“Why did he love her?  Curious fools, be still! 
     Is human love the fruit of human will?”

She knows she ought not to love this man, yet she combats her passion with poor success, allows herself to be compromised in her relations with him, and is only rescued by a supreme effort of self-renunciation,—­a principle which runs through all George Eliot’s novels, in which we see the doctrines of Buddha rather than those of Paul, although at times they seem to run into each other.  Maggie erred in not closing the gate of her heart inexorably, and in not resisting the sway of a purely “physiological law.”  The vivid description of this sort of love, with its “strange agitations” and agonizing ecstasies, would have been denounced as immoral fifty years ago.  The denouement is an improbable catastrophe on a tidal river, in the rising floods of which Maggie and her brother are drowned,—­a favorite way with the author in disposing of her heroes and heroines when she can no longer manage them.

The secondary characters of this novel are numerous, varied, and natural, and described with great felicity and humor.  None of them are interesting people; in fact, most of them are very uninteresting,—­vulgar, money-loving, material, purse-proud, selfish, such as are seen among those to whom money and worldly prosperity are everything, with no perception of what is lofty and disinterested, and on whom grand sentiments are lost,—­yet kind-hearted in the main, and in the case of the Dobsons redeemed by a sort of family pride.  The moral of the story is the usual one with George Eliot,—­the conflict of duty with passion, and the inexorable fate which pursues the sinner.  She brings out the power of conscience as forcibly as Hawthorne has done in his “Scarlet Letter.”

The “Mill on the Floss” was soon followed by “Silas Marner,” regarded by some as the gem of George Eliot’s novels, and which certainly—­though pathetic and sad, as all her novels are—­does not leave on the mind so mournful an impression, since in its outcome we see redemption.  The principal character—­the poor, neglected, forlorn weaver—­emerges at length from the Everlasting Nay into the Everlasting Yea; and he emerges by the power of love,—­love for a little child whom he has rescued from the snow, the storm, and death.  Driven by injustice to a solitary life, to abject penury, to despair, the solitary miser, gloating over his gold pieces,—­which he has saved by the hardest privation, and in which he trusts,—­finds himself robbed, without redress or sympathy; but in the end he is consoled for his loss in the love he bestows on a helpless orphan, who returns it with the most noble disinterestedness, and lives to be his solace and his pride.  Nothing more touching has ever been written by man or woman than this short story, as full of pathos as “Adam Bede” is full of humor.