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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/17172-h.zip b/17172-h.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..d3f6519 --- /dev/null +++ b/17172-h.zip diff --git a/17172-h/17172-h.htm b/17172-h/17172-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..959ecb1 --- /dev/null +++ b/17172-h/17172-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,3152 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html + PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" + "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> +<html> +<head> +<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" /> +<title>The Ethics of George Eliot's Works</title> + <style type="text/css"> +/*<![CDATA[ XML blockout */ +<!-- + P { margin-top: .75em; + margin-bottom: .75em; + } + H1, H2 { + text-align: center; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + } + H3, H4 { + text-align: left; + margin-top: 1em; + margin-bottom: 1em; + } + BODY{margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; + } + .blkquot {margin-left: 4em; margin-right: 4em;} /* block indent */ + + .smcap {font-variant: small-caps;} + + .pagenum {position: absolute; + left: 92%; + font-size: smaller; + text-align: right; + color: gray;} + + // --> + /* XML end ]]>*/ + </style> +</head> +<body> +<h2> +<a href="#startoftext">The Ethics of George Eliot's Works, by John Crombie Brown</a> +</h2> +<pre> +The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Ethics of George Eliot's Works, by John +Crombie Brown + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: The Ethics of George Eliot's Works + + +Author: John Crombie Brown + + + +Release Date: November 28, 2005 [eBook #17172] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ETHICS OF GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS*** +</pre> +<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p> +<p>Transcribed from the 1884 William Blackwood and Sons edition by David +Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p> +<h1>THE ETHICS OF GEORGE ELIOT’S WORKS</h1> +<p>BY THE LATE JOHN CROMBIE BROWN</p> +<p>FOURTH EDITION</p> +<p>WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS<br /> +EDINBURGH AND LONDON<br /> +MDCCCLXXXIV</p> +<p><i>All Rights reserved</i></p> +<h2><!-- page v--><span class="pagenum">p. v</span>PREFACE.</h2> +<p>The greater part of the following Essay was written several years +ago. It was too long for any of the periodicals to which the author +had been in the habit of occasionally contributing, and no thought was +then entertained of publishing it in a separate form. One day, +however, during his last illness, the talk happened to turn on George +Eliot’s Works, and he mentioned his long-forgotten paper. +One of the friends then present—a competent critic and high literary +authority—expressed a wish to see it, and his opinion was so favourable +that its publication was determined on. The author then proposed +to complete his work by taking <!-- page vi--><span class="pagenum">p. vi</span>up +‘Middlemarch’ and ‘Deronda’; and if any trace +of failing vigour is discernible in these latter pages, the reader will +bear in mind that the greater portion of them was composed when the +author was rapidly sinking under a painful disease, and that the concluding +paragraphs were dictated to his daughter after the power of writing +had failed him, only five days before his death.</p> +<h2><!-- page vii--><span class="pagenum">p. vii</span>PREFACE TO THIRD +EDITION.</h2> +<p>It is a source of great gratification to the friends of the author +that his little volume has already been so well received that the second +edition has been out of print for some time. In now publishing +a third, they have been influenced by two considerations,—the +continued demand for the book, and the favourable opinion expressed +of it by “George Eliot” herself, which, since her lamented +death, delicacy no longer forbids them to make public.</p> +<p>In a letter to her friend and publisher, the late Mr John Blackwood, +received soon after the appearance of the first edition, she writes, +with reference to certain passages: “They seemed to me more penetrating +and finely felt than almost anything I have read in the way of printed +comments on my own writings.” Again, in a letter to a friend +of the author, <!-- page viii--><span class="pagenum">p. viii</span>she +says: “When I read the volume in the summer, I felt as if I had +been deprived of something that should have fallen to my share in never +having made his personal acquaintance. And it would have been +a great benefit,—a great stimulus to me to have known some years +earlier that my work was being sanctioned by the sympathy of a mind +endowed with so much insight and delicate sensibility. It is difficult +for me to speak of what others may regard as an excessive estimate of +my own work, but I will venture to mention the keen perception shown +in the note on page 29, as something that gave me peculiar satisfaction.”</p> +<p>Once more. In an article in the ‘Contemporary Review’ +of last month, on “The Moral Influence of George Eliot,” +by “One who knew her,” the writer says: “It happens +that the only criticism which we have heard mentioned as giving her +pleasure, was a little posthumous volume published by Messrs Blackwood.”</p> +<p>With such testimony in its favour, it is hoped a third edition will +not be thought uncalled for.</p> +<p><i>March</i> 1881.</p> +<h2><!-- page 1--><span class="pagenum">p. 1</span>THE ETHICS OF GEORGE +ELIOT’S WORKS.</h2> +<p>“There is in man a higher than love of happiness: he can do +without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.”</p> +<p>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. <!-- page 2--><span class="pagenum">p. 2</span>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 3--><span class="pagenum">p. 3</span>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 4--><span class="pagenum">p. 4</span>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 5--><span class="pagenum">p. 5</span>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 æsthetic 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 <!-- page 6--><span class="pagenum">p. 6</span>escape +what it calls the pains of hell—to win what it calls the joys +of heaven.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 æsthetic +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: <!-- page 7--><span class="pagenum">p. 7</span>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 <i>now</i>, struggling on and up through hardness +and toil and battle, careless though its crown be the crown of thorns.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 8--><span class="pagenum">p. 8</span>“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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p><!-- page 9--><span class="pagenum">p. 9</span>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 æsthetic, 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.</p> +<p>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, <!-- page 10--><span class="pagenum">p. 10</span>moreover, +have seen more clearly than Wordsworth did, that it is for faith, not +for sight, that duty wears</p> +<blockquote><p>“The Godhead’s most benignant grace;”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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<!-- page 11--><span class="pagenum">p. 11</span>—“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 æsthetic +delight. But the palace of art, <i>made the palace of the soul</i>, +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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 12--><span class="pagenum">p. 12</span>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 13--><span class="pagenum">p. 13</span>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.</p> +<p>The ‘Scenes of Clerical Life,’ delicately outlined as +they are, still profess to be but sketches. In them, <!-- page 14--><span class="pagenum">p. 14</span>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.”</p> +<p>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, <!-- page 15--><span class="pagenum">p. 15</span>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.” +<a name="citation15"></a><a href="#footnote15">{15}</a></p> +<p>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 <!-- page 16--><span class="pagenum">p. 16</span>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.</p> +<p>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—<!-- page 17--><span class="pagenum">p. 17</span>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 <!-- page 18--><span class="pagenum">p. 18</span>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 <i>any</i> reward.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p><!-- page 19--><span class="pagenum">p. 19</span>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 <!-- page 20--><span class="pagenum">p. 20</span>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?</p> +<p>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 <i>interests</i>,—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 <!-- page 21--><span class="pagenum">p. 21</span>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 22--><span class="pagenum">p. 22</span>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 23--><span class="pagenum">p. 23</span>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 24--><span class="pagenum">p. 24</span>all +its grossness by the presence of imagination and thought.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>With her introduction to Stephen Guest, that conflict assumes specific +and tangible form; and it has emphatically to be fought out <i>alone</i>. +All external circumstances are against her; even Lucy’s sweet +<!-- page 25--><span class="pagenum">p. 25</span>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 26--><span class="pagenum">p. 26</span>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.”</p> +<p>‘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 <!-- page 27--><span class="pagenum">p. 27</span>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 28--><span class="pagenum">p. 28</span>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 29--><span class="pagenum">p. 29</span>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?</p> +<p>We cannot assign this seeming anomaly to that undefinable something +called the instinct of the gentleman, <a name="citation29"></a><a href="#footnote29">{29}</a> +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 +<!-- page 30--><span class="pagenum">p. 30</span>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 <i>can</i> choose +the right which imperils his own interests, because it <i>is</i> the +right; he <i>can</i> set his back on the wrong which would advantage +himself, because it <i>is</i> 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 <!-- page 31--><span class="pagenum">p. 31</span>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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, ‘Nôtre Dame de +Paris.’ It is not that we <i>see</i> 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 <!-- page 32--><span class="pagenum">p. 32</span>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.</p> +<p>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, <!-- page 33--><span class="pagenum">p. 33</span>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 34--><span class="pagenum">p. 34</span>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 35--><span class="pagenum">p. 35</span>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 <!-- page 36--><span class="pagenum">p. 36</span>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p><!-- page 37--><span class="pagenum">p. 37</span>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.”</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 38--><span class="pagenum">p. 38</span>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 <i>him</i>—him who will +not be saved, who has already vitally placed himself out of the pale +of possible salvation.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 39--><span class="pagenum">p. 39</span>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.</p> +<p>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, “<i>is</i> 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 <!-- page 40--><span class="pagenum">p. 40</span>right—has +so far led <i>him</i> 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.</p> +<p>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 <i>hers</i>. 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 <!-- page 41--><span class="pagenum">p. 41</span>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.”</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 42--><span class="pagenum">p. 42</span>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 43--><span class="pagenum">p. 43</span>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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, <!-- page 44--><span class="pagenum">p. 44</span>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p><!-- page 45--><span class="pagenum">p. 45</span>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.</p> +<p>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, +<!-- page 46--><span class="pagenum">p. 46</span>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, <!-- page 47--><span class="pagenum">p. 47</span>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 <i>cannot</i> +be forgiven, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”</p> +<p>“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.</p> +<p>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, <!-- page 48--><span class="pagenum">p. 48</span>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 <i>by sympathy</i>—sympathy +at once with the greatness of his aims, and still more fully with the +weaknesses that lead him astray.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 49--><span class="pagenum">p. 49</span>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.</p> +<p>One trial of his faith and steadfastness, long expected, comes on +him at last. The recognised head <!-- page 50--><span class="pagenum">p. 50</span>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 <!-- page 51--><span class="pagenum">p. 51</span>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.”</p> +<p>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 <i>all</i> the relations of duty +gives over a spirit equally earnest to seek the right alone.