ither to please or to quicken the mind. It cannot
please when it leaves the heart depressed and burdened with the failures
and sadness of the world. If it is to please, it must make use of that
goodness and joy which are in excess of evil and misery. It cannot quicken
when it unnerves the mind and brings despair of moral purpose. If it is to
inspire it must show that something great is to be done, and awaken the
courage to do it.

That life has its sad and painful elements is a terrible fact, and the
novelist who would paint life as it is must recognize them. It is quite as
true that the good and the hopeful are more than the sad and painful, that
right is more powerful in human life than wrong. The novelist who would
paint life with an exact and even-handed justice, must not make all his
endings sorrowful, for very many in real life are not so. _The Mill on the
Floss_ would have been a more powerful and effective book could Maggie have
been made to conquer. It would have been quite as true to nature to have
represented her as overcoming her defects, and as being purified through
suffering. Is all suffering to conquer us, instead of our being able to
conquer it, and gaining a more peaceful and a purer life through its aid?
If Maggie is George Eliot in her youthful experiences, then the novel is
untrue to fact in that Marian Evans conquered and Maggie failed. The same
fault is to be found in _Middlemarch_, that Dorothea, great as she is,
deserved a much better fate than that accorded to her. The elements of
womanly greatness were in her character, and with all the barriers created
by society she would have done better things had her creator been true to
her capacities in unfolding her life-history. The effect of both these
great novels is one of depression and disappointment. The reader always
expects more as he goes on his way through these scenes, depicted with such
genius, than is realized at the end. Disappointment is almost inevitable,
for the promise is greater than the fulfilment. The like result is produced
by those books which have the brightest closing scenes, as in _Adam Bede_
and _Daniel Deronda_, where the author's aim was evidently hopeful and
constructive. _Silas Marner_ and _Felix Holt_ are the only exceptions to
this pessimistic tone, and in which justice is done to the better side of
life. In all her later books the ending is painful. In _The Mill on the
Floss_, Maggie and Tom are drowned after Maggie had