quite as true to nature to have represented her as overcoming her defects, and as being purified through suffering.  Is all suffering to conquer us, instead of our being able to conquer it, and gaining a more peaceful and a purer life through its aid?  If Maggie is George Eliot in her youthful experiences, then the novel is untrue to fact in that Marian Evans conquered and Maggie failed.  The same fault is to be found in Middlemarch, that Dorothea, great as she is, deserved a much better fate than that accorded to her.  The elements of womanly greatness were in her character, and with all the barriers created by society she would have done better things had her creator been true to her capacities in unfolding her life-history.  The effect of both these great novels is one of depression and disappointment.  The reader always expects more as he goes on his way through these scenes, depicted with such genius, than is realized at the end.  Disappointment is almost inevitable, for the promise is greater than the fulfilment.  The like result is produced by those books which have the brightest closing scenes, as in Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda, where the author’s aim was evidently hopeful and constructive. Silas Marner and Felix Holt are the only exceptions to this pessimistic tone, and in which justice is done to the better side of life.  In all her later books the ending is painful.  In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie and Tom are drowned after Maggie had been led to a most bitter end of her love-affairs.  In Romola the heroine is left a widow, after her husband’s treachery had brought him to a terrible death, and after Savonarola had suffered martyrdom.  Dorothea marries into a life of ordinary drudgery, and Lydgate fails.  Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen are separated from each other, and Deronda goes to the east in furtherance of a wild scheme of Jewish colonization.  Fedalma loses her father by the treachery of her lover, and without hope conducts her tribe to Africa.  Jubal dies dishonored, and Armgart loses her voice.  Yet it is not merely that the conclusion does not lead to the expected result, but throughout there is a tone of doubt and failure.  That George Eliot purposed to give life this tinge of sadness is not to be accepted as the true explanation of it.  It is known that she did not have such a purpose, that she was surprised and disappointed that her books should produce such a result on her readers.  The explanation is to be found in another direction.

She was an agnostic; life had no wide horizon for her.  The light of a genuinely ideal and spiritual conception of life was not hers.  The world was bounded to her vision, rounded into the little capacity possessed by man.  Where others would have cast a glow of hope and sunset brilliance, promise of a brighter day yet to dawn over the closing scenes of her novels, she could see nothing beyond but the feeble effect of an earthly transmitted good.  In this