</p> +<p>In time there comes a change, almost imperceptibly, working from +within outwards, first clearly announced through the changed relations +of others to him, though <!-- page 52--><span class="pagenum">p. 52</span>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 <i>my party</i> +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, <!-- page 53--><span class="pagenum">p. 53</span>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.</p> +<p>* * * * *</p> +<p>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—<!-- page 54--><span class="pagenum">p. 54</span>in +itself pure and noble, but—short of the highest.</p> +<p>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</p> +<blockquote><p> “Castilian +gentlemen<br /> +<i>Choose</i> not their task—they choose <i>to do it well</i>.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.</p> +<p><!-- page 55--><span class="pagenum">p. 55</span>On Fedalma’s +first appearance on the wonderful scene upon the Plaça, 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 Plaça scene to Don Silva, she herself defines it in one +line better than all words of ours can do—</p> +<blockquote><p>“<i>I</i> was not, but joy was, and love and triumph.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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 <!-- page 56--><span class="pagenum">p. 56</span>those +eyes whose gaze, not to be so read by any nature lower and more superficial +than hers—</p> +<blockquote><p> “Seemed +to say he bore<br /> +The pain of those who never could be saved.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 57--><span class="pagenum">p. 57</span>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—</p> +<blockquote><p>“But is it <i>what</i> we love, or <i>how</i> we +love,<br /> +That makes true good?”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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 <!-- page 58--><span class="pagenum">p. 58</span>for +his truth, but the more that its breach might seem to secure her own +happiness.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 59--><span class="pagenum">p. 59</span>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.</p> +<p>The “child of light,” the embodied “joy and love +and triumph” of the Plaça, 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 <!-- page 60--><span class="pagenum">p. 60</span>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:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Yes, say that we shall fail. I will not +count<br /> +On aught but being faithful. . . .<br /> +I will seek nothing but to shun base joy.<br /> +The saints were cowards who stood by to see<br /> +Christ crucified. They should have thrown themselves<br /> +Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain.<br /> +The grandest death, to die in vain, for love<br /> +Greater than rules the courses of the world.<br /> +Such death shall be my bridegroom. . . .<br /> +Oh love! you were my crown. No other crown<br /> +Is aught but thorns on this poor woman’s brow.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 61--><span class="pagenum">p. 61</span>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.</p> +<blockquote><p> “Father, my +soul is weak,<br /> +. . . . . . . .<br /> +But if I cannot plant resolve on hope,<br /> +It will stand firm on certainty of woe.<br /> +. . . Hopes have precarious life;<br /> +But faithfulness can feed on suffering,<br /> +And knows no disappointment. Trust in me.<br /> +If it were needed, this poor trembling hand<br /> +Should grasp the torch—strive not to let it fall,<br /> +Though it were burning down close to my flesh.<br /> +No beacon lighted yet. I still should hear<br /> +Through the damp dark the cry of gasping swimmers.<br /> +Father, I will be true.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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 <!-- page 62--><span class="pagenum">p. 62</span>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 <i>happiness</i>. More nobly beautiful +by far in her sad steadfastness than when she glowed before us as the +“child of light” upon the Plaça,—</p> +<blockquote><p> “Her choice +was made.<br /> +. . . . . . .<br /> +Slowly she moved to choose sublimer pain,<br /> +Yearning, yet shrinking: . . .<br /> +. . . firm to slay her joy,<br /> +That cut her heart with smiles beneath the knife,<br /> +Like a sweet babe foredoomed by prophecy.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>To all the despairing pleadings and appeals of her lover she has +but one answer:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“You must forgive Fedalma all her debt.<br /> +She is quite beggared. If she gave herself,<br /> +’Twould be a self corrupt with stifled thoughts<br /> +<!-- page 63--><span class="pagenum">p. 63</span>Of a forsaken better. +. . .<br /> +Oh, all my bliss was in our love, but now<br /> +I may not taste it; some deep energy<br /> +Compels me to choose hunger.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<blockquote><p> <!-- page 64--><span class="pagenum">p. 64</span>“What +the Zíncala may not quit for you,<br /> +I cannot joy that you should quit for her.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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</p> +<blockquote><p> “But as the +funeral urn that bears<br /> +The ashes of a leader.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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 <i>true</i>. When first she accepted this burden +of her nobleness and her sorrow, she had said—</p> +<blockquote><p> “I will not +count<br /> +On aught but being faithful;”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.</p> +<p><!-- page 65--><span class="pagenum">p. 65</span>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—</p> +<blockquote><p> “Our +marriage rite<br /> +Is our resolve that we will each be true<br /> +To high allegiance, higher than our love;”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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—</p> +<blockquote><p>“But is it what we love, or how we love,<br /> +That makes true good?”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.</p> +<p>Those closing lines, whose still, deep, melancholy cadence lingers +upon ear and heart as do the concluding lines of ‘Paradise Lost’—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Straining he gazed, and knew not if he gazed<br /> +On aught but blackness overhung with stars”—</p> +</blockquote> +<p>tell us how Fedalma passes away from the sight, the <!-- page 66--><span class="pagenum">p. 66</span>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.</p> +<blockquote><p>“A man of high-wrought strain, fastidious<br /> +In his acceptance, dreading all delight<br /> +That speedy dies and turns to carrion.<br /> +. . . . . .<br /> +A nature half-transformed, with qualities<br /> +That oft bewrayed each other, elements<br /> +Not blent but struggling, breeding strange effects.<br /> +. . . . . A spirit framed<br /> +Too proudly special for obedience,<br /> +Too subtly pondering for mastery:<br /> +Born of a goddess with a mortal sire;<br /> +Heir of flesh-fettered weak divinity.<br /> +. . . A nature quiveringly poised<br /> +In reach of storms, whose qualities may turn<br /> +To murdered virtues that still walk as ghosts<br /> +Within the shuddering soul and shriek remorse.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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 <!-- page 67--><span class="pagenum">p. 67</span>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.</p> +<p>Throughout the first wonderful love-scene with <!-- page 68--><span class="pagenum">p. 68</span>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:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Have <i>I</i> not made your place and dignity<br /> +The very height of my ambition?”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Her nobler nature recoils with chill foreboding terror from his first +breach of trust, <i>because</i> 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.</p> +<p>We are not attempting a formal review of this work; <!-- page 69--><span class="pagenum">p. 69</span>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.</p> +<p><!-- page 70--><span class="pagenum">p. 70</span>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.</p> +<p>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 <!-- page 71--><span class="pagenum">p. 71</span>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.</p> +<p>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,</p> +<blockquote><p>“Our joy is dead, and only smiles on us,<br /> +A loving shade from out the place of tombs.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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</p> +<blockquote><p>“His will was prisoner to the double grasp<br /> +Of rage and hesitancy;”—</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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—</p> +<blockquote><p> <!-- page 72--><span class="pagenum">p. 72</span>“<i>Our</i> +poor faith<br /> +Allows not rightful choice save of the right<br /> +Our birth has made for us”—</p> +</blockquote> +<p>fall unheeded amid that fierce tempest of aroused self-will; and +the Spanish knight and noble of that very age when</p> +<blockquote><p> “Castilian +gentlemen<br /> +Choose not their task—they choose to do it well,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>becomes the renegade, abjuring and forswearing country, honour, and +God.</p> +<p>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:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Push off the boat,<br /> + Quit, quit the shore,<br /> + The stars will guide us back:—<br /> +O gathering cloud,<br /> + O wide, wide sea,<br /> + O waves that keep no track!</p> +<p>On through the pines!<br /> + The pillared woods,<br /> + Where silence breathes sweet breath:—<br /> +O labyrinth,<br /> + O sunless gloom,<br /> + The other side of death!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p><!-- page 73--><span class="pagenum">p. 73</span>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</p> +<blockquote><p> “To walk as +ghosts<br /> +Within the shuddering soul and shriek remorse.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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—</p> +<blockquote><p> “The life that +made<br /> +His full-formed self, as the impregnant sap<br /> +Of years successive frames the full-branched tree”—</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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—</p> +<blockquote><p> “My sin was +made for me<br /> +By men’s perverseness:”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>still the same impulses of mad, despairing self-assertion—</p> +<blockquote><p> <!-- page 74--><span class="pagenum">p. 74</span>“I +have a <i>right</i> to choose my good or ill,<br /> +A right to damn myself!”—</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>When with the fearful Gypsy chant and curse</p> +<blockquote><p> “The newer +oath<br /> +Thrusts its loud presence on him,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>we feel that any madness of act the wild conflict within may dictate +has become possible; and we follow to that presence of Fedalma which +is now the only goal life has left to him, prepared for such outbreak +of despair as shall be commensurate with a life called to such nobleness +of deed and fallen to such a depth of ruin. We see the trust he +has deserted in the hands of the foe against whom he had accepted commission +to guard it; his friends slaughtered at the post he had forsaken; himself +as the sworn Zíncalo in alliance with the enemy and slaughterer, +and associated with the havoc they have wrought. The “right +to damn” himself which he had claimed is his in all its bitterness; +and when he would charge the self damnation upon the Gypsy chief, the +reply of <!-- page 75--><span class="pagenum">p. 75</span>calm withering +scorn can but add keener pang to his awaking remorse: the self-damning</p> +<blockquote><p> “Deed was done<br /> +Before you took your oath, or reached our camp,<br /> +Done when you slipped in secret from the post<br /> +’Twas yours to keep, and not to meditate<br /> +If others might not fill it.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The climax of his revulsion, remorse, and despair is reached when +the Prior, the man whom he has impeached as the true author of all his +sin, is led forth to die. Then all sophistries are swept away, +and the full import of his deed glares up before him, and its import +as <i>his</i>, only and wholly his. Zarca, in his high self-possession +of soul, almost pitying while he cannot but despise, presents a fitting +object on which all the fierce conflicting passions of wrath, self-accusing +remorse, and despair, may vent themselves; and the sudden and treacherous +deed, which</p> +<blockquote><p> “Strangles +one<br /> +Whom ages watch for vainly,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>gives also to Don Silva himself to carry</p> +<blockquote><p> “For ever with +him what he fled—<br /> +<i>Her</i> murdered love—her love, a dear wronged ghost,<br /> +Facing him, beauteous, ’mid the throngs of hell.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Few authors or artists but George Eliot could have won us again to +look on Don Silva except with revulsion or disgust; and it is characteristic +of more <!-- page 76--><span class="pagenum">p. 76</span>than all ordinary +power that through the deep impressive solemnity of the closing scene, +he, the renegade and murderer, almost divides our interest and sympathy +with Fedalma herself; and this by no condoning of his guilt, no extenuation +of the depth of his fall, for these are here, most of all, kept ever +before our eyes. But the better and nobler elements of his nature, +throughout all his degradation revealed to us as never wholly overborne, +as ever struggling to assert themselves, have begun to prevail, and +to put down from supremacy that meaner self which has led him into such +abysses of faithlessness, apostasy, and sin. The wild despair +of remorse is giving way to the self-renunciation of repentance; the +storm of conflicting passions and emotions is stilled; the fearful battle +between good and evil through which he has passed has left him exhausted +of every hope and aim save to die, repentant and absolved, for the country +and faith he had abjured. The self-assertion, too, of love is +gone, and only its deep purity and tenderness remain. Without +murmur or remonstrance, he acquiesces in the doom of hopeless separation; +accepting all that remains possible to him of that “high allegiance +higher than our love,” which is thenceforth the only bond of union +between these two. In that last sad interview with her for whom +he had so fearfully sinned, and so all but utterly fallen, we can regard +Don Silva with a fuller and truer sympathy than we dare accord to him +in all the height of his greatness, and <!