. . .It runs abroad in Wuthering Heights and Aurora Leigh and Sonnets from the Portuguese. And George Eliot, for all her spurious masculinity, is as the rest. You may trace the disease in her most admired passages. For example:--

"It was to Adam the time that a man can least forget in after life, --the time when he believes that the first woman he has ever loved betrays by a slight something--a word, a tone, a glance, the quivering of a lip or an eyelid--that she is at least beginning to love him in return. The sign is so slight, it is scarcely perceptible to the ear or eye--he could describe it to no one--it is a mere feather-touch, yet it seems to have changed his whole being, to have merged an uneasy yearning into a delicious consciousness of everything but the present moment." (Adam Bede, p. 187.)

Observe here the eager iteration of the woman, making haste to say what she means, and, conscious of failure, falling back on insis. . . Read More