“THE celebrated Tommy first comes into view on a dirty London stair, and he was in sexless garments, which were all he had, and he was five, and so though we are looking at him, we must do it sideways, lest he sit down hurriedly to hide them.”
To turn from George Elliot's Tom Tulliver to Sentimental Tommy is to encounter the maladies of the soul. It is to leave the firm and solid ground of ordinary boyhood for the quicksands of a character that is almost feminine in its subtlety, hard to understand, and harder still to love. Tommy, in his shifting moods, his substitution of feeling for principle, his delight in his own exceeding cleverness, is at times more girl than boy. Even his kindness of heart, his gentleness, his constitutional disregard of truth, his supreme emotionalism, his desire to be masterful, not by riding roughly and gayly through life, but by holding and handling and hurting the hearts of those who love him—all these interesting attributes savor a little of femininity. Only his peculiar innocence, untarnished, almost untouched by his broad and premature knowledge of evil, proclaims him still the boy. It would seem at first sight that London ought to be a better field than Thrums for so versatile a genius, yet it finds its really harmonious setting in the Scotch hamlet. Even the most wonderful of little scamps is lost in the vast scampishness of the world's greatest city; but in Thrums Tommy's remarkable gifts win instant recognition. His one grand London exploit at the supper for juvenile criminals is not half so telling as his simpler device of outwitting the schoolmaster by cutting off Francie Crabbe's curls. Nor could he, in the London slums, have lived so thrillingly that double life—by day a schoolboy, insignificant, unknown; by night, under the friendly moon, a royal exile, whoso handful of brave followers have sworn to restore to him the throne of his ancient and ill-fated race ...
