THE ETHICS OF GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS.

"There is in man a higher than love of happiness: he can do without

happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness."

Such may be regarded as the fundamental lesson which one of the great

teachers of our time has been labouring to impress upon the age. The

truth, and the practical corollary from it, are not now first enunciated.

Representing, as we believe it to do, the practical aspect of the noblest

reality in man--that which most directly represents Him in whose image he

is made--it has found doctrinal expression more or less perfect from the

earliest times. The older Theosophies and Philosophies--Gymnosophist and

Cynic, Chaldaic and Pythagorean, Epicurean and Stoic, Platonist and

Eclectic--were all attempts to embody it in teaching, and to carry it out

in life. They saw, indeed, but imperfectly, and their expressions of the

truth are all one-sided and inadequate. But they did see, in direct

antagonism alike to the popular view and to the natural instinct of the

animal man, that what is ordinarily called happiness does not represent

the highest capability in humanity, or meet its indefinite aspirations;

and that in degree as it is consciously made so, life becomes animalised

and degraded. The whole scheme of Judaism, as first promulgated in all

the stern simplicity of its awful Theism, where the Divine is

fundamentally and emphatically represented as the Omnipotent and the

Avenger, was an emphatic protest against that self-isolation in which the

man folds himself up like a chrysalid in its cocoon whenever his

individual happiness--the so-called saving of his own soul--becomes the

aim and aspiration of his life. In one sense the Jew of Moses had no

individual as apart from a national existence. The secret sin of Achan,

the vaunting pride of David, call forth less individual than national

calamity.

At last in the fulness of time there came forth One--whence and how we do

not stop to inquire--who gathered up into Himself all these tangled,

broken, often divergent threads; who gave to this truth, so far as one

very brief human life could give--at once its perfect and exhaustive

doctrinal expression, and its essentially perfect and exhaustive

practical exemplification, by life and by death. Endless controversies

have stormed and are still storming around that name which He so

significantly and emphatically appropriated--the "Son of Man." But from

amid all the controversy that veils it, one fact, clear, sharp, and

unchallenged, stands out as the very life and seal of His human

greatness--"He pleased not Himself." By every act He did, every word He

spoke, and every pain He bore, He put away from Him happiness as the aim

and end of man. He reduced it to its true position of a possible

accessory and issue of man's highest fulfilment of life--an issue, the

contemplation of which might be of some avail as the being first awoke to

its nobler capabilities, but which, the more the life went on towards

realisation, passed the more away from conscious regard.

Thenceforth the Cross, as the typical representation of this truth,

became a recognised power on the earth. Thenceforth every great teacher

of humanity within the pale of nominal Christendom, whatever his apparent

tenets or formal creed, has been, in degree as he was great and true,

explicitly or implicitly the expounder of this truth; every great and

worthy life, in degree as it assimilated to that ideal life, has been the

practical embodiment of it. "Endure hardness," said one of its greatest

apostles and martyrs, "as good soldiers of Christ." And to the endurance

of hardness; to the recognition of something in humanity to which what we

ordinarily call life and all its joys are of no account; to the

abnegation of mere happiness as aim or end,--to this the world of

Christendom thenceforth became pledged, if it would not deny its Head and

trample on His cross.

In no age has the truth been a popular one: when it becomes so, the

triumph of the Cross--and in it the practical redemption of humanity--will

be near at hand. Yet in no age--not the darkest and most corrupt

Christendom has yet seen--have God and His Christ been without their

witnesses to the higher truth,--witnesses, if not by speech and doctrine,

yet by life and death. Even monasticism, harshly as we may now judge it,

arose, in part at least, through the desire to "endure hardness;" only it

turned aside from the hardness appointed in the world without, to choose,

and ere long to make, a hardness of its own; and then, self-seeking, and

therefore anti-Christian, it fell. Amid all its actual corruption the

Church stands forth a living witness, by its ritual and its sacraments,

to this fundamental truth of the Cross; and ever and anon from its

deepest degradation there emerges clear and sharp some figure bending

under this noblest burden of our doom--some Savonarola or St Francis

charged with the one thought of truth and right, of the highest truth and

right, to be followed, if need were, through the darkness of death and of

hell.

Perhaps few ages have needed more than our own to have this fundamental

principle of Christian ethics--this doctrine of the Cross--sharply and

strongly proclaimed to it. Our vast advances in physical science tend,

in the first instance at least, to withdraw regard from the higher

requirements of life. Even the progress of commerce and navigation, at

once multiplying the means and extending the sphere of physical and

aesthetic enjoyment, aids to intensify the appetite for these. Systems

of so-called philosophy start undoubtingly with the axiom that happiness

is the one aim of man: and with at least some of these happiness is

simply coincident with physical well-being. Political Economy aims as

undoubtingly to act on the principle, "the greatest possible happiness of

the greatest possible number:" and perhaps, as Political Economy claims

to deal with man in his physical life only, it were unreasonable to

expect from it regard to aught above this. Our current and popular

literature--Fiction, Poetry, Essays on social relations--is emphatically

a literature of enjoyment, ministering to the various excitements of

pleasure, wonder, suspense, or pain. And last, and in some respects most

serious of all, our popular theology has largely conformed to the spirit

of the age. Representative of a debased and emasculated Christianity, it

attacks our humanity at its very core. It rings out to us, with

wearisome iteration, as our one great concern, the saving of our own

souls: degrades the religion of the Cross into a slightly-refined and

long-sighted selfishness: and makes our following Him who "pleased not

Himself" to consist in doing just enough to escape what it calls the

pains of hell--to win what it calls the joys of heaven.

This is the dark side of the picture; but it has its bright side too.

These advances of science, these extensions of commerce, these

philosophies, even where they are falsely so called, this Political

Economy, which from its very nature must first "labour for the meat that

perisheth,"--these are all God's servants and man's ministers still--the

ministers of man's higher and nobler life. Consciously or unconsciously,

they are working to raise from myriads burdens of poverty, care,

ceaseless and fruitless toil, under the pressure of which all higher

aspiration is wellnigh impossible. Sanitary reform in itself may mean

nothing more than better drainage, fresher air, freer light, more

abundant water: to the "Governor among the nations" it means lessened

impossibility that men should live to Him.

If in few ages the great bulk and the most popular portion of literature

has more prostituted itself to purposes of sensational or at most

aesthetic enjoyment, it is at least as doubtful if in any previous age

our highest literature has more emphatically and persistently devoted

itself to proclaiming this great doctrine of the Cross. Sometimes

directly and explicitly, oftener by implication, this is the ultimate

theme of those who are most deeply influencing the spirit of the time.

Our finest and most widely recognised pulpit oratory is at home here, and

only here: Maurice and Arnold, Trench and Vaughan, Robertson and Stanley,

James Martineau and Seeley, Thirlwall and Wilberforce, Kingsley and

Brooke, Caird and Tulloch, different in form, in much antagonistic in

what is called opinion, are of one mind and heart on this. The thought

underlying all their thoughts of man is that "higher than love of

happiness" in humanity which expresses the true link between man and God.

The practical doctrine that with them underlies all others is, "Love not

pleasure--love God. Love Him not alone in the light and amid the calm,

but through the blackness and the storm. Though He hide Himself in the

thick darkness, yet" give thanks at remembrance of His holiness. "Though

He slay thee, yet trust still in Him." The hope to which they call us is

not, save secondarily and incidentally, the hope of a great exhaustless

future. It is the hope of a true life _now_, struggling on and up

through hardness and toil and battle, careless though its crown be the

crown of thorns.

Even evangelicism indirectly, in great degree unconsciously, bears

witness to the truth through its demand of absolute self-abnegation

before God: though the inversion of the very idea of Him fundamentally

involved in its scheme makes the self-abnegation no longer that of the

son, but of the slave; includes in it the denial of that law which

Himself has written on our hearts; and would substitute our subjection to

an arbitrary despotism for our being "made partakers of His holiness."

One of the sternest and most consistent of Calvinistic theologians,

Jonathan Edwards, in one of his works expresses his willingness to be

damned for the glory of God, and to rejoice in his own damnation: with a

strange, almost incredible, obliquity of moral and spiritual insight

failing to perceive that in thus losing himself in the infinite of holy

Love lies the very essence of human blessedness, that this and this alone

is in very truth his "eternal life."

Among what may be called Essayists, two by general consent stand out as

most deeply penetrating and informing the spirit of the age--Carlyle and

Ruskin. To the former, brief reference has already been made. In the

work then quoted from, one truth has prominence above all others: that

with the will's acceptance of happiness as the aim of life begins the

true degradation of humanity; and that then alone true life dawns upon

man when truth and right begin to stand out as the first objects of his

regard. Never since has Carlyle's strong rough grasp relaxed its hold of

this truth; and howsoever in later works, in what are intended as

biographical illustrations of it, he may seem to confuse mere strength

and energy with righteousness of will, and thence to confound outward and

visible success with vital achievement, that strength and energy are

always in his eyes, fighting or enduring against some phase of the many-

headed hydra of wrong.

Of Ruskin it seems almost superfluous to speak. They have read him to

little purpose who have not felt that all his essays and criticisms in

art, all his expositions in social and political science, are essentially

unified by one animating and pervading truth: the truth that to man's

moral relations, or, in other words, the developing and perfecting in him

of that Divine image in which he is made,--all things else, joy, beauty,

life itself, are of account only to the degree in which they are

consciously used to subserve that higher life. His ultimate standard of

value to which everything, alike in art and in social and political

relations, is referred, is--not success, not enjoyment, whether sensuous,

sentimental, or aesthetic, but--the measure in which may thereby be

trained up that higher life of humanity. Art is to him God's minister,

not when she is simply true to nature, but solely when true to nature in

such forms and phases as shall tend to bring man nearer to moral truth,

beauty, and purity. The Ios and Ariadnes of the debased Italian schools,

the boors of Teniers, the Madonnas of Guido, are truer to one phase of

nature than are Fra Angelico's angels, or Tintoret's Crucifixion. But

that nature is humanity as degraded by sense; and therefore the measure

of their truthfulness is for him also the measure of their debasement.

In poetry, the key-note so firmly struck by Wordsworth in his noble "Ode

to Duty" has been as firmly and more delicately caught up by other

singers; who, moreover, have seen more clearly than Wordsworth did, that

it is for faith, not for sight, that duty wears

"The Godhead's most benignant grace;"

for the path along which she leads is inevitably on earth steep, rugged,

and toilsome. Take almost any one of Tennyson's more serious poems, and

it will be found pervaded by the thought of life as to be fulfilled and

perfected only through moral endurance and struggle. "Ulysses" is no

restless aimless wanderer; he is driven forth from inaction and security

by that necessity which impels the higher life, once begun within, to

press on toward its perfecting this all-possible sorrow, peril, and fear.

