“So far as George Eliot’s life is concerned,” says Mr. Stopford Brooke, “she was eager in her self-development, and as eager in her sympathies.  But it was a different matter in the main drift of her work.  She lowered the power of individualism.  Nay, she did not believe in its having any self-caused or God-caused existence.  Few have individualized their characters more than she did, and of these characters we have many distinct types.  But she individualized them with, I may say, almost the set purpose of showing that their individualism was to be sacrificed to the general welfare of the race.  The more her characters cling to their individuality the more they fail in reaching happiness or peace.  If they are noble characters, they are finally obliged, through their very nobility, to surrender all their ideals, all their personal hopes, all the individual ends they hoped to develop; and they reach peace finally only through utter surrender of personality in humanity.  The characters in her books who do not do this, who cling to their individuality and maintain it, succeed in life, for the most part, if they are strong; are broken to pieces if they are weak; but in all cases, save one, are not the noble but the ignoble characters.  The whole of her books is a suppressed attack on individualism, and an exaltation of self-renunciation as the only force of progress, as the only ground of morality.  I leave aside here, as apart from the moral side of the subject, the view that individual power or weakness of any kind is the consequence of the past, of race, of physical causes.  What a man is found to do is not affected by that, in her view....  No one can deny that the morality is a lofty one, and, as far as it asserts self-renunciation, entirely useful; we have with all our hearts to thank George Eliot for that part of her work.  But when sacrifice of self is made, in its last effort, equivalent to the sacrifice of individuality, the doctrine of self-renunciation is driven to a vicious extreme.  It is not self-sacrifice which is then demanded, it is suicide ...  Fully accepted, it would reduce the whole of the human race to hopelessness.  That, indeed, is the last result.  A sad and fatal hopelessness of life broods over all the nobler characters.  All their early ideals are sacrificed, all their early joys depart, all the pictures they formed are blotted out.  They gain peace through renunciation, after long failure; some happiness in yielding to the inevitable, and harmonizing life with it; and some blessedness in doing all they can for the progress of those who follow them, for the good of those that are with them.  Their self is conquered, not through ennoblement of personality, but through annihilation of personality.  And having surrendered their separate personality, they then attain the fitting end, silence forevermore.  It is no wonder that no characters are so sad, that none steep the reader in such hopelessness of joy, as the noble characters of the later works of George Eliot.  They want the mighty power, the enkindling hopes, the resurrection of life, the joy and rapture which deepens towards death and enables man to take up the ideals of youth again.”