ne, I
would rather have had him either better or worse. I would rather have
had a little more premeditation before his fault, or a little more
repentance after it; that is, while repentance could still be of use.
Not that, all things considered, he is not a very fair image of a
frank-hearted, well-meaning, careless, self-indulgent young gentleman;
but the author has in his case committed the error which in Hetty's she
avoided,--the error of showing him as redeemed by suffering. I cannot
but think that he was as weak as she. A weak woman, indeed, is weaker
than a weak man; but Arthur Donnithorne was a superficial fellow, a
person emphatically not to be moved by a shock of conscience into a
really interesting and dignified attitude, such as he is made to assume
at the close of the book. Why not see things in their nakedness? the
impatient reader is tempted to ask. Why not let passions and foibles
play themselves out?

It is as a picture, or rather as a series of pictures, that I find "Adam
Bede" most valuable. The author succeeds better in drawing attitudes of
feeling than in drawing movements of feeling. Indeed, the only attempt
at development of character or of purpose in the book occurs in the case
of Arthur Donnithorne, where the materials are of the simplest kind.
Hetty's lapse into disgrace is not gradual, it is immediate: it is
without struggle and without passion. Adam himself has arrived at
perfect righteousness when the book opens; and it is impossible to go
beyond that. In his case too, therefore, there is no dramatic
progression. The same remark applies to Dinah Morris. It is not in her
conceptions nor her composition that George Eliot is strongest: it is in
her _touches_. In these she is quite original. She is a good deal of a
humorist, and something of a satirist; but she is neither Dickens nor
Thackeray. She has over them the great advantage that she is also a good
deal of a philosopher; and it is to this union of the keenest
observation with the ripest reflection, that her style owes its
essential force. She is a thinker,--not, perhaps, a passionate thinker,
but at least a serious one; and the term can be applied with either
adjective neither to Dickens nor Thackeray. The constant play of lively
and vigorous thought about the objects furnished by her observation
animates these latter with a surprising richness of color and a truly
human interest. It gives to the author's style, moreover, that
lingering, a