnemann, Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard (Boston, 1909).
His son, Charles Eliot (1859–1897), graduated at Harvard in 1882, studied landscape architecture at the Bussey Institution of Harvard and in Europe, successfully urged the incorporation of the Massachusetts Trustees of Public Reservations (1891) and of the Metropolitan Park Commission (1892) of Boston, became landscape architect to the Metropolitan Park Commission in 1892, and in 1893, with F. L. Olmsted and J. C. Olmsted, formed the firm of Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot, which was employed by the Metropolitan Commission. His life was written by his father, Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect (Boston, 1902).
ELIOT, GEORGE, the pen-name of the famous English writer,
née Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans (1819–1880), afterwards Mrs
J. W. Cross, born at Arbury Farm, in Warwickshire, on the 22nd
of November 1819. Her father, Robert Evans, was the agent
of Mr Francis Newdigate, and the first twenty-one years of the
great novelist’s life were spent on the Arbury estate. She received
an ordinary education at respectable schools till the age
of seventeen, when her mother’s death, and the marriage of her
elder sister, called her home in the character of housekeeper.
This, though it must have sharpened her sense, already too acute,
of responsibility, was an immense advantage to her mind, and,
later, to her career, for, delivered from the tiresome routine of
lessons and class-work, she was able to work without pedantic
interruptions at German, Italian and music, and to follow her
unusually good taste in reading. The life, inasmuch as she was
a girl still in her teens, was no doubt monotonous, even unhappy.
Just as Cardinal Newman felt, with such different results, the
sadness and chain of evangelical influences from his boyhood till
the end of his days, so Marian Evans was subdued all through
her youth by a severe religious training which, while it pinched
her mind and crushed her spirit, attracted her idealism by the very
hardness of its perfect counsels. It is not surprising to find,
therefore, that when Mr Evans moved to Coventry in 1841,
and so enlarged the circle of their acquaintance, she became
much interested in some new friends, Mr and Mrs Charles Bray
and Mr Charles Hennell. Mr Bray had literary taste and wrote
works on the Education of the Feelings, the Philosophy of
Necessity, and the like. Mr Hennell had published in 1838
An Enquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity. Miss Evans,
then twenty-two, absorbed immediately these unexpected, and,
at that time, daring habits of thought. So compelling was the
atmosphere that it led to a complete change in her opinions.
Kind in her affection, she was relentless in argument. She refused
to go to church (for some time, at least), wrote painful letters
to a former governess—the pious Miss Lewis—and barely
avoided an irremediable quarrel with her father, a churchman
of the old school. Here was rebellion indeed. But rebels come,
for the most part, from the provinces where petty tyranny,
exercised by small souls, show the scheme of the universe on
the meanest possible scale. George Eliot was never orthodox
again; she abandoned, with fierce determination, every creed,
and although she passed, later, through various phases, she remained
incessantly a rationalist in matters of faith and in all
other matters. It is nevertheless true that she wrote admirably
about religion and religious persons. She had learnt the evangelical
point of view; she knew—none better—the strength of
religious motives; vulgar doubts of this fact were as distasteful
to her as they were to another eminent writer, to whom she refers
in one of her letters (dated 1853) as “a Mr Huxley, who was
the centre of interest” at some “agreeable evening.” Her
books abound in tributes to Christian virtue, and one of her own
favourite characters was Dinah Morris in Adam Bede.
She undertook, about the beginning of 1844, the translation of Strauss’s Leben Jesu. This work, published in 1846, was considered scholarly, but it met, in the nature of things, with no popular success. On the death of Mr Evans in 1849, she went abroad for some time, and we hear of no more literary ventures till 1851, when she accepted the assistant-editorship of the Westminster Review. For a while she had lodgings at the offices of that publication in the Strand, London. She wrote several notable papers, and became acquainted with many distinguished authors of that period—among them Herbert Spencer, Carlyle, Harriet Martineau, Francis Newman and George Henry Lewes. Her friendship with the last-named led to a closer relationship which she regarded as a marriage. Among the many criticisms passed upon this step (in view of the fact, among other considerations, that Lewes had a wife living at the time), no one has denied her courage in defying the law, or questioned the quality of her tact in a singularly false position. That she felt the deepest affection for Lewes is evident; that we owe the development of her genius to his influence and constant sympathy is all but certain. Yet it is also sure that what she gained from his intimate companionship was heavily paid for in the unceasing consciousness that most people thought her guilty of a grave mistake, and found her written words, with their endorsement of traditional morality, wholly at variance with the circumstances of her private life. Doubts of her suffering in this respect will be at once dismissed after a study of her journal and letters. Stilted and unnatural as these are to a tragic degree, one can read well enough between the lines, and also in the elaborate dedication of each manuscript to “my husband” (in terms of the strongest love), that self-repression, coupled with audacity, does not make for peace. Her sensitiveness to criticism was extreme; a flippant paragraph or an illiterate review with regard to her work actually affected her for days. The whole history of her union with Lewes is a complete illustration of the force of sheer will—in that case partly her own and not inconsiderably his—over a nature essentially unfitted for a bold stand against attacks. At first she and the man whom she had described “as a sort of miniature
