Page:The Essays of George Eliot, ed. Sheppard, 1883.djvu/25

 in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the last parting?"

While a large proportion of her work in the analysis of motives is confined to woman, she has done nothing more skilful or memorable than the "unravelling" of Bulstrode's mental processes by which he "explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with his beliefs." If there were no Dorothea in "Middlemarch" the character of Bulstrode would give that novel a place by itself among the masterpieces of fiction. The Bulstrode wound was never probed in fiction with more scientific precision. The pious villain finally finds himself so near discovery that he becomes conscientious. "His equivocation now turns venomously upon him with the full-grown fang of a discovered lie." The past came back to make the present unendurable. "The terror of being judged sharpens the memory." Once more "he saw himself the banker's clerk, as clever in figures as he was fluent in speech, and fond of theological definition. He had striking experience in conviction and sense of pardon; spoke in prayer-meeting and on religious platforms. That was the time he would have chosen now to awake in and find the rest of dream. He remembered his first moments of shrinking. They were private and were filled with arguments—some of these taking the form of prayer.

Private prayer—but "is private prayer necessarily candid? Does it necessarily go to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative. Who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?" Bulstrode's course up to the time of his being suspected "had, he thought, been sanctioned by remarkable providences, appearing to point the way for him to be the agent in making the best use of a large property." Providence would have him use for the glory of God the money he had stolen. "Could it be for God's service that this fortune should go to" its rightful owners, when its rightful owners were "a young woman and her husband who were given up to the lightest