ke light, that bind the world in one:
Sweeps like the sense of vastness, when at night
We hear the roll and dash of waves that break
Nearer and nearer with the rushing tide,
Which rises to the level of the cliff
Because the wide Atlantic roils behind,
Throbbing respondent to the far-off orbs.

George Eliot did all that could be done to make the morality she taught
commendable and inspiring. In her own direct teachings, and in the
development of her characters and her plots, she has done much to make it
acceptable. Her strong insistence on the social basis of morality is to be
admired, and the truth presented is one of great importance. Even more
important is her teaching of the stern nature of retribution, that every
thought, word and deed has its effect. There is need of such teaching, and
it can be appropriated into the thought and life of the time with great
promise of good. Yet the outcome of George Eliot's morality was rather
depressing than otherwise. While she was no pessimist, yet she made her
readers feel that life was pessimistic in its main tendencies. She makes on
the minds of very many of her readers the impression that life has not very
much light in it. This comes from the whole cast of her mind, and still
more because the light of true ideal hopes was absent from her thought. A
stern, ascetic view of life appears throughout her pages, one of the
results of the new morality and the humanitarian gospel of altruism.
Unbending, unpitiful, does the universe seem to be when the idea of law and
Nemesis is so strongly presented, and with no relief from it in the theory
of man's free will. Not less depressing to the moral nature is an
unrelieved view of the universe under the omnipotent law of cause and
effect, which is not lighted by any vision of God and a spiritual order
interpenetrating the material. Her teaching too often takes the tone of
repression; it is hard and exacting. She devotes many pages to showing the
effects of the law of retribution; she gives comparatively few to the
correlative law that good always has its reward. Renunciation is presented
as a moral force, and as duty of supreme importance; life is to be
repressed for the sake of humanity. The spontaneous tendencies of the mind
and heart, the importance of giving a free and healthy development to human
nature, is not regarded. Her morality is justly to be criticised for its
ascetic and pessimistic tendencies.

XIII.