e and deliberate moral
misjudgment; it is protecting itself as much as it is condemning the
offenders. On all this, then, we need have neither sophistry nor cant.
But those who seek something deeper than a verdict for the honest
working purpose of leaving cards and inviting to dinner, may feel, as
has been observed by a contemporary writer, that men and women are more
fairly judged, if judge them we must, by the way in which they bear the
burden of an error than by the decision that laid the burden on their
lives. Some idea of this kind was in her own mind when she wrote to her
most intimate friend in 1857, 'If I live five years longer, the positive
result of my existence on the side of truth and goodness will outweigh
the small negative good that would have consisted in my not doing
anything to shock others' (i. 461). This urgent desire to balance the
moral account may have had something to do with that laborious sense of
responsibility which weighed so heavily on her soul, and had so
equivocal an effect upon her art. Whatever else is to be said of this
particular union, nobody can deny that the picture on which it left a
mark was an exhibition of extraordinary self-denial, energy, and
persistency in the cultivation and the use of great gifts and powers for
what their possessor believed to be the highest objects for society and
mankind.

A more perfect companionship, one on a higher intellectual level, or of
more sustained mental activity, is nowhere recorded. Lewes's mercurial
temperament contributed as much as the powerful mind of his consort to
prevent their seclusion from degenerating into an owlish stagnation. To
the very last (1878) he retained his extraordinary buoyancy. 'Nothing
but death could quench that bright flame. Even on his worst days he had
always a good story to tell; and I remember on one occasion in the
drawing-room at Witley, between two bouts of pain, he sang through with
great _brio_, though without much voice, the greater portion of the
tenor part in the _Barber of Seville_, George Eliot playing his
accompaniment, and both of them thoroughly enjoying the fun' (iii. 334).
All this gaiety, his inexhaustible vivacity, the facility of his
transitions from brilliant levity to a keen seriousness, the readiness
of his mental response, and the wide range of intellectual
accomplishments that were much more than superficial, made him a source
of incessant and varied stimulation. Even those, and there were