failure to realize the possibilities of his own nature was never more clearly and minutely told than in the case of Lydgate.  We see all the steps of his fall, we know all the reasons why it came, we comprehend fully what he might have been and done.  The bitterness of his own failure made him call his wife a basil plant—­“a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.”  His hair never became white, but having won a large practice in his profession, he had his life heavily insured, and died at the age of fifty.  He regarded his own life as a failure, though he was outwardly successful and “his skill was relied on by many paying patients.”  Against his will, by ways and causes he could not foresee, through the tenderness and ease of his own nature, the vision of his youth did not come true.

Perhaps Middlemarch is the most perfect example among George Eliot’s novels of her purpose to show how we are guided, controlled and modified in our thought and action by the whole society of which the individual forms a single atom.  Many characters appear in Middlemarch, drawn with wonderful skill and finish, each having some part to perform in the complicated, play of life, and each some subtle, scarce-understood influence on all.  Tragedy and comedy, selfishness and renunciation, greed and charity, love and jealousy, mingle here as in life.  Many of these characters, such as Caleb Garth, Farebrother, Mrs. Cadwallader and Mr. Brooke, are remarkable portraitures, original and well conceived; but they all have their place in the social structure, and serve a purpose in the moral issue to be worked out.

It has been said of Felix Holt, and justly, that its characters are too typical, too much representative of a class, and too little personal in their natures and individual in their actions.  Yet this method of treating character is consistent with the purpose of the novel, which is quite as much ethical as literary.  Here we have imbruted and ignorant workingmen, laborers who would elevate their class, pious Dissenters, typical clergymen of the Church of England, old hereditary families with the smouldering evils which accumulate about them, ambitious and unscrupulous adventurers, and all the other phases of character likely to be found in such a town as Treby Magna.  Each person stands for a class; and the aim of the novel is to indicate how the relative position of the classes represented may be changed with as little as possible of disorder and disruption.

It should be borne in mind, however, that the aim of George Eliot is not exclusively ethical. Felix Holt and Middlemarch are not ethical or socialistic treatises, and the whole purpose does not run in these directions.  She ever keeps in mind, however, the great fact that on the ethical basis of right and wrong rests all the tragedy and comedy of the world.  Her ideas are made alive with genius, and her ethical purposes take color in the glow of a brilliant imagination.  She never did violence to the rule which she stated in her essay on the poet Young.