delight in picturing country life as it is, and very
little of what we call inspiration. We must add, however, that this does
not express a unanimous literary judgment, for critics are not wanting who
assert that _Daniel Deronda_ is the highest expression of the author's
genius.

The general character of all these novels may be described, in the author's
own term, as psychologic realism. This means that George Eliot sought to do
in her novels what Browning attempted in his poetry; that is, to represent
the inner struggle of a soul, and to reveal the motives, impulses, and
hereditary influences which govern human action. Browning generally stops
when he tells his story, and either lets you draw your own conclusion or
else gives you his in a few striking lines. But George Eliot is not content
until she has minutely explained the motives of her characters and the
moral lesson to be learned from them. Moreover, it is the development of a
soul, the slow growth or decline of moral power, which chiefly interests
her. Her heroes and heroines differ radically from those of Dickens and
Thackeray in this respect,--that when we meet the men and women of the
latter novelists, their characters are already formed, and we are
reasonably sure what they will do under given circumstances. In George
Eliot's novels the characters develop gradually as we come to know them.
They go from weakness to strength, or from strength to weakness, according
to the works that they do and the thoughts that they cherish. In _Romola_,
for instance, Tito, as we first meet him, may be either good or bad, and we
know not whether he will finally turn to the right hand or to the left. As
time passes, we see him degenerate steadily because he follows his selfish
impulses, while Romola, whose character is at first only faintly indicated,
grows into beauty and strength with every act of self-renunciation.

In these two characters, Tito and Romola, we have an epitome of our
author's moral teaching. The principle of law was in the air during the
Victorian era, and we have already noted how deeply Tennyson was influenced
by it. With George Eliot law is like fate; it overwhelms personal freedom
and inclination. Moral law was to her as inevitable, as automatic, as
gravitation. Tito's degeneration, and the sad failure of Dorothea and
Lydgate in _Middlemarch_, may be explained as simply as the fall of an
apple, or as a bruised knee when a man loses his balance. A certain