"The Lotos-eaters" are no mere legendary myth: they shadow forth what the

lower instincts of our humanity are ever urging us all to seek--ease and

release from the ceaseless struggle against wrong, the ceaseless

straining on toward right. "In Memoriam" is the record of love "making

perfect through suffering:" struggling on through the valley of the

shadow of death toward the far-off, faith-seen light "behind the veil."

"The Vision of Sin" portrays to us humanity choosing enjoyment as its

only aim; and of necessity sinking into degradation so profound, that

even the large heart and clear eye of the poet can but breathe out in sad

bewilderment, "Is there any hope?"--can but dimly see, far off over the

darkness, "God make Himself an awful rose of dawn." In one of the most

profound of all His creations--"The Palace of Art"--we have presented to

us the soul surrounding itself with everything fair and glad, and in

itself pure, not primarily to the eye, but to the mind: attempting to

achieve its destiny and to fulfil its life in the perfections of

intellectual beauty and aesthetic delight. But the palace of art, _made

the palace of the soul_, becomes its dungeon-house, self-generating and

filling fast with all loathsome and deathly shapes; and the heaven of

intellectual joy becomes at last a more penetrative and intenser hell.

The "Idylls of the King" are but exquisite variations on the one

note--that the only true and high life of humanity is the life of full

and free obedience; and that such life on earth becomes of necessity one

of struggle, sorrow, outward loss and apparent failure. In "Vivien"--the

most remarkable of them all for the subtlety of its conception and the

delicacy of its execution,--the picture is perhaps the darkest and

saddest time can show--that of a nature rich to the utmost in all lower

wisdom of the mind, struggling long and apparently truly against the

flesh, yet all the while dallying with the foul temptation, till the

flesh prevails; and in a moment, swift and sure as the lightning, moral

and spiritual death swoops down, and we see the lost one no more.

Many other illustrations might be given from our noblest and truest

poetry--from the works of the Brownings, the "Saints' Tragedy" of Charles

Kingsley, the dramatic poems of Henry Taylor--of the extent to which it

is vitally, even where not formally Christian; the extent to which the

truth of the Cross has transfused it, and become one chief source of its

depth and power. But we must hasten on to our more immediate object in

these remarks.

Those who read works of fiction merely for amusement, may be surprised

that it should be thought possible they could be vehicles for conveying

to us the deepest practical truth of Christianity,--that the highest life

of man only begins when he begins to accept and to bear the Cross; and

that the conscious pursuit of happiness as his highest aim tends

inevitably to degrade and enslave him. Even those who read novels more

thoughtfully, who recognise in them a great moral force acting for good

or evil on the age, may be startled to find George Eliot put forward as

the representative of this higher-toned fiction, and as entitled to take

place beside any of those we have named for the depth and force, the

consistency and persistence, with which she has laboured to set before us

the Christian, and therefore the only exhaustively true, ideal of life.

Yet a careful examination will, we are satisfied, show that from her

first appearance before the public, this thought, and the specific

purpose of this teaching, have never been absent from the writer's mind;

that it may be defined as the central aim of all her works: and that it

gathers in force, condensation, and power throughout the series. Other

qualities George Eliot has, that would of themselves entitle her to a

very high place among the teachers of the time. In largeness of

Christian charity, in breadth of human sympathy, in tenderness toward all

human frailty that is not vitally base and self-seeking, in subtle power

of finding "a soul of goodness even in things apparently evil," she has

not many equals, certainly no superior, among the writers of the day.

Throughout all her works we shall look in vain for one trace of the

fierce self-opinionative arrogance of Carlyle, or the narrow dogmatic

intolerance of Ruskin: though we shall look as vainly for one word or

sign that shall, on the mere ground of intellectual power, energy, and

ultimate success, condone the unprincipled ambition of a Frederick, so-

called the Great, and exalt him into a hero; or find in the cold heart

and mean sordid soul of a Turner an ideal, because one of those strange

physiological freaks that now and then startle the world, the artist's

temperament and artist's skill, were his beyond those of any man of his

age. But as our object here is to attempt placing her before the reader

as asserting and illustrating the highest life of humanity, as a true

preacher of the doctrine of the Cross, even when least formally so, we

leave these features, as well as her position as an artist, untouched on,

the rather that they have all been already discussed by previous critics.

The 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' delicately outlined as they are, still

profess to be but sketches. In them, however, what we have assumed to be

the great moral aim of the writer comes distinctly out; and even within

the series itself gathers in clearness and power. Self-sacrifice as the

Divine law of life, and its only true fulfilment; self-sacrifice, not in

some ideal sphere sought out for ourselves in the vain spirit of self-

pleasing, but wherever God has placed us, amid homely, petty anxieties,

loves, and sorrows; the aiming at the highest attainable good in our own

place, irrespective of all results of joy or sorrow, of apparent success

or failure,--such is the lesson that begins to be conveyed to us in these

"Scenes."

The lesson comes to us in the quiet unselfish love, the sweet hourly self-

devotion of the "Milly" of Amos Barton, so touchingly free and full that

it never recognises itself as self-devotion at all. In "Mr Gilfil's Love-

Story" we have it taught affirmatively through the deep unselfishness of

Mr Gilfil's love to Tina, and his willingness to offer up even this, the

one hope and joy of his life, upon the altar of duty; negatively, through

the hard, cold, callous, self-pleasing of Captain Wybrow--a type of

character which, never repeated, is reproduced with endless variations

and modifications in nearly all the author's subsequent works. It is,

however, in "Janet's Repentance" that the power of the author is put most

strongly forth, and also that what we conceive to be the vital aim of her

works is most definitely and firmly pronounced. Here also we have

illustrated that breadth of nature, that power of discerning the true and

good under whatsoever external form it may wear, which is almost a

necessary adjunct of the author's true and large ideal of the Christian

life. She goes, it might almost seem, out of her way to select, from

that theological school with which her whole nature is most entirely at

dissonance, one of her most touching illustrations of a life struggling

on towards its highest through contempt, sorrow, and death. That

narrowest of all sectarianisms, which arrogates to itself the name

Evangelical, and which holds up as the first aim to every man the saving

of his own individual soul, has furnished to her Mr Tryan, whose life is

based on the principle laid down by the one great Evangelist, "He that

loveth his soul shall lose it; he that hateth his soul shall keep it unto

life eternal." {15}

Mr Tryan, as first represented to us, is not an engaging figure. Narrow

and sectarian, full of many uncharities, to a great extent vain and self-

conscious, glad to be flattered and idolised by men and women by no means

of large calibre or lofty standard--it might well seem impossible to

invest such a figure with one heroic element. Yet it is before this man

we are constrained to bow down in reverence, as before one truer,

greater, nobler than ourselves; and as we stand with Janet Dempster

beside the closing grave, we may well feel that one is gone from among us

whose mere presence made it less hard to fight our battle against "the

world, the flesh, and the devil." The explanation of the paradox is not

far to seek. The principle which animated the life now withdrawn from

sight--which raised it above all its littlenesses and made it a witness

for God and His Christ, constraining even the scoffers to feel the

presence of "Him who is invisible"--this principle was self-sacrifice. So

at least the imperfections of human speech lead us to call that which

stands in antagonism to self-pleasing; but before Him to whom all things

are open, what we so call is the purification and exaltation of that self

in us which is the highest created reflex of His image--the growing up of

it into His likeness for ever.

We may here, once for all, and very briefly, advert to one specialty of

the author's works, which, if we are right in our interpretation of their

central moral import, flows almost necessarily as a corollary from it. In

each of these sketches one principal figure is blotted out just when our

regards are fixed most strongly on it. Milly, Tina, and Mr Tryan all

die, at what may well appear the crisis of life and destiny for

themselves or others. There is in this--if not in specific intention,

certainly in practical teaching--something deeper and more earnest than

any mere artistic trick of pathos--far more real than the weary

commonplace of suggesting to us any so-called immortality as the

completion and elucidation of earthly life; far profounder and simpler,

too, than the only less trite commonplace of hinting to us the mystery of

God's ways in what we call untimely death. The true import of it we take

to be the separation of all the world calls success or reward from the

life that is thus seeking its highest fulfilment. In conformity with the

average doctrine of "compensation," Amos Barton should have appeared

before us at last installed in a comfortable living, much respected by

his flock, and on good terms with his brethren and well-to-do neighbours

around. With a truer and deeper wisdom, the author places him before us

in that brief after-glimpse still a poor, care-worn, bowed-down man, and

the sweet daughter-face by his side shows the premature lines of anxiety

and sorrow. Love, anguish, and death, working their true fruits within,

bring no success or achievement that the eye can note. By all the

principles of "poetic justice," Mr Tryan ought to have recovered and

married Janet; under the influence of her larger nature to have shaken

off his narrownesses; to have lived down all contempt and opposition, and

become the respected influential incumbent of the town; and in due time

to have toned down from his "enthusiasm of humanity" into the simply

earnest, hard-working, and rather commonplace town rector. Better,

because truer, as it is. Only in the earlier dawn of this higher life of

the soul, either in the race or in the individual man; only in the days

of the Isaacs and Jacobs of our young humanity, though not with the

Abrahams, the Moses', or the Joshuas even then; only when the soul first

begins to apprehend that its true relation to God is to be realised only

through the Cross--is there conscience and habitual "respect unto the

recompense" of _any_ reward.

In 'Adam Bede,' the first of George Eliot's more elaborate works, the

illustrations of the great moral purpose we have assigned to her are so

numerous and varied, that it is not easy to select from among them. On

the one hand, Dinah Morris--one of the most exquisitely serene and

beautiful creations of fiction--and Seth and Adam Bede present to us,

variously modified, the aspect of that life which is aiming toward the

highest good. On the other hand, Arthur Donnithorne and Hetty

Sorrel--poor little vain and shallow-hearted Hetty--bring before us the

meanness, the debasement, and, if unarrested, the spiritual and

remediless death inevitably associated with and accruing from that "self-

pleasing" which, under one form or other, is the essence of all evil and

sin. Of these, Arthur Donnithorne and Adam Bede seem to us the two who

are most sharply and subtilely contrasted; and to these we shall confine

our remarks.

