lended common sense and fresh untarnished feeling which
is the healthy eye of the soul, is looked at afterward with the lens of
apologetic ingenuity, through which all things that men call beautiful
and ugly are seen to be made up of textures very much alike. Europe
adjusts itself to a _fait accompli_, and so does an individual
character--until the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive
retribution. [Footnote: Chapter XXIX.]

What we have done, determines what we shall do, even in opposition to
our wills. After Tito Melema had done his first act towards denying his
foster-father, we have this observation of the author's:

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act
apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds
never; they have an indestructible life both in and out of our
consciousness; and that dreadful vitality of deeds was pressing hard on
Tito for the first time.

When Tito had openly denied that father, at an unexpected moment, we hear
the ever-present chorus repeating this great ethical truth:

Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we
prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or
evil that gradually determines character.

As a river moves in the channel made for it, as a plant grows towards the
sunlight, so man does again what he has once done. The impression of his
act is left upon his nature, it is taken up into his motives, it leads to
feeling and impulse, it repeats itself in future conduct. His deed lives in
memory, it lives in weakness or strength of impulse, it lives in disease or
in health, it lives in mental listlessness or in mental vigor. What is
done, determines our natures in their character and tendency for the
future. "A man can never separate himself from his past history," says
George Eliot in one of the mottoes of _Felix Holt_. We cannot rid ourselves
of the effects of our actions; they follow us forever. This truth takes
shape in _Romola_ in these words:

Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves, as the life
of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race; and to have
once acted greatly, seems a reason why we should always be noble. But
Tito was feeling the effect of an opposite tradition: he had now no
memories of self-conquest and perfect faithfulness from which he could
have a sense