eneral knowledge which has been called
general ignorance. The excitement was immense. Evolution, development,
heredity, adaptation, variety, survival, natural selection, were so many
patent pass-keys that were to open every chamber.

George Eliot's novels, as they were the imaginative application of this
great influx of new ideas, so they fitted in with the moods which those
ideas had called up. 'My function,' she said (iii. 330), 'is that of the
aesthetic, not the doctrinal teacher--the rousing of the nobler emotions
which make mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing of
special measures, concerning which the artistic mind, however strongly
moved by social sympathy, is often not the best judge.' Her influence in
this direction over serious and impressionable minds was great indeed.
The spirit of her art exactly harmonised with the new thoughts that were
shaking the world of her contemporaries. Other artists had drawn their
pictures with a strong ethical background, but she gave a finer colour
and a more spacious air to her ethics by showing the individual passions
and emotions of her characters, their adventures and their fortunes, as
evolving themselves from long series of antecedent causes, and bound up
with many widely operating forces and distant events. Here, too, we find
ourselves in the full stream of evolution, heredity, survival, and fixed
inexorable law.

This scientific quality of her work may be considered to have stood in
the way of her own aim. That the nobler emotions roused by her writings
tend to 'make mankind desire the social right' is not to be doubted; but
we are not sure that she imparts peculiar energy to the desire. What she
kindles is not a very strenuous, aggressive, and operative desire. The
sense of the iron limitations that are set to improvement in present and
future by inexorable forces of the past, is stronger in her than any
intrepid resolution to press on to whatever improvement may chance to be
within reach if we only make the attempt. In energy, in inspiration, in
the kindling of living faith in social effort, George Sand, not to speak
of Mazzini, takes a far higher place.

It was certainly not the business of an artist to form judgments in the
sphere of practical politics, but George Eliot was far too humane a
nature not to be deeply moved by momentous events as they passed. Yet
her observations, at any rate after 1848, seldom show that energy of
sympathy of which we h