What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—­to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting.

In Felix Holt there is a passage on this subject which must have come directly from her own experience, and it gives us a true insight into the spirit in which she accepted the distrust of friends and the coldness of the world which her marriage brought her.

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman’s life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul’s highest needs, is not to be had when and how she will:  to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness.  It is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult.

Throughout her novels she exalts marriage, never casts any slur upon it, treats it as one of the most sacred of all human relations.  She makes it appear as a sacrament, not of the Church, but of the sublime fellowship of humanity.  It is pure, holy, a binding tie, a sacred obligation, as it appears in her books.  When Romola is leaving Florence and her husband, her love dead and all that made her life seem worthy gone with it, she meets Savonarola, who bids her return to her home and its duties.  What the great prophet-priest says on this occasion we have every reason to believe expressed the true sentiments of George Eliot herself.  He proclaims, what she doubtless thoroughly believed, that marriage is something far more than mere affection, more than love; that its obligation holds when all love is gone; that its obligation is so sacred and binding as to call for the fullest measure of renunciation and personal humiliation.  As throwing light on George Eliot’s manner of looking at this subject, the whole chapter which describes the meeting of Romola and Savonarola deserves to be read.  That portion of it in which Savonarola gives his views of marriage may here be reproduced, not as giving the doctrine of the Church, but as presenting the positivist conception of marriage as interpreted by George Eliot.

His arresting voice had brought a new condition into her life, which made it seem impossible toiler that she could go on her way as if she had not heard it; yet she shrank as one who sees the path she must take, but sees, too, that the hot lava lies there.  And the instinctive shrinking from a return to her husband brought doubts.  She turned away her eyes from Fra Girolamo, and stood for a minute or two with her hands hanging clasped before her, like a statue.  At last she spoke, as if the words were being wrung from her, still looking on the ground.

    “My husband—­he is not—­my love is gone!”