It is to be said of this affair that George Eliot was very far from looking at such a problem as Goethe or, George Sand would have looked at it, from the position of personal inclination. Yet we are told by Miss Blind that she early entertained liberal views in regard to divorce, believing that greater freedom in this respect is desirable. There could have been no passionate individualistic defiance of law in her case, however. No one has insisted more strongly than she on the importance and the sanctity of the social regulations in regard to the union of the sexes. That her marriage was a true one in all but the legal form, that she was faithful to its every social obligation, has been abundantly shown. She was a most faithful wife to Lewes, and the devoted mother of his three children by the previous marriage, while she found in him that strong, self-reliant helpmate she needed. Her marriage under these circumstances required no little individualism of purpose, and some defiance of social obligations. Her intimate friends were unable to comprehend her conduct, and she was alienated from most of them. Especially her friends in Coventry were annoyed at such a marriage, and were not reconciled with her for a long time, and not until they saw that she had acted with a conscientious purpose. She was excluded from society by this act, and her marriage was interpreted as a gross violation of social morality. To a sensitive nature, as hers assuredly was, and to one who so much valued the confidence of her friends as she did, such exclusion must have been a serious cross. She freely elected her own course in life, however, and she never seems to have complained at the results it brought her. That it saddened her mind seems probable, but there is no outward evidence that she accepted her lot in a bitter or complaining spirit. No one could have written of love and marriage in so high and pure a spirit as everywhere appears in her books with whom passion was in any degree a controlling influence. In _Adam Bede_ her own conception of wedded love is expressed out of the innermost convictions and impulses of her own heart, when she exclaims,-- What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting. In _Felix Holt_ there is a passage on this subject which must have come directly from her own experience, and it gives us a true insight into the spirit in which she accepted the distrust of friends and the coldness of the world which her marriage brought her.