In Arthur Donnithorne, the slight sketch placed before us in Captain

Wybrow is elaborated into minute completeness, and at the same time freed

from all that made Wybrow even superficially repellent. Handsome,

accomplished, and gentlemanly; loving and lovable; finding his keenest

enjoyment in the enjoyment of others; irreproachable in life, and free

from everything bearing the semblance of vice,--what more could the most

exacting fictionist desire to make up his ideal hero? Yet, without

ceasing to be all thus portrayed, he scatters desolation and crime in his

path. He does this, not through any revulsion of being in himself, but

in virtue of that very principle of action from which his lovableness

proceeds. Of duty simply as duty, of right solely as right, his

knowledge is yet to come. Essentially, his ideal of life as yet is "self-

pleasing." This impels him, constituted as he is, to strive that he

shall stand well with all. This almost necessitates that he shall be

kindly, genial, loving; enjoying the joy and well-being of all around

him, and therefore lovable. But this also assures that his struggle

against temptation shall be weak and vacillating; and that when, through

his paltering with it, it culminates, he shall at once fall before it.

The wood scene with Adam Bede still further illustrates the same

characteristics. This man, so genial and kindly, rages fiercely in his

heart against him whom he has unwittingly wronged. Frank and open,

apparently the very soul of honour, he shuffles and lies like a coward

and a knave; and this in no personal fear, but because he shrinks to lose

utterly that goodwill and esteem of others,--of Adam in particular,

because Adam constrains his own high esteem,--which are to him the

reflection of his own self-worship. Repentance comes to him at last,

because conscience has never in him been entirely overlaid and crushed.

It comes when the whirlwind of anguish has swept over him, scattered all

the flimsy mists of self-excuse in which self-love had sought to veil his

wrong-doing, and bowed him to the dust; but who shall estimate the

remediless and everlasting loss already sustained?

We have spoken of Captain Wybrow as the prototype of Arthur. He is so in

respect of both being swayed by that vital sin of self-pleasing to which

all wrong-doing ultimately refers itself; but that in Arthur the

corruption of life at its source is not complete, is shown throughout the

whole story. The very form of action which self-love assumes in him,

tells that self though dominant is not yet supreme. It refers itself to

others. It absolutely requires human sympathy. So long as the man lives

to some extent in the opinion and affections of his brother men,--so long

as he is even uncomfortable under the sense of being shut out from these

otherwise than as the being so shall affect his own _interests_,--we may

be quite sure he is not wholly lost. The difference between the two men

is still more clearly shown when they are brought face to face with the

result of their wrong-doing. With each there is sorrow, but in Wybrow,

and still more vividly as we shall see in Tito Melema, it is the sorrow

of self-worship only. No thought of the wronged one otherwise than as an

obstacle and embarrassment, no thought of the wrong simply as a wrong,

can touch him. This sorrow is merely remorse, "the sorrow of the world

which worketh death." Arthur, too, is suddenly called to confront the

misery and ruin he has wrought; but in him, self then loses its

ascendancy. There is no attempt to plead that he was the tempted as much

as the tempter; and no care now as to what others shall think or say

about him. All thought is for the wretched Hetty; and all energy is

concentrated on the one present object, of arresting so far as it can be

arrested the irremediable loss to her. The wrong stands up before him in

its own nakedness as a wrong. This is repentance; and with repentance

restoration becomes possible and begins.

Adam Bede contrasts at nearly every point with Arthur Donnithorne.

Lovable is nearly the last epithet we think of applying to him. Hard

almost to cruelty toward his sinning father; hard almost to

contemptuousness toward his fond, foolish mother; bitterly hard toward

his young master and friend, on the first suspicion of personal wrong;

savagely vindictive, long and fiercely unforgiving, when he knows that

wrong accomplished;--these may well seem things irreconcilable with any

true fulfilment of that Christian life whose great law is love. Yet,

examined more narrowly, they approve themselves as nearly associated with

the larger fulness of that life. They are born of the same spirit which

said of old, "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"

fulfilments, howsoever imperfect, of that true and deep "law of

resentment" which modern sentimentalism has all but expunged from the

Christian code. The hardness is essentially against the wrong-doing, not

against the doer of it; and against it rather as it affects others than

as it burdens, worries, or overshadows his own life. It subsists in and

springs from the intensity with which, in a nature robust and energetic

in no ordinary degree, right and wrong have asserted themselves as the

realities of existence. Even Seth can be more tolerant than Adam,

because the gentle, placid moral beauty of his nature is, so far as this

may ever be, the result of temperament; while in Adam whatever has been

attained has been won through inward struggle and self-conquest.

In the 'Mill on the Floss,' the moral interest of the whole drama is

concentrated to a very great degree on Maggie Tulliver; and in her is

also mainly concentrated the representative struggle between good and

evil, the spirit of the Cross and that of the world; for Stephen Guest is

little more than the objective form under which the latent evil of her

own humanity assails her. Her life is the field upon which we see the

great conflict waging between the elements of spiritual life and

spiritual death; swaying amid heart-struggle and pain, now toward

victory, now toward defeat, till at last all seems lost. Then at one

rebound the strong brave spirit recovers itself, and takes up the full

burden of its cross; sees and accepts the present right though the heart

is breaking; and the end is victory crowned and sealed by death.

From her first appearance as a child, those elements of humanity are most

prominent in her which, unguided and uncontrolled, are most fraught with

danger to the higher life; and for her there is no real outward guidance

or control whatever. The passionate craving for human sympathy and love,

which meets no fuller response than from the rude instinctive fondness of

her father and the carefully-regulated affection of her brother, on the

one hand prepares her for the storm of passion, and on the other, chilled

and thrown back by neglect and refusal, threatens her with equal danger

of hardness and self-inclusion. The strong artist temperament, the power

of spontaneous and intense enjoyment in everything fair and glad to eye

and ear, repressed by the uncongenial accessories around her, tends to

concentrate her existence in a realm of mere imaginative life, where, if

it be the only life, the diviner part of our being can find no

sustenance. This danger is for her the greater and more insidious,

because in her the sensuous, so strongly developed, is refined from all

its grossness by the presence of imagination and thought.

When at last, amid the desolation that has come upon her home, and the

increasing bareness of all the accessories of her young life, its deeper

needs and higher aspirations awaken to definite purpose and seek definite

action, the direction they take is toward a hard stern asceticism,

cramping up all life and energy within a narrow round of drudgeries and

privations. She strives, as many an earnest impassioned nature like hers

has done in similar circumstances, to fashion her own cross, and to make

it as hard as may be to bear. She would deny to herself the very beauty

of earth and sky, the music of birds and rippling waters, and everything

sweet and glad, as temptations and snares. From all this she is brought

back by Philip. But he, touching as he is in the humility and tender

unselfishness of his love, is too exclusively of the artist temperament

to give direction or sustainment to the deeper moral requirements of her

being. He may win her back to the love of beauty and the sense of joy;

but he is not the one to stand by her side when the stern conflict

between pleasure and right, sense and soul, the world and God, is being

fought out within her.

With her introduction to Stephen Guest, that conflict assumes specific

and tangible form; and it has emphatically to be fought out _alone_. All

external circumstances are against her; even Lucy's sweet unjealous

temper, and Tom's bitter hatred, combining with Philip's painful self-

consciousness to keep the safeguard of his presence less constantly at

her side. At last the crowning temptation comes. Without design, by a

surprise on the part of both, the step has been taken which may well seem

irretraceable. Going back from it is not merely going back from joy and

hope, but going back to deeper loneliness than she has ever known; and

going back also to misunderstanding, shame, and lifelong repentance. But

conscience, the imperative requirements of the higher life within, have

resumed their power. There is no paltering with that inward voice; no

possibility but the acceptance of the present urgent right,--the instant

fleeing from the wrong, though with it is bound up all of enjoyment life

can know. It is thus she has to take up her cross, not the less hard to

bear that her own hands have so far fashioned it.

One grave criticism on the death-scene has been made, that at first sight

seems unanswerable. It is said that no such full, swift recognition

between the brother and sister, in those last moments of their

long-severed lives, is possible; because there is no true point of

contact through which such recognition, on the brother's part, could

ensue. We think, however, there is something revealed to us in the

brother which brings him nearer to what is noblest and deepest in the

sister than at first appears. He also has his ideal of duty and right:

it may not be a very broad or high one, but it is there; it is something

without and above mere self; and it is resolutely adhered to at

whatsoever cost of personal ease or pleasure. That such aim cannot be so

followed on without, to some extent, ennobling the whole nature, is shown

in his love for Lucy. It has come on him, and grown up with him,

unconsciously, when there was no wrong connected with it; but with her

engagement to Stephen all this is changed. Hard and stern as he is to

others, he is thenceforth the harder and sterner still to self. There is

no paltering with temptation, such as brings the sister so near to

hopeless fall. Here the cold harsh brother rises to true nobility, and

shows that upon him too life has established its higher claim than that

of mere self-seeking enjoyment. There is, then, this point of contact

between these two, that each has an ideal of duty and light, and to it

each is content to sacrifice all things else. Through this, in that

death-look, they recognise each other; and the author's motto in its full

significance is justified, "In their death they were not divided."

'Silas Marner,' though carefully finished, is of slighter character than

any of the author's later works, and does not require lengthened notice.

In Godfrey Cass we have again, though largely modified, the type of

character in which self is the main object of regard, and in which,

therefore, with much that is likeable, and even, for the circumstances in

which it has grown up, estimable, there is little depth, truth, or

steadfastness. Repentance, and, so far as it is possible, restoration,

come to him mainly through the silent ministration of a purer and better

nature than his own: but the self-pleasing of the past has brought about

that which no repentance can fully reverse or restore. Even on the

surface this is shown; for Eppie, unowned and neglected, can never become

his daughter. But--far beyond and beneath this--we have here, and

elsewhere throughout the author's works, indicated to us one of the most

solemn, and, at the same time, most certain truths of our existence: that

there are forms of accepted and fostered evil so vital that no repentance

can fully blot them out from the present or the future of life. No

turning away from the accursed thing, no discipline, no futurity near or

far, can ever place Arthur Donnithorne or Godfrey Cass alongside Dinah

Morris or Adam Bede. Their irreversible part of self-worship precludes

them, by the very laws of our being, from the highest and broadest

achievement of life and destiny.

Leaving for the present 'Romola,' as in many respects more directly

linking itself with George Eliot's great poetic effort, 'The Spanish

Gypsy,' we turn for a little to 'Felix Holt,' the next of her English

tales. It would be perhaps natural to select, from among the characters

here presented to us, in illustration of life consciously attuning itself

to the highest aim irrespective of any end save that aim itself, one or

other of the two in whom this is most palpably presented to us--Felix

himself or Esther Lyon. We prefer, however, selecting Harold Transome,

certainly one of the most difficult and one of the most strikingly

wrought out conceptions, not only in the works of George Eliot, but in

modern fiction.

