She is more at home among villagers than in the drawing-room. A profound intuition has led her to the very heart of English life among the happier and worthier classes of working-people. There is no squalor in her books, no general misery, but always conscience, respectability and home-comforts. There is something of coarseness in some of her scenes, and a realism too bare and bald; but for the most part she has come far short of what might have been done in picturing the repulsive and sensual side of life. In all her books there is abundant evidence of her painstaking, and of her anxious desire to be truthful. She has studied life on the spot, and gives to it the local coloring. In writing Romola, she searched into every corner of Florentine history, custom and thought. She is true to every touch of local incident and manner. In Daniel Deronda, she made herself familiar with Jewish life, and has given the race aroma to her portraits and scenes. She is thoroughly a realist, but a realist with a wide and attractive sympathy, a profound insight into motives and impulses, and a strong imagination. She is too great a genius to believe that the novelist can describe life as the geologist describes the strata of the earth. She feels with her characters; she has that form of insight or imagination which enables her to apprehend a mind totally unlike her own. This is what saves the history of Hetty from coarseness and repulsiveness. It is Hetty's own account of her life-woes. Its infinite pathos, and the tenderness and pity it awakens, destroys our concern for the other features of the narrative.
Psychologic analysis seems out of place in a novel, but with George Eliot it is a chief purpose of her writing. She lays bare the soul, opens its inmost secrets, and its anatomy is minutely studied. She devotes more space to the inner life and character of her personalities than to her narratives and conversations. She traces some of her characters through a long process of development, and shows how they are affected by the experiences of life. Her more important characters grow up under her pen, develop under the influence of thought or sorrow. Novelists usually carry their characters through their pages on the same level of mind and life; and George Eliot not only does this with her uncultured characters, but she also shows the soul in the process of unfolding or expanding. None of her leading characters are at the end what they were in the beginning; with the most subtle power she traces the growth of Tito Melema's mind through its perilous descent into selfish corruption, and with equal or even greater skill she unfolds the history of Daniel Deronda's development under the impulse to find for himself a life-mission. In this direction George Eliot is always great. Her skill is remarkable, albeit she has not sounded either the highest or the lowest ranges of human capacity. The range within which her studies are made is a wide one, however, and within it she has shown herself the master of human motives and a consummate artist in portraying the soul. She devotes the utmost care to describing some plain person who appears in her pages for but a moment, and is as much concerned that he shall be truly presented as if he were of the utmost consequence. More than one otherwise very ordinary character acquires under this treatment of hers the warmest interest for the reader. And she describes such persons, because their influence is subtle or momentous as it affects the lives of others. Personages and incidents play a part in her books not for the sake of the plot or to secure dramatic unity, but for the sake of manifesting the soul, in order that the unfoldment of psychologic analysis may go on. The unity she aims at is that of showing the development of the soul under influence of some one or more decisive impulses or as affected by given surroundings. The lesser characters, while given a nature quite their own, help in the process of unfolding the personality which gives central purpose to each of her novels. The influence of opposite natures on each other, the moulding power of circumstances, and especially the bearings of hereditary impulses, all play a prominent part in this process of psychologic analysis.
Through page after page and chapter after chapter she traces the feelings and thoughts of her characters. How each decisive event appears to them is explained at length. Moreover, the most trivial trait of character, the most incidental impulse, is described in all its particularity. Through many pages Hetty's conduct in her own bedroom is laid before the reader, and in no other way could her nature have been so brought to our knowledge. Her shallow lightness of heart and her vanity could not be realized by ordinary intercourse with one so pretty and so bright; but George Eliot describes Hetty's taking out the earrings given her by Arthur, and we see what she is. The author seeks to open before us the inner life of that childish soul, and we see into its nature and realize all its capacities for good and evil.
Oh, the delight of taking out that little box and looking at the earrings! Do not reason about it, my philosophical reader, and say that Hetty, being very pretty, must have known that it did not signify whether she had any ornaments or not; and that, moreover, to look at earrings which she could not possibly wear out of her bedroom could hardly be a satisfaction, the essence of vanity being a reference to the impressions produced on others; you will never understand women's natures if you are so excessively rational. Try rather to divest yourself of all your rational prejudices, as much as if you were studying the psychology of a canary-bird, and only watch the movements of this pretty round creature as she turns her head on one side with an unconscious smile at the earrings nestled in the little box. Ah! you think, it is for the sake of the person who has given them to her, and her thoughts are gone back now to the moment when they were put into her hands. No; else why should she have cared to have earrings rather than anything else? and I know that she had longed for earrings from among all the ornaments she could imagine.
