And it is all so earnest and so intellectual, and it does so much credit to Sylvester. After long consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the following sonnet, from Brother and Sister, is the best piece of sustained poetry that George Eliot achieved. It deals with the pathetic and beautiful relations which existed between her and her elder brother Isaac, the Tom Tulliver of _The Mill on the Floss:_
His sorrow was my sorrow, and his joy Sent little leaps and laughs through all my frame; My doll seemed lifeless, and no girlish toy Had any reason when my brother came. I knelt with him at marbles, marked his fling, Cut the ringed stem and made the apple drop, Or watched him winding close the spiral string That looped the orbits of the humming-top. Grasped by such fellowship my vagrant thought Ceased with dream-fruit dream-wishes to fulfil; My aëry-picturing fantasy was taught Subjection to the harder, truer skill That seeks with deeds to grave a thought-tracked line, And by "What is" "What will be" to define.
How near this is to true poetry, and yet how many miles away!
At last George Eliot seems to have felt that she could never hope, with all her intellect, to catch the unconsidered music which God lavishes on the idle linnet and the frivolous chaffinch. She returned to her own strenuous business of building up the psychological novel. She wrote _Middlemarch_, which appeared periodically throughout 1872 and as a book early the following year. It was received with great enthusiasm, as marking the return of a popular favourite who had been absent for several years. _Middlemarch_ is the history of three parallel lives of women, who "with dim lights and tangled circumstances tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement," although "to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness." The three ineffectual St. Theresas, as their creator conceived them, were Dorothea, Rosamond, and Mary, and they "shaped the thought and deed" of Casaubon and Ladislaw and Fred Vincy. _Middlemarch_ is constructed with unfailing power, and the picture of commonplace English country life which it gives is vivacious after a mechanical fashion, but all the charm of the early stories has evaporated, and has left behind it merely a residuum of unimaginative satire. The novel is a very remarkable instance of elaborate mental resources misapplied, and genius revolving, with tremendous machinery, like some great water-wheel, while no water is flowing underneath it.