of the only practicable right.  The action which before commission has been seen with that blended common sense and fresh untarnished feeling which is the healthy eye of the soul, is looked at afterward with the lens of apologetic ingenuity, through which all things that men call beautiful and ugly are seen to be made up of textures very much alike.  Europe adjusts itself to a fait accompli, and so does an individual character—­until the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive retribution. [Footnote:  Chapter XXIX.]

What we have done, determines what we shall do, even in opposition to our wills.  After Tito Melema had done his first act towards denying his foster-father, we have this observation of the author’s: 

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will.  Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never; they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness; and that dreadful vitality of deeds was pressing hard on Tito for the first time.

When Tito had openly denied that father, at an unexpected moment, we hear the ever-present chorus repeating this great ethical truth: 

    Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we
    prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or
    evil that gradually determines character.

As a river moves in the channel made for it, as a plant grows towards the sunlight, so man does again what he has once done.  The impression of his act is left upon his nature, it is taken up into his motives, it leads to feeling and impulse, it repeats itself in future conduct.  His deed lives in memory, it lives in weakness or strength of impulse, it lives in disease or in health, it lives in mental listlessness or in mental vigor.  What is done, determines our natures in their character and tendency for the future.  “A man can never separate himself from his past history,” says George Eliot in one of the mottoes of Felix Holt.  We cannot rid ourselves of the effects of our actions; they follow us forever.  This truth takes shape in Romola in these words: 

Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves, as the life of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race; and to have once acted greatly, seems a reason why we should always be noble.  But Tito was feeling the effect of an opposite tradition:  he had now no memories of self-conquest and perfect faithfulness from which he could have a sense of falling.

A motto in Daniel Deronda reiterates this oft-repeated assertion.

  Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life,
  And righteous or unrighteous, being done,
  Must throb in after-throbs till Time itself
  Be laid in stillness, and the universe
  Quiver and breathe upon no mirror more.