-- page 77--><span class="pagenum">p. 77</span>all +the wealth, beauty, and joy of his yet unshadowed love.</p> +<p>* * * * *</p> +<p>In the next of this series of great works, and the one which to many +of her readers is and will remain the most fascinating—‘Middlemarch’—George +Eliot has stretched a broader and more crowded canvas, on which, however, +every figure, to the least important that appears, is—not sketched +or outlined, but—filled in with an intense and lifelike vividness +and precision that makes each stand out as if it stood there alone. +Quote but a few words from any one of the speakers, and we know in a +moment who that speaker is. And each is the type or representative +of a class; we have no monsters or unnatural creations among them. +To a certain extent all are idealised for good or for evil,—it +cannot be otherwise in fiction without its ceasing to be fiction; but +the essential elements of character and life in all are not peculiar +to them, but broad and universal as our humanity itself. Dorothea +and her sister, Mr Brooke and Sir James Chettam, Rosamond Vincy and +her brother, Mr Vincy and his wife, Casaubon and Lydgate, Farebrother +and Ladislaw, Mary Garth and her parents, Bulstrode and Raffles, even +Drs Sprague and Minchin, old Featherstone and his kindred—all +are but representative men and women, with whose prototypes every reader, +if gifted with the subtle power of penetration and analysis of George +Eliot, might claim personal acquaintance.</p> +<p><!-- page 78--><span class="pagenum">p. 78</span>This richly-crowded +canvas presents to us such variety of illustration of the two great +antagonistic principles of human life—self-pleasing and self-abnegation, +love of pleasure and the love of God more or less absolute and consummate—that +it is no easy task to select from among them. But two figures +stand out before us, each portrayed with such finished yet unlaboured +art—living, moving, talking before us—contrasted with such +exquisite yet unobtrusive delicacy, and so subtilely illustrating the +two great phases of human inspiration and life—that which centres +in self, and that which yearns and seeks to lose itself in the infinite +of truth, purity, and love—that instinctively and irresistibly +the mind fixes upon them. These are Dorothea and Rosamond Vincy.</p> +<p>To not a few of George Eliot’s readers, we believe that Dorothea +is and will always be a fairer and more attractive form than Dinah Morris +or Romola di Bardi, Fedalma or Mirah Cohen. In her sweet young +enthusiasm, often unguided or misguided by its very intensity, but always +struggling and tending on toward the highest good; in the touching maidenly +simplicity with which she at once identifies and accepts Mr Casaubon +as her guide and support toward a higher, less self-contained and self-pleasing, +more inclusive and all-embracing life; in the yearning pain with which +the first dread of possible disappointment dawns and darkens over her, +and the meek humility of her repentance on the one faint betrayal—wrung +from her <!-- page 79--><span class="pagenum">p. 79</span>by momentary +anguish—of that disappointment; in the tender wifely patience, +reticence, forbearance, with which she hides from all, the heart-gnawings +of shattered and expiring hope; the sense which she can no longer veil +from her own deepest consciousness that in Mr Casaubon there is no help +or stay for her and the unwearied though too soon unhoping earnestness +with which she labours to establish true relations between herself and +her uncongenial mate; in the patient yet crushing anguish of that long +night’s heart-struggle which precedes the close—a struggle +not against her own higher self, but whether she dare bind down that +higher self to a lifelong, narrow, worthless task, and the aching consciousness +of what—almost against conscience and right—her answer must +be;—there is an inexpressible charm and loveliness in all this +which no one, not utterly dead to all that is fairest and best in womanhood, +can fail to recognise.</p> +<p>Not less wonderfully depicted is the guileless frankness which, from +first to last, characterises her whole relations to Ladislaw. +If there is one flaw in this noble work, it is that Ladislaw on first +examination is scarcely equal to this exquisite creation. Yet +it might have been nearly as difficult even for George Eliot to satisfy +our instinctive cravings in this particular with regard to Dorothea, +as in respect to Romola or Fedalma. And when we study her portrait +of Ladislaw more carefully, there is a latent <!-- page 80--><span class="pagenum">p. 80</span>beauty +and nobleness about him; an innate and intense reverence for the highest +and purest, and an unvarying aim and struggle toward it; an utter scorn +and loathing of everything mean and base,—that almost makes us +cancel the word flaw. We recognise this nobleness of nature almost +on his first appearance, in the deep reverence with which he regards +Dorothea, the fulness with which he penetrates the guileless candour +of the relation she assumes to him, the entireness of his trust in the +spotless purity of her whole nature. And in him we have presented +all those essential and fundamental elements of nature which give assurance +that, Dorothea by his side, he shall be no unfitting helpmeet to her, +no drag or hindrance on her higher life; that he shall rise to the elevation +and purity of her self-consecration, and shall stand by her side sustaining, +guiding, expanding that life of ever-growing fulness and human helpfulness +to which each is dedicated.</p> +<p>But the essence of all this moral and spiritual loveliness is its +unconsciousness. Self has no place in it. From the first +the one absorbing life aim and action is toward others—toward +aiding the toils, advancing the well-being, relieving the suffering, +elevating the life, of all around her. And this in no spirit of +self-satisfied and vainglorious self-estimation, but in that utter unconsciousness +which is characteristic of her whole being. Of the social reformer, +the purposed philanthropist, the benefactor of the poor, the <!-- page 81--><span class="pagenum">p. 81</span>wretched, +and the fallen, there is no trace in Dorothea Brooke. Grant that, +as she is first presented to us, that aim is for the time apparently +concentrated in improved cottage accommodation for the poor; even here +there is no thought of displaying the skill of the design and contriver: +there is thought alone of the object she seeks—ameliorating the +condition of those she yearns to benefit.</p> +<p>In her very first interview with Casaubon, there is something inexpressibly +touching in the humility of childlike trust with which she accepts him +and his “great mind,” and the innocent purity with which +she allows herself to indulge the vision of a life passed by his side; +a life which he, by his influence and guidance, is to make more full +and free, and delivered from those conventionalities of custom and fashion +which restrict it. At last his cold, formal proposal of marriage +is made. She sees nothing of its true character—that he +is but seeking, not an helpmeet for life and soul in all their higher +requirements, but simply and solely a kind of superior, blindly submissive +dependant and drudge. In the <i>impossibility</i> of marriage +presenting itself to her purity of maiden innocence as a mere establishment +in life, or in any of those meaner aspects in which meaner natures regard +it, she sees nothing of all this—nothing save that the yearning +of her heart is fulfilled, and that henceforth her life shall pass under +a higher guardianship, sustained by a holier strength, animated by a +<!-- page 82--><span class="pagenum">p. 82</span>more self-expansive +fulness, guided toward nobler and fuller aims.</p> +<p>Picturing to some extent, in degree as we are capable of entering +into a nature like hers, the anguish that such an awakening must be +to her, it is exquisitely painful to follow in imagination the slow +sure process of her awakening to what this man, who “has no good +red blood in his body,” really is—a cold, shallow pedant, +whose entire existence is bound up in researches, with regard to which +he even shrinks from inquiry as to whether all he has for years been +vaguely attempting has not been anticipated, and whose intense and absorbing +egoism makes the remotest hint of depreciation pierce like a dagger. +The first faint dawn of discovery breaks on her almost immediately on +their arrival at Rome. Conscious of her want of mere æsthetic +culture—neglected in the past as a turning aside from life’s +highest aims—she has looked forward to his guidance and support +for the supply of this want as enlarging her whole being; broadening +and deepening, refining and elevating all its sympathies. For +all shadow of aid or sympathy here, she finds herself as utterly alone +as if she were in a trackless and uninhabited desert. Nay, more: +he who sits by her side is as cold and dead to all sensations or emotions +that art can enkindle, as the glorious marbles amid which they wander. +Soon she finds herself relegated to the society and fellowship of her +maid; her husband is less to her, is incapable <!-- page 83--><span class="pagenum">p. 83</span>of +being other than less, amid those transcendant treasures of architecture, +painting, and sculpture, than a hired guide or cicerone would be.</p> +<p>Soon follows the scene where her timid offer of humble service is +thrown back with all the irritation of that absorbing egoism which is +the very essence and life-in-death of the man. For the first and +only time, a faint cry of conscious irritation escapes her, followed +by an anguish of repentance so deep, so meekly, humbly self-accusing, +it reveals to us more of her truest and innermost life than pages of +elaborate description could do. A single sentence descriptive +of her mood even in that first irritation brings before us her deepest +soul, and the utter absence of self isolation and self-insistence there:—“However +just her indignation might be, her ideal was not <i>to claim justice</i>, +but <i>to give tenderness</i>.”</p> +<p>She meets Ladislaw; and he more than hints to her that the dim, vague +labours and accumulations of years which have constituted her husband’s +nearest approach to life have been labour in vain; that the “great +mind” has been toiling, with feeble uncertain steps, in a path +which has already been trodden into firmness and completeness; toiling +in wilful and obdurate ignorance that other and abler natures have more +than anticipated all he has been painfully and abortively labouring +to accomplish. Again a cry bursts from the wounded heart, seemingly +of anger against her informant, really of anguish—<!-- page 84--><span class="pagenum">p. 84</span>anguish, +not for her own sinking hopes, but for the burden of disappointment +and failure which she instinctively perceives must, sooner or later, +fall on the husband who is thus throwing away life in vain.</p> +<p>So it goes on, through all the ever-darkening problem of her married, +yet unmated, life. Effort, always more earnest on the part of +her yearning, unselfish tenderness, to establish true relations between +them; to find in him something of that sweet support, that expansive +and elevating force, silently entering into her own innermost life, +which her first childlike trust inspired; to become to him, even if +no more may be, that to which her childlike humility at first alone +aspired—eyes to his weakness, and strength and freedom to his +pen. So it goes on; ever-gnawing pain and anguish, as all her +yearning love and pity is thrown back, and that dulled insensate heart +and all-absorbing egoism can find only irritation in her timid attempts +at sympathy, only dread of detection of the half-conscious futility +of all his labours, in her humble proffers of even mechanical aid. +Not easily can even the most fervid and penetrative imagination conceive +what, to a nature like Dorothea’s, such a life must be, with its +never-ceasing, ever-gathering pain; its longing tenderness not even +actively repelled, but simply ignored or misinterpreted; its humblest, +equally with its highest yearnings, baffled and shattered against that +triple mail of shallowest self-includedness. And all has to be +borne in silence and <!-- page 85--><span class="pagenum">p. 85</span>alone. +No word, no look, no sign, betrays to other eye the inward anguish, +the deepening disappointment, the slow dying away of hope. Nay, +for long, on indeed to the bitter close, failure seems to her to be +almost wholly on her own side; and repentance and self-upbraiding leave +no room for resentment.</p> +<p>Ere long—indeed, very soon—another, and, if possible, +a still deeper humiliation comes upon her,—another, and, in some +respects, a keener pang, as showing more intensely how entirely she +stands alone, is thrown into her life,—in her husband’s +jealousy of Ladislaw. Yet jealousy it cannot be called. +Of any emotion so comparatively profound, any passion so comparatively +elevated, that self-absorbed, self-tormenting nature is utterly incapable. +Jealousy, in some degree, presupposes love; love not wholly absorbed +in self, but capable to some extent of going forth from our own mean +and sordid self-inclusion in sympathetic relation, dependence, and aid, +towards another existence. In Mr Casaubon there is no capability, +no possibility of this. What in him wears the aspect of jealousy +is simply and solely self-love, callous irritation, that any one should—not +stand above, but—approach himself in importance with the woman +he has purchased as a kind of superior slave. For long her guileless +innocence and purity, her utter inability to conceive such a feeling, +leaves her only in doubt and perplexity before it; long after it has +first betrayed itself, she reveals this incapability in the fullest +extent, and in the way most <!