George Eliot goes beyond the conduct of any one person and its results, and attempts to show how it is affected by the person’s environment.  It was Maggie’s family, education, social standing and personal qualities of mind and heart which helped to determine for her the consequences of her conduct.  It was Dorothea’s education and social environment which largely helped to shape her career and to leave her bereaved of the largest possibilities of which her life was capable.  Gwendolen’s life was largely determined by her early training and by her social surroundings.  Yet with all these, life has its necessary issues, and Nemesis plays its part.  Retribution is for all; it is ever stern, just and inevitable.  Just, however, only in the sense that wrong-doing cannot escape its own effects, but not just in the sense that the guiltless must often share the fate of the guilty.  Wrong-doing drags down to destruction many an innocent person.  It is to be said of George Eliot, however, that she never presents any of her characters as doomed utterly by the past.  However strong the memories of the ages lay upon them, they are capable of self-direction.  Not one of her characters is wholly the victim of his environment.  There is no hint in Middlemarch that Dorothea was not capable of heroism and self-consecration.  Her environment gave a wrong direction to her moral purpose; but that purpose remained, and the moral nobleness of her mind was not destroyed.  Still, it is largely true, that in her books the individual is sacrificed to his social environment.  He is to renounce his own personality for the sake of the race.  Consequently his fate is linked with that of others, and he must suffer from other men’s deeds.

With all its limitations and defects, George Eliot’s teaching concerning the moral effects of conduct is wholesome and healthy.  It rests on a solid foundation of experience and scientific evidence.  Her books are full of moral stimulus and strengthening, because of the profound conviction with which she has presented her conception of moral cause and effect.  With her, we must believe that moral sequences are as inevitable as the physical.

It would be very unjust to George Eliot to suppose that she left man in the hands of a relentless moral order which manifests no tenderness and which is incapable of pity and mercy.  She did not believe in an Infinite Father, full of love and forgiveness; that faith was not for her.  Yet she did believe in a providence which can assuage man’s sorrows and deal tenderly with his wrong-doing.  While nature is stern and the moral sequences of life unbending, man may be sympathetic and helpful.  Man is to be the providence of man; humanity is to be his tender forgiving Friend.  A substitute so poor for the old faith would seem to have little power of moral renovation or sympathetic impulse in it; but it quickened George Eliot’s mind with enthusiasm and ardor.  The “enthusiasm of humanity” filled her whole soul, was a luminous