_The Mill on the Floss_ is partly an autobiographic romance. Maggie Tulliver’s character resembles George Eliot in her youth. The contrast between the practical and the ideal, the conflict between love and duty in the heart of a girl, belong to those _problematische Naturen_, as Goethe called them, which may taste keen joys but cannot escape sharp sorrows. The centre of the story lies in Maggie’s strong devotion to her father and to her brother Tom—a person not altogether unlike the “elder brother” in the parable—in strife with her love for Philip, the son of the family enemy. Tom ruthlessly commands his sister to choose between breaking with him and giving up her lover. Maggie, after a bitter struggle, chooses her brother. Would a real woman do that? Yes, I have known some very real women who have done it, in one case with a tragic result. The original title of this book (and the right one) was _Sister Maggie_. Yet we can see why George Eliot chose the other name. The little river Floss, so tranquil in its regular tidal flow, yet capable of such fierce and sudden outbreaks, runs through the book from beginning to end. It is a mysterious type of the ineluctable power of Nature in man’s mortal drama. In the last chapter, when the flood comes, and the erring sister who loved her brother so tenderly, rescues him who loved her so cruelly from the ruined mill, the frail skiff which carries them clasped heart to heart, reconciled in that revealing moment, goes down in the senseless irresistible rush of waters. It is not a “bad ending.” The sister’s love triumphs. Such a close was inevitable for such a story. But it is not a conclusion. It cries out for immortality. * * * * * On the art of George Eliot judgments have differed. Mr. Oscar Browning, a respectable authority, thinks highly of it. Mr. W. C. Brownell, a far better critic, indeed one of the very best, thinks less favourably of it, says that it is too intellectual; that the development and conduct of her characters are too logical and consistent; that the element of surprize, which is always present in life, is lacking in her people. “Our attention,” he writes, “is so concentrated on what they think that we hardly know how they feel, or whether ... they feel at all.” This criticism does not seem to me altogether just. Certainly there is no lack of surprize in Maggie Tulliver’s temporary infatuation with the handsome, light-minded Stephen Guest, or in Dorothea Brooke’s marriage to that heady young butterfly, Will Ladislaw. These things certainly were not arrived at by logical consistency. Nor can one lay his hand on his heart and say that there is no feeling in the chapter where the fugitive Romola comes as Madonna to the mountain village, stricken by pestilence, or in the passage where Dinah Morris strives for Hetty’s soul in prison. George Eliot herself tells us the purpose of her art—it is _verity_.