Though he is not a religious believer and despises ordinary conventions, he differs from a Raskolnikov in that he would not consider for an instant violating the moral law in order to benefit humanity. In fact this is precisely what estranges him from the Radical politicians he encounters, who have easy consciences in such matters, accepting with a wink the prospect of violence—a little rough-and-tumble—for the ultimate good of defeating the Tory. Felix would never commit a murder, even in the abstract, turning it over in his mind as a theory. Yet in reality it happens to him to kill a man and to be tried and sentenced for it, though his intention was to halt a riot and the blow he struck was not meant to be mortal. Thus he joins the ranks of principled heroes of nineteenth-century fiction who end up on the wrong side of the law: Jean Valjean, Julien Sorel, Raskolnikov, Nekhludov in Resurrection, who joins the woman he has wronged—the prostitute Maslova—in the convict gang traveling to Siberia. No reflection, however, precedes the decision that leads Felix unintentionally to take a man’s life; an impulse, rather, rooted in his nature, sends him to try to head off the riotous working men who will only damage their cause and other people’s property by a drunken spree of violence. In the style of so many other nineteenth-century “new men,” he has proudly announced “I am a man of this generation,” but what we find in his actions is a simple old-fashioned boy any mother could be proud of—a testimonial to right training.
“If there’s anything our people want convincing of,” he tells Esther Lyon when she comes to see him in prison, “it is, that there’s some dignity and happiness for a man other than changing his station.” (By “our people” he means his own class, the working people, not the English nation, I assume.) Of course there is some truth in what he says, but it is a truth that discourages political action. Felix seems to be totally immune to his century, as though he had been vaccinated against the bug of equality. The novel, which ends with him out of jail and happily married (there is even a little Felix), has a lengthy appendix called “Address to Working Men.” There the author imagines Felix expounding his political philosophy to a working-class audience: “Now the only safe way by which society can be steadily improved...is not by any attempt to do away directly with existing class distinctions and advantages, as if everybody would have the same sort of work, or lead the same sort of life...but by the turning of Class Interests into Class Functions or duties.” One is grateful for the knowledge that the address is imaginary, with the audience’s reaction mercifully unimagined.
Despite all her learning and her capacious intelligence, ideas for George Eliot are wholesome moral reflections; she does not seem to have suspected that they could possibly be anything but “improving.” Tolerance was her great virtue as a novelist; she always seeks to widen, to make common to all, emotions in her characters’ bosoms that the reader might be inclined to spurn any intimacy with. I take an example at random from Middlemarch, where the pious banker Bulstrode, obliged to face his conscience, at once begins to dodge. “If this be hypocrisy,” the author writes, “it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all. ...” The effect of such reminders, page after page, is broadening: we are all made of the same stuff, we have to acknowledge. And, side by side with the injunction to look in the mirror, a general cure is suggested whose name is unselfishness. This is the single thought urged on us by her novels. It is stated explicitly over and over and driven home by telling examples. Mr. Casaubon is selfish, Rosamond Vincy is selfish, her brother Fred is selfish, Tom Tulliver is selfish, Harold Transome is selfish, Esther Lyon starts out to be selfish but is saved in time by Felix Holt. On the other side of the ledger, Maggie Tulliver is unselfish, Mary Garth is unselfish, the Dissenting minister Rufus Lyon is a pillar of unselfishness, Dorothea Brooke is headstrong yet capable of self-sacrifice.
The limitations of this urgent central idea may explain why George Eliot’s “good” characters are so unconvincing, even when she tries, as with Felix Holt and Will Ladislaw, to give them a rough edge that might make them complicated to know socially. Her selfish characters are far more persuasive since we are forced to recognize ourselves—or part of ourselves—in them. Thus the virtue of tolerance we are called on to exercise by this writer at her fullest and best has no work to do with the characters we are instructed to admire and to imitate. If George Eliot fails, even in Middlemarch, to be a very great writer, this, I think, is because of an intellectual deficiency. The division of central characters into self-seeking and non-self-seeking is inadequate as a key to understanding. In Felix Holt, for example, it tells us nothing about the Radicalism that is presumably the subject of the story, and what we get is something strangely like a less ponderous, more charming Romola, in costumes of the post-Reform Bill period.