. . . The fault of most of her work is the absence of spontaneity, the excess of reflection. . . .

Felix Holt and Middlemarch are elaborate studies of what seemed to the author to be modern characters and society,--studies of immense effort and erudition not unenlightened by humour, but on the whole dead. . . . For some years past George Eliot, though she may still be read, has more or less passed out of contemporary critical appreciation.  There are, of course, a few obstinate and Contemporary critical appreciation.  There are, of course, a few obstinate and "know-nothing" worshippers; perhaps there are some who kept their heads even in the heyday, and who can now say sunt lacrymae rerum, as they contemplate a fame once so great, in part so solidly founded, and yet now to a greater extent than strict justice can approve almost utterly vanished away.

[Middlemarch] is prompted by a sympathy for the enthusiast, but turns out to be virtually a satire upon the modern world.  The lofty nature is to exhibited struggling against the circumambient element of crass stupidity and stolid selfishness.  But that element comes to represent the dominant and overpowering force.  Belief is in so chaotic a state that the idealist is likely to go astray after false lights.  Intellectual ambition mistakes pedantry for true learning; religious aspiration tempts acquiescence in cant and superstition; the desire to carry your creed into practice makes compromise necessary, and compromise passes imperceptibly into surrender.  One is tempted to ask whether this does not exaggerate one aspect of the human tragicomedy.

The more one examines the great emotional scenes the more nervously one anticipates the brewing and gathering and thickening of the clouds which will burst upon our heads at the moment of crisis in a shower of disillusionment and verbosity.  It is partly that her hold upon dialogue, when it is not dialect, is slack; and partly that she seems to shrink with an elderly dread of fatigue from the effort of emotional concentration.  She allows her heroines to talk too much.  She has little verbal felicity.  She lacks the unerring taste which chooses one sentence and compresses the heart of the scene within that.  "Whom are you going to dance with?" asked Mr. Knightley at the Weston's ball.  "With you, if you will ask me," said Emma; and she had said enough.  Mrs. Casaubon would have talked for an hour and we should have looked out the window.

[Middlemarch] is almost one of the great novels of the language.  A little more ease and play and simplicity, a little less of the anxious idealism which ends in going beyond nature, and it might have been one of the greatest.  Some of the figures, like Ladislaw, are mere pasteboard; but there is still a dense throng of persons whom we all might have known, perhaps too well.  Some of the men whose inner crises are described with most labour and travail are least real; such are the pedant Mr. Casaubon and the banker Bulstrode.  But the whole is like some piece of experience that we might wish to but cannot forget.  There is no plan, but there is not confusion.

. . . George Eliot often goes behind the apparent motive to something lying deeper in the consciousness which is the main determinant of conduct. . . . It was in Middlemarch that George Eliot did her most remarkable work in this line.

George Eliot's imagination had to scrape what nourishment it could from the bare bones of Puritan ethics; her narrow way led beneath a dull sky into darkness; she had to persuade herself that a life of self-denial was sufficiently rewarded by the consciousness of virtue. . . . And when in Middlemarch she turned to survey the spectacle of human life in the harsh disillusioning light of mature experience, she clearly found it all she could do to believe that a good conscience was much satisfaction at all. . . . do what she will, she cannot disguise the fact that the thought of Dorothea's life leaves her disappointed, disheartened and depressed.  And she communicates her depression to her readers.

. . . In Middlemarch her style is achieved.  In a novel of this type, complete stylistic uniformity is impossible and undesirable:  There are passages in which the dominant note is satirical, others of almost pure psychological analysis, and others, again, in which passages of purely humorous intention alternate with passages in which the pathos is underlined by the writer's unreserved participation in the feelings of her characters:  in Middlemarch the intention, and the attitude towards the subject, are serious throughout, even in the light glancing at social follies.

The weakness of the book . . . is in Dorothea. . . . Aren't we . . . , we wonder, in sight of an unqualified self-indentification?  Isn't there something dangerous in the way the irony seems to be reserved for the provincial background and circumstances, leaving the heroine immune?

There is no real madness in George Eliot.  Both heavy feet are on the ground.  Outside of Wuthering Heights there is no madness in Victorian fiction.  The Victorians were a histrionic people who measured themselves by the Elizabethans; and George Eliot, like Browning and Tennyson, was compared to Shakespeare by her contemporaries.  The comparison failed, if only because madness is lacking.  Hysteria, the effect of the exorbitant straining of their wills, the Victorians did, alas, too often achieve.  George Eliot somehow escapes it.  She is too level-headed.  One pictures her, in life, moralizing instead of making a scene.  There is no hysteria in Middlemarch; perhaps there are no depths because there is so much determination.  But there is a humane breadth and resolution in this novel which offers neither hope nor despair to mankind but simply the necessity of fashioning a moral life.

[George Eliot's] perception of individual human beings is more complex than that of ny of her predecessors.  She never suggests a simple division of characters into good and bad.  The individual, like the environment, has evolved and is evolving;  his or her behaviour at any given moment is the inevitable result of all that has gone before; therefore, while the action can itself be judged, both in relation to its consequences and to its aesthetic beauty (an action that pleases or displeases), the doer is not presented judicially but compassionately.  In her discourse George Eliot sometimes deviates from this attitude and her novel suffers accordingly.  But whenever her reflective powers are in due subordination to her creative gift, wherever, as usually happens in the dialogue, she responds to her characters rather than thinks about them, the reader feels with them and the total effect of her novel is an increase of understanding and compassion.

