a growing desire.  In this sort of love it is the forsaker who has the melancholy lot; for an abandoned belief may be more effectively vengeful than Dido.  The child of a wandering tribe, caught young and trained to polite life, if he feels a hereditary yearning, can run away to the old wilds and get his nature into tune.  But there is no such recovery possible to the man who remembers what he once believed without being convinced that he was in error, who feels within him unsatisfied stirrings toward old beloved habits and intimacies from which he has far receded without conscious justification or unwavering sense of superior attractiveness in the new.  This involuntary renegade has his character hopelessly jangled and out of tune.  He is like an organ with its stops in the lawless condition of obtruding themselves without method, so that hearers are amazed by the most unexpected transitions—­the trumpet breaking in on the flute, and the oboe confounding both.

With a strong and eloquent energy, George Eliot teaches the natural consequences of conduct.  Every feeling, thought and deed has its effect, comes to fruition.  Desire modifies life, shapes our destiny, moulds us into the image of its own nature.  Actions become habits, become controlling elements in our lives, and tend to work out their own legitimate results.  The whole of George Eliot’s doctrine of retribution is, that human causes, as much as any other, lead to their appropriate effects.  Her frequent use of the word Nemesis indicates the idea she had of the inevitableness of moral consequences, that a force once set in motion can never be recalled in its effects, which make a permanent modification of human life in its present and in its past.  It was not the old doctrine of fate which she presented, not any arbitrary inflictment from supernatural powers.  The inevitableness of moral consequences influenced her as a solemn and fearful reality which man must strictly regard if he would find true manhood.

The doctrine of retribution is very clearly taught by George Eliot in her comments.  With a still greater distinctness it is taught in the development of her characters.  As we follow the careers of Hetty, Maggie, Tito, Fedalma, Lydgate and Gwendolen we see how wonderful was George Eliot’s insight into the moral issues of life.  Not only with these, but with all her characters, we see a righteous moral unfoldment of character into its effects.  There is no compromise with evil in her pages; all selfishness, wrong and crime comes to its proper results.  The vanity and selfishness of Hetty leads to what terrible crime and shame for her, and what misery for others!  Tito’s selfishness and want of resolute purpose carries him inevitably downward to a hideous end.  What is so plain in the case of these characters is as true, though not so palpable, in that of many others in her books.  Dorothea’s conduct is clearly shown to develop into consequences (as did Lydgate’s) which were the natural results of what she thought, did and was.  Maggie’s misery was the product of her conduct, the legitimate outcome of it.