other notion comes from the supposition of arbitrary revelation."
This is the motto to one of her short tales: –
"Give me no light, great heaven, but such as turns
To energy of human fellowship ;
No powers save the growing heritage
That makes completer manhood.""The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world, and that we can say to ourselves with effect, 'There is an order of considerations which I will keep myself continually in mind of, so that they may continually be the prompters of certain feelings and actions,' seems to me as undeniable as that we can resolve to study the Semitic languages and apply to an oriental scholar to give us daily lessons."
"In her general attitude towards life," says her biographer, "George Eliot was neither optimist nor pessimist. She held to the middle term which she invented for herself of 'meliorist.' She was cheered by the hope and by the belief in gradual improvement of the mass; for in her view each individual must find the better part of happiness in helping another."
"Will you believe," she writes, "that an accomplished man some years ago said to me, that he saw no place for the exercise of resignation, when there was no personal divine will contemplated as ordaining sorrow or privation? He is not yet aware that he is getting old, and needing that unembittered compliance of soul with the inevitable, which seems to me a full enough meaning for the word 'resignation.'"
"I fear," she writes to Mrs Bray, "the fatal fact about your story is the absence of God and hell. 'My dear madam, you have not presented motives to the children!' It is really hideous to find that those who sit in the scribes' seats have got no further than the appeal to selfishness, which they call God."
She is fond of affirming that high effort, though it fail, is not failure: –
"My impression of the good there is in all unselfish efforts is continually strengthened. Doubtless many a ship is drowned on expeditions of discovery or rescue, and precious freights lie buried. But there was the good of manning and furnishing the ship with a great purpose before it set out."
On the death of Mazzini she writes: –
"Such a man leaves behind him a wider good than the loss of his personal presence can take away.
"'The greatest gift the hero leaves his race,
Is to have been a hero. '"I must be excused for quoting my own words, because they are my credo."
Of her life with Lewes she writes: –
"Our unspeakable joy in each other has no other alloy than the sense that it must one day end in parting."
"The approach of parting is the bitterness of age."
"The realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech."
"I desire," she writes in her journal, "no added blessing for the coming year but this, – that I may do some good lasting work, and make both my outward and inward habits less imperfect – that is, more directly tending to the best uses of life."
To a friend she writes: –
"For nearly a year death seems to me my most intimate daily companion. I mingle the thought of it with every other, not sadly, but as one mingles the thought of some one who is nearest in love and duty with all one's motives. I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity, – possible for us to gain much more independence, than is usually believed, of the small bundle of facts that make our own personality."
