![]() ![]() Williams (ibid) explains that the shift in meaning onto people came through metaphor, initially with particular reference to the face. The image is significant, for if we examine the etymology of ‘character’, we are taken back to the Greek for ‘sharpening’, ‘furrowing’, or ‘engraving’: the techniques used for imprinting lettering, signs and symbols (Williams 1988: 234). The navvy waking from sleep and without malice heaving a stone to crush the life out of his still sleeping comrade, is understood to lack the trained motive which makes a character fairly calculable in his actions.(Eliot 1974: 364) (Daniel Deronda)Įliot presents us with the unpredictability of human nature each of us at the mercy of individual biology, that ‘strange spiritual chemistry’, is, although ‘fairly calculable’, simultaneously capable of working against the ordered patterns of character formation we have previously etched. ![]() We mortals have a strange spiritual chemistry going on within us, so that a lazy stagnation, or even a cottony milkiness may be preparing one knows not what biting or explosive material. ![]()
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