Silas Marner, artistically considered, is George Eliot’s masterpiece.  In addition to the ruddy glow of life in the characters, there is an idyllic beauty about the pastoral setting, and a poetic, half mystic charm about the weaver’s manner of connecting his gold with his bright-haired Eppie.  The slight plot is well planned and rounded, and the narrative is remarkable for ease and simplicity.

Romola (1863) is a much bolder flight.  It is an attempt to present Florence of the fifteenth century, to contrast Savonarola’s ardent Christianity with the Greek aestheticism of the Medicis, and to show the influence of the time upon two widely different characters, Romola and Tito Melema.  This novel is the greatest intellectual achievement of its author; but it has neither the warmth of life, nor the vigor of her English stories.  Though no pains is spared to delineate Romola, Tito, and the inspiring monk, Savonarola, yet they do not possess the genuineness and reality that are felt in her Warwickshire characters.

Middlemarch (1871-1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876) marked the decline of George Eliot’s powers.  Although she still possessed the ability to handle dialogue, to analyze subtle complex characters, and to attain a philosophical grasp of the problems of existence, yet her weakening powers were shown in the length of tedious passages, in an undue prominence of ethical purpose, in the more studied and, on the whole, duller characters, and in the prolixity of style.

George Eliot’s poetry does not bear comparison with her prose. The Spanish Gypsy (1868) is her most ambitious poem, and it contains some fine dramatic passages.  Her most beautiful poem is the hymn beginning:—­

  “Oh, may I join the choir invisible
  Of those immortal dead who live again
  In minds made better by their presence!”

There is a strain of noble thought and lofty feeling in her poems, and she rises easily to the necessary passion and fervor of verse; but her expression is hampered by the metrical form.

General Characteristics.—­George Eliot is more strictly modern in spirit than either of the other two great contemporary novelists.  This spirit is exhibited chiefly in her ethical purpose, her scientific sympathies, and her minute dissection of character.

Her writings manifest her desire to benefit human beings by convincing them that nature’s laws are inexorable, and that an infraction of the moral law will be punished as surely as disobedience to physical laws.  She strives to arouse people to a knowledge of hereditary influences, and to show how every deed brings its own results, and works, directly or indirectly, toward the salvation or ruin of the doer.  She throws her whole strength into an attempt to prove that joy is to be found only in strict attendance upon duty and in self-renunciation.  In order to carry home these serious lessons of life, she deals with powerful human tragedies, which impart a somberness of tone to all her novels.  In her early works she treats these problems with artistic beauty; but in her later books she often forgets the artist in the moralist, and uses a character to preach a sermon.