he critics are right in pronouncing _Adam Bede_ artistically defective,
it is not difficult to see that there is still less of unity in _The Mill
on the Floss_. Unconnected and unnecessary scenes and persons abound, while
the Tulliver and Dodson families, and their stupidities, are described at a
tedious length. Yet the picture of child-life given here compensates for
all we might complain of in other directions. Maggie is an immortal child,
wonderfully drawn, out of the very heart of nature herself. Her joy in
life, her doubts and fears, her conflicts with self, are delineated with a
master's hand, and justify--such is their faithfulness to child-life--the
supposition that this is George Eliot's own childhood, so delicate and
penetrating is the insight of this description, Swinburne has justly said
that "no man or woman, outside the order of poets, has ever written of
children with such adorable fidelity of affection as the spiritual mother
of Totty, Eppie and of Lillo." Nor have the poets surpassed her in
truthfulness to child-life and intuitive insight into child-nature. The
child Maggie is unsurpassed, not as an ideal being, but as a living child
that plays in the dirt, tears her frocks, and clips her hair in an hour of
childish anger.

In this novel we first come distinctly upon another element in the writings
of George Eliot, and this is a yearning after a fuller, larger life. It
does not appear as distinctly developed in _Adam Bede_, where there is more
of poise and repose. Maggie represents the restless spirit of the
nineteenth century, intense dissatisfaction with self, and a profoundly
human passion for something higher and diviner. A passionate restlessness
and a profound spiritual hunger are united in this novel to an eager desire
for a deeper and fuller life, and for a satisfactory answer to the soul's
spiritual thirst. The spiritual repose of Dinah, who has found all the
religious cravings of her nature satisfied in Methodism, is abandoned for
the inward yearning of Maggie, whose passionate search for spiritual truth
ends in disaster.

No other of George Eliot's books has been so severely criticised as this
one, except _Daniel Deronda_, and mainly because of Maggie. The apparent
fall of the heroine, and the crude tragedy of the ending, have been
regarded as serious defects. The moral tone and purpose have been severely
condemned. In his essays on foul and fair fiction, Ruskin puts _The Mill on
the Floss_ i