The Ethics of George Eliot's Works

The Ethics of George Eliot's Works by John Crombie Brown is Brown's review of the moral meaning of George Eliot's novels Middlemarch and Deronda. Excerpt: «There is in man a higher than the love of happiness: he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.» Such may be regarded as the fundamental lesson that one of the great teachers of our time has been laboring to impress upon the age. The truth, and the practical corollary from it, are not now first enunciated. Representing, as we believe it to do, the practical aspect of the noblest reality in man—that which most directly represents Him in whose image he is made—it has found doctrinal expression more or less perfect from the earliest times."