“There are memories and affections, and longing after perfect goodness, that have such a strong hold on me, they would never quit me for long; they would come back and be pain to me—­repentance.  I couldn’t live in peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God.  I have caused sorrow already—­I know—­I feel it; but I have never deliberately consented to it; I have never said, ’They shall suffer that I may have joy.’”

And again, she says,—­

“We can’t choose happiness either for ourselves or for another; we can’t tell where that will lie.  We can only choose whether we will indulge ourselves in the present moment, or whether we will renounce that, for the sake of obeying the divine voice within us—­for the sake of being true to all the motives that sanctify our lives.  I know this belief is hard; it has slipped away from me again and again; but I have felt that if I let it go forever I should have no light through the darkness of this life.”

In these remarkable passages from Romola and The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot presented her own theory of life.  One of her friends, in giving an account of her moral influence, speaks of “the impression she produced, that one of the greatest duties of life was that of resignation.  Nothing was more impressive as exhibiting the power of feelings to survive the convictions which gave them birth, than the earnestness with which she dwelt, on this as the great and real remedy for all the ills of life.  On one occasion she appeared to apply it to herself in speaking of the short space of life that lay before her, and the large amount of achievement that must be laid aside as impossible to compress into it—­and the sad, gentle tones in which the word resignation was uttered, still vibrate on the ear.” [Footnote:  Contemporary Review, February, 1881.] Not only renunciation but resignation was by her held to be a prime requisite of a truly moral life.  Man must renounce many things for the sake of humanity, but he must also resign himself to endure many things because the universe is under the dominion of invariable laws.  Much of pain and sorrow must come to us which can in no way be avoided.  A true resignation and renunciation will enable us to turn pain and sorrow into the means of a higher life.  In Adam Bede she says that “deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.”  She teaches that man can attain true unity with the race only through renunciation, and renunciation always means suffering.  Self-sacrifice means hardship, struggle and sorrow; but the true end of life can only be attained when self is renounced for that higher good which comes through devotion to humanity.  Her noblest characters, Maggie Tulliver, Romola, Jubal, Fedalma, Armgart, attain peace only when they have found their lives taken up in the good of others.  To her the highest happiness consists in being loyal to duty, and it “often brings so much pain with it that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good.”