and capacity of the
individual is a most serious defect in George Eliot's work, and mars it in
many directions. A very competent critic has shown how serious is the
limitation arising in this manner, and permeating her books with a false
conception of life.

"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