that was an aim of hers or not,
she undoubtedly did attempt to indicate how altogether important is
renunciation to a life of true development, how difficult it is to attain,
and that it is the vital result of all human endeavor. She surrounded a
tender, sensitive, musical and poetic soul, one quick to catch the tone of
a higher spiritual faith, with the common conditions of ordinary social
life, to show how such an "environment" cripples and retards a soul full of
aspiration and capable of the best things. Maggie saw the way to the light,
but the way was hard, beset with difficulties individual and social, and
she could neither overcome herself nor the world. She was taken suddenly
away, and the novel comes to a hasty conclusion, because the author desired
to indicate the causes of spiritual danger to ardent souls, and not to
inculcate a formula for their relief. Maggie had learned how difficult it
is for the individual to make for himself a new way in life, how benumbing
are the conditions of ordinary human existence; and through her death we
are to learn that in such difficulties as hers there is no remedy for the
individual. Only through the mediation of death could Maggie be reconciled
to those she had offended; death alone could heal the social wounds she had
made, and restore her as an accepted and ennobled member of the corporate
existence of humanity. This seems to be the idea underlying the hurried
conclusion of this novel, that the path of renunciation once truly entered
on, brings necessarily such difficulties as only death can overcome; and
death does overcome them when those we have loved and those we have helped,
forget what seem to them our wrong deeds in the loving memories which
follow the dead. Over the grave men forget all that separated them from
others, and the living are reconciled to those who can offend them no more.
All that was good and pure and loving is then made to appear, and memory
glorifies the one who in life was neglected or hated. Through death Maggie
was restored to her brother, and over her grave came perfect reconciliation
with those others from whom she had been alienated. That renunciation may
lead to cruel martyrdoms is what George Eliot means; but she would say it
has its lofty recompense in that restoration which death brings, when the
individual becomes a part of the spiritual influence which surrounds and
guides us all. For those who can accept such a conclusion as this the unit