Sir James never ceased to regard Dorothea’s second marriage as a mistake; and indeed this remained the tradition concerning it in Middlemarch, where she was spoken of to a younger generation as a fine girl who married a sickly clergyman, old enough to be her father, and in little more than a year after his death gave up her estate to marry his cousin—­young enough to have been his son, with no property, and not well-born.  Those who had not seen anything of Dorothea usually observed that she could not have been “a nice woman,” else she would not have married either the one or the other.

Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful.  They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling under prosaic conditions.  Among the many remarks passed on her mistakes, it was never said in the neighborhood of Middlemarch that such mistakes could not have happened if the society into which she was born had not smiled on propositions of marriage from a sickly man to a girl less than half his own age—­on modes of education which make a woman’s knowledge another name for motley ignorance—­on rules of conduct which are in flat contradiction with its own loudly asserted beliefs.  While this is the social air in which mortals begin to breathe, there will be collisions such as those in Dorothea’s life, where great feelings take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.  For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.  A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial; the medium in which their ardent deeds took place is forever gone.  But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts, are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible.  Her full nature, like that river of which Alexander broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth.  But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The influence of social environment is also presented in Felix Holt as a chief determining agent in the lives of individuals.  However high the aims and noble the purposes of the individual, he must succumb to those social influences which are more powerful than he.  In the third chapter we are told that—­