"You forget, perhaps, that the moralist and the novelist are not the same person. The latter does indeed convey some moral lessons, but his main object is to portray life as he finds it, aiming ever at the ideal for which life should stand. It is for him to place before the public the different phases of human nature, the differences of character formed by circumstances, the influences of fate or the rules and laws of Society, all of which are again controlled by the laws of the Universe. George Eliot, who understands the mission of an author, does not want to change human nature, does not want to create either gods or demons. She only expresses life as she finds it, and awakens in her reader love and sympathy. Dorothea lives in the ideal, her hopes and aspirations are utopian, and yet what blunders do not such people often commit in this world of ours. This fact the writer has made plain in her character. Is there not a deep pathos in this failure of a life?"
"We pity her, but at the same time we must lose patience with her, because she loved such an unworthy man in the end."
"Some say," I remarked, "that Dorothea