Harold, we believe, is not a general favourite with the modern public,

any more than he was with his own contemporaries. He has none of those

lovablenesses which make Arthur Donnithorne so attractive; and at first

sight nothing of that uncompromising sense of right which characterises

Adam Bede. He comes before us apparently no more than a clearheaded,

hard, shrewd, successful man of the world, greatly alive to his own

interests and importance, and with no particular principles to boast of.

How does it come that this man, when over and over again, in great things

and in small, two paths lie before him to choose, always chooses the

truer and better of the two? When Felix attempts to interfere in the

conduct of his election, even while resenting the interference as

impertinent, he sets himself honestly to attempt to arrest the wrong. He

buys Christian's secret; but it is to reveal it to her whom it enables,

if so she shall choose, to dislodge himself from the position which has

been the great object of his desires and efforts. By simply allowing the

trial and sentence of Felix to take their course, he would, to all

appearance, strengthen the possibility that by marriage to Esther his

position shall be maintained, with the further joy of having that "white

new-winged dove" thenceforth by his side. He comes forward as witness on

behalf of Felix, and gives his evidence fairly, truly, and in such guise

as makes it tell most favourably for the accused, and at the same time

against himself; and, last and most touching of all, it is after he knows

the full depth of the humiliation in which his mother's sin has for life

involved him, that his first exhibition of tenderness, sympathy, and

confidence towards that poor stricken heart and blighted life comes

forth. How comes it that this "well-tanned man of the world" thus always

chooses the higher and more difficult right; and does this in no

excitement or enthusiasm, but coolly, calculatingly, with clear

forecasting of all the consequences, and fairly entitled to assume that

these shall be to his own peril or detriment?

We cannot assign this seeming anomaly to that undefinable something

called the instinct of the gentleman, {29} so specially recognised in the

elder and younger Debarry, as a reality and power in life. To say

nothing of the fact that this instinct deals primarily with questions of

feeling, and only indirectly and incidentally with questions of moral

right, Harold Transome, alike congenitally and circumstantially, could

scarcely by possibility have been animated by it even in slight degree,

nor does it ever betray its presence in him through those slight but

graceful courtesies of life which are pre-eminently the sphere of its

manifestation. Equally untenable is the hypothesis which ascribes these

manifestations of character wholly to the influence of a nature higher

than his own appealing to him--that of Felix Holt, the glorious old

Dissenter, or Esther Lyon. Such appeals can have any avail only when in

the nature appealed to there remains the capability to recognise that

right is greater than success or joy, and the moral power of will to act

on that recognition. In the fact that Harold's nature does respond to

these appeals we have the clue to the apparent anomaly his character

presents. We see that, howsoever overlaid by temperament and restrained

by circumstance, the noblest capability in man still survives and is

active in him. He _can_ choose the right which imperils his own

interests, because it _is_ the right; he _can_ set his back on the wrong

which would advantage himself, because it _is_ the wrong. That he does

this coolly, temperately, without enthusiasm, with full, clear

forecasting of all the consequences, is only saying that he is Harold

Transome still. That he does so choose when the forecast probabilities

are all against those objects which the mere man of the world most

desires, proves that under that hard external crust dwells as essential a

nobleness as any we recognise in Felix Holt. There is an inherent

strength and manliness in Harold Transome to which Arthur Donnithorne or

Godfrey Cass can never attain.

Few things in the literary history of the age are more puzzling than the

reception given to 'Romola' by a novel-devouring public. That the lovers

of mere sensationalism should not have appreciated it, was to be fully

expected. But to probably the majority of readers, even of average

intelligence and capability, it was, and still is, nothing but a

weariness. With the more thoughtful, on the other hand, it took at once

its rightful place, not merely as by far the finest and highest of all

the author's works, but as perhaps the greatest and most perfect work of

fiction of its class ever till then produced.

Of its artistic merits we do not propose to speak in detail. But as a

historical reproduction of an epoch and a life peculiarly difficult of

reproduction, we do not for a moment hesitate to say that it has no

rival, except, perhaps,--and even that at a distance,--Victor Hugo's

incomparably greatest work, 'Notre Dame de Paris.' It is not that we

_see_ as in a panorama the Florence of the Medicis and Savonarola,--we

live, we move, we feel as if actors in it. Its turbulence, its struggles

for freedom and independence, its factions with their complicated

transitions and changes, its conspiracies and treasons, its classical

jealousies and triumphs,--we feel ourselves mixed up with them all. Names

historically immortal are made to us familiar presences and voices. Its

nobles and its craftsmen alike become to us as friends or foes. Its very

buildings--the Duomo and the Campanile, and many another--rise in their

stateliness and their grace before those who have never been privileged

to see them, clear and vivid as the rude northern houses that daily

obtrude on our gaze.

So distinct and all-pervading, in this great work, is what we are

maintaining to be the central moral purpose of all the author's works,

that it can scarcely escape the notice of the most superficial reader.

Affirmatively and negatively, in Romola and Tito--the two forms of

illustration to some extent combined in Savonarola--the constant,

persistent, unfaltering utterance of the book is, that the only true

worth and greatness of humanity lies in its pursuit of the highest truth,

purity, and right, irrespective of every issue, and in exclusion of every

meaner aim; and that the true debasement and hopeless loss of humanity

lies in the path of self-pleasing. The form of this work, the time and

country in which the scene is laid, and the selection of one of the three

great actors in it, leads the author more definitely than in almost any

of those which preceded it to connect her moral lesson, not merely with

Christianity as a religious faith, but with that Church which, as called

by the name of Christ, howsoever fallen away from its "first love," is

still, in the very fact of its existence, a witness for Him. While, on

the other hand, through many of its subordinate characters, we have the

broad catholic truth kept ever before us, that, irrespective of all

formal profession or creed, voluntary acceptance of a higher life-law

than the seeking our own interests, pleasure, or will, is, according to

its degree, life's best and highest fulfilment; and thus we trace Him who

"pleased not Himself" as the life and the light of the world, even when

that world may be least formally acknowledging Him.

The three in whom this great lesson is most prominently illustrated in

the work before us are, of course, Romola herself, Tito Melema, and

Savonarola. And in each the illustration is so modified, and, through

the three together, so almost exhaustively accomplished, that some

examination of each seems necessary to our main object in this survey of

George Eliot's works.

Few, we think, can study the delineation of Romola without feeling that

imagination has seldom placed before us a fairer, nobler, and completer

female presence. Perfectly human and natural; unexaggerated, we might

almost say unidealised, alike in her weaknesses and her nobleness;

combining such deep womanly tenderness with such spotless purity; so

transparent in her truthfulness; so clear in her perceptions of the true

and good, so firm in her aspirations after these; so broad, gentle, and

forbearing in her charity, yet so resolute against all that is mean and

base;--everything fair, bright, and high in womanhood seems to combine in

Romola. So true, also, is the process of her development to what is

called nature--to the laws and principles that regulate human action and

life--that, as it proceeds before us, we almost lose note that there is

development. The fair young heathen first presented to us, linked on to

classic times and moralities through all the surroundings of her life,

passes on so imperceptibly into the "visible Madonna" of the after-time,

that we scarcely observe the change till it is accomplished. From the

first, we know that the mature is involved in the young Romola. The

reason of this is, that from first to last the essential principle of

life is in her the same. Equally, when she first comes before us, and in

all the after-glory of her serene unconscious self-devotedness, she is

living to others, not to herself.

Her first devotion is to her father. Her one passion of life is to

compensate to him all he has lost: the eyes, once so full of fire, now

sightless; the son and brother, who, at the call of an enthusiasm with

which their nobler natures refuse to sympathise--for it was, in the first

instance, but the supposed need to save his own soul--has fled from his

nearest duty of life. To this devotion she consecrates her fair young

existence. For this she dismisses from it all thought of ease or

pleasure, and chooses retirement and isolation; gives herself to

uncongenial studies and endless labours, and accepts, in uncomplaining

sadness, that which to such a nature is hardest of all to bear--her

father's non-appreciation of all she would be and is to him. From the

first, her life is one of entire self-consecration. The sphere of its

activities expands as years flow on, but the principle is throughout the

same. In the exquisite simplicity, purity, and tenderness of her young

love, she is Romola still. There is no self-isolation included in it.

Side by side with satisfying her own yearning heart, lies the thought

that she is thus giving to her father a son to replace him who has

forsaken him. Her first perception of the want of perfect oneness

between Tito and herself dawns upon her through no change in him towards

herself, but through his less sedulous attendance on her father. And

when at last the conviction is borne in upon her that between him and

her, seemingly so closely united, there lies the gulf that parts truth

and falsehood, heaven and hell, it is no perceptible withdrawal of his

love from her that forces on her this conviction. It is his falseness

and treason to the dead. Then comes the crisis of her career; her flight

from the unendurable burden of that divided life; her meeting with

Savonarola; and her being through him brought face to face with the

Christian aspect of that deepest of all moral truths,--the precedence of

duty above all else. Savonarola's demand might well seem to one such as

Romola laying on her a burden too heavy to be borne. It was not that it

called her to return to hardness and pain; she was going forth

unshrinking into the unknown with no certainty but that these would find

her there; it called her to return to what, with her high ideal of love

and life, could not but seem degradation and sin,--according in the

living daily lie that they two, so hopelessly parted, were one. To any

lower nature the appeal would have been addressed in vain. It prevails

with her because it sets before her but the extension and more perfect

fulfilment of the life law toward which she has been always aiming, even

through the dim light of her all but heathen nurture.

She goes back to reassume her cross: sadly, weariedly forecasting, as

only such a nature can do, all its shame and pain; and even still only

dimly assured that her true path lies here. The very nobleness which

constrains her return makes that return the harder. The unknown into

which she had thought to flee had no possibility of pain or fear for her,

compared to the certain pain and difficulty of that life from which all

reality of love is gone: where her earnest, truthful spirit must live in

daily contact with baseness,--may even have, through virtue of her

relation to Tito, tacitly to concur in treason. She goes back to what,

constituted as she is, can be only a daily, lifelong crucifying, and she

goes back to it knowing that such it must be.

Thenceforth goes on in her that process which, far beyond all reasonings,

makes the mystery of sorrow intelligible to us,--the "making perfect

through suffering." It is not necessary we should trace the process step

by step. It is scarcely possible to do so, for its stages are too subtle

to be so traced. We see rather by result than in operation how her path

of voluntary self-consecration--of care and thought for all save self--of

patient, silent, solitary endurance of her crown of thorns, is

brightening more and more toward the perfect day. In the streets of the

faction-torn, plague-stricken, famine-wasted city; by the side of the

outraged Baldassarre; in the room of the child-mistress Tessa; most of

all in that home whence all other brightness has departed,--she moves and

stands more and more before us the "visible Madonna."

