to show how we are guided, controlled and modified in
our thought and action by the whole society of which the individual forms a
single atom. Many characters appear in _Middlemarch_, drawn with wonderful
skill and finish, each having some part to perform in the complicated, play
of life, and each some subtle, scarce-understood influence on all. Tragedy
and comedy, selfishness and renunciation, greed and charity, love and
jealousy, mingle here as in life. Many of these characters, such as Caleb
Garth, Farebrother, Mrs. Cadwallader and Mr. Brooke, are remarkable
portraitures, original and well conceived; but they all have their place in
the social structure, and serve a purpose in the moral issue to be worked
out.

It has been said of _Felix Holt_, and justly, that its characters are too
typical, too much representative of a class, and too little personal in
their natures and individual in their actions. Yet this method of treating
character is consistent with the purpose of the novel, which is quite as
much ethical as literary. Here we have imbruted and ignorant workingmen,
laborers who would elevate their class, pious Dissenters, typical clergymen
of the Church of England, old hereditary families with the smouldering
evils which accumulate about them, ambitious and unscrupulous adventurers,
and all the other phases of character likely to be found in such a town as
Treby Magna. Each person stands for a class; and the aim of the novel is to
indicate how the relative position of the classes represented may be
changed with as little as possible of disorder and disruption.

It should be borne in mind, however, that the aim of George Eliot is not
exclusively ethical. _Felix Holt_ and _Middlemarch_ are not ethical or
socialistic treatises, and the whole purpose does not run in these
directions. She ever keeps in mind, however, the great fact that on the
ethical basis of right and wrong rests all the tragedy and comedy of the
world. Her ideas are made alive with genius, and her ethical purposes take
color in the glow of a brilliant imagination. She never did violence to the
rule which she stated in her essay on the poet Young.

On its theoretic and perceptive side, morality touches science; on its
emotional side, art. Now the products of art are great in proportion as
they result from that immediate prompting of innate power which we call
genius, and not from labored obedience to a theory or rule; and the