A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

And this is definitely not the case. We do feel that if Lydgate could
~nly
have exerted himself a little here, had only controlled hisimpetuous
and impatient tongue there, and had struggled to find a vocabulary
to describe his and Rosamond's behaviour that would have been intelligible
and acceptable to them both, things would have been different. This
accords very much with Lewes' description of the factors involved in any
decision, when he says that "inpsychological·language, the resultant is
the chosen motive, and is conditioned by three determinants,--1)fhe
nature of the stimulus; 2) The momentary state of the mind; 3) The in-
82
dividuality of the person. II This suggests that a slight alteration of
potency in one or other of the factors will create a different combination
and that it is this which provides the possibility of a small degree
of freedom, the loophole both George Eliot and Lewes allow for exercising
the will. This does not suggest that the character will act inconsistently;
his behaviour will still be seen to accord with the rules
governing his part~cular
organism. George Eliot frequently refers to
the "bias" of a personts nature. In the following quotation from
Middlemarch Mr Casaubon has just been told the serious nature of his
illness and George Eliot stresses that even her~ at the moment of facing
death/he does not behave in a way that is inconsistent with his
''bias. tI "When the conunonplace, 'We must all die l
'j:;ransforms itself suddenly
into the acute consciousness 'I must die--and soon,' then death
grapples us, and his fingers are cruel •••• In such an hour the mind
does not change its lifelong bias, but carries it onward in imagination
to the other side of death, gazing backward--perhaps with the divine calm
of beneficence, perhaps with the petty anxieties of self-assertion." 83
But George Eliot is careful to distinguish between those characters
who, like Tom Tulliver, are "inexorable, unbending, unmodifiable" 84 and
those she shows as having the possibility of growth and change. In her