Promise is all of which we are as yet entitled to speak, for the audacity of those discoverers of art treasures who can in their minds construct the entire statue so soon as a part of it has been uncovered from the soil is best left unimitated.

The self-contained strength of matured powers is impressed upon this book, and this is not more than was to be anticipated: but an equally unmistakable characteristic the absence of which would have caused less surprise in the freshness of this mellow fruit of genius.įrom the third chapter onwards, at all events, Daniel Deronda exhibits all the signs of an author in the fullest enjoyment of his most proper gifts and when we remember the indisputable fact that there are few great novelists who have measured the extent of their productivity by the endurances of the fulness of their powers, we rejoice to recognise in the first book the promise of a work belonging to the best 'period' of its author's creations. Whatever other work 'George Eliot' may have been, or may have engaged upon, the vein to which we owe Middlemarch and Romola is not yet exhausted and while any attempt at criticism would be out of place so long as only an instalment of Daniel Deronda is in our hands, one observation may be made with absolute safety with regard to it. Rumour, which never shrinks from busying itself with the 'intentions' even of those authors who are least inclined to feel its appetite, had persistently asserted that it would be long before Middlemarch would be followed by another work of prose fiction. It is not necessary to resort to the invidious expedient of comparisons in order to account for the interest the announcement of a new novel by 'George Eliot' has excited.

1876 novel by george eliot