“A character divorced from its surroundings is an abstraction.  A personality is only a concrete living whole, when we attach it by a network of organic filaments to its particular environment, physical and social.  Our author evidently chooses her surroundings with strict regard to her characters.  She paints nature less in its own beauty than in its special aspect and significance for those whom she sets in its midst.  ’The bushy hedgerows,’ ’the pool in the corner of the field where the grasses were dank,’ ’the sudden slope of the old marl-pit, making a red background for the burdock’—­these things are touched caressingly and lingered over because they are so much to the ‘midland-bred souls’ whose history is here recorded; so much because of cumulative recollection reaching back to the time when they ‘toddled among’ them, or perhaps ’learnt them by heart standing between their father’s knees while he drove leisurely.’  And what applies to the natural environment applies still more to those narrower surroundings which men construct for themselves, and which form their daily shelter, their work-shop, their place of social influence.  The human interest which our author sheds about the mill, the carpenter’s shop, the dairy, the village church, and even the stiff, uninviting conventicle, shows that she looks on these as having a living continuity with the people whom she sets among them.  Their artistic value is but a reflection of all that they mean to those for whom they have made the nearer and habitually enclosing world.”  The larger influence in the environment of any person, according to George Eliot, is that which arises from tradition.  Cut off from the sustenance given by tradition, the person loses the motives, the supports of his life.  This is well shown in the case of Silas Marner, who had fled from his early home and all his life held dear.  George Eliot describes the effect of such a change of environment.

Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible—­nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas—­where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished.  Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories. [Footnote:  Chapter II.]

She delights to return again and again to the influences produced upon us by the environment of childhood.  In The Mill on the Floss she tells us how dear the earth becomes by such associations.