author sheds about the mill, the carpenter's shop, the
dairy, the village church, and even the stiff, uninviting conventicle,
shows that she looks on these as having a living continuity with the people
whom she sets among them. Their artistic value is but a reflection of all
that they mean to those for whom they have made the nearer and habitually
enclosing world." The larger influence in the environment of any person,
according to George Eliot, is that which arises from tradition. Cut off
from the sustenance given by tradition, the person loses the motives, the
supports of his life. This is well shown in the case of Silas Marner, who
had fled from his early home and all his life held dear. George Eliot
describes the effect of such a change of environment.

Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes
find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on
their faith in the Invisible--nay, on the sense that their past joys
and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported
to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their
history, and share none of their ideas--where their mother earth shows
another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their
souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old
faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in
which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished,
and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.
[Footnote: Chapter II.]

She delights to return again and again to the influences produced upon us
by the environment of childhood. In _The Mill on the Floss_ she tells us
how dear the earth becomes by such associations.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood
in it,--if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again
every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat
lisping to ourselves on the grass--the same hips and haws on the autumn
hedgerows--the same redbreasts that we used to call "God's birds,"
because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth
that sweet monotony where everything is known, and _loved_ because it
is known?

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown
foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky