_Pulcheria._ Not having been obliged by circumstances to read _Middlemarch_ to other people, I didn’t read it at all. I couldn’t read it to myself. I tried, but I broke down. I appreciated Rosamond, but I couldn’t believe in Dorothea.
_Theodora_ (very gravely). So much the worse for you, Pulcheria. I have enjoyed _Daniel Deronda because_ I had enjoyed _Middlemarch_. Why should you throw _Middlemarch_ up against her? It seems to me that if a book is fine it is fine. I have enjoyed _Deronda_ deeply, from beginning to end.
_Constantius._ I assure you, so have I. I can read nothing of George Eliot’s without enjoyment. I even enjoy her poetry, though I don’t approve of it. In whatever she writes I enjoy her intelligence; it has space and air, like a fine landscape. The intellectual brilliancy of _Daniel Deronda_ strikes me as very great, in excess of anything the author has done. In the first couple of numbers of the book this ravished me. I delighted in its deep, rich English tone, in which so many notes seemed melted together.
_Pulcheria._ The tone is not English, it is German.
_Constantius._ I understand that--if Theodora will allow me to say so. Little by little I began to feel that I cared less for certain notes than for others. I say it under my breath--I began to feel an occasional temptation to skip. Roughly speaking, all the Jewish burden of the story tended to weary me; it is this part that produces the poor illusion which I agree with Pulcheria in finding. Gwendolen and Grandcourt are admirable--Gwendolen is a masterpiece. She is known, felt and presented, psychologically, altogether in the grand manner. Beside her and beside her husband--a consummate picture of English brutality refined and distilled (for Grandcourt is before all things brutal), Deronda, Mordecai and Mirah are hardly more than shadows. They and their fortunes are all improvisation. I don’t say anything against improvisation. When it succeeds it has a surpassing charm. But it must succeed. With George Eliot it seems to me to succeed, but a little less than one would expect of her talent. The story of Deronda’s life, his mother’s story, Mirah’s story, are quite the sort of thing one finds in George Sand. But they are really not so good as they would be in George Sand. George Sand would have carried it off with a lighter hand.