been led to a most
bitter end of her love-affairs. In _Romola_ the heroine is left a widow,
after her husband's treachery had brought him to a terrible death, and
after Savonarola had suffered martyrdom. Dorothea marries into a life of
ordinary drudgery, and Lydgate fails. Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen are
separated from each other, and Deronda goes to the east in furtherance of a
wild scheme of Jewish colonization. Fedalma loses her father by the
treachery of her lover, and without hope conducts her tribe to Africa.
Jubal dies dishonored, and Armgart loses her voice. Yet it is not merely
that the conclusion does not lead to the expected result, but throughout
there is a tone of doubt and failure. That George Eliot purposed to give
life this tinge of sadness is not to be accepted as the true explanation of
it. It is known that she did not have such a purpose, that she was
surprised and disappointed that her books should produce such a result on
her readers. The explanation is to be found in another direction.

She was an agnostic; life had no wide horizon for her. The light of a
genuinely ideal and spiritual conception of life was not hers. The world
was bounded to her vision, rounded into the little capacity possessed by
man. Where others would have cast a glow of hope and sunset brilliance,
promise of a brighter day yet to dawn over the closing scenes of her
novels, she could see nothing beyond but the feeble effect of an earthly
transmitted good. In this regard her books afford a most interesting
contrast to those of the two other great women who have adorned English
literature with their genius. The lot of Mrs. Browning and Charlotte Bronte
was much sadder and more depressing than that of George Eliot; more of
darkness and pain affected their lives. A subtle tone of sadness runs
through their books, but it is not burdensome and depressing as is the case
of George Eliot. There is hope with it, and a buoyant faith in the good,
which lies above and beyond all pain and sorrow. With neither of them was
this faith conventional, a mere reflection of the religion taught them in
childhood. It was a thoughtful result of a large experience, and of hard
contact with many of the severest facts of human experience. That wide
horizon of spiritual reality which shone for them on every hand, lights all
their work with a brilliance which almost puts out of sight the pain and
sorrow of the world. The reader of their books is made to bel