This faculty of soul interpretation may be illustrated by innumerable passages and from characters the most diverse in nature and capacity. As an instance of her ability to interpret uncommon minds, those affected in some peculiar manner, reference may be made to Baldassarre, in Romola. The descriptions of this man's sufferings, the giving way of his mind under them, and the purpose of revenge which took complete possession of him, form a study in character unsurpassed. For subtle insight into the action of a morbid mind, and for a majestic conception of human passion, the passage wherein Baldassarre finds he can again read his Greek book is most worthy of attention.
Her ability to delineate a growing mind, and a mind at work under the influence of new and rare experiences, is shown in the case of Daniel Deronda. His quiet love of ease as a boy is described as he sits one day watching the falling rain, and meditates on the possibility which has been suggested to him, that his is not to be the life of a gentleman.
He knew a great deal of what it was to be a gentleman by inheritance, and without thinking much about himself—for he was a boy of active perceptions, and easily forgot his own existence in that of Robert Bruce—he had never supposed that he could be shut out from such a lot, or have a very different part in the world from that of the uncle who petted him… But Daniel's tastes were altogether in keeping with his nurture: his disposition was one in which every-day scenes and habits beget not ennui or rebellion but delight, affection, aptitudes; and now the lad had been stung to the quick by the idea that his uncle—perhaps his father—thought of a career for him which was totally unlike his own, and which he knew very well was not thought of among possible destinations for the sons of English gentlemen.
The mind of this lad expands; ideal desires awake in him; there is a yearning for a life of noble knight-errantry in some heroic cause. The reader is permitted to watch from step to step the growth of this longing, and to behold each new deed by which it is expressed. He craves for a broader life, but he is surrounded by such a social atmosphere as to make his longing futile. As a young man who is seeking to know what there is in the world for him to do, and who is eager for some task that is to end in a larger life for man, he is again described.
It happened that the very vividness of his impressions had often made him the more enigmatic to his friends, and had contributed to an apparent indefiniteness in his sentiments. His early wakened sensibility and reflectiveness, had developed into a many-sided sympathy, which threatened to hinder any persistent course of action: as soon as he took up any antagonism, though only in thought, he seemed to himself like the Sabine warriors in the memorable story—with nothing to meet his spear but flesh of his flesh, and objects that he loved. His imagination had so wrought itself to the habit of seeing things as they probably appeared to others, that a strong partisanship, unless it were against an immediate oppression, had become an insincerity for him. His plenteous, flexible sympathy had ended by falling into one current with that reflective analysis which tends to neutralize sympathy. Few men were able to keep themselves clearer of vices than he; yet he hated vices mildly, being used to think of them less in the abstract than as a part of mixed human natures having an individual history, which it was the bent of his mind to trace with understanding and pity. With the same innate balance he was fervidly democratic in his feeling for the multitude, and yet, through his affections and imagination, intensely conservative; voracious of speculations on government and religion, yet loath to part with long-sanctioned forms which, for him, were quick with memories and sentiments that no argument could lay dead… He was ceasing to care for knowledge—he had no ambition for practice—unless they could both be gathered up into one current with his emotions; and he dreaded, as if it were a dwelling-place of lost souls, that dead anatomy of culture which turns the universe into a mere ceaseless answer to queries, and knows, not everything, but everything else about everything—as if one should be ignorant of nothing concerning the scent of violets except the scent itself, for which one had no nostril. But how and whence was the needed event to come?—the influence that would justify partiality, and make him what he longed to be, yet was unable to make himself—an organic part of social life, instead of roaming in it like a yearning disembodied spirit, stirred with a vague, social passion, but without fixed local habitation to render fellowship real? To make a little difference for the better was what he was not contented to live without; but how make it? It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.
He rescues Mirah and sets out in search of her brother. He finds Mordecai, and gradually a way is opened to him along which his yearning is satisfied. Step by step the reader is permitted to trace the expansion of his mind. A window is opened into his soul, and we see its every movement as Daniel is led on to find the mission which was to be his. When that task is fully accepted he says to Mordecai,—