This scientific quality of her work may be considered to have stood in the way of her own aim.  That the nobler emotions roused by her writings tend to ‘make mankind desire the social right’ is not to be doubted; but we are not sure that she imparts peculiar energy to the desire.  What she kindles is not a very strenuous, aggressive, and operative desire.  The sense of the iron limitations that are set to improvement in present and future by inexorable forces of the past, is stronger in her than any intrepid resolution to press on to whatever improvement may chance to be within reach if we only make the attempt.  In energy, in inspiration, in the kindling of living faith in social effort, George Sand, not to speak of Mazzini, takes a far higher place.

It was certainly not the business of an artist to form judgments in the sphere of practical politics, but George Eliot was far too humane a nature not to be deeply moved by momentous events as they passed.  Yet her observations, at any rate after 1848, seldom show that energy of sympathy of which we have been speaking, and these observations illustrate our point.  We can hardly think that anything was ever said about the great civil war in America, so curiously far-fetched as the following reflection:—­’My best consolation is that an example on so tremendous a scale of the need for the education of mankind through the affections and sentiments, as a basis for true development, will have a strong influence on all thinkers, and be a check to the arid narrow antagonism which in some quarters is held to be the only form of liberal thought’ (ii. 335).

In 1848, as we have said, she felt the hopes of the hour in all their fulness.  To a friend she writes (i. 179):—­’You and Carlyle (have you seen his article in last week’s Examiner?) are the only two people who feel just as I would have them—­who can glory in what is actually great and beautiful without putting forth any cold reservations and incredulities to save their credit for wisdom.  I am all the more delighted with your enthusiasm because I didn’t expect it.  I feared that you lacked revolutionary ardour.  But no—­you are just as sans-culottish and rash as I would have you.  You are not one of those sages whose reason keeps so tight a rein on their emotions that they are too constantly occupied in calculating consequences to rejoice in any great manifestation of the forces that underlie our everyday existence.

’I thought we had fallen on such evil days that we were to see no really great movement—­that ours was what St. Simon calls a purely critical epoch, not at all an organic one; but I begin to be glad of my date.  I would consent, however, to have a year clipt off my life for the sake of witnessing such a scene as that of the men of the barricades bowing to the image of Christ, ‘who first taught fraternity to men.’  One trembles to look into every fresh newspaper lest there should be something to