For it has virtues, many and large.  Its spirit is broad, tolerant, wide and loving.  In no previous Eliot fiction are there finer single effects:  no one is likely to forget the scene in which Gwendolen and Harcourt come to a rupture; or the scene of Deronda’s dismissal.  And in the way of character portrayal, nothing is keener and truer than the heroine of this book, whose unawakened, seemingly light, nature is chastened and deepened as she slowly learns the meaning of life.  The lesson is sound and salutary:  it is set forth so vividly as to be immensely impressive.  Mordecai, against the background necessary to show him, is sketched with splendid power.  And the percentage of quotable sayings, sword-thrusts, many of them, into the vitals of life, is as high perhaps as in any other of the Novels, unless it be “Middlemarch.”  Nevertheless those who point to “Deronda” as illustrating the novelist’s decadence—­although they use too harsh a word—­have some right on their side.  For, viewed as story, it is not so successful as the books of the first half of George Eliot’s career.  It all depends whether a vital problem Novel is given preference over a Novel which does not obtrude message, if it have any at all.  And if fiction be a fine art, it must be confessed that this latter sort is superior.  But we have perfect liberty to admire the elevation, earnestness and skill en detail that denote such a work.  Nay, we may go further and say that the woman who wrote it is greater than she who wrote “The Mill on the Floss.”

With a backward glance now at the list, it may be said in summary that the earlier fiction constitutes George Eliot’s most authoritative contribution to English novel-making, since the thinking about life so characteristic of her is kept within the bounds of good story-telling.  And the compensation for this artistic loss in her later fiction is found in its wider intellectual outlook, its deeper sympathy, the more profound humanity of the message.

But what of her philosophy?  She was not a pessimist, since the pessimist is one who despairs of human virtue and regards the world as paralyzing the will nobly to achieve.  She was, rather, a meliorist who hoped for better things, though tardy to come; who believed, in her own pungent phrase, “in the slow contagion of good.”  Of human happiness she did in one of her latest moods despair:  going so far in a dark moment as to declare that the only ideal left her was duty.  In a way, she grew sadder as she grew older.  By intellect she was a positivist who has given up any definite hope of personal immortality—­save that which by a metaphor is applied to one’s influence upon the life of the world here upon earth.  And in her own career, by her unconventional union with Lewes, she made a questionable choice of action, though from the highest motives; a choice which I believe rasped her sensitive soul because of the way it was regarded by many whom she respected and whose