More George Eliot

"Art must be either real and concrete, or ideal and eclectic.  Both are good and true in their way, but my stories are the former kind.  I undertake to exhibit nothing as it should be; I only try to exhibit some things as they have been or are, seen through the medium as my own nature gives me.  The moral of the stories of course depends on my power of seeing truly and feeling justly; and as I am not conscious of looking at things through the medium of cynicism or irreverence, I can't help hoping that there is no tendency in what I write to produce those miserable mental states."