It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the complexity Introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilization—­the sight of a fashionably dressed female in grief.  From the sorrow of a Hottentot to that of a woman in large buckram sleeves, with several bracelets on each arm, an architectural bonnet, and delicate ribbon-strings—­what a long series of gradations!  In the enlightened child of civilization the abandonment characteristic of grief is checked and varied in the subtlest manner, so as to present an interesting problem to the analytic mind.  If, with a crushed heart and eyes half-blinded by the mist of tears, she were to walk with a too devious step through a door-place, she might crush her buckram sleeves, too, and the deep consciousness of this possibility produces a composition of forces by which she takes a line that just clears the door-post.  Perceiving that the tears are hurrying fast, she unpins her strings and throws them languidly backward—­a touching gesture, indicative, even in the deepest gloom, of the hope in future dry moments when cap-strings will once more have a charm.  As the tears subside a little, and with her head leaning backward at an angle that will not injure her bonnet, she endures that terrible moment when grief, which has made all things else a weariness, has itself become weary; she looks down pensively at her bracelets, and adjusts their clasps with that pretty studied fortuity which would be gratifying to her mind if it were once more in a calm and healthy state. [Footnote:  Mill on the Floss, chapter VII.]

In her later books the strained efforts at satire are partially avoided, and though the satirical spirit is not withdrawn in any measure, yet it is more delicately managed.  It is less open, less blunt, but hardly more subtle and penetrative.  It is still a strained effort, and it is quite too hard and bare in statement.  We are told in Middlemarch that

Mrs. Bulstrode’s naive way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask, was not a sufficient relief from the weight of her husband’s invariable seriousness.

Such a turning of sentiment into satire as the following is rather jarring, and is a good specimen of that “laborious smartness,” as Mr. R.H.  Hutton justly calls it, which is found in all of George Eliot’s books:—­

Young love-making—­that gossamer web!  Even the points it clings to—­the things whence its subtile interlacings are swung—­are scarcely perceptible:  momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors.  The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life toward another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.  And Lydgate