In speaking of George Eliot's earlier stories I was at pains to show how explicitly she avowed their moral purpose; in _Amos Barton_, in _Janet's Repentance_, in _Adam Bede_, everywhere there is the fullest avowal of didacticism; on almost every other page one meets those direct appeals from the author in her own person to the reader, in which George Eliot indulged more freely than any novelist I know, enforcing this or that moral view in plain terms of preaching. But it curiously happens that even these moral 'asides' are conspicuously absent in _Daniel Deronda_: the most cursory comparison of it in this particular with _Adam Bede_, for example, reveals an enormous disproportion in favor of _Deronda_ as to the weight of this criticism. Yet people who had enthusiastically accepted and extolled _Adam Bede_, with all its explicitly moralizing passages and its professedly preaching characters, suddenly found that _Daniel Deronda_ was intolerably priggish and didactic. But resting then on the facts in the case--easily possible by comparing _Daniel Deronda_ with any previous work--as to show how this censure of didacticism loses all momentum as against this particular book; let us advance to the more interesting, because more general, fact that many people--some in great sincerity--have preferred this censure against all of George Eliot's work and against all didactic novels in general. The objection involved many shades of opinion, and is urged with the most diverse motives and manner. At one extreme we have the _Saturday Review_ growling that the office of the novelist is to amuse, never to instruct, that George Eliot, in seeking the latter has even forfeited the former, and that _Daniel Deronda_ neither amuses nor instructs; whereupon George Eliot is derisively bid, in substance, to put on the cap and bells again, and leave teaching to her betters; with a voice, by the way, wondrously like that with which the _Edinburgh Review_ some years ago cried out to our adorable John Keats, "Back to your gallipots, young man." From this extreme we have all shades of opinion to that vague and moderate apprehension much current among young persons influenced by a certain smart sound in the modern French phrase _l'Art pour l'Art_, or by the German nickname of "tendency-books," that a moral intention on the part of an artist is apt to interfere with the naturalness or intrinsic beauty of his work; that in art the controlling consideration must always be artistic beauty; and that artistic beauty is not only distinct from, but often opposed to moral beauty. Now, to discuss this question _a priori_: to go forward and establish an æsthetic basis for beauty, involving an examination which must range from Aristotle to Kant and Burke and Mr. Grant Allen's physiological theories, would require another course of lectures quite as long as that which is now ending; so that all I can hope to do is but to throw, if I can, some light upon this question.