The humour in "The Mill on the Floss" is almost as rich as that of "Adam Bede," though the special qualities of the four sisters are perhaps unduly exaggerated. Sister Pullet's eternal tears become wearisome, and lose their effect by causeless and ceaseless repetition; and surely sister Grigg could not have been always such an unmitigated Gorgon! Mrs. Tulliver's helpless foolishness and tactless interference, moving with her soft white hands the lever which set the whole crushing machinery in motion, are after George Eliot's best manner; and the whole comedy circling round sister Pullet's wonderful bonnet and the linen and the chaney—comedy at last linked on to tragedy—is of inimitable richness. The girlish bond of sympathy between sister Pullet and sister Tulliver, in that they both liked spots for their patterned linen, while sister Grigg—allays contrairy to Sophy Pullet, would have striped things—is repeated in that serio-comic scene of the ruin, when the Tullivers are sold up and the stalwart cause of their disaster is in bed, paralysed. By the way, would he have recovered so quickly and so thoroughly as he did from such a severe attack? Setting that aside, for novelists are not expected to be very accurate pathologists, the humour of this part of the book is all the more striking for the pathos mingled with it.
"The head miller, a tall broad-shouldered man of forty, black-eyed and black-haired, subdued by a general mealiness like an auricula":—"They're nash things, them lop-eared rabbits—they'd happen ha' died if they'd been fed. Things out o' natur never thrive. God Almighty doesn't like 'em. He made the rabbit's ears to lie back, and it's nothing but contrariness to make 'em lie down like a mastiff dog's":—"Maggie's tears began to subside, and she put out her mouth for the cake and bit a piece; and then Tom bit a piece, just for company, and they ate together and rubbed each other's cheeks and brows and noses together, while they ate, with a humiliating resemblance to two friendly ponies":—Is there anything better than these in Mrs. Poyser's repertory?
Of acute psychological vision is that fine bit on "plotting contrivance and deliberate covetousness"; and the summing up of the religious and moral life of the Dodsons and Tullivers, beginning "Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers," is as good as anything in our language. No one theoretically knew human nature better than George Eliot. Practically, she was too thin-skinned to bear the slightest abrasion, such as necessarily comes to us from extended intercourse or the give and take of equality. But theoretically she sounded the depths and shallows, and knew where the bitter springs rose and where the healing waters flowed; and when she translated what she knew into the conduct and analysis of her fictitious characters, she gave them a life and substance peculiarly her own.
Hitherto George Eliot has dealt with her own experiences, her reminiscences of old friends and well-known places, of familiar acquaintances, and, in Maggie Tulliver, of her own childish frowardness and affectionateness—her girlish desire to do right and facile slipping into wrong. In "Silas Marner" she ventures into a more completely creative region; and, for all the exquisite beauty and poetry of the central idea, she has failed her former excellence. The story is one of the not quite impossible but highly improbable kind, with a Deus ex machinâ as the ultimate setter-to-rights of all things wrong. As with "Adam Bede," the date is thrown back a generation or two, without the smallest savour of the time indicated, save in the fashion of the dresses of the sisters Lammeter—a joseph substituted for a cloak, and riding on a pillion for a drive in a fly. Else there is not the least attempt to synchronise time, circumstances and sentiment, while the story is artificial in its plot and unlikely in its treatment. Yet it is both pretty and pathetic; and the little introduction of fairyland in the golden-haired child asleep by the fire, as the substitute for the stolen hoard, is as lovely as fairy stories generally are. But we altogether question the probability of a marriage between the young squire and his drunken wife. Such a woman would not have been too rigorous, and was not; and such a man as Godfrey Cass would not have married a low-born mistress from "a movement of compunction." As we said before, in the story of Hetty and Arthur, young squires a century ago were not so tender-hearted towards the honour of a peasant girl. It was a pity, of course, when things went wrong; but then young men will be young men, and it behoved the lasses to keep themselves to themselves! If the young squire did the handsome thing in money, that was all that could be expected of him. The girl would be none the worse thought of for her slip; and the money got by her fault would help in her plenishing with some honest fellow who understood things. This is the sentiment still to be found in villages, where the love-children of the daughters out in service are to be found comfortably housed in the grandmother's cottage, and where no one thinks any the worse of the unmarried mother; and certainly, a century ago, it was the universal rule of moral measurement. George Eliot undoubtedly made a chronological mistake in both stories by the amount of conscientious remorse felt by her young men, and the depth of social degradation implied in this slip of her young women.
