Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/38

While Romola and Daniel Deronda are of a different genre from the other novels,, they have a share of their excellences of style and characterisation. Since attention was first drawn to the point, too much stress has been laid on the 'scientific technicalities' of her style of late years. She would not have been the foremost woman of her age if she had not been influenced by one of its greatest movements. Yet the evidences of this are as clear in her earliest as in her latest works. In Janet's Repentance we read that 'the idea of duty ... is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life.' In the second page of Adam Bede, Seth's 'coronal arch' becomes a prominent feature in his portrait. In The Mill on the Floss George Eliot cannot let us know the ingenious trick by which Bob Jakin gains a couple of inches in measuring out his flannel without referring to his thumb as the 'mark of difference between the man and the monkey.' It is not quite correct to say that her style became more scientific in her last two novels; it would be more exact to say that it became more complex. As her thoughts became more subtle, her sentences naturally became more complex, and it would be difficult to determine the limits beyond which subtlety and complexity become inartistic. Allied to