If too severe in some directions, this criticism is substantially sound.  It does not matter what theory of personality we adopt, in a philosophical sense, if that theory upholds personal confidence and force of will.  If it does not do this, the whole result is evil.  This lack of faith in personality saddened all the work done by George Eliot.  In theory a believer in an ever-brightening future, and no pessimist, yet the outcome of her work is dark with despondency and grief.

Life is sad, hard and ascetic in her treatment of it.  An ascetic tone runs through all her work, the result of her theories of renunciation.  The same sternness and cheerlessness is to be seen in the poetry and painting of the pre-Raphaelites.  The joy, freshness and sunniness of Raphael is not to be found in their work.  Life is painful, puritanic and depressing to them.  Old age seems to be upon them, or the decadence of a people that has once been great.  Human nature does not need that this strain be put upon it.  Life is stronger when more assertive of itself.  It has a right to assert itself in defiance of mere rules, and only when it does so is it true and great.  The ascetic tone is one of the worst results of a scientific view of the world as applied to literature; for it is thoroughly false both in fact and in sentiment.  The strong, hopeful, youthful look at life is the one which literature demands, and because it is the nearest the heart and spirit of life itself.  The dead nation produces a dead literature.  The age made doubtful by an excess of science produces a literature burdened with sadness and pain.  Great and truthful as it may be, it lacks in power to conquer the world.  It shows, not the power of Homer, but the power of Lucretius.

Her altruism has its side of truth, but not all of the truth is in it.  Any system of thought which sees nothing beyond man is not likely to find that which is most characteristic in man himself.  He is to be fathomed, if fathomed at all, by some other line than that of his own experience.  If he explains the universe, the universe is also necessary to explain him.  Man apart from the supersensuous is as little to be understood as man apart from humanity.  He belongs to a Universal Order quite as much as he belongs to the human order.  Man may be explained by evolution, but evolution is not to be explained by anything in the nature of man.  It requires some larger field of vision to take note of that elemental law.  Not less true is it that mind does not come obediently under this method of explanation, that it demands account of how matter is transformed into thought.  The law of thought needs to be solved after mind is evolved.