She is more at home among villagers than in the drawing-room.  A profound intuition has led her to the very heart of English life among the happier and worthier classes of working-people.  There is no squalor in her books, no general misery, but always conscience, respectability and home-comforts.  There is something of coarseness in some of her scenes, and a realism too bare and bald; but for the most part she has come far short of what might have been done in picturing the repulsive and sensual side of life.  In all her books there is abundant evidence of her painstaking, and of her anxious desire to be truthful.  She has studied life on the spot, and gives to it the local coloring.  In writing Romola, she searched into every corner of Florentine history, custom and thought.  She is true to every touch of local incident and manner.  In Daniel Deronda, she made herself familiar with Jewish life, and has given the race aroma to her portraits and scenes.  She is thoroughly a realist, but a realist with a wide and attractive sympathy, a profound insight into motives and impulses, and a strong imagination.  She is too great a genius to believe that the novelist can describe life as the geologist describes the strata of the earth.  She feels with her characters; she has that form of insight or imagination which enables her to apprehend a mind totally unlike her own.  This is what saves the history of Hetty from coarseness and repulsiveness.  It is Hetty’s own account of her life-woes.  Its infinite pathos, and the tenderness and pity it awakens, destroys our concern for the other features of the narrative.

Psychologic analysis seems out of place in a novel, but with George Eliot it is a chief purpose of her writing.  She lays bare the soul, opens its inmost secrets, and its anatomy is minutely studied.  She devotes more space to the inner life and character of her personalities than to her narratives and conversations.  She traces some of her characters through a long process of development, and shows how they are affected by the experiences of life.  Her more important characters grow up under her pen, develop under the influence of thought or sorrow.  Novelists usually carry their characters through their pages on the same level of mind and life; and George Eliot not only does this with her uncultured characters, but she also shows the soul in the process of unfolding or expanding.  None of her leading characters are at the end what they were in the beginning; with the most subtle power she traces the growth of Tito Melema’s mind through its perilous descent into selfish corruption, and with equal or even greater skill she unfolds the history of Daniel Deronda’s development under the impulse to find for himself a life-mission.  In this direction George Eliot is always great.  Her skill is remarkable, albeit she has not sounded either the highest or the lowest ranges of human capacity.  The range within which her studies are made is a wide one, however,