How sharply the sword has pierced her heart, how sorely the crown of

thorns is pressing her fair young brow, we learn in part from her

decisive interview with Tessa. She, the high-born lady, spotless in

purity, shrinking back from the very shadow of degradation, questions the

unconscious instrument of one of her many wrongs with the one anxiety and

hope that she may prove to be no true wife after all; that the bond which

binds her to living falsehood and baseness may be broken, though its

breaking stamp her with outward dishonour and blot. Otherwise there is

no obtrusion of her burning pain; no revolt of faith and trust,

impeaching God of hardness and wrong toward her; no murmur in His ear,

any more than in the ear of man. Meek, patient, steadfast, she devotes

herself to every duty and right that life has left to her; and the dark-

garmented Piagnone moves about the busy scene a white-robed ministrant of

mercy and love. Ever and anon, indeed, the lonely anguish of her heart

breaks forth, but in the form of expression it assumes she is

emphatically herself. In those frequent touching appeals to Tito,

deepening in their sweet earnestness with every failure, we may read the

intensity of her ever-present inward pain. In them all the self-seeking

of love has no place. The effort is always primarily directed, not

toward winning back his love and confidence for herself, but toward

winning him back to truth and right and loyalty of soul. Her pure high

instinct knows that only so can love return between them--can the

shattered bond be again taken up. She seeks to save _him_--him who will

not be saved, who has already vitally placed himself out of the pale of

possible salvation.

One of the most touching manifestations in this most touching of all

records of feminine nobleness and suffering, is the story of her

relations to Tessa. It would seem as if in that large heart jealousy,

the reaching self-love of love, could find no place. Her discovery of

the relation in which Tessa stands to Tito awakens first that saddest of

all sad hopes in one like Romola, that through the contadina she may be

released from the marriage-bond that so galls and darkens her life. When

that hope is gone, no thought of Tessa as a successful rival presents

itself. She thinks of her only as another victim of Tito's

wrong-doing--as a weak, simple, helpless child, innocent of all conscious

fault, to be shielded and cared for in the hour of need.

At last, after the foulest of Tito's treasons, which purchases safety and

advancement for himself by the betrayal and death of her noble old

godfather, her last living link to the past, the burden of her life

becomes beyond her bearing, and again she attempts to lay it down by

fleeing. There is no Savonarola now to meet and turn her back.

Savonarola has lost the power, has forfeited the right, to do so. The

pupil has outgrown the teacher; her self-renunciation has become simpler,

purer, deeper, more entire than his. The last words exchanged between

these two bring before us the change that has come over the spiritual

relations between them. "The cause of my party," says Savonarola, "_is_

the cause of God's kingdom." "I do not believe it," is the reply of

Romola's "passionate repugnance." "God's kingdom is something wider,

else let me stand without it with the beings that I love." These words

tell us the secret of Savonarola's gathering weakness and of Romola's

strength. Self, under the subtle form of identifying truth and right

with his own party--with his own personal judgment of the cause and the

course of right--has so far led _him_ astray from the straight onward

path. Right, in its clear, calm, direct simplicity, has become to her

supreme above what is commonly called salvation itself.

It is another agency than Savonarola's now that brings her back once more

to take up the full burden of her cross. She goes forth not knowing or

heeding whither she goes, "drifting away" unconscious before wind and

wave. These bear her into the midst of terror, suffering, and death; and

there, in self-devotedness to others, in patient ministrations of love

amid poverty, ignorance, and superstition, the noble spirit rights itself

once more, the weary fainting heart regains its quiet steadfastness. She

knows once more that no amount of wrong-doing can dissolve the bond

uniting her to Tito; that no degree of pain may lawfully drive her forth

from that sphere of doing and suffering which is _hers_. She returns,

not in joy or hope, but in that which is deeper than all joy and hope--in

love; the one thought revealed to us being that it may be her blessedness

to stand by him whose baseness drove her away when suffering and loss

have come upon him. But Death--the mystery to which we look as the

solver of all earthly mysteries--has resolved for her this darkest and

saddest perplexity of her life. Tito is gone to his place: and his

baseness shall vex her no more with antagonistic duties and a divided

life. There is no joy, no expressed sense of relief and release; no

reproach of him other than that implied one which springs out of the

necessities of her being, the putting away from her, quietly and

unobtrusively, the material gains of his treasons. The poor innocent

wrong-doer, Tessa, is sought for, rescued, and cared for; and is never

allowed to know the foul wrong to her rescuer of which she has been made

the unconscious instrument. Even to her the language is that "Naldo will

return no more, not because he is cruel, but because he is dead."

One direct trial of her faith and patience remains, through the weakness

and apparent apostasy of Savonarola. Has he, through whom first came to

her definite guidance amid the dark perplexities of her life, been always

untrue? has the light that seemed through him to dawn on her been

therefore misleading and perverting? In almost agonised intentness she

listens for some word, watches for some sign, which shall tell her it has

not been so. She outrages all her womanly sensibilities by being present

at the death-scene, in hope that something there, were it but the

uplifting of the drooping head to the clear true light of heaven, shall

reassure her that the prophet was a true prophet, and his voice to her

the voice of God. But she watches in vain. Without word or sign that

even her quick sure instinct can interpret, Savonarola passes into "the

eternal silence." What measure of overshadowing darkness and sorrow then

again fell over her life we are not told: we only know how that life

passed from under this cloud also into purer and serener light. This

perplexity also solves itself for her in the path of unquestioning

acceptance of duty, human service, and human love; and as she treads this

path, the mists clear away from around Savonarola too, and she sees him

again at last as he really was, in the essential truthfulness, nobleness,

and self-devotedness of his life.

Of the after-life little is told us, but little needed to be told. We

have followed Romola thus far with dulled intelligence of mind and soul

if we cannot picture it clearly and certainly for ourselves. Love that

never falters, patience that never questions, meekness that never fails,

truth clear and still as the light of heaven, devotedness that knows no

thought of self, a life flowing calmly on through whatever of sorrow and

disappointment may remain toward the perfect purity and blessedness of

heaven. Few, we think, can carefully study the character and development

of Romola del Bardo and refuse to endorse the verdict that Imagination

has given us no figure more rounded and complete in every grace and glory

of feminine loveliness.

The sensational fiction of the day has laboured hard in the production of

great criminals; but it has produced no human being so vitally debased,

no nature so utterly loathsome, no soul so hopelessly lost, as the

handsome, smiling, accomplished, popular, viceless Greek, Tito Melema.

Yet is he the very reverse of what is called a monster of iniquity. That

which gives its deep and awful power to the picture is its simple,

unstrained, unvarnished truthfulness. He knows little of himself who

does not recognise as existent within himself, and as always battling for

supremacy there, that principle of evil which, accepted by Tito as his

life-law, and therefore consummating itself in him, "bringeth forth

death;" death the most utter and, so far as it is possible to see, the

most hopeless that can engulf the human soul.

The conception of Tito as one great central figure in a work of art would

scarcely, we think, have occurred to any one whose moral aim was other

than that which it is the endeavour of these remarks to trace out in

George Eliot's works. The working out of that conception, as it is here

worked out, would, we believe, have been impossible to any one who had

less strongly realised wherein all the true nobleness and all the true

debasement of humanity lie.

Outwardly, on his first appearance, there is not merely nothing repellent

about Tito; in person and manner, in genial kindly temper, in those very

forms of intelligence and accomplishment that specially suit the city and

the time, there is superficially everything to conciliate and attract. It

is almost impossible to define the subtle threads of indication through

which, from the first, we are forced to distrust him. Superficially, it

might seem at this time as if with Tito the probabilities were equal as

regards good and evil; and that with Romola's love thrown into the scale,

their preponderance on the side of good were all but irresistible. Yet

from the first we feel that it is otherwise--that this light, genial,

ease-loving nature has already, by its innate habitude of self-pleasing,

foreordained itself to sink down into ever deeper and more utter

debasement. With the "slight, almost imperceptible start," at the

accidental words which connect the value of his jewels with "a man's

ransom," we feel that some baseness is already within himself

contemplated. With the transference of their price to the goldsmith's

hands, we know that the baseness is in his heart resolved on. When the

message through the monk tells him that the ransom may still be

available, we never doubt what the decision will be. Present ease and

enjoyment, the maintaining and improving the position he has won--in

short, the "something that is due to himself," rather than a distant,

dangerous, possibly fruitless duty, howsoever clear.

The one purer feeling in that corrupt heart--his love for Romola--is

almost from the first tainted by the same selfishness. From the first he

recognises that his relation to her will give him a certain position in

the city; and he feels that with his ready tact and Greek suppleness this

is all that is needed to secure his further advancement. The vital

antagonism between his nature and hers bars the possibility of his

foreseeing how her truthfulness, nobleness, and purity shall become the

thorn in his ease-loving life.

In his earlier relations with Tessa, there is nothing more than seeking a

present and passing amusement, and the desire to sun himself in her

childish admiration and delight. He is as far as possible from the

intentional seducer and betrayer. But his accidental encounters with

her, cause him perplexity and annoyance; and at last it seems to him

safer for his own position, especially in regard to Romola, that she

should be secretly housed as she is, and taught to regard herself as his

wife. Soon there comes to be more of ease for him with the

bond-submissive child-mistress, than in the presence of the high-souled,

pure-hearted wife. In the first and decisive encounter with Baldassarre,

the words of repudiation which seal the whole after-character of his

life, apparently escape from him unconsciously and by surprise. But it

is the traitor-heart that speaks them. They could never even by surprise

have escaped the lips, had not the baseness of their denial and desertion

been already in the heart consummated.

We need not follow him through all his subsequent and deepening treasons.

They all, without exception, want every element that might make even

treason impressive. They want even such factitious elevation as their

being prompted by hatred or revenge might lend;--even such broader

interest as their being done in the interest of a party, or for some wide

end, could confer. They have no fuller or deeper import than the present

ease, present safety, present or future advantage, of that object which

fills up his universe,--Self. He would rather not have betrayed the

trust reposed in him by Romola's father, if the end he thereby proposed

to himself could have been attained otherwise than through such betrayal.

His plot with Dolfo Spini for placing the great Monk-prophet in the hands

of his enemies, has no darker motive than the getting out of the way an

indirect obstacle to his own advancement, and a man whose labours tend to

make life harder and more serious for all who come under his influence.