-- page 86--><span class="pagenum">p. 86</span>intensely +irritating to her husband’s self-love—by her simple-hearted +proposal that whatever of his property would devolve on her should be +shared with Ladislaw. Then it is that Casaubon is roused to inflict +on her the last long and bitter anguish; to lay on her for life—had +not death intervened—the cold, soul-benumbing, life contracting +clutch of “the Dead Hand.” In the innocence of her +entire relations with Ladislaw, not the faintest dawning of thought +connects itself with him in her husband’s cold, insistent demand +on her blind obedience to his will. She thinks alone of his thus +binding her to a lifelong task, not only hard and ungenial, but one +that shall absorb and fetter all her energies, restrain all her faculties, +impair and frustrate all her higher and broader aims, make impossible +all that better and purer fulness of life for which she yearns. +Then follows the long and painful struggle,—a struggle so agonising +to such a nature, that only one nearly akin to her own can adequately +conceive or picture it. For it is a struggle not primarily to +forego any certain or fancied mere personal good. On one side +is ranged tenderest pitifulness over her husband’s wasted life +and energies, even though she knows those energies have been wasted—that +life has been thrown away—on an object in which there is no gain +to humanity, no advancement of human well-being, no profit even to himself, +save, perchance, a barren and useless notoriety at last; an object that +has been already far more fully and ably achieved. <!-- page 87--><span class="pagenum">p. 87</span>On +the other stands her clear undoubting <i>conscience</i> of her own truest +and highest course,—the course to which every prompting of the +Divine within impels her,—that she shall not thus isolate herself +within this narrowest sphere, shut herself out from all social sympathies +and social outgoings, and sacrifice to the Dead Hand that holds her +in its cold remorseless clutch every interest that may be intrusted +to her. We instinctively shudder at the result; but we never doubt +what the answer will be. We know that the tender, womanly, wifely +pitifulness, the causeless remorse, will be the nearest and most urgent +conscience, and will prevail. The agonised assent is to be given; +but it falls on the ear of the dead.</p> +<p>It is scarcely necessary to follow Dorothea minutely through all +the details of her widowed relations to Mr Casaubon. Enough that +these are all in touching and beautiful harmony with everything that +has gone before. No resentment, no recalcitration against all +the ever-gathering perplexity, pain, and anguish he has caused her—nothing +but the sweet unfailing pitifulness, the uncalled-for repentance, almost +remorse, over her own assumed shortcomings and deficiencies—her +failures to be to him what in those first days of her childlike simplicity +and innocence she had hoped she might become. Even on the discovery +of the worse than treachery, of the mean insulting malignity with which, +trusting to her confiding purity and truthfulness, he had sought to +grasp her for life in <!-- page 88--><span class="pagenum">p. 88</span>his +“Dead Hand” with regard to Ladislaw, and she only escaped +the irrevocable bond her own blindly-given pledge would have fixed around +her by his death,—the momentary and violent shock of revulsion +from her dead husband, who had had hidden thoughts of her, perhaps perverting +everything she said or did, <i>terrified her as if it had been a sin</i>.</p> +<p>It is not alone, however, toward her husband that this simple, unconscious +self-devotion and self-abnegation of Dorothea Brooke displays itself. +Toward every one with whom she comes in contact, it steals out unobtrusively +and silently, as the dew from heaven on the tender grass, to each and +all according to the kind and nearness of that relation. Even +for her “pulpy” uncle she has no supercilious contempt—no +sense of isolation or separation; not even the consciousness of toleration +toward him. Toward Celia, with her delicious commonplace of rather +superficial yet <i>naïve</i> worldly wisdom, her half-conscious +selfishness, her baby-worship, and her inimitable “staccato,” +she is more than tolerant. She looks up to her as in many respects +a superior, even though her own far higher instincts and aims of life +cannot accept her as an aid and guidance toward the realisation of these. +Even at old Featherstone’s funeral, her one emotion is of pitiful +sorrow over that loveless mockery of all human pity and love; and for +the “Frog-faced” there is no feeling but sympathetic compassion +for his apparent loneliness amongst strangers, who all stand <!-- page 89--><span class="pagenum">p. 89</span>aloof +and look askance on him. Into all Lydgate’s plans, into +the whole question of the hospital and all he hopes to achieve through +means of it, she throws herself with swift intelligence, with active, +eager sympathy, as a probable instrumentality by which at least one +phase of suffering may be redressed or allayed. And in the hour +of his deep humiliation, when all others have fallen away from his side, +when the wife of his bosom forsakes him in callous and heartless resentment +of what was done for her sake alone; when he stands out the mark of +scorn and obloquy for all save Farebrother, and scans and all but loathes +himself—she, with her artless trust in the best of humanity, in +the strength of her instinctive recognition of the merest glimmering +of whatever is true and right and high in others, comes to his side, +yields him at once her fullest confidence, gives him with frank simplicity +her aid, and enables him, so far as determined prejudice and uncharity +will allow, to right himself before others.</p> +<p>Reference has already been made to her whole relations, from first +to last, with Ladislaw. It is not easy to conceive anything more +touchingly beautiful than these, more perfectly in harmony with her +whole nature. Of anything approaching either coquetry or prudery +she is incapable. The utter absence of all self-consciousness, +whether of external beauty or inward loveliness; the ethereal purity, +the childlike trustfulness, the instinctive recognition of all that +is <!-- page 90--><span class="pagenum">p. 90</span>true and earnest +and high in Ladislaw, through all the surface appearance of indecision, +of vague uncertain aim and purpose and limited object in life; no thought +of what is ordinarily called love toward him, of love on his part toward +her—ever dawns upon her guileless innocence. Through all +her yearning to do justice to him as regards the property of her dead +husband, which she looks upon as fairly and justly his, or at least +to be shared with him, there arises before her the determination of +her dead husband that it should not be so; and her sweet regretful pitifulness +over that meagre wasted life prevails. Anon, when at last through +the will she is made aware of the crowning act of that concentrated +callousness of heart and soul, and of the true nature of the benumbing +grasp it had sought to lay on her for life, and had so far succeeded +in doing, then for the first time her “tremulous” maiden +purity and simplicity awakens, and for the first time it enters her +mind that Ladislaw could, under any circumstances, become her lover; +that another had thought of them in that light, and that he himself +had been conscious of such a possibility arising. The later scenes +between them are characterised by a quiet beauty, a suppressed power +and pathos, compared to which most other love-scenes in fiction appear +dull and coarse. The tremulous yearning of her love, as it awakens +more and more to distinct consciousness within; the new-born shyness +blent with the old, trustful, frank simplicity,—bring before us +a picture <!-- page 91--><span class="pagenum">p. 91</span>of love, +in its purest and most beautiful aspect, such as cannot easily be paralleled +in fiction.</p> +<p>Toward her late husband’s parishioners there is the same wise +instinctive insight as to their true needs, the same thoughtful and +provident consideration that characterises her in every relation into +which she is brought. If she at once objects, on their behoof, +to Mr Tyke’s so-called “apostolic” preaching, it is +that she means by that, sermons about “imputed righteousness and +the prophecies in the Apocalypse. I have always been thinking +of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever +I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling +to that as the truest—I mean that which takes in the most good +of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it.” +And in her final selection of Mr Farebrother, she is guided not alone +by her sense of his general and essential fitness for the work assigned +to him, but also in some degree by her desire to make whist-playing +for money, and the comparatively inferior society into which it necessarily +draws him, no longer a need of his outer life.</p> +<p>Of all the less prominent relations into which Dorothea Brooke is +brought, there is not one more touchingly tender, or in which her whole +nature is drawn more beautifully out, than that to Rose Vincy. +Between these two, at least on the side of the hard unpenetrable incarnation +of self-inclusion and self-pleasing, any approach to harmony or sympathy +is <!-- page 92--><span class="pagenum">p. 92</span>impossible. +There is not even any true ground of womanhood on which Rosamond can +meet Dorothea; for she is nearly as far removed from womanhood as Tito +Melema is from manliness or manhood. Yet even here the tender +pitifulness of Dorothea overpasses a barrier that to any other would +be impassable. In her sweet, instinctive, universal sympathy for +human sorrow and pain, she finds a common ground of union; and in no +fancied sense of superiority—solely from the sense of common human +need—she strives to console, to elevate, to lead back to hope +and trust, with a gentle yet steadfast simplicity all her own.</p> +<p>Such, as portrayed by unquestionably the greatest fictionist of the +time—is it too much to say, the greatest genius of our English +nineteenth century?—is the nineteenth century St Theresa.</p> +<p>The question may be raised by some of George Eliot’s readers +whether it constitutes the best and completest ethical teaching that +fiction can attain, to bring before its readers such high ideals of +the possibilities of humanity—of the aim and purpose of life toward +which it should ever aspire. Were the author’s canvas occupied +with such portraitures alone—with Romolas and Fedalmas, Dinah +Morrises and Dorothea Brookes, Daniel Derondas and Adam Bedes, even +Mr Tryans and Mr Gilfils—the question might call for full discussion, +and a contrast might be unfavourably drawn between the author and him +whose <!-- page 93--><span class="pagenum">p. 93</span>emphatic praise +it is that he “holds the mirror up to nature.” But +the great artist for all time brings before us not only an Iago and +an Edmund, an Angelo and an Iachimo, a Regan and a Goneril, but a Miranda +and an Imogen, an Isabella and a Viola, a Cordelia and a Desdemona, +with every conceivable intermediate shade of human character and life; +and in George Eliot we have the same clearly-defined contrasts and endless +variety. That a Becky Sharp and a Beatrix Castlewood are drawn +with the consummate skill and force of the most perfect artist in his +own special sphere our age has produced, few will be disposed to deny: +and that they have momentous lessons to teach us all,—that they +may by sheer antagonism rouse some from dreams of selfish vanity and +corruption, and awaken within some germ of better and purer elements +of life,—will scarcely be disputed. But it is not from these, +or such as these, that the highest and noblest, the purest and most +penetrative, the most extended and enduring teaching and elevation of +the world has come. That has come emphatically from Him whose +self-chosen name, “the Son of Man,” designates Him the ideal +of humanity on earth; Him who is at once the “Lamb of God” +and “the Lion of the tribe of Judah,” the “Good Shepherd,” +and the stern and fearless but ever-righteous Judge—the concentration +of all tender and holy love, and of divinest scorn of, and revulsion +from, everything mean and false in humanity; Him who for <!-- page 94--><span class="pagenum">p. 94</span>the +repentant sinner has no harsher word of rebuke than “Go and sin +no more,” and who over the self-righteous, self-wrapt, all-despising +Pharisees thundered back, to His own ultimate destruction, His terrible +“Woe unto you <i>hypocrites</i>.” He too stands out, +not isolated or severed, but prominent, amid every conceivable phase +and gradation of human character, from a John to a Judas; touches each +and all at some point of living contact; meets them with tender sympathy, +with gentle patience, and pitying love, over their weaknesses and falls. +Can the true artist err in aiming, according to his nature or to the +purity and elevation of his genius, to approach in his portraitures +such ideals as this great typical exemplar of our humanity, whose influence +has for eighteen centuries been stealing down into the hearts and souls +of men to elevate and refine, and who is now, and who is more and more +becoming, the paramount factor in individual character, and in social +and political relations? Or can such ideals, presented before +us, fail to arouse in some degree the better elements of our humanity, +and to lead us to strive toward the realisation of these?</p> +<p>In wonderfully drawn and finished yet never obtruded contrast to +this beautiful creation comes before us Rosamond Vincy. Outwardly +even more characterised by every personal charm, save that one living +and crowning charm which outshines from the soul within; to the eye, +therefore—such eyes as can <!