In the story Dorothea has found her husband to be a man of narrow mind and unsympathetic nature. Such a disillusionment after marriage frequently happens, and we are not deeply moved by what is not unusual, although it may mean a real life-tragedy. Ruskin says “God gives the disposition to every healthy human mind in some degree to pass over or even harden itself against evil things, else the suffering would be too great to be borne” (Modern Painters v., xix., 32). Only thus could we have lived through the horrors of the present war.
George Eliot’s analogy between intensity of the emotions and acuteness of the senses reminds one of Pope’s lines (“Essay on Man,” Ep. I.) where he says life would be insupportable, if we had the acute hearing, smell and other senses of insects and other animals; we should
Die of a rose in aromatic pain.
Man that passes by
So like to God, so like the beasts that die.
W. Morris (The Earthly Paradise).
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;