of injustice is made to great precedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in its institutions.  It is this living force of sentiment in common which makes a national consciousness.  Nations so moved will resist conquest with the very breasts of their women, will pay their millions and their blood to abolish slavery, will share privation in famine and all calamity, will produce poets to sing “some great story of a man,” and thinkers whose theories will bear the test of action.  An individual man, to be harmoniously great, must belong to a nation of this order, if not in actual existence yet existing in the past—­in memory, as a departed, invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be restored....  Not only the nobleness of a nation depends on the presence of this national consciousness, but also the nobleness of each individual citizen.  Our dignity and rectitude are proportioned to our sense of relationship with something great, admirable, pregnant with high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice, a continual inspiration to self-repression and discipline by the presentation of aims larger and more attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal ease or prosperity. [Footnote:  Theophrastus Such, chapter XVIII.]

Zealous as is George Eliot’s faith in tradition, she is broad-minded enough to see that it is limited in its influence by at least two causes,—­by reason and by the spirit of universal brotherhood.  We have already seen that she makes reason one of man’s guides.  In Romola the right of the individual to make a new course for action is distinctly expressed.  Romola had “the inspiring consciousness,” we are told, “that her lot was vitally united with the general lot which exalted even the minor details of obligation into religion,” and so “she was marching with a great army, she was feeling the stress of a common life.”  Yet she began to feel that she must not merely repeat the past; and the influence of Savonarola, in breaking with Rome for the sake of a pure and holy life, inspired her.

To her, as to him, there had come one of those moments in life when the soul must dare to act on its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to, but in face of a law which is not unarmed with divine lightnings—­lightnings that may yet fall if the warrant has been false.

It is reason’s lamp by which “we walk evermore to higher paths;” and by its aid, new deeds are to be done, new memories created, fresher traditions woven into feeling and hope.  National memories are to be superseded by the spirit of brotherhood, for, as the race advances, nations are brought closer to each other, have more in common, and development is made of world-wide traditions.  Theophrastus Such, in the last of his essays, tells us that “it is impossible to arrest the tendencies of things towards the quicker or slower fusion of races.”

The environment of her characters George Eliot makes of very great importance.  She dwells upon the natural scenery which they love, but especially does she magnify the importance of the social environment, and the perpetual influence it has upon the whole of life.  Mr. James Sully has clearly interpreted her thought on this subject, and pointed out its engrossing interest for her.