ffectionate, comprehensive quality which is its chief
distinction; and perhaps occasionally it makes her tedious. George Eliot
is so little tedious, however, because, if, on the one hand, her
reflection never flags, so, on the other, her observation never ceases
to supply it with material. Her observation, I think, is decidedly of
the feminine kind; it deals, in preference, with small things. This fact
may be held to explain the excellence of what I have called her
pictures, and the comparative feebleness of her dramatic movement. The
contrast here indicated, strong in "Adam Bede," is most striking in
"Felix Holt, the Radical." The latter work is an admirable tissue of
details; but it seems to me quite without character as a composition. It
leaves upon the mind no single impression. Felix Holt's radicalism, the
pretended motive of the story, is utterly choked amidst a mass of
subordinate interests. No representation is attempted of the growth of
his opinions, or of their action upon his character: he is marked by the
same singular rigidity of outline and fixedness of posture which
characterized Adam Bede,--except, perhaps, that there is a certain
inclination towards poetry in Holt's attitude. But if the general
outline is timid and undecided in "Felix Holt," the different parts are
even richer than in former works. There is no person in the book who
attains to triumphant vitality; but there is not a single figure, of
however little importance, that has not caught from without a certain
reflection of life. There is a little old waiting-woman to a great
lady,--Mrs. Denner by name,--who does not occupy five pages in the
story, but who leaves upon the mind a most vivid impression of decent,
contented, intelligent, half-stoical servility.

"There were different orders of beings,--so ran Denner's creed,--and she
belonged to another order than that to which her mistress belonged. She
had a mind as sharp as a needle, and would have seen through and through
the ridiculous pretensions of a born servant who did not submissively
accept the rigid fate which had given her born superiors. She would have
called such pretensions the wrigglings of a worm that tried to walk on
its tail.... She was a hard-headed, godless little woman, but with a
character to be reckoned on as you reckon on the qualities of iron."

"I'm afraid of ever expecting anything good again," her mistress says to
her in a moment of depression.

"'That's weakness, m