this characteristic,
however objective and impersonal he may have been. Homer, Virgil, Dante,
Cervantes, Shakspere, Scott, were all earnest ethical teachers. The moral
problems of life impressed them profoundly, and they showed a strong
personal preference for righteousness. The literary masters of all times
and countries have loved virtue, praised purity, and admired ethical
uprightness. Any other attitude than this argues something less than
genius, though genius may be far from didactic and not given to preaching.
The moral intent of life is so inwoven with all its experiences, that the
failure of any mind to be impressed with it, and profoundly affected,
proves it wanting in insight, poetic vision and genius. George Eliot is
entirely in harmony, in this respect, with all the masters of the literary
art. Her ethical passion is a clear sign of her genius, and proves the
vigor of her intellectual vision. No one who rightly weighs the value of
her books, and fairly estimates the nature of her teaching, can regret that
she had so keen a love of ethical instruction. The vigor, enthusiasm and
originality of her teaching compensate for many faults.

Her teachings have a special interest because they afford a literary
embodiment of the ethical theories of the evolution philosophy. They
indicate the form which is likely to be given to ethics if theism and
individualism are discarded, and the peculiar effects upon moral life which
will be induced by agnosticism. She applied agnosticism to morals, by
regarding good and evil as relative, and as the results, of man's
environment. For her, ethics had no infinite sanctions, no intuitive
promulgation of an eternal law; but she regarded morality as originating in
and deriving its authority from the social relations of men to each other.
Our intuitive doing of right, or sorrow for wrong, is the result of
inherited conditions. In _Romola_ she speaks of Tito as affected by--

the inward shame, the reflex of that outward law which the great heart
of mankind makes for every individual man, a reflex which will exist
even in the absence of the sympathetic impulses that need no law, but
rush to the deed of fidelity and pity as inevitably as the brute mother
shields her young from the attack of the hereditary enemy. [Footnote:
Chapter IX.]

This teaching is often found in her pages, and in connection with the
assertion of the relativity of morals. There is no absolute