noble work; no
rent or splash on the raiment, but a cancer in the very bosom, a gangrene
in the very flesh. It is a radical and mortal plague-spot, corrosive and
incurable."

Such criticism has little if any value, because there is no point of
sympathy between the critic and his author. That real life contains such
errors as Maggie's cannot be doubted, and George Eliot wished to paint no
ideal scenes or heroines. To portray a passionate, eager, yearning nature,
full of poetry, longing for a diviner spiritual life, surrounded by dull
and unpoetic conditions and persons, was her purpose. That the hunger of
such a person for the expression of her inward cravings for joy, music and
beauty should lead her astray and make a sudden lapse possible, is not to
be doubted. The fault of the critics is in supposing that this lapse from
moral conduct was that of a physical depravity. Maggie's passion grew
wholly out of that inward yearning for a fuller life which made all her
difficulties. It was not physical passion but spiritual craving; and in the
purpose of the novelist she was as pure after as before.

The cause of what must be regarded as the great defect in _The Mill on the
Floss_ is not that George Eliot chose to paint life in a diseased state,
but that she had not the power to make her characters act what they
themselves were. While the delightful inward portraiture of Maggie is in
process all are charmed with her, her soul is as pure and sweet as a rose
new-blown; but when the time arrives for her to act as well as to meditate
and to dream, she is not made equal to herself. Through all her books this
is true, that George Eliot can describe a soul, but she cannot make her men
and women act quite up to the facts of daily life. In this way Dinah and
Adam are not equal to themselves, and settle down to a prosaic life such as
is not in keeping with that larger action of which they were capable.
George Eliot's characters are greater than their deeds; their inward life
is truer and more rounded than their outward life is pure and noble.

_The Mill on the Floss_ fully develops George Eliot's conception of the
value of self-renunciation in the life of the individual, and gives a new
emphasis to her ideas about the importance of the spiritual life as an
element in true culture. It has been said that she intended to indicate
the nature of physiological attraction between men and women, and how
large an influence it has; but whether