relations to Stephen Guest.  He calls it “the hideous transformation by which Maggie is debased.”  He says that most of George Eliot’s admirers would regard this as “the highest and the purest and the fullest example of her magnificent and matchless powers.  The first two thirds of the book suffice to compose perhaps the very noblest of tragic as well as of humorous prose idyls in the language; comprising one of the sweetest as well as saddest and tenderest, as well as subtlest examples of dramatic analysis—­a study in that kind as soft and true as Rousseau’s, as keen and true as Browning’s, as full as either’s of the fine and bitter sweetness of a pungent and fiery fidelity.  But who can forget the horror of inward collapse, the sickness of spiritual re-action, the reluctant, incredulous rage of disenchantment and disgust, with which he came upon the thrice-unhappy third part?  The two first volumes have all the intensity and all the perfection of George Sand’s best work, tempered by all the simple purity and interfused with all the stainless pathos of Mrs. Gaskell’s; they carry such affluent weight of thought, and shine with such warm radiance of humor, as invigorates and illuminates the work of no other famous woman; they have the fiery clarity of crystal or of lightning; they go near to prove a higher claim and attest a clearer right on the part of their author than that of George Sand herself to the crowning crown of praise conferred on her by the hand of a woman ever greater and more glorious than either in her sovereign gift of lyric genius, to the salutation given as by an angel indeed from heaven, of ‘large-brained woman and large-hearted man.’” In the momentary lapse of Maggie, Swinburne finds a fatal defect, which no subsequent repentance atones for.  He says that “here is the patent flaw, here too plainly is the flagrant blemish, which defaces and degrades the very crown and flower of George Eliot’s wonderful and most noble work; no rent or splash on the raiment, but a cancer in the very bosom, a gangrene in the very flesh.  It is a radical and mortal plague-spot, corrosive and incurable.”

Such criticism has little if any value, because there is no point of sympathy between the critic and his author.  That real life contains such errors as Maggie’s cannot be doubted, and George Eliot wished to paint no ideal scenes or heroines.  To portray a passionate, eager, yearning nature, full of poetry, longing for a diviner spiritual life, surrounded by dull and unpoetic conditions and persons, was her purpose.  That the hunger of such a person for the expression of her inward cravings for joy, music and beauty should lead her astray and make a sudden lapse possible, is not to be doubted.  The fault of the critics is in supposing that this lapse from moral conduct was that of a physical depravity.  Maggie’s passion grew wholly out of that inward yearning for a fuller life which made all her difficulties.  It was not physical passion but spiritual craving; and in the purpose of the novelist she was as pure after as before.