The basis of such sympathetic helpfulness she finds in the common sorrows and trials of the world.  All find life hard, pain comes to all, none are to be found unacquainted with sorrow.  These common experiences draw men together in sympathy, unite them in a common purpose of assuagement and help.  The sorrow of Adam Bede made him more gentle and patient with his brother.

It was part of that growing tenderness which came from the sorrow at work within him.  For Adam, though you see him quite master of himself, working hard and delighting in his work after his inborn inalienable nature, had not outlived his sorrow—­had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the same man again.  Do any of us?  God forbid!  It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it—­if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown toward which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness.  Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy—­the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.  Not that this transformation of pain into sympathy had completely taken place in Adam yet; there was still a great remnant of pain, which he felt would subsist as long as her pain was not a memory, but an existing thing, which he must think of as renewed with the light of every morning.  But we get accustomed to mental as well as bodily pain, without, for all that, losing our sensibility to it; it becomes a habit of our lives, and we cease to imagine a condition of perfect ease as possible for us.  Desire is chastened into submission; and we are contented with our day when we are able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.  For it is at such periods that the sense of our lives having visible and invisible relations beyond any of which either our present or prospective self is the centre, grows like a muscle that we are obliged to lean on and exert.

Armgart finds that “true vision comes only with sorrow.”  Sorrow and suffering create a sympathy which sends us to the relief of others.  “Pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion,” we are told in Middlemarch.  In the trying hours of Maggie Tulliver’s life she came to know—­

    that new sense which is the gift of sorrow—­that susceptibility to the
    bare offices of humanity which raises them into a bond of loving
    fellowship.