Bernardo del Nero, with his stainless honour, has from the first taken up

an attitude of tacit revulsion toward him; but there is no revenge

prompting the part he plays towards the noble, true-hearted old man. He

would rather that he and his fellow-victims were saved, if his own safety

and ultimate gain could be secured otherwise than through their betrayal

and death. There is no hardness or cruelty in him, save when its

transient displays toward Romola are necessary for furthering some

present end: he never indulges in the luxury of unnecessary and

unprofitable sins. The sharp, steadfast, unwavering consistency of Tito

is even more marked than that of Romola, for twice Romola falters, and

turns to flee. The supple, flexible Greek follows out the law he has

laid down as the law of his life,--worships the god he has set up as the

god of his worship with an inexorable constancy that never for one chance

moment falters. That god is self; that law is, in one word,

self-pleasing. Long before the end comes, we feel that Tito Melema is a

lost soul; that for him and in him there is no place for repentance; that

to him we may without any uncharity apply the most fearful words human

language has ever embodied;--he has sinned the "sin which _cannot_ be

forgiven, neither in this world, neither in the world to come."

"Justice," says the author, as the dead Tito is borne past still locked

in the death-clutch of the human avenger--"justice is like the kingdom of

God: it is not without us as a fact; it is within us as a great

yearning." In these solemn truthful words we have suggested to us how

feebly mere physical death can shadow forth that spiritual corruption,

that "second death," which we have seen hour by hour consummating in him

who has lived for self alone.

Few of the great figures which stand up amid the dimness of medieval

history are more perplexing to historian and biographer than Savonarola.

On a first glance we seem shut up to one or other of two

alternatives--regarding him as an apostle and martyr, or as a charlatan.

And even more careful examination leaves in his character and life

anomalies so extraordinary, contradictions so inextricable, that most

historians have fallen back on the hypothesis of partial insanity--the

insanity born of an honest and upright but extravagant fanaticism--as the

only one adequate to explain the mystery. Whether George Eliot has in

this work produced a more satisfactory solution, we do not attempt

formally to determine. We are sure, however, that every thoughtful

reader will recognise that the solution she offers is one in strict and

deep consistency with all the laws of human action, and all the

tendencies of human imperfection; and that the Savonarola she places

before us is a being we can understand _by sympathy_--sympathy at once

with the greatness of his aims, and still more fully with the weaknesses

that lead him astray.

The picture is a very impressive one, alike in its grandeur and in its

sadness, speaking its true, deep, universal lesson home to us and to our

life: alike when it shows us the strength and nobleness of life attuning

itself to the highest good, and battling on toward the highest right; and

when it shows us how self, under a form which does not seem self, may

steal in to sap its strength and to abase its nobleness.

The great Monk-prophet comes upon the scene a new "voice crying in the

wilderness" of selfishness and wrong around him--an impassioned witness

that "there is a God that judgeth in the earth," protesting by speech and

by life against the self-seeking and self-pleasing he sees on every side.

To the putting down of this, to the living his own life, to the rousing

all men to live theirs, not to pleasure, but to God; merging all private

interests in the public good, and that the best good; looking each one

not to his own pleasures, ambition, or ease, but to that which shall best

advance a reign of truth, justice, and love on earth,--to this end he has

consecrated himself and all his powers. The path thus chosen is for

himself a hard one; circumstanced as our humanity is, it never has been

otherwise--never shall be so while these heavens and this earth remain.

Mere personal self-denials, mere turning away from the outward pomps and

vanities of the world, lie very lightly on a nature like Savonarola's,

and such things scarcely enter into the pain and hardness of his chosen

lot. It is the opposition,--active, in the intrigues and machinations of

enemies both in Church and State--passive, in the dull cold hearts that

respond so feebly and fitfully to his appeals; it is the constant wearing

bitterness of hope deferred, the frequent still sterner bitterness of

direct disappointment,--it is things like these that make his cross so

heavy to bear. But they cannot turn him aside from his course--cannot

win him to lower his aim to something short of the highest good

conceivable by him. We may smile now in our days of so-called

enlightenment at some of the measures he directs in pursuance of his

great aim. His "Pyramid of Vanities" may be to our self-satisfied

complacency itself a vanity. To him it represents a stern reality of

reformation in character and life; and to the Florentine of his age it

symbolises one form of vain self-pleasing offered up in solemn willing

sacrifice to God.

One trial of his faith and steadfastness, long expected, comes on him at

last. The recognised head of that great organisation of which he is a

vowed and consecrated member declares against him, and the papal sentence

of excommunication goes forth. We, looking as we deem on the Papacy

trembling to its fall, can very imperfectly enter into the awful gravity

of this struggle. To us, the prohibition of an Alexander Borgia may seem

of small account, and his anathema of small weight in the councils of the

universe. But it was otherwise with Savonarola: the Monk-apostle,

trained and vowed to unqualified obedience, has thus forced on him the

most difficult problem of his time. This to him more than earthly

authority, the visible embodiment of the Divine on earth, the direct and

only representative of the one authority of God in Christ, has declared

his course to be a course of error and sin. Shall he accept or reject

the decision? To reject, is to break with the supposed tradition of

fourteen centuries, and with all his own past training, predilections,

and habits of thought; it is to nullify his own voluntary act of the

past, accepting implicit obedience, and to go forth on a path which has

thenceforth no outward guidance, light, or stay. To accept, is to break

with all his own truest and deepest past, to abandon all that for him

gives truth and reality to life, and to retire to his cell, and limit his

attention thenceforth--if he can--to making the "salvation" of his own

soul secure. We may safely esteem that this is the culminating struggle

of his life. We may well understand the solemn pause that ensues, the

retirement to solitude, there to review the position before the only

court of appeal that remains to him,--that inward voice of conscience,

that inward sense of right, which is the immediate presence of God

within. But we never doubt what the decision will be. "I must obey God

rather than man; I cannot recognise that this voice--even of God's

vicegerent--is the voice of God. Necessity is laid on me, which I dare

not gainsay, to preach this Gospel of God's kingdom, as, even on earth, a

kingdom of righteousness, truth, and love."

Such is one phase of the Savonarola here portrayed to us; and herein is

placed before us the secret of his greatness and strength. This firm

assertion of the highest right his consciousness recognises, amid all

difficulty, hardness, and disappointment; this persistent endeavour by

precept and example to rouse men to a truer and better life than their

own varied self-seekings; this unflinching struggle against everything

false, mean, and base,--these things make him a power in the State before

which King and Pope are compelled to bow in respect or fear. Over even

the larger nature of Romola his words at this time have sway,--the sway

which more distinct perception of _all_ the relations of duty gives over

a spirit equally earnest to seek the right alone.

In time there comes a change, almost imperceptibly, working from within

outwards, first clearly announced through the changed relations of others

to him, though these are but symptomatic of change within himself. The

political strength of his sway is broken, its moral strength is all but

gone. The nature of the change in himself he unwittingly defines in

those last words to Romola already quoted, "The cause of _my party_ is

the cause of God's kingdom." Various external circumstances have

contributed to bring about the result thus indicated; but on these it is

unnecessary to dwell. God's kingdom has lowered and narrowed itself into

his party. The spirit of the partisan has begun to overshadow the purity

of the patriot, to contract and abase the wide aim of the Christian; and

he has come to substitute a law of right modified to suit the interests

of the party, for that law which is absolute and unconditional. He whom

we listened to in the Duomo as the fervid proclaimer of God's justice,

stands now before us as the perverter of even human justice and human

law. The very nobleness of Bernardo del Nero strengthens the necessity

that he should die, that the Mediceans may be thus deprived of the

support of his stainless honour and high repute; though to compass this

death the law of mercy which Savonarola himself has instituted must be

put aside. As we listen to the miserable sophistries by which he strives

to justify himself--far less to Romola than before his own accusing

soul--we feel that the greatness of his strength has departed from him.

All thenceforth is deepening confusion without and within. Less and less

can he control the violences of his party, till these provoke all but

universal revolt, and the "Masque of the Furies" ends his public career.

The uncertainties and vacillations of the "Trial by Fire," the long

series of confessions and retractations, historically true, are still

more morally and spiritually significant. They tell of inward confusion

and perplexity, generated through that partial "self-pleasing" which,

under guise so insidious, had stolen into the inner life; of faith and

trust perturbed and obscured thereby; of dark doubts engendered whether

God had indeed ever spoken by him. We feel it is meet the great life

should close, not as that of the triumphant martyr, but amid the depths

of that self-renouncing penitence through which once more the soul

resumes its full relation to the divine.

* * * * *

We have now come to the one great poem George Eliot has as yet given to

the world, and which we have no hesitation in placing above every

poetical or poetico-dramatic work of the day--'The Spanish Gypsy.' Less

upon it than upon any of its predecessors can we attempt any general

criticism. Our attention must be confined mainly to two of the great

central figures of the drama--Fedalma herself, and Don Silva; the

representatives respectively of humanity accepting the highest, noblest,

most self-devoting life presented to it, simultaneously with life's

deepest pain; and of humanity choosing something--in itself pure and

noble, but--short of the highest.

Fedalma is essentially a poetic Romola, but Romola so modified by

circumstances and temperament as to be superficially contrasting. She is

the Romola of a different race and clime, a different nurture, and an era

which, chronologically nearly the same, is in reality far removed. For

the warm and swift Italian we have the yet warmer and swifter Gypsy

blood; for the long line of noble ancestry, descent from an outcast and

degraded race; for the nurture amid the environments, almost in the creed

of classicism, the upbringing under noble female charge in a household of

that land where the Roman Church had just sealed its full supremacy by

the establishment of the Inquisition; for the era when Italian subtleties

of thought, policy, and action had attained their highest elaboration,

the grander and simpler time when

"Castilian gentlemen

_Choose_ not their task--they choose _to do it well_."

But howsoever modified through these and other accessories of existence

are the more superficial aspects of character, and the whole outward form

and course of life, the great vital principle is the same in

both;--clearness to see, nobleness to choose, steadfastness to pursue,

the highest good that life presents, through whatsoever anguish,

darkness, and death of all joy and hope the path may lead.

On Fedalma's first appearance on the wonderful scene upon the Placa, she

presents herself as emphatically what her poet-worshipper Juan hymns her,

the "child of light"--a creature so tremulously sensitive to all beauty,

brightness, and joy, that it seems as if she could not co-exist with

darkness and sorrow. But even then we have intimated to us that vital

quality in her nature which makes all self-sacrifice possible; and which

assures us that, whenever her life-choice shall come to lie between

enjoyment and right, she shall choose the higher though the harder path.