-- page 95--><span class="pagenum">p. 95</span>penetrate +no deeper than the surface—prettier, more graceful, more accomplished +and fascinating, than Dorothea Brooke;—it is difficult to conceive +a more utterly unlovable example of womanhood, whether as maiden or +wife. Hard and callous of heart and dead of soul, incapable of +one thought or emotion that rises above or extends beyond self, insistent +on her own petty claims and ambitions to the exclusion of all others, +ever aiming to achieve these, now by dogged sullen persistence, now +by mean concealments and frauds, no more repellent portraiture of womanhood +has ever been placed before us. The fundamental character of her +entire home relations is, on her first appearance, drawn by a single +delicate touch—her objecting to her brother’s red herring, +or rather to its presence after she enters the room, because its odour +jars on her sense of pseudo-refinement. In her relation to her +husband there is not from first to last one shadow of anything that +can be called love, no approach to sympathy or harmony of life. +She looks on him solely as a means for removing herself to what she +considers a higher social circle, securing to her greater ease, freedom, +and luxury of daily life, and ultimately withdrawing her to a wider +sphere of petty and selfish enjoyment. Seeking these ends, she +resorts to every mean device of deceit and concealment. Utterly +callous and impenetrable to his feelings, to every manlier instinct +within him, as she is utterly insensible of, and indeed incapable of, +<!-- page 96--><span class="pagenum">p. 96</span>entering into his higher +and wider professional aims, she not only ignores these, but in her +dull and hard insensibility runs counter to, and tramples on them all.</p> +<p>Even toward Mary Garth there is nothing approaching true friendship +or affection; no power of recognising her honesty, unselfishness, and +earnestness of nature. She is nothing to her but a tool and <i>confidante</i>, +the recipient of her own petty hopes and desires, worries and cares.</p> +<p>All Dorothea’s gentle, unobtrusive attempts to soothe, to win +her back to truer and better relations with her husband, and to awaken +to active life and exercise the true womanhood, which she in her sweet +instinct believes to be inherent in all her sex, are met by hard indifference +or dull resistance. And in the one act of apparent friendliness +or rather explanation toward Dorothea, she is actuated far less by sympathy +or desire to clear away what has come between her and Ladislaw, than +by sullen resentment against the latter for his rejection of her unseemly +and unwifely advances to him.</p> +<p>In the position she at last takes up toward Ladislaw, there is no +approach to anything in the very least resembling love—even illicit +and overmastering passion. Of that her very nature is incapable. +She is influenced solely by resentment against her husband, and his +failure to fulfil her vain and self-absorbed dreams; by the hope that +he will remove her to a sphere which will give wider scope to her heartless +<!-- page 97--><span class="pagenum">p. 97</span>selfishness, and take +her away from the social disappointments and humiliations into which +that selfishness has mainly plunged her. In every relation of +life near or far, important or trivial, amid all environments, under +all impulsion toward anything purer and better, Rosamond Vincy is ever +the same; as consistent and unvarying in her hard unwomanliness and +impenetrable, insistent self-seeking, as is Dorothea in every opposite +characteristic. And even while the picture in one way fascinates +the reader, it is the fascination of ever-increasing contempt and loathing +where the extremest charity can hardly even pity; and from it we ever +turn to that of St Theresa with the more intense refreshment alike of +mind and heart, and the deeper sense of its elevating and refining influence.</p> +<p>Among the many clearly defined and vividly drawn portraits in this +great work, it would be easy, did space permit, to select others well +worthy of detailed examination, and illustrative of the salient aim +and tendency of all George Eliot’s works. The homely yet +beautiful family groups of the Garths, Celia and Sir James Chettam, +the Bulstrodes, <a name="citation97"></a><a href="#footnote97">{97}</a> +even <!-- page 98--><span class="pagenum">p. 98</span>the wretched old +Featherstone, and the crowd of vultures “waiting for death around +him,” all more or less illustrate the fundamental principle of +the highest ethics—that self-abnegation is life, elevation, purity, +uplifting our humanity toward the Divine; that self-seeking and self-isolation +tend surely toward moral and spiritual death. Two, however, stand +out so delicately yet clearly defined and contrasting, that they claim +brief consideration before passing from this great work—Lydgate +and Farebrother.</p> +<p>The whole character and career of Lydgate are brought before us with +the skill of the consummate artist. At first he appears as a man +of massive and energetic proportions, of high professional impulses +and aims, resolute to carry these through against all difficulty and +amid all indifference and opposition, and apparently seeking through +these aims the general good of humanity—the alleviation of suffering, +and the arrestment, it may be, of death. But even then there are +signs of inherent weakness, and all but certain decline and fall. +There are indications of arrogant self sufficiency and supercilious +contempt for others; of undue deference for Bulstrode, not from respect +or esteem, but as a tool to further his views; and a tendency to treat +patients not as human beings but as cases—objects to experiment +on, and verify hypotheses regarding pathology and disease, all which +betray a nature not attuned to the highest and noblest pitch, and that +cannot be expected to stand in the <!-- page 99--><span class="pagenum">p. 99</span>hour +of trial. His first direct lapse is when, against his secret conviction, +he supports Tyke as hospital chaplain in opposition to Farebrother; +but mainly in mere defiance and resentment of the general style of his +reception at the Board meeting, and the opposition he encounters there. +Anon comes his marriage to Rosamond Vincy,—a marriage prompted +by no true affection, but solely by the fascination of her prettiness, +her external grace and accomplishments. Led on mainly by his own +taste for luxury and external show, he plunges into extravagances of +every kind. Debt inevitably follows, crippling his resources, +cramping his energies, fettering him as regards all his higher professional +aims and efforts. To his wife he looks in vain for sympathy or +aid. She only aggravates the difficulties and harassments of his +life by her callous selfishness, her dull obdurate insistance on all +her own claims, her mean deceits and concealments. Embarrassments +of every kind thicken around him; and at last in the all but universal +estimation of his fellows, and nearly in his own, in the hope of temporary +relief he becomes accessory to murder. His end is as sad a one +for his character, and in his circumstances, as can well be conceived: +falling from all his high if somewhat arrogant professional aims, his +hopes of elevating the general practitioner, and of raising medicine +from an art to a science, into the fashionable London lady’s doctor.</p> +<p>Though Mr Farebrother occupies a somewhat less <!-- page 100--><span class="pagenum">p. 100</span>prominent +place in the narrative, he is delineated with not less consummate skill. +He comes before us at first a man of genial kindly sympathies, frankly +alive to, and frankly acknowledging, his own deficiencies. There +is an utter absence of pretence and affectation about him, a graceful +and engaging simplicity and frankness of whole nature, that can hardly +fail to win the heart. All his home relations—toward mother +and sisters—are singularly touching. Feeling all his defects +as a clergyman, half laughing, half apologetic over his devotion to +his favourite Coleoptera, and admitting that which is so far a necessity +to him, not of choice, but of actual external need in his narrow circumstances—admitting, +too, the comparatively inferior and uncongenial society into which he +is drawn—the full revelation of his nobler and higher nature begins. +His true and deep appreciation of Mary Garth, and tender, devoted, and +unselfish love for her, more clearly reveal his innate manliness, self-denial, +and simplicity of character. This revelation is still further +unfolded before us in his entire relations with Fred Vincy. That +firm persistent interview in the billiard-room, is actuated by the one +absorbing and self-abnegating desire that he may still be saved from +the moral and spiritual decay impending over him: and when, in answer +to Fred’s appeal for his intercession, we discover the blighting +of his own hopes, the shattering of his love, the tender heart stricken +to the core should Fred prove, as he <!-- page 101--><span class="pagenum">p. 101</span>suspects, +his successful rival, we discern in him a nature of the finest capabilities, +and surely tending on and up toward the noblest ends; and we part from +him as from a dear and valued friend, whose society has cheered and +elevated us, whose pure simplicity of nature has refuted our vain pretensions, +and whose memory clings to us as a fragrance and refreshment.</p> +<p>There now only remains the last yet published, and in the estimation +of many, the greatest, of George Eliot’s works—‘Daniel +Deronda.’ In it the author takes up—not a new scope, +but extends one that has all along been present, and that indeed was +inevitably associated with her great ethical principle,—the bringing +of that principle definitely and directly to bear upon not only every +domestic but every social and political relation of human life. +This tendency may be briefly expressed in the old and profound words: +“No man liveth to himself; no man dieth to himself.” +As we aim toward the true and good and pure, or surrender ourselves +the slaves of self and sense, we live or die to God or to the devil.</p> +<p>Before, however, proceeding to detailed examination of this remarkable +work, it seems necessary to draw attention to one objection which has +been urged against it—the prominent introduction of the Jewish +element into its scheme. Such objection could scarcely have been +put forward by any one who considers what the Jew has been in the past—what +an enormous factor <!-- page 102--><span class="pagenum">p. 102</span>his +past and present have been and are, in the development and progress +of our highest civilisation. Historically, we first meet him coming +forth from the Arabian desert, a rude unlettered herdsman, in intelligence, +cultivation, and morality far below the tribes among whom he is thrown. +A terrible weapon arms him—a theism stern, hard, and pitiless, +beyond, perhaps, all the world has ever seen. To the bravest and +best of his race—a Moses and a Joshua, a Deborah and a Jephtha—this +presents ruthless massacre, the vilest treachery, offering up a sacrifice +the dearest and most loved, not as mere permissible acts, but as deeds +of religious homage solemnly enjoined by his Most High. This theism +has one central thought in which it practically stands alone, and which +it was the aim of all its supposed heads and legislators to keep inviolate +amid all surrounding antagonisms—the intense assertion of the +Divine unity. “Hear, O Israel! the Lord thy God is <i>one</i> +Lord.” In these brief words lies the very core of Judaism. +So long as he holds fast by this central truth, the Jew is exhibited +to us as practically omnipotent. Seas and floods divide before +him; hosts numberless as the sands are scattered at his appearance; +cyclopean walls fall prone at his trumpet-blast.</p> +<p>And this thought of the Divine unity, thus intensely pervading the +national life, upfolds within capacity of indefinite development. +No long time in the life of a nation elapses ere “The Lord thy +God is a <!-- page 103--><span class="pagenum">p. 103</span>jealous +God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children,” +became “As a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth +them that fear Him.” “Can a woman forget her sucking +child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? +Yea, she <i>may</i> forget; yet will not <i>I</i> forget thee.”</p> +<p>In no sense of the word was the Jew a creature of imagination. +The stern and hard realities of his life would seem to have crushed +out every trace of the æsthetic element within him. Yet +from among these people arose a literature, especially a hymnology, +which has never been approached elsewhere; and it arose emphatically +and distinctly out of the great central and animating thought of the +Divine unity. To the Psalms so-called of David, the glorious outbursts +of sacred song in their mythico-historical books, as in Isaiah <a name="citation103"></a><a href="#footnote103">{103}</a> +and some of the minor prophets, the finest of the Vedic or Orphic hymns +or the Homeric ballads are cold and spiritless. These address +themselves to scholars alone, or chiefly to a cultivated few, and address +themselves to them eloquently and gloriously. The hymns of the +Jews have so interpenetrated the very heart of humanity, <!-- page 104--><span class="pagenum">p. 104</span>so +identified themselves with the best longings, the noblest aspirations, +the purest hopes, and the deepest sorrows of man, that still, after +more than twenty centuries, that wonderful hymnology breathes up day +after day, week after week, from millions of households and hearts. +They outbreathe its fervid aspirations toward a purer and diviner life. +They give expression to its profound wailings over degradation and fall. +They give utterance on all the inscrutable mysteries of existence; and +ever and anon as the clouds and darkness break away from the Infinite +Love,—they burst forth into the exultant cry, “God reigneth, +let the earth be glad. . . . Give thanks at remembrance of His <i>holiness</i>.”</p> +<p>But important as is this factor of Judaism, there is another generally +considered which has perhaps exercised a still more profound and cumulative +influence on the civilisation especially of the West. This lies +in the intense indestructible nationality of the race. Eighteen +centuries have passed since they became a people, “scattered and +peeled,” their “holy and beautiful house” a ruin, +their capital a desolation, their land proscribed to the exile’s +foot. During these centuries deluge after deluge of so-called +barbarians has swept over Asia and Europe: Hun and Tartar, Alan and +Goth, Suev and Vandal,—we attach certain vague meanings to the +names, but can the most learned scholar identify one individual of the +true unmingled blood? All have disappeared, merged in <!