To Daniel however it was a real, stirring, and great idea to which he wished to devote his life. Now, in order that Gwendolen should realize in herself such a great impersonal idea, she had to fall in love with the man whose life they filled, and through her heart and her love for him it would reach her mind and raise her thoughts. Daniel, again, the man she loves, is contrasted with the narrow and selfish man, the hardened and crystallized type of another social world, consuming itself in its own self-love.
All Gwendolen's experiences directly or indirectly tend to bring about this development of her soul. A striking scene in this sense is her interview with Klesmer, the genuine and thorough musician devoted to his art and work. And when she comes out of the final soul's tragedy we feel that the woman has stood the test of fire, and has realized the greatness and overwhelming vastness of the spiritual world. G. H. Lewes, to whom the writer communicated this conception of 'Daniel Deronda' assured him that he had grasped the central idea which George Eliot had in her mind, and the actual history in the story's construction.
Gwendolen's counterpart (and there are many in George Eliot's books) is Dorothea in 'Middlemarch.' She starts with great and extraordinary ideas, and must, through life and suffering, realize the moral justification of the simple and commonplace in life. The contrasting types illustrating this central point can be found in every work: Dorothea and Rosamond on the one side,—original, spiritual, striving as commonplace selfishness,—and Dorothea and Ladislaw as heavy, serious, intellectual morality, and light, playful, artistic freedom, on the other; Lydgate with his great reformatory ideas, slowly enfeebled and annihilated in his Samson-like vigor by the pretty, selfish, shallow-souled Rosamond of provincial worldliness. Gwendolen is also contrasted with Mirah. In 'Adam Bede,' again, Dinah and Hetty present the same contrasts as do Tito Melema and Romola, Esther and Felix Holt. Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom, the spirit of revolt in Maggie and the hard conventionality of respectability in her brother Tom, are strongly marked types of this kind. Maggie's conflict with her narrow and commonplace surroundings and their conventional respectability are typified in the Mill. It is a wonderful touch of artistic suggestion that she and her brother are finally submerged in the Mill, carried away by the flood. This novel reflects more thoroughly the spirit of Greek tragedy than any other work of modern fiction. The Mill, and the part it plays in the life of the Tulliver family and in Maggie's sorrows, are like great Fate in the Greek tragedy. It is an embodiment of the hard and unrelenting tyranny of the powers that are. Even in 'Silas Marner,' the most artistic and least doctrinaire of her novels, the moral process of remedying Silas's social unfitness and misanthropy is the central idea. Space will not allow us to give further illustrations of this idea in her novels; but enough has been said to enable the reader to test it and follow it up for himself.
The two most striking qualities in George Eliot as a writer are her humor and her sympathy. They are realty connected with one another. The power of intellectual observation, when coupled with the power of feeling sympathy, produces humor; the purely intellectual or objective cast of mind produces wit; while the purely subjective habit of mind is unable to produce either.
But with all her wide range of sympathy, upon which we have been dwelling, its limitations can still be discerned. The careful observer will recognize that the subjective attitude of the woman cannot wholly be hidden from view. The chief women into whom she projects herself are after all those that are nearest to herself, and she cannot help treating them as favorites and bestowing the greater attention upon them: Daniel only exists as a creation to develop Gwendolen; nay, Savonarola is really constructed for Romola's spiritual development, Casaubon for Dorothea, and so on. A still more marked and important limitation in her sympathies, arising out of her ethical bias, is her pronounced dislike to all morbid art, all that is fantastic. The poetry of Byron, the music of Chopin, all forms of morbid sentiment, are so repulsive to her nature that she cannot treat them with tolerance or even with humor. Remarks on Esther in 'Felix Holt' bear this out. Probably this is an autobiographical touch, and having freed herself from these morbid tendencies in her youth, she could never look back upon them with tolerance.
Her seriousness and ethical bias may at times also have impaired her style. Her extensive studies in science and philosophy often make her ponderous in thought and in expression. The fondness with which she takes her similes from science is often confusing to the reader who is unfamiliar with the facts and thoughts that are used as illustrations. She never quite overcame the temptation to insert what was new and striking to herself; so that her science and philosophy never reached that mature stage of mental assimilation in which they manifest themselves merely in the general fullness of thought, without ever asserting themselves as science or as philosophy. Still, no writer of fiction has ever introduced reflections and episodes in propria persona which are so striking and well worth reading in themselves. When her imitators attempt this they fail signally, and one need but compare such passages with those of George Eliot to realize her greatness as a writer and as a thinker.
To sum up the estimate of George Eliot as a novelist, we would say that she is the greatest representative of the analytical and psychological school, fixing with truth and sensuousness the types of English provincial life; with a final purpose, which she achieved, of illustrating by them the ideals of social ethics for the wider life of humanity.
