ABSTRACT
Sympathy, for George Eliot, is prior to the aesthetics of realism, functioning both as the purpose of her novelistic art and as its source. The wider span of Eliot's thinking on sympathy in relation to Schiller also has a central bearing on her realism. Eliot, however, has a different starting point from Schiller. While Schiller's thrust is towards an ideal state of moral freedom beyond the urging of violent passion, for her morality starts with greater empathy and an imaginative reaching out to a real 'other', variously defined. A crude juxtaposition of the imperfect self with a shining image of the other, however, would alienate her readership and merely intensify its resistance. For this reason, just as she presents the negative aspects of the empirical-practical tendency, she also stresses the dangers of the idealist mindset which play a determining role in the characters' lives: Felix's naivety, Dorothea's blindness, Maggie Tulliver's uncontrolled emotionalism, the increasing fanaticism of the otherworldly Savonarola.
