y the deaths of its heroes who died to preserve its
national existence; when it is reminded of its small beginnings and
gradual growth through past labors and struggles, such as are still
demanded of it in order that the freedom and well-being thus inherited
may be transmitted unimpaired to children and children's children; when
an appeal against the permission of injustice is made to great
precedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in its
institutions. It is this living force of sentiment in common which
makes a national consciousness. Nations so moved will resist conquest
with the very breasts of their women, will pay their millions and their
blood to abolish slavery, will share privation in famine and all
calamity, will produce poets to sing "some great story of a man," and
thinkers whose theories will bear the test of action. An individual
man, to be harmoniously great, must belong to a nation of this order,
if not in actual existence yet existing in the past--in memory, as a
departed, invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be
restored.... Not only the nobleness of a nation depends on the presence
of this national consciousness, but also the nobleness of each
individual citizen. Our dignity and rectitude are proportioned to our
sense of relationship with something great, admirable, pregnant with
high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice, a continual inspiration to
self-repression and discipline by the presentation of aims larger and
more attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal ease
or prosperity. [Footnote: Theophrastus Such, chapter XVIII.]

Zealous as is George Eliot's faith in tradition, she is broad-minded enough
to see that it is limited in its influence by at least two causes,--by
reason and by the spirit of universal brotherhood. We have already seen
that she makes reason one of man's guides. In _Romola_ the right of the
individual to make a new course for action is distinctly expressed. Romola
had "the inspiring consciousness," we are told, "that her lot was vitally
united with the general lot which exalted even the minor details of
obligation into religion," and so "she was marching with a great army, she
was feeling the stress of a common life." Yet she began to feel that she
must not merely repeat the past; and the influence of Savonarola, in
breaking with Rome