There is something in "The Mill on the Floss" akin to the gloomy fatalism of a Greek tragedy. In "Adam Bede" is more spontaneity of action, more liberty of choice; but, given the natures by which events were worked out to their final issues in "The Mill on the Floss," it seems as if everything must have happened precisely as it did. An obstinate, litigious and irascible man like Mr. Tulliver was bound to come to grief in the end. Fighting against long odds as he did, he could not win. Blind anger and as blind precipitancy, against cool tenacity and clear perceptions, must go under; and Mr. Tulliver was no match against the laws of life as interpreted by Mr. Wakem and the decisions of the law courts. His choice of a fool for his wife--was not Mrs. Tulliver well known at Coventry?--was another step in the terrible March of Fate. She was of no help to him as a wife--with woman's wit to assist his masculine decisions--nor as a mother was she capable of ruling her daughter or influencing her son. She was as a passive instrument in the hands of the gods--one of those unnoted and unsuspected agents by whose unconscious action such tremendous results are produced. George Eliot never did anything more remarkable than in the union she makes in this book between the most commonplace characters and the most majestic conception of tragic fate. There is not a stage hero among them all--not a pair of buskins for the whole company; but the conception is Æschylean, though the stage is no bigger than a doll's house.
The humour in "The Mill on the Floss" is almost as rich as that of "Adam Bede," though the special qualities of the four sisters are perhaps unduly exaggerated. Sister Pullet's eternal tears become wearisome, and lose their effect by causeless and ceaseless repetition; and surely sister Grigg could not have been always such an unmitigated Gorgon! Mrs. Tulliver's helpless foolishness and tactless interference, moving with her soft white hands the lever which set the whole crushing machinery in motion, are after George Eliot's best manner; and the whole comedy circling round sister Pullet's wonderful bonnet and the linen and the chaney--comedy at last linked on to tragedy--is of inimitable richness. The girlish bond of sympathy between sister Pullet and sister Tulliver, in that they both liked spots for their patterned linen, while sister Grigg--allays contrairy to Sophy Pullet, would have striped things--is repeated in that serio-comic scene of the ruin, when the Tullivers are sold up and the stalwart cause of their disaster is in bed, paralysed. By the way, would he have recovered so quickly and so thoroughly as he did from such a severe attack? Setting that aside, for novelists are not expected to be very accurate pathologists, the humour of this part of the book is all the more striking for the pathos mingled with it.