[411] Diana of the Crossways, 275.
[412] The Egoist, 2.
[413] Adam Bede, I, 268.
[414] History of English Literature, V, 140.
[415] Middlemarch, II, 275. In this story also occurs the exquisite passage on the theme of the second citation above: “If we had a keen feeling and vision of all ordinary human life, it would be like seeing the grass grow and hearing the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”
[416] Daniel Deronda, III, 79.
[417] One of her biographers, G. W. Cooke, evidently holding to the old idea of satire, makes the opposite deduction, that “she is too much in sympathy with human nature to laugh at its follies and its weaknesses. * * * The foibles of the world she cannot treat in the vein of the satirist.” Not if this vein be restricted to the Juvenalian and Popeian types, certainly.
[418] Letters, II, 535.
[419] A description of this youth concludes with a most significant epigram: “He was one of those who delight to dally with gentleness and faith, * * * but the mere suspicion of coquetry and indifference plunged him into a fury of jealous wrathfulness, and tossed so desirable an image of beauty before him that his mad thirst to embrace it seemed love. By our manner of loving we are known.” Vittoria, 378.
[420] An Amazing Marriage, 511. He adds, “Character must ever be a mystery, only to be explained in some degree by conduct; and that is very dependent upon accident.”