Is it not that continually in the narrative you lose its broader human interest because of the narrower political and social questions that are raised?  They are vital questions, but still, more specific, technical, of the time.  Nor is their weaving into the more permanent theme altogether skilful:  you feel like exclaiming to the novelist:  “O, let Kingsley handle chartism, but do you stick to your last—­love and its criss-cross, family sin and its outcome, character changed as life comes to be more vitally realized.”  George Eliot in this fine story falls into this mistake, as does Mrs. Humphry Ward in her well-remembered “Robert Elsmere,” and as she has again in the novel which happens to be her latest as these words are written, “Marriage a la Mode.”  The thesis has a way of sticking out obtrusively in such efforts.

Many readers may not feel this in “Felix Holt,” which, whatever its shortcomings, remains an extremely able and interesting novel, often underestimated.  Still, I imagine a genuine distinction has been made with regard to it.

The difference is more definitely felt in “Middlemarch,” not infrequently called Eliot’s masterpiece.  It appeared five years later and the author was over fifty when the book was published serially during 1871 and 1872.  Nearly four years were spent in the work of composition:  for it the sum of $60,000 was paid.

“Middlemarch,” which resembles Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” in telling two stories not closely related, seems less a Novel than a chronicle-history of two families.  It is important to remember that its two parts were conceived as independent; their welding, to call it such, was an afterthought.  The tempo again, suiting the style of fiction, is leisurely:  character study, character contrast, is the principal aim.  More definitely, the marriage problem, illustrated by Dorothea’s experience with Casaubon, and that of Lydgate with Rosamond, is what the writer places before us.  Marriage is chosen simply because it is the modern spiritual battleground, a condition for the trying-out of souls.  The greatness of the work lies in its breadth (subjective more than objective), its panoramic view of English country life of the refined type, its rich garner of wisdom concerning human motive and action.  We have seen in earlier studies that its type, the chronicle of events as they affect character, is a legitimate one:  a successful genus in English-speaking fiction in hands like those of Thackeray, Eliot and Howells.  It is one accepted kind, a distinct, often able, sympathetic kind of fiction of our race:  its worth as a social document (to use the convenient term once more) is likely to be high.  It lacks the close-knit plot, the feeling for stage effect, the swift progression and the sense of completed action which another and more favored sort of Novel exhibits.  Yet it may have as much chance of permanence in the hands of a master.  The proper question, then, seems to be whether it most fitly expresses the genius of an author.