words, a public exposure--urged him to a kind of
propitiation which was not a doctrinal transaction. The divine tribunal
had changed its aspect to him. Self-prostration was no longer enough.
He must bring restitution in his hand. By what sacrifice could he stay
the rod? He believed that if he did something right God would stay the
rod, and save him from the consequences of his wrong-doing." His
religion was "the religion of personal fear," which "remains nearly at
the level of the savage." The exposure comes, and the explosion.
Society shudders with hypocritical horror, especially in the presence of
poor Mrs. Bulstrode, who "should have some hint given her, that if she
knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet." Society
when it is very candid, and very conscientious, and very scrupulous,
cannot "allow a wife to remain ignorant long that the town holds a bad
opinion of her husband." The photograph of the Middlemarch gossips
sitting upon the case of Mrs. Bulstrode is taken accurately. Equally
accurate, and far more impressive, is the narrative of circumstantial
evidence gathering against the innocent Lydgate and the guilty
Bulstrode--circumstances that will sometimes weave into one tableau of
public odium the purest and the blackest characters. From this tableau
you may turn to that one in "Adam Bede," and see how circumstances are
made to crush the weak woman and clear the wicked man. And then you can
go to "Romola," or indeed to almost any of these novels, and see how
wrong-doing may come of an indulged infirmity of purpose, that
unconscious weakness and conscious wickedness may bring about the same
disastrous results, and that repentance has no more effect in averting or
altering the consequences in one case than the other. Tito's ruin comes
of a feeble, Felix Holt's victory of an unconquerable, will. Nothing is
more characteristic of George Eliot than her tracking of Tito through all
the motives and counter motives from which he acted. "Because he tried
to slip away from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing
so much as his own safety, he came at last to commit such deeds as make a
man infamous." So poor Romola tells her son, as a warning, and adds: "If
you make it the rule of your life to escape from what is disagreeable,
calamity may come just the same, and it would be calamity falling on a
base mind, which is the one form of sorrow that has no balm in it."

Out of thi