have its elements of pathos and tragedy, its touches of beauty and its motives of heroism.  It has in it also the promise of better things to be.  That is the true poetry, the true fiction, which brings out this promise so that we know it, so that it moves us to better deeds and enchants us with music of purer living.  The world is bad enough without dragging to the light all its evils and discords; let us rather know what promise it contains of the better.  In one word, the real oppresses and enthralls; the ideal liberates, and brings us to ourselves.

Genius redeems every fault.  It must be taken for what it is, must not be criticised, is to be used to the highest ends.  Only when genius unites itself to false methods and checks itself by false theories, has the critic a right to complain.  Genius, obedient to its own laws, accepts every fact life presents, and lifts each one to be an instrument for the enlargement of man’s life.  When it deliberately strikes out all that is not human, however, from man’s experience, denies the realty of that impression and that conviction which comes from other than material sources, it cripples and denies itself.

XX.

THE LIMITATIONS OF HER THOUGHT.

It must be remembered that George Eliot does not use the novel merely for the purpose of inculcating certain doctrines, and that her genius for artistic creation is of a very high order.  In dealing with her as a thinker and as a moral and religious teacher, she is to be regarded, first of all, as a poet and an artist.  Her ethics are subordinate to her art; her religion is subsidiary to her genius.  That she always deliberately set about the task of introducing her positivism into the substance of her novels is not to be supposed.  This would be to imply a forgetfulness on her part of her own methods, and a prostration of art to purposes she would have scorned to adopt.  This is evidently true, however, that certain features of the positive and the evolution philosophy had so thoroughly approved themselves to her mind as to cause them to be accepted as a completely satisfactory explanation of the world, so far as any explanation is possible.  So heartily were they received, so fully did they become incorporated with the substance of her thinking, that she viewed all human experiences in their light.  They had ceased to be theory and speculation with her.  When she thought about the world, when she observed the acts of men, the positivist explanation was at once applied, and instinctively.

That she did teach positivism is unfortunately true, so far as her literary touch and expression is concerned.  That philosophy affects all her books with its subtly insinuating flavor, and it gives meaning and bias to most of them.  They thus gain in definiteness of purpose, in moral vigor, in minutely faithful study of some phases of human experience, and in a massive impression of thoughtfulness which her work creates.  At the same time, they undoubtedly lose in value as studies of life; in free range of expression for her genius, her poetry and her art; and in that spiritual vision which looks forward with keen gazing eyes of hope and confident inquiry.