The cause of what must be regarded as the great defect in The Mill on the Floss is not that George Eliot chose to paint life in a diseased state, but that she had not the power to make her characters act what they themselves were.  While the delightful inward portraiture of Maggie is in process all are charmed with her, her soul is as pure and sweet as a rose new-blown; but when the time arrives for her to act as well as to meditate and to dream, she is not made equal to herself.  Through all her books this is true, that George Eliot can describe a soul, but she cannot make her men and women act quite up to the facts of daily life.  In this way Dinah and Adam are not equal to themselves, and settle down to a prosaic life such as is not in keeping with that larger action of which they were capable.  George Eliot’s characters are greater than their deeds; their inward life is truer and more rounded than their outward life is pure and noble.

The Mill on the Floss fully develops George Eliot’s conception of the value of self-renunciation in the life of the individual, and gives a new emphasis to her ideas about the importance of the spiritual life as an element in true culture.  It has been said that she intended to indicate the nature of physiological attraction between men and women, and how large an influence it has; but whether that was an aim of hers or not, she undoubtedly did attempt to indicate how altogether important is renunciation to a life of true development, how difficult it is to attain, and that it is the vital result of all human endeavor.  She surrounded a tender, sensitive, musical and poetic soul, one quick to catch the tone of a higher spiritual faith, with the common conditions of ordinary social life, to show how such an “environment” cripples and retards a soul full of aspiration and capable of the best things.  Maggie saw the way to the light, but the way was hard, beset with difficulties individual and social, and she could neither overcome herself nor the world.  She was taken suddenly away, and the novel comes to a hasty conclusion, because the author desired to indicate the causes of spiritual danger to ardent souls, and not to inculcate a formula for their relief.  Maggie had learned how difficult it is for the individual to make for himself a new way in life, how benumbing are the conditions of ordinary human existence; and through her death we are to learn that in such difficulties as hers there is no remedy for the individual.  Only through the mediation of death could Maggie be reconciled to those she had offended; death alone could heal the social wounds she had made, and restore her as an accepted and ennobled member of the corporate existence of humanity.  This seems to be the idea underlying the hurried conclusion of this novel, that the path of renunciation once truly entered on, brings necessarily such difficulties as only death can overcome; and death does overcome them when those we have loved and those we have helped,