The beginning of "Silas Marner" is much finer than that of either of her former books. It strikes the true note of a harmonious introduction, and is free from the irritating trivialities of the former openings. In those early days of which "Silas Marner" treats, a man from the next parish was held as a "stranger"; and even now a Scotch, Irish or Welsh man would be considered as much a foreigner as a "Frenchy" himself, were he to take up his abode in any of the more remote hamlets of the north or west. The state of isolation in which Silas Marner lived was true on all these counts—his being a "foreigner" to the autochthonous shepherds and farmers of Ravaloe—his half mazed, half broken-hearted state owing to the false accusation brought against him and the criminal neglect of Providence to show his innocence—and his strange and uncongenial trade. Yet, for this last, were not the women of that time familiar with the weaving industry?—else what could they have done with the thread which they themselves had spun? If it were disposed of to a travelling agent for the hand-loom weavers, why not have indicated the fact? It would have been one touch more to the good of local colour and conditional accuracy. To be sure, the paints are laid on rather thickly throughout; but eccentricities and folks with bees in their bonnets were always to be found in remote places before the broom of steam and electricity came to sweep them into a more common conformity; and that line between oddity and insanity, always narrow, was then almost invisible.
The loss of the hoarded treasure and the poor dazed weaver's terrified flight to the Rainbow introduces us to one of George Eliot's most masterly of her many scenes of rustic humour.
"The more important customers, who drank spirits and sat nearest the fire, staring at each other as if a bet were depending on the first man who winked; while the beer drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and smock-frocks, kept their eyelids down and rubbed their hands across their mouths, as if their draughts of beer were a funereal duty attended with embarrassing sadness"—these, as well as Mr. Snell, the landlord, "a man of a neutral disposition, accustomed to stand aloof from human differences, as those of beings who were all alike in need of liquor"—do their fooling admirably. From the cautious discussion on the red Durham with a star on her forehead, to the authoritative dictum of Mr. Macey, tailor and parish clerk (were men of his social stamp called Mr. in those days?) when he asserts that "there's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself"—from the gossip about the Lammeter land to the ghos'es in the Lammeter stables, it is all excellent—rich, racy and to the manner born. And the sudden appearance of poor, scared, weazen-faced Silas in the midst of the discussion on ghos'es, gives occasion for another fytte of humour quite as good as what has gone before.
Worthy of Mrs. Poyser, too, was sweet and patient Dolly Winthrop's estimate of men. "It seemed surprising that Ben Winthrop, who loved his quart-pot and his joke, got along so well with Dolly; but she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that 'men would be so' and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks." Good, too, when speaking of his wife, is Mr. Macey's version of the "mum" and "budget" of the fairies' dance. "Before I said 'sniff' I took care to know as she'd say 'snaff,' and pretty quick too. I wasn't a-going to open my mouth like a dog at a fly, and snap it to again, wi' nothing to swaller."
But in spite of all this literary value of "Silas Marner" we come back to our first opinion of its being unreal and almost impossible in plot. The marriage of Godfrey to an opium-eating(?) drab, and the robbery of Silas Marner's hoard by the squire's son were pretty hard nuts to crack in the way of probability; but the timely death of the wife just at the right moment and in the right place—the adoption of a little girl of two by an old man as nearly "nesh" as was consistent with his power of living free from the restraint of care—the discovery of Dunsay's body and the restoration to the weaver of his long-lost gold—the impasse of Eppie, the squire's lawfully born daughter and his only legal inheritor, married to a peasant and living as a peasant at her father's gates: all these things make "Silas Marner" a beautiful unreality, taking it out of the ranks of human history and placing it in those of fairy tale and romance.