A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

249.
But we may also feel that the subtly enooded messages impose too rigid
a struoture and prevent the oharaoters from manifesting their "plenitude,
diversity and individuality." W. J. Harvey olaimsthat the noveliat, lias
he surveys the crowded human soene" ~must
II be able to withhold final
judgement, to suspend his attaohment to a partioular point of view, to
reconcile disparities, to encompass the multitudinous and oonflioting
interests, values and assumptions of the world if he is to allow this
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full weight within the world of his novel."
I am maintaining that George Eliot does not always aohieve this suspension
of final judgement. This is not to de~ the breadth and oompassion
of her insight, the eoologioal oomplexity of her presentation of
the inter-relationship between an individual and his society, nor the
trenohant iro~ with whioh she treats her morally deluded oharacters. But
at either end of her moral soale there is a rigidity of presentation.
And espeoia1ly with the more morally evolved charaoters, the moral absolutes
take over and we feel that they are being held in too oonstraining
a grasp_
But, as I have indioated, it is not every George Eliot oharacter
who is locked in this rigid set of co-ordinates. There are ~ charact
ers in the middle range of her moral scale who are struggling against
their own impUlses, foroed to endure the consequences of giving in or
failing to exert the neoessary strength of will. And for them, George
Eliot herself aoknowledges, a different psyohologioal approaoh is needed.
She answeredB1aokwood's demurabout~Maggie-Tul1iverby_deo1aring that
"if the ethios of art do not admit the truthful .presentation of a oharacter
essentially noble but liable to great error--error that is anguish
to its 'own nobleness--then, it seems to me, the ethics of art are too
narrow, and must be widened to correspond with'a widening psychology./I
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The presentation of such oharacters as Maggie and Lydgate whose errors