-- page 105--><span class="pagenum">p. 105</span>the +race they overran, in the kingdoms they conquered and devastated. +The Jew alone, through these centuries, has remained the Jew: proscribed, +persecuted, hunted as never was tiger or wolf, he is as vividly defined, +as unchangeably national, as when he stood alone, everywhere without +and beyond the despised and hated Gentile. And this intense and +conservative nationality springs essentially out of the central conception +of Judaism, “God is <i>one</i>.” Be He the incarnation +of pitiless vengeance, hardening Pharaoh’s heart that He may execute +sevenfold wrath on him and his people; be He the Good Shepherd, who +“gathers the lambs in His arms,” and for their sakes “tempers +His rough wind in the day of His east wind;”—to the Jew +He has been and is, “I am the Lord; that is My name; and My glory +will I not give to another.”</p> +<p>Through those long ages of darkness, devil-worship, and polytheism +(in its grossest forms all around), the Jew stood up in unfaltering +protest against all. Persecutions, proscriptions, tortures in +every form, were of no avail. On the gibbet, on the rack, amid +the flames, his last words embodied the central confession of Judaism, +“O Israel, the Lord <i>thy</i> God is one Lord.” Christianity, +the appointed custodier of the still more central truth, “God +is love,” had to all appearance failed of its mission; had not +only merged its higher message in a theistic presentation, dark and +terroristic as that of Judaism at its dawn, but had absorbed into <!-- page 106--><span class="pagenum">p. 106</span>its +scheme, under other names, the gods many who swarm all around it; till +nowhere and never, save by some soul upborne by its own fervour above +these dense fogs and mists, could individual man meet his God face to +face, and realise that higher life of the soul which is His free gift +to all who seek it. Between this heathenised Christianity and +Judaism, the contrast was the sharpest, the contest the most embittered +and unvarying. Elsewhere we hear of times of toleration and indulgence +even for the hunted Monotheist,—in medieval Christendom, never. +The Inquisition plied its rack for the Jews with a more fiendish zeal +than even for the hated Morisco. The mob held him responsible +for plague and famine; and kings and nobles hounded the mob on to indiscriminate +massacre. The Jew lived on through it all,—lived, multiplied, +and prospered, and became more and more emphatically the Jew. +Is it too much to say that in the West in particular, where this contrast +and contest were keenest, Judaism was, during these long ages of terror +and darkness, the great conservator of the vital truth of the Divine +unity, under whatever forms science or philosophy may now attempt to +define this; and in being so, became the conservator of that thought, +without the vivifying power of which, howsoever imperfectly apprehended, +all human advance is impossible? Is it exaggerating the importance +of the Jew and his intense nationality, based on such a truth, to say +that, but for his presence, “scattered and <!-- page 107--><span class="pagenum">p. 107</span>peeled,” +among all nations, the Europe we now know could not have been? +And this indestructible nationality, for whose existence miracle has +been called into account—has it no significance in the future +equal to what it has had in the past? There seems an impression +that the Jew is being absorbed by other races. We hear much of +relaxing Judaisms; of rituals and beliefs assimilating to those around +them; of peculiarities being laid aside, that have withstood the wear +and tear of centuries. The inference is sought to be drawn that +the Jew is beginning to feel his isolation, and to sink his own national +life amid that among which he dwells. We accept all the facts; +but can only see in them that, under the influence of the profound thought +and research of its great leaders, Judaism is shaking off the dust of +ages, and is more vividly awaking to its mission upon earth. We +believe it is coming forth from all this superficial change, more intensely +and powerfully Judaical, more penetrated and vivified by that thought +which for untold centuries has been the life of its life. What +is to be its specific future as a leader in the advancement and redemption +of humanity, none can foresee. But it seems the reverse of strange +that a genius like George Eliot’s should have been powerfully +attracted by this problem; and that, in one of her noblest works, she +should have very prominently addressed herself to at least a partial +solution of it. That the solution she suggests is a noble one, +few who carefully consider <!-- page 108--><span class="pagenum">p. 108</span>the +subject will, we think, deny. The establishment of a Jewish polity, +in the true sense of the word a theocracy, where the Infinite Holiness +is supreme, and in its supremacy is included a reign of justice, purity, +and love;—the establishment of such a polity locally between the +materialistic proclivities of the West and the psychological subtleties +of the East, mediative between them, communicating from each to each +of those essentials to human life in which the other is deficient, is +a conception worthy of her genius.</p> +<p>Another minor and very trivial objection to the presence of this +Jewish element need be no more than adverted to. It is the presence +of such different types as the mean-souled scoundrel Lapidoth; the shrewd +self-approving trader Cohen, with the inimitable picture of a home-life +so pleasant and kindly; the vague intense enthusiasm, the ardent aspirations +and fervent hopes of Mordecai; the absorbing Judaism of the Physician; +the fierce revulsion of his daughter against her race and name; the +meek, delicate, ethereal purity of Mirah; the innate Jewish yearnings +and aspirations of Deronda, expanded by all the breadth that could be +given by the highest Anglo-Saxon culture and training. To those +who take exception to this, it is answer more than sufficient that, +as an artist, it was necessary to present every typical phase of Jewish +character and life; and we confess there are other passages in the work +we could better spare than <!-- page 109--><span class="pagenum">p. 109</span>these +delicious pictures of a London-Jewish pawnbroker at home.</p> +<p>Of all the characters portrayed in fiction, there is perhaps not +one so difficult to analyse and define as that which stands out so prominently +in this wonderful work, Gwendolen Harleth. At once attractive +and repellent—fascinating in no ordinary degree, and yet, in the +estimation of all around her, hard, cold, and worldly-minded—bewitching, +alike from her beauty, grace, and accomplishments, yet a superficial +and seemingly heartless coquette,—she presents a combination of +at once some of the finest and some of the meanest qualities of woman. +Her hardness towards her fond, doting mother, and her contempt for her +sisters, are conspicuous almost from her first appearance. Her +arrogant defiance of Deronda in the gambling-house, and the fierce revulsion +of pride with which she received the return of her necklace, are entirely +in keeping with these characteristics. And the news of the reduction +of her family to utter poverty awakens no emotion save on her own behalf +alone. Yet, ever and anon, faint gleams of tenderness towards +her gentle mother break forth, though soon obscured by the bitter insistance +with which her own claims to station, wealth, and luxury assert themselves. +Her first acceptance of Grandcourt represents this phase of her twofold +nature; her rejection of him and flight from him, after her interview +with Mrs Glasher, are equally characteristic of the second. That +rejection <!-- page 110--><span class="pagenum">p. 110</span>is actuated +much more by resentment against Mrs Glasher, that she should have dared +to anticipate her in anything resembling affection he had to give, and +against him, that he should have presumed to offer to her a heart already +sealed to anything resembling love, than by the faintest approach to +it in her own. The leap, as it were, by which she ultimately accepts +him, is merely a quick, half-conscious instinct to secure her own deliverance +from poverty, and the attainment of those higher external enjoyments +of life for which she conceived herself formed; and if, in addition, +a thought of relieving the wants of her mother and sisters obtrudes, +it holds only a very secondary place in her mind. Deeming herself +born for dominion over every male heart, in her utter childish ignorance +of human character, she deems that Grandcourt also shall be her slave.</p> +<p>But through all her relations with that magnificent incarnation of +self-isolation and self-love, she is compelled to cower before him. +Again and again she attempts to turn, only to be crushed under his heel +as ruthlessly as a worm. During the yachting voyage it is the +same; intense inward revulsion on the one side—cold, inexorable +despotism on the other.</p> +<p>The drowning scene first begins to stir the better nature within +her. The intensity of terror with which she regards the involuntary +murderous thought, and which prompted her leap into the water, the fervour +of remorse which followed, all begin to indicate a <!-- page 111--><span class="pagenum">p. 111</span>nature +which may yet be attuned to the highest qualities. On the other +hand, the sweet clinging trust with which she hangs on Deronda, looks +up to him, feels that for her every possibility of good lies in association +with him, are those of a guileless, artless child. She has been +called a hard-hearted, callous woman of the world: her worldliness is +on the surface alone. Her first cry to Deronda is the piteous +wail of a forsaken child; the letter with which their relations close +is the fond yearning of a child towards one whom she looks up to as +protector and saviour.</p> +<p>Grandcourt is portrayed before us in more massive and simple proportions +as a type of concentrated selfishness. We dare not despise him, +we cannot loathe him—we stand bowed and awe-stricken before him. +He never for a moment falls from that calm dignity of pride and self-isolation—never +for a moment softens into respect for anything without himself. +Without a moment’s exception he is ever consistent, imperturbable +in his self-containedness, ruthlessly crushing all things from dog to +wife, under his calm, cold, slighting contempt. He stands up before +us, not so much indomitable as simply unassailable. We cannot +conceive the boldest approaching or encroaching on him—all equally +shiver and quail before that embodiment of the devil as represented +by human self-love.</p> +<p>Fain would we linger over the Jewish girl, Mirah. She has been +spoken of as characterless; to us it seems as if few characters of more +exquisite loveliness <!-- page 112--><span class="pagenum">p. 112</span>have +ever been portrayed. From her first appearance robed in her meek +despair, through all her subsequent relations with Deronda, her brother, +and Gwendolen, there is the same delicate purity, the same tender meekness, +the same full acceptance of the life of a Jewess as—in harmony +with the life of her race—one of “sufferance.” +Even as her spirits gladden in that sunny Meyrick home, with its delicious +interiors, and brighten under the noble-hearted musician Klesmer’s +encouragement, the brightness refers to something entirely without herself. +In one sense far more acquainted with the evil that is in the world +than Gwendolen with all her alleged worldliness, it is her shrinking +from the least approach to this that prompts her strange, apparently +hopeless flight in search of the mother she had loved so dearly. +Her sad, humble complaints that she has not been a good Jewess, because +she has been inevitably cut off from the use of Jewish books, and restrained +by her scoundrel father from attendance at Jewish worship, find their +answer in her deep unfailing sense of her share in the national doom +of suffering. We feel with Mrs Meyrick “that she is a pearl, +and the mud has only washed her.” In her startling interview +with Gwendolen, the sudden indignant protest which the inquiry of the +latter calls out is a protest against even a hint of evil being directed +towards that which has been best and highest to her. Her love +for Deronda steals into the maiden purity of her soul with an unconscious +<!-- page 113--><span class="pagenum">p. 113</span>delicacy which cannot +be surpassed; and as she parts from us by his side, we feel that she +is no Judith or Esther, but the meek Mary of the annunciation, going +forth on her unknown mission of love with the words, “Behold the +handmaid of the Lord.”</p> +<p>Beside the exquisitely meek child-figure, with the small delicate +head faintly drooping under the sorrow which is the heritage of her +race, stands up Deronda in his calm dignity. As he lies on the +grass, and the first faint glimmering of the possible origin of his +life breaks upon him, even the first inevitable risings of resentment +against Sir Hugo are softened and toned down by the old yearning affection; +and the longings for the unknown mother, intense as they are, yet shrink +from full discovery of what she may have been or may still be. +He and he alone, in unconscious dignity, stands up uncowering before +Grandcourt. His whole relations to Mordecai are characterised +by a deep suppressed enthusiasm, that fully responds to the enthusiast’s +soul. Towards Gwendolen every word he speaks, every act he does, +is marked by the fervour of his whole nature; but it is beside the fair +head drooping under its burden of hereditary sorrow that Deronda passes +from our sight, the fitting type of him who shall yet, sooner or later, +re-establish that great Jewish theocracy so long dreamt of, and reaffirm +that Judaism yet holds a great place in human life and civilisation.</p> +<p>We have throughout had no intention of dealing <!-- page 114--><span class="pagenum">p. 114</span>with +George Eliot merely as the artist; but if we have succeeded in showing +this unity of moral purpose and aim as pervading all her works, as giving +rise to their variety by reason of the varieties and modifications it +necessitates in order to its full illustration, and as ministered to, +directly or indirectly, by all the accessory characters and incidents +of these creations,—the question naturally arises, whether this +does not constitute her an artist of the highest possible order.</p> +<p>But the true worth of George Eliot’s works rests, we think, +on higher grounds than any mere perfection of artistic finish; on this +ground, specially, that among all our fictionists she stands out as +the deepest, broadest, and most catholic illustrator of the true ethics +of Christianity; the most earnest and persistent expositor of the true +doctrine of the Cross, that we are born and should live to something +higher than the love of happiness; the most subtle and profound commentator +on the solemn words, “He that loveth his soul shall lose it: he +that hateth his soul shall keep it unto life eternal.”