How could a novelist as morally perceptive as George Eliot come to be so imperceptive, so earnestly soggy, with ‘ideal’ characters like Dorothea Brooke in the later sections of Middlemarch or the waxwork hero of Daniel Deronda? It does not explain much to say (as one of her most morally-sympathetic critics, F. R. Leavis, does, for example) that there was always a streak of immaturity in her personality. Taken in one sense, this is not an explanation at all – it merely restates the problem in different terms. But even in a more substantial sense, it still does not make clear how she could have judged her flights of moral ‘elevation’, which strike any modern reader (as they struck some of her sharper contemporaries) as utterly at odds with the moral precision and specificity of other parts of the very same work, to be both proper and right: to be, that is, not only good (morally), but also supported by and completing (argumentatively) the moral insights and judgments realized elsewhere in the book.

To us, her moral ‘elevation’ is likely to seem merely Victorian – which is to say, neither proper nor right but only an example of tendencies characteristic of her time: the tendency to look for social ‘community’ in moral sentiment, for instance, or the tendency that Nietzsche noted, to resort to an ardent credulity about conventional Christian morality in order to compensate for incredulity about conventional Christian doctrine.