The lesson is sound and
salutary: it is set forth so vividly as to be immensely
impressive. Mordecai, against the background necessary to show
him, is sketched with splendid power. And the percentage of
quotable sayings, sword-thrusts, many of them, into the vitals
of life, is as high perhaps as in any other of the Novels,
unless it be "Middlemarch." Nevertheless those who point to
"Deronda" as illustrating the novelist's decadence--although
they use too harsh a word--have some right on their side. For,
viewed as story, it is not so successful as the books of the
first half of George Eliot's career. It all depends whether a
vital problem Novel is given preference over a Novel which does
not obtrude message, if it have any at all. And if fiction be a
fine art, it must be confessed that this latter sort is
superior. But we have perfect liberty to admire the elevation,
earnestness and skill en detail that denote such a work. Nay, we
may go further and say that the woman who wrote it is greater
than she who wrote "The Mill on the Floss."

With a backward glance now at the list, it may be said in
summary that the earlier fiction constitutes George Eliot's most
authoritative contribution to English novel-making, since the
thinking about life so characteristic of her is kept within the
bounds of good story-telling. And the compensation for this
artistic loss in her later fiction is found in its wider
intellectual outlook, its deeper sympathy, the more profound
humanity of the message.

But what of her philosophy? She was not a pessimist, since the
pessimist is one who despairs of human virtue and regards the
world as paralyzing the will nobly to achieve. She was, rather,
a meliorist who hoped for better things, though tardy to come;
who believed, in her own pungent phrase, "in the slow contagion
of good." Of human happiness she did in one of her latest moods
despair: going so far in a dark moment as to declare that the
only ideal left her was duty. In a way, she grew sadder as she
grew older. By intellect she was a positivist who has given up
any definite hope of personal immortality--save that which by a
metaphor is applied to one's influence upon the life of the
world here upon earth. And in her own career, by her
unconventional union with Lewes, she made a questionable choice
of action, though from the highest motives; a choice which I
believe rasped her sensitive soul because of the way it was
regarded by many whom s