“I will bear it, and bear it till death...  But how long it will be before death comes!  I am so young, so healthy.  How shall I have patience and strength?  Am I to struggle and fall, and repent again?  Has life other trials as hard for me still?” With that cry of self-despair Maggie fell on her knees against the table, and buried her sorrow-stricken face.  Her soul went out to the Unseen Pity that would be with her to the end.  Surely there was something being taught her by this experience of great need, and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering that the less erring could hardly know.  “O God, if my life is to be long, let me live to bless and comfort—­”

Then the flood came, and death.  Maggie could repent, she could acquire the true spirit of renunciation, she could even give herself to a life of altruism; but death only could restore her to the world.  Death, says George Eliot, is the great reconciler.

Silas Marner is the only one of these earlier novels in which there is a continuous unity of purpose and action.  Its several parts are thoroughly wrought into each other, the aim of the narrative is adhered to throughout, and there are no superfluous incidents.  The plot is simple, cause and effect flow on steadily to the end in the unfoldment of character and action, and the design of the author is easily grasped.  One of her critics, himself a novelist of a high order, has said that in its unity of purpose and dramatic expression Silas Marner is more nearly a masterpiece than any other of George Eliot’s novels; “it has more of that simple, rounded, consummate aspect, that absence of loose ends and gaping issues, which marks a classical work.” [Footnote:  Henry James, Jr.] In this novel, too, her humor flows out with a richer fulness, a racier delight and a more sparkling variety of expression than in any other book of hers, not excepting Adam Bede.  She has here reached the very height of her qualities as a humorist, for in Silas Marner her humor is constantly genial and delightful.

Certain ethical ideas appear very distinctly in this novel.  It illustrates man’s need of social ties and connections.  Silas forsook his old life, the life of his childhood and youth, and the world was a blank for him in consequence.  With the sundering of the ties which bound him to the traditional environment amidst which he was reared, all the purpose and meaning of his life was gone.  The old ties, obligations and associations gone, his life was without anchorage, its ideal aims perished, and he lived a selfish and worthless creature.  When new social ties were formed by the young child he found then his life opened up to a larger meaning again, and he recovered the better things in his nature.  He was then led back again into his relations to society, he became once more a man, a fresh life was opened to him.  This brought a new confidence in religion,