as long as _her_ pain was not a
memory, but an existing thing, which he must think of as renewed with
the light of every morning. But we get accustomed to mental as well as
bodily pain, without, for all that, losing our sensibility to it; it
becomes a habit of our lives, and we cease to imagine a condition of
perfect ease as possible for us. Desire is chastened into submission;
and we are contented with our day when we are able to bear our grief in
silence, and act as if we were not suffering. For it is at such periods
that the sense of our lives having visible and invisible relations
beyond any of which either our present or prospective self is the
centre, grows like a muscle that we are obliged to lean on and exert.

Armgart finds that "true vision comes only with sorrow." Sorrow and
suffering create a sympathy which sends us to the relief of others. "Pain
must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into
compassion," we are told in _Middlemarch_. In the trying hours of Maggie
Tulliver's life she came to know--

that new sense which is the gift of sorrow--that susceptibility to the
bare offices of humanity which raises them into a bond of loving
fellowship.

Again, she learns that "more helpful than all wisdom is one draught of
simple human pity that will not forsake us." Man is in this way brought to
live for man, to suffer in his sufferings, to be mercifully tender and
pitiful with him in his temptations and trials. Sympathy builds up the
moral life, gives an ethical meaning to man's existence. Thus humanity
becomes a providence to man, and it is made easier for him to bear his
sufferings and to be comforted in his sorrows. Nemesis is stern, but man is
pitiful; retribution is inexorable, but humanity is sympathetic. Nature
never relents, and there is no God who can so forgive us our sins as to
remove their legitimate effects; but man can comfort us with his love, and
humanity can teach us to overcome retribution by righteous conduct.

All idealistic rights are to be laid aside, according to her theory, all
personal claims and motives are to be renounced. In the duties we owe to
others, life is to find its rightful expression. In _Janet's Repentance_
she says,--

The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond
the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition
of a great central ganglion is