For her joy is essentially the joy of sympathy; mere self has no place in

it. In her exquisite justification of the Placa scene to Don Silva, she

herself defines it in one line better than all words of ours can do--

"_I_ was not, but joy was, and love and triumph."

She is but a form and presence in which the joy, not merely of the fair

sunset scene, but primarily and emphatically of the human hearts around

her, enshrines itself. It has no free life in herself apart from others;

it must inevitably die if shut out from this tremulousness of human

sympathy. And we know it shall give place to a sorrow correspondingly

sensitive, intense, and absorbing, whenever the young bright spirit is

brought face to face with human sorrow. Even while we gaze on her as the

embodied joy, and love, and triumph of the scene, the shadow begins to

fall. The band of Gypsy prisoners passes by, and her eyes meet those

eyes whose gaze, not to be so read by any nature lower and more

superficial than hers--

"Seemed to say he bore

The pain of those who never could be saved."

Joy collapses at once within her; the light fades away from the scene;

the very sunset glory becomes dull and cold. We are shown from the first

that no life can satisfy this "child of light" which shall not be a life

in the fullest and deepest unison to which circumstances shall call her

with the life of humanity. That true greatness of our humanity is

already active within her, which makes it impossible she should live or

die to herself alone. Her destiny is already marked out by a force of

which circumstance may determine the special manifestation, but which no

force of circumstance can turn aside from its course; the force of a

living spiritual power within herself which constrains that she shall be

faithful to the highest good which life shall place before her.

We would fain linger for a little over the scenes which follow between

her and Don Silva; portraying as they do a love so intense in its virgin

tenderness, and so spiritually pure and high. It is the same "child of

light" that comes before us here; the same tremulous living in the light

and joy of her love, but also the same impossibility of living even in

its light and joy apart from those of her beloved. And not from his

only: that passion which in more ordinary natures so almost inevitably

contracts the sphere of the sympathies, in Fedalma expands and enlarges

it. Amid all the intoxicating sweetness of her bright young joys, the

loving heart turns again and again to the thought of human sorrow and

wrong; and among all the hopes that gladden her future, one is never

absent from her thoughts--"Oh! I shall have much power as well as joy;"

power to redress the wrong and to assuage the suffering. Half playfully,

half seriously, she asks the question--

"But is it _what_ we love, or _how_ we love,

That makes true good?"

Most seriously and solemnly is the question answered through her after-

life. To love less wholly, purely, unselfishly--yet still holding the

outward claims of that love subordinate to a possible still higher and

more imperative claim--to such a nature as hers is no love and no true

good at all. And this thirst for the highest alike in love and life

includes her lover as well as herself. The darkest terror that overtakes

her in all those after-scenes comes when he is about to abjure country,

honour, and God on her account. To her, the Gypsy, without a country,

without a faith save faithfulness to the highest right, without a God

such as the Spaniards' God, this might be a small thing. But for him,

Spanish noble and Christian knight, she knows it to be abnegation of

nobleness, treason to duty, dishonour and shame. She is jealous for his

truth, but the more that its breach might seem to secure her own

happiness.

The first and decisive scene with her Gypsy father is so true in

conception, and so full of poetic force and grandeur throughout, that no

analysis, nothing short of extracting the whole, can do justice to it.

Seldom before has art in any guise placed the grand, heroic,

self-devoting purpose of a grand, heroic, self-devoting nature more

impressively before us than in the Gypsy chief. It is easy to think and

speak of such an enterprise as Quixotic and impossible. There is a stage

in every great enterprise humanity has ever undertaken when it might be

so characterised: and the greatest of all enterprises, when an obscure

Jew stood forth to become light and life, not to a tribe or a race, but

to humanity, was to the judgers according to appearance of His day, the

most Quixotic and impossible of all.

It has been felt and urged as an objection to this scene, and

consequently to the whole scheme of the drama, that such influence, so

immediately exerted over Fedalma by a father whom till then she had never

known, is unnatural if not impossible. If it were only as father and

daughter they thus stand face to face, there might be force in the

objection. But this very partially and inadequately expresses the

relation between these two. It is the father possessed with a lofty,

self-devoting purpose, who calls to share in, and to aid it, the daughter

whose nature is strung to the same lofty, self-devoting pitch. It is the

saviour of an oppressed, degraded, outcast race, who calls to share his

mission her who could feel the brightness of her joy of love brightened

still more by the hope of assuaging sorrow and redressing evil. It is

the appeal through the father of that which is highest and noblest in

humanity to that which is most deeply inwrought into the daughter's soul.

To a narrower and meaner nature the appeal would have been addressed by

any father in vain: for a narrower and meaner end, the appeal even by

such a father would have been addressed to Fedalma in vain. With her it

cannot but prevail, unless she is content to forego--not merely her

father's love and trust, but--her own deepest and truest life.

The "child of light," the embodied "joy and love and triumph" of the

Placa, is called on to forego all outward and possible hope on behalf of

that love which is for her the concentration of all light and joy and

triumph. Very touching are those heart-wrung pleadings by which she

strives to avert the sacrifice; and we are oppressed almost as by the

presence of the calm, loveless, hateless Fate of the old Greek tragedy,

as Zarca's inexorable logic puts them one by one aside, and leaves her as

sole alternatives the offering up every hope, every present and possible

joy of the love which is entwined with her life, or the turning away from

that highest course to which he calls her. As her own young hopes die

out under the pressure of that deepest energy of her nature to which he

appeals, it can hardly be but that all hope should grow dull and cold

within--hope even with regard to the issue of that mission to which she

is called; and it is thus that she accepts the call:--

"Yes, say that we shall fail. I will not count

On aught but being faithful. . . .

I will seek nothing but to shun base joy.

The saints were cowards who stood by to see

Christ crucified. They should have thrown themselves

Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain.

The grandest death, to die in vain, for love

Greater than rules the courses of the world.

Such death shall be my bridegroom. . . .

Oh love! you were my crown. No other crown

Is aught but thorns on this poor woman's brow."

In this spirit she goes forth to meet her doom, faithfulness thenceforth

the one aim and struggle of her life--faithfulness to be maintained under

the pressure of such anguish of blighted love and stricken hope as only

natures so pure, tender, and deep can know--faithfulness clung to with

but the calmer steadfastness when the last glimmer of mere hope is gone.

The successive scenes in the Gypsy camp with Juan, with her father, and

with the Gypsy girl Hinda, bring before us at once the intensity of her

suffering and the depth of her steadfastness. Trembling beneath the

burden laid upon her,--laid on her by no will of another, but by the

earnestness of her own humanity,--we see her seeking through Juan

whatever of possible comfort can come through tidings of him she has

left; in the strong and noble nature of her father, the consolation of at

least hoping that her sacrifice shall not be all in vain; and in Hinda's

untutored, instinctive faithfulness to her name and race, support to her

own resolve. But no pressure of her suffering, no despondency as to the

result of all, no thought of the lonely life before her, filled evermore

with those yearnings toward the past and the vanished, can turn her back

from her chosen path.

"Father, my soul is weak,

. . . . . . . .

But if I cannot plant resolve on hope,

It will stand firm on certainty of woe.

. . . Hopes have precarious life;

But faithfulness can feed on suffering,

And knows no disappointment. Trust in me.

If it were needed, this poor trembling hand

Should grasp the torch--strive not to let it fall,

Though it were burning down close to my flesh.

No beacon lighted yet. I still should hear

Through the damp dark the cry of gasping swimmers.

Father, I will be true."

The scenes which follow, first with her lover, then with her lover and

her father together, present the culmination at once of her trial and of

her steadfastness. Hitherto she has made her choice, as it were, in the

bodily absence of that love, the abnegation of whose every hope gives its

sharpness to her crown of thorns. Now the light and the darkness, the

joy and the sorrow, the love whose earthly life she is slaying, and the

life of lonely, ceaseless, lingering pain before her, stand, as it were,

visibly and tangibly side by side. On the one hand her father, with his

noble presence, his calm unquestioning self-devotion, his fervid

eloquence, and his withering scorn of everything false and base,

represents that deepest in humanity--and in her--which impels to seek and

to cling to the highest good. On the other her lover, associated with

all the deeply-cherished life, joy, and hope of her past, pleads with his

earnest, impassioned, almost despairing eloquence, for her return to

_happiness_. More nobly beautiful by far in her sad steadfastness than

when she glowed before us as the "child of light" upon the Placa,--

"Her choice was made.

. . . . . . .

Slowly she moved to choose sublimer pain,

Yearning, yet shrinking: . . .

. . . firm to slay her joy,

That cut her heart with smiles beneath the knife,

Like a sweet babe foredoomed by prophecy."

To all the despairing pleadings and appeals of her lover she has but one

answer:--

"You must forgive Fedalma all her debt.

She is quite beggared. If she gave herself,

'Twould be a self corrupt with stifled thoughts

Of a forsaken better. . . .

Oh, all my bliss was in our love, but now

I may not taste it; some deep energy

Compels me to choose hunger."

What that energy is, we surely do not need to ask. It is that deep

principle of all true life which represents the affinity--latent,

oppressed by circumstances, repressed by sin, but always there--between

our human nature and the Divine, and through subjection to which we

reassume our birthright as "the sons of God"; conscience to see and will

to choose--not what shall please ourselves, but--the highest and purest

aim that life presents to us.

It is the same "deep energy," the same inexorable necessity of her

nature, that she should put away from her all beneath the best and

purest, which originates the sudden terror that smiles upon her when Don

Silva, for her sake, breaks loose from country and faith, from honour and

God. There is no triumph in the greatness of the love thus displayed; no

rejoicing in prospect of the outward fulfilment of the love thus made

possible; no room for any emotion but the dark chill foreboding of a

separation thus begun, wider than all distance, and more profound and

hopeless than death. The separation of aims no longer single, of souls

no longer one; of his life falling, though for her sake, from its best

and highest, and therefore ceasing, inevitably and hopelessly, fully to

respond to hers.

"What the Zincala may not quit for you,

I cannot joy that you should quit for her."

The last temptation has now been met and conquered. Henceforth we see

Fedalma only in her calm, sad, unwavering steadfastness, bearing, without

moan or outward sign, the burden of her cross. Not even her father's

dying charge is needed to confirm her purpose, to fix her life in a self-

devotedness already fixed beyond all relaxing and all change. With his

death, indeed, the last faint hope fades utterly away that his great

purpose shall be achieved; and she thenceforth is

"But as the funeral urn that bears

The ashes of a leader."

