Chapter II: Part 2

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.