A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

98.
main component of this feeling is G:7F1pathy. VIe can see, also, her definite
claim that there are stages of moral development ranging from rank
egoism at the lovlest level to the highest-reaching, unself-regarding
sympathy or altrJJiJSm. And she believes that sympathy needs to be dir- /~.
ected towarcls those who are near at hand. Part of the moral education
of Adam Bede, that stalwart, but somewhat rie;id young man, comes from
the tende:tt:'he~sr.>
and protectiveness of his love for Hetty. tlThere is but
one way," we are told, "in which a strong determined soul can learn
ITellow-feelinil--by getting his heart-strings bound round the weak and
erring, so that he must share not only the outward consequence of their
error, but their inward suffering." 3 Romola rejects Tito and his bland
rationalisations of his motives for selling her father's library. She
presents a similar viewpoint to that expressed by George Eliot in
'Propria persona in her article on Young. Romola' 8
"nature, possessed
with the energies of strong emotion, recoiled from this hopelessly
shallow readiness which professed to appropriate the vddest sympathies
and had no pulse for the nearest. II 4- We can compare this with the following
tribute to Deronda whose "conscience included sensibilities beyond
the c~mon,
enlarged by his early habit of thinking himself imaginatively
into the experience of others. II 5 Tito and Deronda, by-the quality of
their respective sympathetic response to the world and especially to
those nearest to them, show that they occupy diametrically opposite
positions on George Eliot t s egOism/sympathy axis.
When we turn now to a brief examination of George Eliot's contemporaries,
of those whose works she is knovm to have read and whom, often, she
knew personally, we find a similar emphasis on sympathy as the affective
component of morality. We also find explicit reference to a faculty
called the moral sense. Alexander Bain, in Mental ~ Moral Science
(186R), offering the familiar opposition bet'ween egoism and sympathy)