George Eliot’s interest in the present amelioration of human conditions was strengthened by her faith in the future of the race.  She expected no rapid improvement, no revolutionizing development; but she believed the past of mankind justifies faith in a gradual attainment of perfect conditions.  This conviction was expressed when she said,—­

    What I look to is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be
    as immediate and irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something
    firm if I am falling.

She saw too much evil and suffering to be an optimist; she could not see that all things are good or tending towards what is good.  Yet her faith in the final outcome was earnest, and she looked to a slow and painful progress as the result of human struggles.  When called an optimist, she responded, “I will not answer to the name of optimist, but if you like to invent Meliorist, I will not say you call me out of my name.”  She trusted in that gradual development which science points out as the probable result of the survival of the fittest in human life.  In “A Minor Prophet” she has presented her conception of human advancement, and tenderly expressed her sympathy with all humble, imperfect lives.

                              Bitterly
  I feel that every change upon this earth
  Is bought with sacrifice.  My yearnings fail
  To reach that high apocalyptic mount
  Which shows in bird’s-eye view a perfect world,
  Or enter warmly into other joys
  Than those of faulty, struggling human kind,
  That strain upon my soul’s too perfect wing
  Ends in ignoble floundering:  I fall
  Into short-sighted pity for the men
  Who, living in those perfect future times,
  Will not know half the dear imperfect things
  That move my smiles and tears—­will never know
  The fine old incongruities that raise
  My friendly laugh; the innocent conceits
  That like a needless eyeglass or black patch
  Give those who wear them harmless happiness;
  The twists and cracks in our poor earthenware,
  That touch me to more conscious fellowship
  (I am not myself the finest Parian)
  With my coevals.  So poor Colin Clout,
  To whom raw onions give prospective zest,
  Consoling hours of dampest wintry work,
  Could hardly fancy any regal joys
  Quite unimpregnate with the onion’s scent: 
  Perhaps his highest hopes are not all clear
  Of waftings from that energetic bulb: 
  ’Tis well that onion is not heresy. 
  Speaking in parable, I am Colin Clout. 
  A clinging flavor penetrates ray life—­
  My onion is imperfectness:  I cleave
  To nature’s blunders, evanescent types
  Which sages banish from Utopia. 
  “Not worship beauty?” say you.  Patience, friend! 
  I worship in the temple with the rest;
  But by my hearth I keep a sacred nook
  For gnomes and dwarfs, duck-footed waddling