If the critics are right in pronouncing Adam Bede artistically defective, it is not difficult to see that there is still less of unity in The Mill on the Floss.  Unconnected and unnecessary scenes and persons abound, while the Tulliver and Dodson families, and their stupidities, are described at a tedious length.  Yet the picture of child-life given here compensates for all we might complain of in other directions.  Maggie is an immortal child, wonderfully drawn, out of the very heart of nature herself.  Her joy in life, her doubts and fears, her conflicts with self, are delineated with a master’s hand, and justify—­such is their faithfulness to child-life—­the supposition that this is George Eliot’s own childhood, so delicate and penetrating is the insight of this description, Swinburne has justly said that “no man or woman, outside the order of poets, has ever written of children with such adorable fidelity of affection as the spiritual mother of Totty, Eppie and of Lillo.”  Nor have the poets surpassed her in truthfulness to child-life and intuitive insight into child-nature.  The child Maggie is unsurpassed, not as an ideal being, but as a living child that plays in the dirt, tears her frocks, and clips her hair in an hour of childish anger.

In this novel we first come distinctly upon another element in the writings of George Eliot, and this is a yearning after a fuller, larger life.  It does not appear as distinctly developed in Adam Bede, where there is more of poise and repose.  Maggie represents the restless spirit of the nineteenth century, intense dissatisfaction with self, and a profoundly human passion for something higher and diviner.  A passionate restlessness and a profound spiritual hunger are united in this novel to an eager desire for a deeper and fuller life, and for a satisfactory answer to the soul’s spiritual thirst.  The spiritual repose of Dinah, who has found all the religious cravings of her nature satisfied in Methodism, is abandoned for the inward yearning of Maggie, whose passionate search for spiritual truth ends in disaster.

No other of George Eliot’s books has been so severely criticised as this one, except Daniel Deronda, and mainly because of Maggie.  The apparent fall of the heroine, and the crude tragedy of the ending, have been regarded as serious defects.  The moral tone and purpose have been severely condemned.  In his essays on foul and fair fiction, Ruskin puts The Mill on the Floss into that class of novels which describe life’s blotches, burrs and pimples, and calls it “the most striking instance extant of this study of cutaneous disease.”  He says the personages are picked up from behind the counter and out of the gutter, and he finds “there is not a single person in the book of the smallest importance to anybody in the world but themselves, or whose qualities deserved so much as a line of printer’s type in their description.”  To the same effect is Swinburne’s criticism of Maggie’s