"The head miller, a tall broad-shouldered man of forty, black-eyed and black-haired, subdued by a general mealiness like an auricula":-- "They're nash things, them lop-eared rabbits--they'd happen ha' died if they'd been fed. Things out o' natur never thrive. God Almighty doesn't like 'em. He made the rabbit's ears to lie back, and it's nothing but contrariness to make 'em lie down like a mastiff dog's":--"Maggie's tears began to subside, and she put out her mouth for the cake and bit a piece; and then Tom bit a piece, just for company, and they ate together and rubbed each other's cheeks and brows and noses together, while they ate, with a humiliating resemblance to two friendly ponies":--Is there anything better than these in Mrs. Poyser's repertory?
Of acute psychological vision is that fine bit on "plotting contrivance and deliberate covetousness"; and the summing up of the religious and moral life of the Dodsons and Tullivers, beginning "Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers," is as good as anything in our language. No one theoretically knew human nature better than George Eliot. Practically, she was too thin-skinned to bear the slightest abrasion, such as necessarily comes to us from extended intercourse or the give and take of equality. But theoretically she sounded the depths and shallows, and knew where the bitter springs rose and where the healing waters flowed; and when she translated what she knew into the conduct and analysis of her fictitious characters, she gave them a life and substance peculiarly her own.
Hitherto George Eliot has dealt with her own experiences, her reminiscences of old friends and well-known places, of familiar acquaintances, and, in Maggie Tulliver, of her own childish frowardness and affectionateness--her girlish desire to do right and facile slipping into wrong. In "Silas Marner" she ventures into a more completely creative region; and, for all the exquisite beauty and poetry of the central idea, she has failed her former excellence. The story is one of the not quite impossible but highly improbable kind, with a _Deus ex machinâ_ as the ultimate setter-to-rights of all things wrong. As with "Adam Bede," the date is thrown back a generation or two, without the smallest savour of the time indicated, save in the fashion of the dresses of the sisters Lammeter--a joseph substituted for a cloak, and riding on a pillion for a drive in a fly. Else there is not the least attempt to synchronise time, circumstances and sentiment, while the story is artificial in its plot and unlikely in its treatment. Yet it is both pretty and pathetic; and the little introduction of fairyland in the golden-haired child asleep by the fire, as the substitute for the stolen hoard, is as lovely as fairy stories generally are. But we altogether question the probability of a marriage between the young squire and his drunken wife. Such a woman would not have been too rigorous, and was not; and such a man as Godfrey Cass would not have married a low-born mistress from "a movement of compunction." As we said before, in the story of Hetty and Arthur, young squires a century ago were not so tender-hearted towards the honour of a peasant girl. It was a pity, of course, when things went wrong; but then young men will be young men, and it behoved the lasses to keep themselves to themselves! If the young squire did the handsome thing in money, that was all that could be expected of him. The girl would be none the worse thought of for her slip; and the money got by her fault would help in her plenishing with some honest fellow who understood things. This is the sentiment still to be found in villages, where the love-children of the daughters out in service are to be found comfortably housed in the grandmother's cottage, and where no one thinks any the worse of the unmarried mother; and certainly, a century ago, it was the universal rule of moral measurement. George Eliot undoubtedly made a chronological mistake in both stories by the amount of conscientious remorse felt by her young men, and the depth of social degradation implied in this slip of her young women.