</p> +<h2>Footnotes:</h2> +<p><a name="footnote15"></a><a href="#citation15">{15}</a> The +translators of our English Bible, possibly perplexed by the seeming +paradox involved in these remarkable words, have taken an unwarrantable +freedom with the original, in rendering the Greek ψυχη, +invariably the synonym of the soul, the spiritual and undying element +in man, by “life”—the ζωη of all Greek +literature so-called, sacred and profane alike; the synonym of that +life which is his in common with the beast of the field and the tree +of the forest.</p> +<p><a name="footnote29"></a><a href="#citation29">{29}</a> Perhaps +no finer and more subtle illustration of this “instinct of the +gentleman” can be found in literature than when, at the moment +of Harold Transome’s deepest humiliation, where Jermyn claims +him as his son, good old Sir Marmaduke, not only his political opponent +but personally disliking him, for the first and only time in all their +intercourse addresses him by his Christian name, “Come, <i>Harold</i>.”</p> +<p><a name="footnote97"></a><a href="#citation97">{97}</a> In +connection with Bulstrode occurs one of those delicate indications of +character, condensed into a few words, which others would expand into +pages, peculiar to George Eliot. It occurs in the depth of his +humiliation, when his wife, hitherto comparatively characterless, in +full token of her acceptance of their fallen lot, “takes off all +her ornaments, and puts on a plain gown, and instead of wearing her +much adorned-cap and large bows of hair, brushes down her hair, and +puts on a plain bonnet-cap, which makes her look like an early Methodist.”</p> +<p><a name="footnote103"></a><a href="#citation103">{103}</a> +Does all poetry ancient or modern, so-called sacred or profane, contain +an image more impressive and majestic than that in the “doom of +Babylon,” as the great incarnation of pride and luxury descends +to its place: “Hades from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee +at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief +ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings +of the nations.”</p> +<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ETHICS OF GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS***</p> +<pre> + + +***** This file should be named 17172-h.htm or 17172-h.zip****** + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/7/1/7/17172 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: The Ethics of George Eliot's Works + + +Author: John Crombie Brown + + + +Release Date: November 28, 2005 [eBook #17172] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ETHICS OF GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS*** + + + + + + +Transcribed from the 1884 William Blackwood and Sons edition by David +Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk + + + + + +THE ETHICS OF GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS + + +BY THE LATE JOHN CROMBIE BROWN + +FOURTH EDITION + +WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS +EDINBURGH AND LONDON +MDCCCLXXXIV + +_All Rights reserved_ + + + + +PREFACE. + + +The greater part of the following Essay was written several years ago. It +was too long for any of the periodicals to which the author had been in +the habit of occasionally contributing, and no thought was then +entertained of publishing it in a separate form. One day, however, +during his last illness, the talk happened to turn on George Eliot's +Works, and he mentioned his long-forgotten paper. One of the friends +then present--a competent critic and high literary authority--expressed a +wish to see it, and his opinion was so favourable that its publication +was determined on. The author then proposed to complete his work by +taking up 'Middlemarch' and 'Deronda'; and if any trace of failing vigour +is discernible in these latter pages, the reader will bear in mind that +the greater portion of them was composed when the author was rapidly +sinking under a painful disease, and that the concluding paragraphs were +dictated to his daughter after the power of writing had failed him, only +five days before his death. + + + + +PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. + + +It is a source of great gratification to the friends of the author that +his little volume has already been so well received that the second +edition has been out of print for some time. In now publishing a third, +they have been influenced by two considerations,--the continued demand +for the book, and the favourable opinion expressed of it by "George +Eliot" herself, which, since her lamented death, delicacy no longer +forbids them to make public. + +In a letter to her friend and publisher, the late Mr John Blackwood, +received soon after the appearance of the first edition, she writes, with +reference to certain passages: "They seemed to me more penetrating and +finely felt than almost anything I have read in the way of printed +comments on my own writings." Again, in a letter to a friend of the +author, she says: "When I read the volume in the summer, I felt as if I +had been deprived of something that should have fallen to my share in +never having made his personal acquaintance. And it would have been a +great benefit,--a great stimulus to me to have known some years earlier +that my work was being sanctioned by the sympathy of a mind endowed with +so much insight and delicate sensibility. It is difficult for me to +speak of what others may regard as an excessive estimate of my own work, +but I will venture to mention the keen perception shown in the note on +page 29, as something that gave me peculiar satisfaction." + +Once more. In an article in the 'Contemporary Review' of last month, on +"The Moral Influence of George Eliot," by "One who knew her," the writer +says: "It happens that the only criticism which we have heard mentioned +as giving her pleasure, was a little posthumous volume published by +Messrs Blackwood." + +With such testimony in its favour, it is hoped a third edition will not +be thought uncalled for. + +_March_ 1881. + + + + +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." + +When with the fearful Gypsy chant and curse + + "The newer oath + Thrusts its loud presence on him," + +we feel that any madness of act the wild conflict within may dictate has +become possible; and we follow to that presence of Fedalma which is now +the only goal life has left to him, prepared for such outbreak of despair +as shall be commensurate with a life called to such nobleness of deed and +fallen to such a depth of ruin. We see the trust he has deserted in the +hands of the foe against whom he had accepted commission to guard it; his +friends slaughtered at the post he had forsaken; himself as the sworn +Zincalo in alliance with the enemy and slaughterer, and associated with +the havoc they have wrought. The "right to damn" himself which he had +claimed is his in all its bitterness; and when he would charge the self +damnation upon the Gypsy chief, the reply of calm withering scorn can but +add keener pang to his awaking remorse: the self-damning + + "Deed was done + Before you took your oath, or reached our camp, + Done when you slipped in secret from the post + 'Twas yours to keep, and not to meditate + If others might not fill it." + +The climax of his revulsion, remorse, and despair is reached when the +Prior, the man whom he has impeached as the true author of all his sin, +is led forth to die. Then all sophistries are swept away, and the full +import of his deed glares up before him, and its import as _his_, only +and wholly his. Zarca, in his high self-possession of soul, almost +pitying while he cannot but despise, presents a fitting object on which +all the fierce conflicting passions of wrath, self-accusing remorse, and +despair, may vent themselves; and the sudden and treacherous deed, which + + "Strangles one + Whom ages watch for vainly," + +gives also to Don Silva himself to carry + + "For ever with him what he fled-- + _Her_ murdered love--her love, a dear wronged ghost, + Facing him, beauteous, 'mid the throngs of hell." + +Few authors or artists but George Eliot could have won us again to look +on Don Silva except with revulsion or disgust; and it is characteristic +of more than all ordinary power that through the deep impressive +solemnity of the closing scene, he, the renegade and murderer, almost +divides our interest and sympathy with Fedalma herself; and this by no +condoning of his guilt, no extenuation of the depth of his fall, for +these are here, most of all, kept ever before our eyes. But the better +and nobler elements of his nature, throughout all his degradation +revealed to us as never wholly overborne, as ever struggling to assert +themselves, have begun to prevail, and to put down from supremacy that +meaner self which has led him into such abysses of faithlessness, +apostasy, and sin. The wild despair of remorse is giving way to the self- +renunciation of repentance; the storm of conflicting passions and +emotions is stilled; the fearful battle between good and evil through +which he has passed has left him exhausted of every hope and aim save to +die, repentant and absolved, for the country and faith he had abjured. +The self-assertion, too, of love is gone, and only its deep purity and +tenderness remain. Without murmur or remonstrance, he acquiesces in the +doom of hopeless separation; accepting all that remains possible to him +of that "high allegiance higher than our love," which is thenceforth the +only bond of union between these two. In that last sad interview with +her for whom he had so fearfully sinned, and so all but utterly fallen, +we can regard Don Silva with a fuller and truer sympathy than we dare +accord to him in all the height of his greatness, and all the wealth, +beauty, and joy of his yet unshadowed love. + +* * * * * + +In the next of this series of great works, and the one which to many of +her readers is and will remain the most fascinating--'Middlemarch'--George +Eliot has stretched a broader and more crowded canvas, on which, however, +every figure, to the least important that appears, is--not sketched or +outlined, but--filled in with an intense and lifelike vividness and +precision that makes each stand out as if it stood there alone. Quote +but a few words from any one of the speakers, and we know in a moment who +that speaker is. And each is the type or representative of a class; we +have no monsters or unnatural creations among them. To a certain extent +all are idealised for good or for evil,--it cannot be otherwise in +fiction without its ceasing to be fiction; but the essential elements of +character and life in all are not peculiar to them, but broad and +universal as our humanity itself. Dorothea and her sister, Mr Brooke and +Sir James Chettam, Rosamond Vincy and her brother, Mr Vincy and his wife, +Casaubon and Lydgate, Farebrother and Ladislaw, Mary Garth and her +parents, Bulstrode and Raffles, even Drs Sprague and Minchin, old +Featherstone and his kindred--all are but representative men and women, +with whose prototypes every reader, if gifted with the subtle power of +penetration and analysis of George Eliot, might claim personal +acquaintance. + +This richly-crowded canvas presents to us such variety of illustration of +the two great antagonistic principles of human life--self-pleasing and +self-abnegation, love of pleasure and the love of God more or less +absolute and consummate--that it is no easy task to select from among +them. But two figures stand out before us, each portrayed with such +finished yet unlaboured art--living, moving, talking before us--contrasted +with such exquisite yet unobtrusive delicacy, and so subtilely +illustrating the two great phases of human inspiration and life--that +which centres in self, and that which yearns and seeks to lose itself in +the infinite of truth, purity, and love--that instinctively and +irresistibly the mind fixes upon them. These are Dorothea and Rosamond +Vincy. + +To not a few of George Eliot's readers, we believe that Dorothea is and +will always be a fairer and more attractive form than Dinah Morris or +Romola di Bardi, Fedalma or Mirah Cohen. In her sweet young enthusiasm, +often unguided or misguided by its very intensity, but always struggling +and tending on toward the highest good; in the touching maidenly +simplicity with which she at once identifies and accepts Mr Casaubon as +her guide and support toward a higher, less self-contained and +self-pleasing, more inclusive and all-embracing life; in the yearning +pain with which the first dread of possible disappointment dawns and +darkens over her, and the meek humility of her repentance on the one +faint betrayal--wrung from her by momentary anguish--of that +disappointment; in the tender wifely patience, reticence, forbearance, +with which she hides from all, the heart-gnawings of shattered and +expiring hope; the sense which she can no longer veil from her own +deepest consciousness that in Mr Casaubon there is no help or stay for +her and the unwearied though too soon unhoping earnestness with which she +labours to establish true relations between herself and her uncongenial +mate; in the patient yet crushing anguish of that long night's +heart-struggle which precedes the close--a struggle not against her own +higher self, but whether she dare bind down that higher self to a +lifelong, narrow, worthless task, and the aching consciousness of +what--almost against conscience and right--her answer must be;--there is +an inexpressible charm and loveliness in all this which no one, not +utterly dead to all that is fairest and best in womanhood, can fail to +recognise. + +Not less wonderfully depicted is the guileless frankness which, from +first to last, characterises her whole relations to Ladislaw. If there +is one flaw in this noble work, it is that Ladislaw on first examination +is scarcely equal to this exquisite creation. Yet it might have been +nearly as difficult even for George Eliot to satisfy our instinctive +cravings in this particular with regard to Dorothea, as in respect to +Romola or Fedalma. And when we study her portrait of Ladislaw more +carefully, there is a latent beauty and nobleness about him; an innate +and intense reverence for the highest and purest, and an unvarying aim +and struggle toward it; an utter scorn and loathing of everything