We recognize George Eliot’s distinctive excellences all through: we never detect a flat or trivial mood of mind: if anything, the style is more weighty and piquant than ever, we may even say loaded with thought. Nobody can resort to the time-honourcd criticism that the work would have been better fur more pains, for labour and care are conspicuous throughout, and labour and care which always produce suitable fruit. But the fact is that the reader uever—or so rarelv as not to affect his general posture of mind—feels at home. The author is ever driving at something foreign to his habits of thought. The leading persons—those with whom her sympathies lie—are guided by Interests and motives with which he has never come in contact, and seem to his perception to belong to the stage once tersely described as peopled by such characters as were never seen, conversing in a language which was never heard, upon topics which will never arise in the commerce of mankind.’ . . . ‘Daniel Deronda’ may be defined as a religious novel without a religion.
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