love, is rescued and purified by love without marriage ; but we are not suffered to forget for a moment that the marriage was criminal and the love was pure. George Eliot determined to write nothing from which it might be inferred that she was pleading for herself. She was scrupulous that no private motive should affect the fidelity of art. To write books, as Corinne and Delphine were written, in the interest of the writer, would have seemed to her degradation, and she never puts forward her own ideal of character.
Marriage was not the only chapter of social ethics touched by the Feuerbach phase, and it was not the gravest. Mazzini belonged to Lewes's circle, and Mazzini was currently suspected of complicity in practices which were distinctly criminal, practices for which the law prescribes its last and simplest penalty. George Eliot wavered a good deal between her interest in his cause and her distrust of his methods, but she would never have felt it a stigma to be on amicable terms with him. Elizabeth and Mary, James and William, lie under the same ban of imputed murder, and the friends of the republican conspirator had no reason to apprehend the censure of those who admired the heroes of Catholic and Protestant monarchy.
Those who remember George Henry Lewes in his prosperity, when he was the most amusing talker in the town, so well content with his labours as to regret nothing he had written, and running over with mirth and good-humour until he could bear contradiction, excuse folly, and even tolerate religion, saw what George Eliot had made him. She knew him first under less genial aspects. Disaster had settled on his domestic life ; he had set his hand to too many things to excel in any, and the mark of failure and frustrated effort was upon him. Varnhagen said in 1850 that Lewes's restless endeavours were repulsive, and that he would end badly if he did not mend his ways. His first books did not recommend him; but there were signs in Ranthorpe of large undiscriminating knowledge, and he was, with Mill, the earliest propounder
