d of the
present time. There is need of more poetry, a more poetic interpretation of
life, a richer imagination and a finer sense of beauty. The common is
everywhere, but it is not necessarily great or beautiful or noble. It may
have its elements of pathos and tragedy, its touches of beauty and its
motives of heroism. It has in it also the promise of better things to be.
That is the true poetry, the true fiction, which brings out this promise so
that we know it, so that it moves us to better deeds and enchants us with
music of purer living. The world is bad enough without dragging to the
light all its evils and discords; let us rather know what promise it
contains of the better. In one word, the real oppresses and enthralls; the
ideal liberates, and brings us to ourselves.

Genius redeems every fault. It must be taken for what it is, must not be
criticised, is to be used to the highest ends. Only when genius unites
itself to false methods and checks itself by false theories, has the critic
a right to complain. Genius, obedient to its own laws, accepts every fact
life presents, and lifts each one to be an instrument for the enlargement
of man's life. When it deliberately strikes out all that is not human,
however, from man's experience, denies the realty of that impression and
that conviction which comes from other than material sources, it cripples
and denies itself.

XX.

THE LIMITATIONS OF HER THOUGHT.

It must be remembered that George Eliot does not use the novel merely for
the purpose of inculcating certain doctrines, and that her genius for
artistic creation is of a very high order. In dealing with her as a thinker
and as a moral and religious teacher, she is to be regarded, first of all,
as a poet and an artist. Her ethics are subordinate to her art; her
religion is subsidiary to her genius. That she always deliberately set
about the task of introducing her positivism into the substance of her
novels is not to be supposed. This would be to imply a forgetfulness on her
part of her own methods, and a prostration of art to purposes she would
have scorned to adopt. This is evidently true, however, that certain
features of the positive and the evolution philosophy had so thoroughly
approved themselves to her mind as to cause them to be accepted as a
completely satisfactory explanation of the world, so far as any explanation
is possible. So heartily were they received, so fully did they become
incorporated