Upon bringing together, however, all the objections which have been urged against _Daniel Deronda_, I think they may be classified and discussed under two main heads. First it is urged that Daniel Deronda and Mirah--and even Gwendolen Harleth, after her change of spirit--are all prigs; secondly, it is urged that the moral purpose of the book has overweighted the art of it, that what should have been pure nature and beauty have been obscured by didacticism, thus raising the whole question of Art for Art's sake which has so mournfully divided the modern artistic world. This last objection, opening, as it does, the whole question of how far fervent moral purpose injures the work of the true artist, is a matter of such living importance in the present state of our art,--particularly of our literary art; it so completely sums up all these contributory items of thought which have been gradually emerging in these lectures regarding the growth of human personality together with the correlative development of the novel: and the discussions concerning it are conducted upon such small planes and from such low and confusing points of view that I will ask to devote my next lecture to a faithful endeavor to get all the light possible upon the vexed matter of Art for Art's sake, and to showing how triumphantly George Eliot's _Daniel Deronda_ seems to settle that entire debate with the most practical of answers. Meantime in discussing the other class of objections which we managed to generalize, to wit that the three main characters in _Daniel Deronda_ are prigs, a serious difficulty lies in the impossibility of learning from these objectors exactly what _is_ a prig. And I confess I should be warned off from any attempt at discussion by this initial difficulty if I did not find great light thrown on the subject by discovering that the two objections of prig-ism and that of didacticism already formulated are really founded upon the same cunning weakness in our current culture. The truth is George Eliot's book _Daniel Deronda_, is so sharp a sermon that it has made the whole English contemporary society uncomfortable. It is curious and instructive to see how unable all the objectors have been to put their fingers upon the exact source of this discomfort; so that in their bewilderment one lays it to prig-ism, another to didacticism, and so on. That a state of society should exist in which such a piece of corruption as Grandcourt should be not only the leader but the crazing fascination and ideal of the most delicate and fastidious young women in that society; that a state of society should exist in which those pure young girls whom George Eliot describes as "the delicate vessels in which man's affections are hoarded through the ages," should be found manœuvring for this Grandcourt infamy, plotting to be Grandcourt's wife instead of flying from him in horror; that a state of society should exist in which such a thing was