uly wonderful portrait of the unconsciously selfish scholar in
Casaubon. Dorothea's noble naturalness, Will Ladislaw's fiery
truth, the verity of Rosamond's bovine mediocrity, the fine
reality of Lydgate's situation, so portentous in its demand upon
the moral nature--all this, and more than this, is admirable and
authoritative. The predominant thought in closing such a study
is that of the tremendous complexity of human fate, influenced
as it is by heredity, environment and the personal equation, and
not without melioristic hope, if we but live up to our best. The
tone is grave, but not hopeless. The quiet, hesitant movement
helps the sense of this slow sureness in the working of the
social law:

"Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small."

In her final novel, "Daniel Deronda," between which and
"Middlemarch" there were six years, so that it was published
when the author was nearly sixty years old, we have another
large canvas upon which, in great detail and with admirable
variety, is displayed a composition that does not aim at
complete unity--or at any rate, does not accomplish it, for the
motive is double: to present the Jew so that Judenhetze may be
diminished: and to exhibit the spiritual evolution through a
succession of emotional experiences of the girl Gwendolen. This
phase of the story offers an instructive parallel with
Meredith's "Diana of the Crossways." If the Jew theme had been
made secondary artistically to the Gwendolen study, the novel
would have secured a greater degree of constructive success; but
there's the rub. Now it seems the main issue; again, Gwendolen
holds the center of the stage. The result is a suspicion of
patchwork; nor is this changed by the fact that both parts are
brilliantly done--to which consideration may be added the well-known
antipathy of many Gentile readers to any treatment of the
Jew in fiction, if an explanation be sought of the relative
slighting of a very noble book.

For it has virtues, many and large. Its spirit is broad,
tolerant, wide and loving. In no previous Eliot fiction are
there finer single effects: no one is likely to forget the scene
in which Gwendolen and Harcourt come to a rupture; or the scene
of Deronda's dismissal. And in the way of character portrayal,
nothing is keener and truer than the heroine of this book, whose
unawakened, seemingly light, nature is chastened and deepened as
she slowly learns the meaning of life.