was."[1] Even his prayer after becoming virtually a murderer is not really a piece of hypocrisy. "Does anyone suppose," asks Eliot, "that private prayer is necessarily candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action?"[2]
George Eliot is, however, even more impressed with the auto-intoxication of optimism as it manifests itself in what might be called group psychology; and especially against a disregard of the law of cause and effect does she turn the shafts of her quiet irony. At the period when the Raveloe tale opens,—[3]
"It was still that glorious war-time which was felt to be a
peculiar favor of Providence toward the landed interest, and
the fall of prices had not yet come to carry the race of small
squires and yeomen down that road to ruin for which extravagant
habits and bad husbandry were plentifully anointing
their wheels."
In pursuance of this comfortable philosophy,—
"* * * the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and
apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families,
and the poor thought that the rich were entirely in the right
of it to lead a jolly life."
In another story we are introduced to some "pious Dissenting
women, who took life patiently, and thought that
salvation depended chiefly on predestination, and not at
all on cleanliness."[4] In a higher social class this inno-*
- ↑ Middlemarch, III, 264.
- ↑ Ibid., 271.
- ↑ Silas Marner, 26-27. In the same narrative the author uses the misfortunes of Godfrey to illustrate the truth that "Favorable Chance is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. * * * The evil principle deprecated in that religion, is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind." 91.
- ↑ Felix Holt, I, 6.
