Perhaps there will never be general agreement as to this in the case of “Middlemarch.”  The book is drawn from wells of experience not so deep in Eliot’s nature as those which went to the making of “Adam Bede” and “The Mill on the Floss,” It is life with which the author became familiar in London and about the world during her later literary days.  She knows it well, and paints it with her usual noble insistence upon truth.  But she knows it with her brain; whereas, she knows “The Mill on the Floss” with her blood.  There is surely that difference.  Hence, the latter work has, it would seem, a better chance for long life; for, without losing the author’s characteristic interpretation, it has more story-value, is richer in humor (that alleviating ingredient of all fiction) and is a better work of art.  It shows George Eliot absorbed in story-telling:  “Middlemarch” is George Eliot using a slight framework of story for the sake of talking about life and illustrating by character.  Those who call it her masterpiece are not judging it primarily as art-work:  any more than those who call Whitman the greatest American poet are judging him as artist.  While it seems necessary to make this distinction, it is quite as necessary to bear down on the attraction of the character-drawing.  That is a truly wonderful portrait of the unconsciously selfish scholar in Casaubon.  Dorothea’s noble naturalness, Will Ladislaw’s fiery truth, the verity of Rosamond’s bovine mediocrity, the fine reality of Lydgate’s situation, so portentous in its demand upon the moral nature—­all this, and more than this, is admirable and authoritative.  The predominant thought in closing such a study is that of the tremendous complexity of human fate, influenced as it is by heredity, environment and the personal equation, and not without melioristic hope, if we but live up to our best.  The tone is grave, but not hopeless.  The quiet, hesitant movement helps the sense of this slow sureness in the working of the social law: 

“Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small.”

In her final novel, “Daniel Deronda,” between which and “Middlemarch” there were six years, so that it was published when the author was nearly sixty years old, we have another large canvas upon which, in great detail and with admirable variety, is displayed a composition that does not aim at complete unity—­or at any rate, does not accomplish it, for the motive is double:  to present the Jew so that Judenhetze may be diminished:  and to exhibit the spiritual evolution through a succession of emotional experiences of the girl Gwendolen.  This phase of the story offers an instructive parallel with Meredith’s “Diana of the Crossways.”  If the Jew theme had been made secondary artistically to the Gwendolen study, the novel would have secured a greater degree of constructive success; but there’s the rub.  Now it seems the main issue; again, Gwendolen holds the center of the stage.  The result is a suspicion of patchwork; nor is this changed by the fact that both parts are brilliantly done—­to which consideration may be added the well-known antipathy of many Gentile readers to any treatment of the Jew in fiction, if an explanation be sought of the relative slighting of a very noble book.