But necessity lies only the more upon her--that most imperious of all

necessities which originates in her own innate nobleness--that she should

be _true_. When first she accepted this burden of her nobleness and her

sorrow, she had said--

"I will not count

On aught but being faithful;"

and faithfulness without hope--truthfulness without prospect, almost

without possibility, of tangible fulfilment--is all that lies before her

now. She accepts it in a mournful stillness, not of despair, and not of

resignation, but simply as the only true accomplishment of her life that

now remains.

The last interview with Don Silva almost oppresses us with its deep

severe solemnity. No bitterness of separation broods over it: the true

bitterness of separation fell upon her when her lover became false to

himself in the vain imagination that, so doing, he could by any

possibility be fully true to her. "Our marriage rite"--thus she

addresses the repentant and returning renegade--

"Our marriage rite

Is our resolve that we will each be true

To high allegiance, higher than our love;"

and it is thus she answers for herself, and teaches him to answer, that

question asked in the fullest and fairest flush of her love's joys and

hopes--

"But is it what we love, or how we love,

That makes true good?"

The tremulous sensitiveness of her former life has now passed beyond all

outward manifestation, lost in absorbing self-devotedness and absorbing

sorrow; and every thought, feeling, and word is characterised by an

ineffable depth of calm.

Those closing lines, whose still, deep, melancholy cadence lingers upon

ear and heart as do the concluding lines of 'Paradise Lost'--

"Straining he gazed, and knew not if he gazed

On aught but blackness overhung with stars"--

tell us how Fedalma passes away from the sight, the life, and all but the

heart of Don Silva. Not thus does she pass away from our gaze. One star

overhanging the blackness, clear and calm beyond all material brightness

of earth and firmament, for us marks out her course: the star of

unwavering faith, unfaltering truth, self-devotion to the highest and

holiest that knows no change for ever.

"A man of high-wrought strain, fastidious

In his acceptance, dreading all delight

That speedy dies and turns to carrion.

. . . . . .

A nature half-transformed, with qualities

That oft bewrayed each other, elements

Not blent but struggling, breeding strange effects.

. . . . . A spirit framed

Too proudly special for obedience,

Too subtly pondering for mastery:

Born of a goddess with a mortal sire;

Heir of flesh-fettered weak divinity.

. . . A nature quiveringly poised

In reach of storms, whose qualities may turn

To murdered virtues that still walk as ghosts

Within the shuddering soul and shriek remorse."

Such is Duke Silva: and in this portraiture is up-folded the dark and

awful story of his life. Noble, generous, chivalrous; strong alike by

mind and by heart to cast off the hard and cruel superstition of his age

and country; capable of a love pure, deep, trustful, and to all

appearance self-forgetting, beyond what men are usually capable of;

trenching in every quality close on the true heroic: he yet falls as

absolutely short of it as a man can do who has not, like Tito Melema, by

his own will coalescing with the unchangeable laws of right, foreordained

himself to utter and hopeless spiritual death. It was, perhaps, needful

he should be portrayed as thus nearly approaching true nobility;

otherwise such perfect love from such a nature as Fedalma's were

inexplicable, almost impossible. But this was still more needful toward

the fulfilment of the author's purpose: the showing how the one deadly

plague-spot shall weaken the strongest and vitiate the purest life. Every

element of the heroic is there except that one element without which the

truly heroic is impossible: he cannot "deny himself." Superficially,

indeed, it might seem that self was not the object of his regard, but

Fedalma: and by much of the distorted, distorting, and radically immoral

fiction of the day, his sacrifice of everything for her love's sake would

have been held up to us as the crowning glory of his heroism, and the

consummation of his claims upon our sympathy and admiration. George

Eliot has seen with a different and a clearer eye: and in Duke Silva's

placing--not his love, but--the earthly fulfilment of his love above

honour and faith, she finds at the root the same vital corruption of self-

pleasing which conducts Tito Melema through baseness on baseness, and

treason after treason, to the lowest deep of perdition.

Throughout the first wonderful love-scene with Fedalma, the vital

difference, the essential antagonism between these two natures, is

revealed to us through a hundred subtle and delicate touches, and we are

made to feel that there is a depth in hers beyond the power of his to

reach. Chivalrous, absorbing, tyrannising over his whole being, even

pure as his love is, it far fails of the deeper and holier purity of

hers. It shudders at the possibility of even outward soil upon her

loveliness; but it does so primarily because such soil would react upon

his self-love:--

"Have _I_ not made your place and dignity

The very height of my ambition?"

Her nobler nature recoils with chill foreboding terror from his first

breach of trust, _because_ it is a fall from his truest and highest

right. His answer to her question already quoted, reveals a love which

the world's judgment may rank as the best and noblest, but reveals a

principle which, applied to aught beneath the only and supremest good,

makes love only a more insidious and deeply corrupting form of

self-pleasing: "'Tis what I love determines how I love." Love is his

"highest allegiance"; and it becomes ere long an allegiance before which

truth, faith, and honour give way, and guidance and control of conscience

are swept before the fierce storm of self-willed passion that brooks no

interposition between itself and its aim.

We are not attempting a formal review of this work; and as we have passed

without notice the powerful embodiment in Father Isidor of whatever was

true and earnest in the Inquisition, we must also pass very slightly over

the interview with a still more remarkable creation--the Hebrew physician

and astrologer Sephardo--except as we have in this interview further

illustration of the character of Don Silva, and of the direction in which

the self-love of passion is impelling him. We see conscience seeking

from Sephardo--and seeking in vain--confirmation of the purpose already

determined in his own heart; striving toward self-justification by every

sophistry the passion-blinded intellect can suggest; struggling to

transfer to another the wrong, if not the shame, of his own contemplated

breach of trust; endeavouring to take refuge in stellar and fatalistic

agencies from his own "nature quiveringly poised" between good and evil;

and at last, merging all sophistries and all influences in the fierce

resolve of the self-love which has made Fedalma the one aim, glory, and

crown of his life. Throughout all the apparent struggle and uncertainty,

we never doubt how all shall end. Amid all the appearances of

vacillation, all the seeking external aid and furtherance, we see that

the resolve is fixed, that the eager passionate self which identifies

Fedalma as its inalienable right and property will prevail--prevail even

to set aside every obstacle of duty and right which shall seem to

interpose between it and realisation.

Equally and profoundly characteristic is the position he mentally takes

up with regard to the Gypsy chief, as well as Fedalma herself. Not

simply or primarily from mere arrogance of rank does he assume it as a

certainty that he has but to find Fedalma to win her back to his side;

that he has but to lay before Zarca the offer of his rank, wealth, and

influence on behalf of the outcast race, to win him to forego his purpose

and to surrender the daughter whom he has called to the same lofty aim.

It is because of the impossibility, swayed and tossed by the self-will of

passion as he is, of his rising to the height of their nobleness; the

impossibility of his realising natures so possessed by a great, heroic,

self-devoting thought, that hope, joy, happiness become of little or no

account in the scale, and even what is called success dwindles into

insignificance, or fades away altogether from regard.

The first betrayal of his trust, the first fall from truth and honour,

has been accomplished. Conscience has begun to succumb to self--self

under the guise of Fedalma and the overmastering self-will which refuses

to resign his claim upon her. He has secretly deserted his post,

transferring to another's hands the trust which was his, and only his. A

slight offence it may appear--a mere error of judgment swayed by devoted

love--to leave for a day or two when no danger seems specially impending,

and to leave in the hands of the trusted and loving friend the charge

committed to him. A slight offence, but it has been done in direct

violation of conscience, and so in practical abnegation of God. Therefore

the flood-gate is opened, and all sweeps swiftly, resistlessly,

remedilessly on towards catastrophe.

The tender beauty of the brief scene with Fedalma is for her overcast,

and hope, the highest hope, dies out within her, when she knows that her

lover, in apparent faithfulness to her, has been false to himself. From

that hour for her,

"Our joy is dead, and only smiles on us,

A loving shade from out the place of tombs."

Then comes the interposition of the Gypsy chief, Fedalma's sweet sad

steadfastness to her "high allegiance, higher than our love;" the brief

moment of suspense, when

"His will was prisoner to the double grasp

Of rage and hesitancy;"--

and then before the stormful revulsion of baffled and despairing passion

all else is swept away, and there only survives in the self-clouded mind

and soul the fixed resolve to secure that which for him has come to

overmaster all allegiance. Strange and sad beyond all description are

the sophistries under which the sinner strives to veil his sin,--by which

to silence that still small voice which will not be hushed amid all that

inward moil. Fedalma's earnest pleadings with his better self, Zarca's

calm, pitying, almost sorrowful scorn--

"_Our_ poor faith

Allows not rightful choice save of the right

Our birth has made for us"--

fall unheeded amid that fierce tempest of aroused self-will; and the

Spanish knight and noble of that very age when

"Castilian gentlemen

Choose not their task--they choose to do it well,"

becomes the renegade, abjuring and forswearing country, honour, and God.

We have hitherto abstained from quotation, except where necessary to

illustrate our remarks. But we cannot forbear extracting from this scene

the most exquisite of the many beautiful lyrics scattered throughout the

poem, expressing, as it does, with a mystic power and depth beyond what

the most elaborate commentary could do, the all but hopelessness of

return from such a fall as Don Silva's:--

"Push off the boat,

Quit, quit the shore,

The stars will guide us back:--

O gathering cloud,

O wide, wide sea,

O waves that keep no track!

On through the pines!

The pillared woods,

Where silence breathes sweet breath:--

O labyrinth,

O sunless gloom,

The other side of death!"

In the scenes which follow among the Gypsy guard, both that with Juan and

the lonely night immediately preceding the march, the terrible reaction

has already begun to set in. The "quivering" poise of Don Silva's nature

makes it impossible he should rest quiet in this utterness of moral and

spiritual fall. Already we hear and see the "murdered virtues" begin

"To walk as ghosts

Within the shuddering soul and shriek remorse."

The past returns on him with tyrannous power,--early associations, the

taking up of his knightly vows with all its grand religious and heroic

accompaniments, the delegated and accepted trust which he has by

forsaking betrayed--

"The life that made

His full-formed self, as the impregnant sap

Of years successive frames the full-branched tree"--

all come back with stern reproach and denunciation of the apostate who,

in hope of the outward realisation of a human love, has cast off and

forsworn them all. Fiercely he fronts and strives to silence the

accusing throng. Still the same plea--

"My sin was made for me

By men's perverseness:"

still the same impulses of mad, despairing self-assertion--

"I have a _right_ to choose my good or ill,

A right to damn myself!"--

still the same vain imagination that union is any longer possible between

Fedalma's high self-abnegating truth and his self-seeking abnegation of

all truth, coupled with the arrogant assumption that he, morally so weak

and fallen, can sustain her steadfast and heroic strength--"I with my

love will be her providence."