George Eliot's representative quality is due largely to her unique position, amongst imaginative writers, as a focus for the best (and the worst) that was being said and thought in her time, in europe as well as at home.  No one was more thoroughly abreast of the newest thought, the latest French or German theory, the last interpretations of dogma, the most up-to-date results in anthropology, medicine, biology or sociology; it is she who first translates Strauss's Life of Jesus and and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity; if Mackay writes The Progress of the Intellect (1850), it is Miss Evans who must review it for the Westminster.  She was the first English writer to bring an intellect of the caliber to the service of fiction, and the wonder is that this preponderant cerebration did not devour her creative instinct more completely than it did. . . . She succeeded, better than J.S. Mill, in uniting what he described as the two main streams of the nineteenth-century mind--its two kinds of one-sidedness--the Benthamite, which stands outside and tests all received opinions, and the Coleridgean, which tries from within to discover what is true in them.

The English novel is so much richer for George Eliot's contribution that one may be tempted into scolding her for not doing what no English novelist of the century did:  for not taking possession of the great world.  Her sense of community, her finely modulated articulation of passion and idea, the clarity and firmness of her characterization--these things alone justify Virginia Woolf's remark that Middlemarch is one of the few English novels written for grow-up people.  Since the grown-up perspective includes Flaubert and Tolstoy, we are of course conscious that George Eliot did not share their power to incarnate the great world in the lesser one, to make the novel and instrument which can register the fate of a society in the perspective of history and heroic achievement.  To exercise this power she would have had to take her own splendid powers for granted, and this she could not do.

George Eliot was the first English novelist to move in the vanguard of the thought and learning of her day, and in so doing added new scope and dignity to the English novel. . . .
        It must be remembered that George Eliot was one of the Victorian "sages" as well as a novelist, one of those who worried and thought and argued about religion, ethics, history, character, with all the concern felt by those most sensitive to their implications.  A sage whose moral vision is most effectively communicated through realistic fiction is an unusual phenomenon--or, at least, was unusual at the time when George Eliot began to write.  If it has become less unusual since, that is because George Eliot by her achievement in fiction permanently enlarged the scope of the novel.

To think of George Eliot's novels as a pattern of subordinate parts governed by a dominating central character is essentially to misconceive their structural principle.  They are built around a balance or conflict of a number of centres of interest all of which solicit our attention.  It is the relationship of these parts, the various tensions existing between them, which make up the pattern of the novels and we shall read them more truly if we think of a network of relations rather than a single character.

. . . For George Eliot morality and responsibility are wholly bound up in determinism, and they are not achievable, as libertarians would have it, by denying the universality of cause and effect.  A man is only good in so far as he has trained himself to exercise his will for what past experience has taught him is good.  George Eliot believed that the only way one can transcend circumstance is by recognizing clearly that the "law of consequence" is irrevocable and invariable-- . . . that the past is a permanent part of one's character, and one's society is, and should be, a very powerful influence on one's actions.  In other words, one overcomes the depressing effects of determinism by understanding it.

Since it has become orthodox to acknowledge George Eliot as the first modern English novelist, there has been a tendency to treat Middlemarch as a Sacred Book. . . . There is a likeness, if it is not pushed too far, between the medieval handling of the Bible and the modern approach to Middlemarch.  If the literal and even the historical meanings of the text appeared remote and irrelevant, the allegorical and the anagogical could be tried.  In something the same way, story, character and setting--those prime data of the nineteenth-century novel--can be pushed aside with slight and sometimes imperfect inspection, while the keen analytic intellects of the modern critical scene apply themselves to elucidate the formal relations, the ideal structures, the metaphors, overt and submerged, and the key-words and phrases of the work in hand.  Sometimes we are carried beyond the identification of conscious artistry and invited to discern, in sequences and recurrences of allied terms, the movements of the novelist's unconscious mind. . . . Since what is left of the doctrine of inspiration is now related to the activity of the unconscious, we may do well to study it in minimis, as early commentators studied the syllables of what they took to the Holy Spirit.

There is probably no novel so fine as Middlemarch that contains so much bad and tasteless writing.  It illustrates two truths, neither of which is very popular with some critics:  that auto didacticism will not take the place of instilled or inherited culture, and that books are not written with words alone.  If we were to judge George Eliot by the way in which she uses words she might take a very low place, less high, probably, than the late Dorothy Sayers.

George Eliot practices an art of reticence, pursuing it with passion.  Her own vulnerability, privacy and silence, lie behind the reticence in her novels.  There are links between characters who tell their stories, the narrator who does everything but tell his or her story, and the reticent author whose name never appeared on the cover or title-page.  These connections have more than a biographical interests.  George Eliot's habits of structured reticence relate the fullness of her fiction to the ellipses of later fiction.  Before George Eliot, all the stories are told by the end of the story. . . . Novels have [now] come to represent the reticences and silences of life outside novels.  Artifice asserts its limits, and refuses to attempt completion and closure.  George Eliot's novels use Victorian forms and conventions, but strain towards the conventions and forms of modernism.