“Art’s the witness of what is
  Beyond this show.  If this world’s show were all,
  Mere imitation would be all in art.”

The glow of genius burns up out of all her pages, and there is an aroma and a subtle power in them which comes alone of this conception of art.  She could not rest content with the little round of man’s experience, but found that all the universe is bound together and all its parts filled with a God-spirit.

“No lily-muffled hum of a summer bee But finds some coupling with, the spinning stars; No pebble at your foot but proves a sphere; No chaffinch but implies the cherubim:  ...  Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God.”

That is a larger faith and a truer faith than appears anywhere in the pages of George Eliot, and it is one which impregnates most of the best literature the world posseses with light and life.  It is a faith which gives hope and impulse where the other saddens and unnerves.

There is wanting in George Eliot’s books that freshness of spirit, that faith in the future, and that peaceful poise of soul which is to be found in the writings of Tennyson, Ruskin and Mrs. Browning.  Even with all his constitutional cynicism and despair, the teachings of Carlyle are much more hopeful than hers.  An air of fatigue and world-weariness is about all her work, even when it is most stimulating with its altruism.  Though in theory not a pessimist, yet a sense of pain and sorrow grows out of the touch of each of her books.  In this she missed one of the highest uses of literature, to quicken new hopes and to awaken nobler purposes.  There is a tone of joy and exultation in the power life confers, an instinctive sense of might to conquer the world, in the best writing.  To make men think, to move men to action, to confer finer feelings and motives, is the power of the true poet.  When he does not accomplish this he has written to a lesser purpose.  Literature aims either to please or to quicken the mind.  It cannot please when it leaves the heart depressed and burdened with the failures and sadness of the world.  If it is to please, it must make use of that goodness and joy which are in excess of evil and misery.  It cannot quicken when it unnerves the mind and brings despair of moral purpose.  If it is to inspire it must show that something great is to be done, and awaken the courage to do it.

That life has its sad and painful elements is a terrible fact, and the novelist who would paint life as it is must recognize them.  It is quite as true that the good and the hopeful are more than the sad and painful, that right is more powerful in human life than wrong.  The novelist who would paint life with an exact and even-handed justice, must not make all his endings sorrowful, for very many in real life are not so. The Mill on the Floss would have been a more powerful and effective book could Maggie have been made to conquer.  It would have been