ge Eliot painted herself, as Madame De Stael describes
her own restless soul-agitations in "Delphine" and "Corinne." Nothing in
fiction is more natural and life-like than the school-days of Maggie,
when she goes fishing with her tyrannical brother, and when the two
children quarrel and make up,--she, affectionate and yielding; he,
fitful and overbearing. Many girls are tyrannized over by their
brothers, who are often exacting, claiming the guardianship which
belongs only to parents. But Maggie yields to her obstinate brother as
well as to her unreasonable and vindictive father, governed by a sense
of duty, until, with her rapid intellectual development and lofty
aspiration, she breaks loose in a measure from their withering
influence, though not from technical obligations. She almost loves
Philip Wakem, the son of the lawyer who ruined her father; yet out of
regard to family ties she refuses, while she does not yet repel, his
love. But her real passion is for Stephen Gurst, who was betrothed to
her cousin, and who returned Maggie's love with intense fervor.

"Why did he love her? Curious fools, be still!
Is human love the fruit of human will?"

She knows she ought not to love this man, yet she combats her
passion with poor success, allows herself to be compromised in her
relations with him, and is only rescued by a supreme effort of
self-renunciation,--a principle which runs through all George Eliot's
novels, in which we see the doctrines of Buddha rather than those of
Paul, although at times they seem to run into each other. Maggie erred
in not closing the gate of her heart inexorably, and in not resisting
the sway of a purely "physiological law." The vivid description of this
sort of love, with its "strange agitations" and agonizing ecstasies,
would have been denounced as immoral fifty years ago. The _denouement_
is an improbable catastrophe on a tidal river, in the rising floods of
which Maggie and her brother are drowned,--a favorite way with the
author in disposing of her heroes and heroines when she can no longer
manage them.

The secondary characters of this novel are numerous, varied,
and natural, and described with great felicity and humor. None
of them are interesting people; in fact, most of them are very
uninteresting,--vulgar, money-loving, material, purse-proud, selfish,
such as are seen among those to whom money and worldly prosperity are
everything, with no perception of what is lofty and di