Complete, Unabridged, and very, very easy to Read.
In 'Middlemarch,' George Eliot is free, and her patient dissection of motives, her reliance upon environment to explain character, and her physiology of the soul,' may be fairly compared with Balzac's mechanical fatalism; except that where the French author beheld only a conflict of individualities, an unchecked and undiluted passion for self, the Agnostic English lady, mindful of her Christian bringing up, could still discern the beauty of sacrifice and the struggle towards perfection. Her profound sadness touched, as with pensive evening light, the vast battlefield over which she gazed, tenderly, yet despairing of an immortal issue. She could have analyzed tears, with the chemist who sought for the Absolute; but her own eyes were dimmed while she steeled herself to the operation. George Eliot was a repentant Realist, for she could not be satisfied with the melancholy facts of existence; she lamented the lost spiritual kingdoms even while she denied that they had ever been, outside the pious imagination of believers. She borrowed her art from Christianity; and, so long as it was not overborne by her science, she wrote what will hardly die before the English language itself.
