eglected, can never become
his daughter. But--far beyond and beneath this--we have here, and
elsewhere throughout the author's works, indicated to us one of the most
solemn, and, at the same time, most certain truths of our existence: that
there are forms of accepted and fostered evil so vital that no repentance
can fully blot them out from the present or the future of life. No
turning away from the accursed thing, no discipline, no futurity near or
far, can ever place Arthur Donnithorne or Godfrey Cass alongside Dinah
Morris or Adam Bede. Their irreversible part of self-worship precludes
them, by the very laws of our being, from the highest and broadest
achievement of life and destiny.

Leaving for the present 'Romola,' as in many respects more directly
linking itself with George Eliot's great poetic effort, 'The Spanish
Gypsy,' we turn for a little to 'Felix Holt,' the next of her English
tales. It would be perhaps natural to select, from among the characters
here presented to us, in illustration of life consciously attuning itself
to the highest aim irrespective of any end save that aim itself, one or
other of the two in whom this is most palpably presented to us--Felix
himself or Esther Lyon. We prefer, however, selecting Harold Transome,
certainly one of the most difficult and one of the most strikingly
wrought out conceptions, not only in the works of George Eliot, but in
modern fiction.

Harold, we believe, is not a general favourite with the modern public,
any more than he was with his own contemporaries. He has none of those
lovablenesses which make Arthur Donnithorne so attractive; and at first
sight nothing of that uncompromising sense of right which characterises
Adam Bede. He comes before us apparently no more than a clearheaded,
hard, shrewd, successful man of the world, greatly alive to his own
interests and importance, and with no particular principles to boast of.

How does it come that this man, when over and over again, in great things
and in small, two paths lie before him to choose, always chooses the
truer and better of the two? When Felix attempts to interfere in the
conduct of his election, even while resenting the interference as
impertinent, he sets himself honestly to attempt to arrest the wrong. He
buys Christian's secret; but it is to reveal it to her whom it enables,
if so she shall choose, to dislodge himself from the position which has
been the great object of his desires and e