mean +and base,--that almost makes us cancel the word flaw. We recognise this +nobleness of nature almost on his first appearance, in the deep reverence +with which he regards Dorothea, the fulness with which he penetrates the +guileless candour of the relation she assumes to him, the entireness of +his trust in the spotless purity of her whole nature. And in him we have +presented all those essential and fundamental elements of nature which +give assurance that, Dorothea by his side, he shall be no unfitting +helpmeet to her, no drag or hindrance on her higher life; that he shall +rise to the elevation and purity of her self-consecration, and shall +stand by her side sustaining, guiding, expanding that life of +ever-growing fulness and human helpfulness to which each is dedicated. + +But the essence of all this moral and spiritual loveliness is its +unconsciousness. Self has no place in it. From the first the one +absorbing life aim and action is toward others--toward aiding the toils, +advancing the well-being, relieving the suffering, elevating the life, of +all around her. And this in no spirit of self-satisfied and vainglorious +self-estimation, but in that utter unconsciousness which is +characteristic of her whole being. Of the social reformer, the purposed +philanthropist, the benefactor of the poor, the wretched, and the fallen, +there is no trace in Dorothea Brooke. Grant that, as she is first +presented to us, that aim is for the time apparently concentrated in +improved cottage accommodation for the poor; even here there is no +thought of displaying the skill of the design and contriver: there is +thought alone of the object she seeks--ameliorating the condition of +those she yearns to benefit. + +In her very first interview with Casaubon, there is something +inexpressibly touching in the humility of childlike trust with which she +accepts him and his "great mind," and the innocent purity with which she +allows herself to indulge the vision of a life passed by his side; a life +which he, by his influence and guidance, is to make more full and free, +and delivered from those conventionalities of custom and fashion which +restrict it. At last his cold, formal proposal of marriage is made. She +sees nothing of its true character--that he is but seeking, not an +helpmeet for life and soul in all their higher requirements, but simply +and solely a kind of superior, blindly submissive dependant and drudge. +In the _impossibility_ of marriage presenting itself to her purity of +maiden innocence as a mere establishment in life, or in any of those +meaner aspects in which meaner natures regard it, she sees nothing of all +this--nothing save that the yearning of her heart is fulfilled, and that +henceforth her life shall pass under a higher guardianship, sustained by +a holier strength, animated by a more self-expansive fulness, guided +toward nobler and fuller aims. + +Picturing to some extent, in degree as we are capable of entering into a +nature like hers, the anguish that such an awakening must be to her, it +is exquisitely painful to follow in imagination the slow sure process of +her awakening to what this man, who "has no good red blood in his body," +really is--a cold, shallow pedant, whose entire existence is bound up in +researches, with regard to which he even shrinks from inquiry as to +whether all he has for years been vaguely attempting has not been +anticipated, and whose intense and absorbing egoism makes the remotest +hint of depreciation pierce like a dagger. The first faint dawn of +discovery breaks on her almost immediately on their arrival at Rome. +Conscious of her want of mere aesthetic culture--neglected in the past as +a turning aside from life's highest aims--she has looked forward to his +guidance and support for the supply of this want as enlarging her whole +being; broadening and deepening, refining and elevating all its +sympathies. For all shadow of aid or sympathy here, she finds herself as +utterly alone as if she were in a trackless and uninhabited desert. Nay, +more: he who sits by her side is as cold and dead to all sensations or +emotions that art can enkindle, as the glorious marbles amid which they +wander. Soon she finds herself relegated to the society and fellowship +of her maid; her husband is less to her, is incapable of being other than +less, amid those transcendant treasures of architecture, painting, and +sculpture, than a hired guide or cicerone would be. + +Soon follows the scene where her timid offer of humble service is thrown +back with all the irritation of that absorbing egoism which is the very +essence and life-in-death of the man. For the first and only time, a +faint cry of conscious irritation escapes her, followed by an anguish of +repentance so deep, so meekly, humbly self-accusing, it reveals to us +more of her truest and innermost life than pages of elaborate description +could do. A single sentence descriptive of her mood even in that first +irritation brings before us her deepest soul, and the utter absence of +self isolation and self-insistence there:--"However just her indignation +might be, her ideal was not _to claim justice_, but _to give +tenderness_." + +She meets Ladislaw; and he more than hints to her that the dim, vague +labours and accumulations of years which have constituted her husband's +nearest approach to life have been labour in vain; that the "great mind" +has been toiling, with feeble uncertain steps, in a path which has +already been trodden into firmness and completeness; toiling in wilful +and obdurate ignorance that other and abler natures have more than +anticipated all he has been painfully and abortively labouring to +accomplish. Again a cry bursts from the wounded heart, seemingly of +anger against her informant, really of anguish--anguish, not for her own +sinking hopes, but for the burden of disappointment and failure which she +instinctively perceives must, sooner or later, fall on the husband who is +thus throwing away life in vain. + +So it goes on, through all the ever-darkening problem of her married, yet +unmated, life. Effort, always more earnest on the part of her yearning, +unselfish tenderness, to establish true relations between them; to find +in him something of that sweet support, that expansive and elevating +force, silently entering into her own innermost life, which her first +childlike trust inspired; to become to him, even if no more may be, that +to which her childlike humility at first alone aspired--eyes to his +weakness, and strength and freedom to his pen. So it goes on; +ever-gnawing pain and anguish, as all her yearning love and pity is +thrown back, and that dulled insensate heart and all-absorbing egoism can +find only irritation in her timid attempts at sympathy, only dread of +detection of the half-conscious futility of all his labours, in her +humble proffers of even mechanical aid. Not easily can even the most +fervid and penetrative imagination conceive what, to a nature like +Dorothea's, such a life must be, with its never-ceasing, ever-gathering +pain; its longing tenderness not even actively repelled, but simply +ignored or misinterpreted; its humblest, equally with its highest +yearnings, baffled and shattered against that triple mail of shallowest +self-includedness. And all has to be borne in silence and alone. No +word, no look, no sign, betrays to other eye the inward anguish, the +deepening disappointment, the slow dying away of hope. Nay, for long, on +indeed to the bitter close, failure seems to her to be almost wholly on +her own side; and repentance and self-upbraiding leave no room for +resentment. + +Ere long--indeed, very soon--another, and, if possible, a still deeper +humiliation comes upon her,--another, and, in some respects, a keener +pang, as showing more intensely how entirely she stands alone, is thrown +into her life,--in her husband's jealousy of Ladislaw. Yet jealousy it +cannot be called. Of any emotion so comparatively profound, any passion +so comparatively elevated, that self-absorbed, self-tormenting nature is +utterly incapable. Jealousy, in some degree, presupposes love; love not +wholly absorbed in self, but capable to some extent of going forth from +our own mean and sordid self-inclusion in sympathetic relation, +dependence, and aid, towards another existence. In Mr Casaubon there is +no capability, no possibility of this. What in him wears the aspect of +jealousy is simply and solely self-love, callous irritation, that any one +should--not stand above, but--approach himself in importance with the +woman he has purchased as a kind of superior slave. For long her +guileless innocence and purity, her utter inability to conceive such a +feeling, leaves her only in doubt and perplexity before it; long after it +has first betrayed itself, she reveals this incapability in the fullest +extent, and in the way most intensely irritating to her husband's self- +love--by her simple-hearted proposal that whatever of his property would +devolve on her should be shared with Ladislaw. Then it is that Casaubon +is roused to inflict on her the last long and bitter anguish; to lay on +her for life--had not death intervened--the cold, soul-benumbing, life +contracting clutch of "the Dead Hand." In the innocence of her entire +relations with Ladislaw, not the faintest dawning of thought connects +itself with him in her husband's cold, insistent demand on her blind +obedience to his will. She thinks alone of his thus binding her to a +lifelong task, not only hard and ungenial, but one that shall absorb and +fetter all her energies, restrain all her faculties, impair and frustrate +all her higher and broader aims, make impossible all that better and +purer fulness of life for which she yearns. Then follows the long and +painful struggle,--a struggle so agonising to such a nature, that only +one nearly akin to her own can adequately conceive or picture it. For it +is a struggle not primarily to forego any certain or fancied mere +personal good. On one side is ranged tenderest pitifulness over her +husband's wasted life and energies, even though she knows those energies +have been wasted--that life has been thrown away--on an object in which +there is no gain to humanity, no advancement of human well-being, no +profit even to himself, save, perchance, a barren and useless notoriety +at last; an object that has been already far more fully and ably +achieved. On the other stands her clear undoubting _conscience_ of her +own truest and highest course,--the course to which every prompting of +the Divine within impels her,--that she shall not thus isolate herself +within this narrowest sphere, shut herself out from all social sympathies +and social outgoings, and sacrifice to the Dead Hand that holds her in +its cold remorseless clutch every interest that may be intrusted to her. +We instinctively shudder at the result; but we never doubt what the +answer will be. We know that the tender, womanly, wifely pitifulness, +the causeless remorse, will be the nearest and most urgent conscience, +and will prevail. The agonised assent is to be given; but it falls on +the ear of the dead. + +It is scarcely necessary to follow Dorothea minutely through all the +details of her widowed relations to Mr Casaubon. Enough that these are +all in touching and beautiful harmony with everything that has gone +before. No resentment, no recalcitration against all the ever-gathering +perplexity, pain, and anguish he has caused her--nothing but the sweet +unfailing pitifulness, the uncalled-for repentance, almost remorse, over +her own assumed shortcomings and deficiencies--her failures to be to him +what in those first days of her childlike simplicity and innocence she +had hoped she might become. Even on the discovery of the worse than +treachery, of the mean insulting malignity with which, trusting to her +confiding purity and truthfulness, he had sought to grasp her for life in +his "Dead Hand" with regard to Ladislaw, and she only escaped the +irrevocable bond her own blindly-given pledge would have fixed around her +by his death,--the momentary and violent shock of revulsion from her dead +husband, who had had hidden thoughts of her, perhaps perverting +everything she said or did, _terrified her as if it had been a sin_. + +It is not alone, however, toward her husband that this simple, +unconscious self-devotion and self-abnegation of Dorothea Brooke displays +itself. Toward every one with whom she comes in contact, it steals out +unobtrusively and silently, as the dew from heaven on the tender grass, +to each and all according to the kind and nearness of that relation. Even +for her "pulpy" uncle she has no supercilious contempt--no sense of +isolation or separation; not even the consciousness of toleration toward +him. Toward Celia, with her delicious commonplace of rather superficial +yet _naive_ worldly wisdom, her half-conscious selfishness, her +baby-worship, and her inimitable "staccato," she is more than tolerant. +She looks up to her as in many respects a superior, even though her own +far higher instincts and aims of life cannot accept her as an aid and +guidance toward the realisation of these. Even at old Featherstone's +funeral, her one emotion is of pitiful sorrow over that loveless mockery +of all human pity and love; and for the "Frog-faced" there is no feeling +but sympathetic compassion for his apparent loneliness amongst strangers, +who all stand aloof and look askance on him. Into all Lydgate's plans, +into the whole question of the hospital and all he hopes to achieve +through means of it, she throws herself with swift intelligence, with +active, eager sympathy, as a probable instrumentality by which at least +one phase of suffering may be redressed or allayed. And in the hour of +his deep humiliation, when all others have fallen away from his side, +when the wife of his bosom forsakes him in callous and heartless +resentment of what was done for her sake alone; when he stands out the +mark of scorn and obloquy for all save Farebrother, and scans and all but +loathes himself--she, with her artless trust in the best of humanity, in +the strength of her instinctive recognition of the merest glimmering of +whatever is true and right and high in others, comes to his side, yields +him at once her fullest confidence, gives him with frank simplicity her +aid, and enables him, so far as determined prejudice and uncharity will +allow, to right himself before others. + +Reference has already been made to her whole relations, from first to +last, with Ladislaw. It is not easy to conceive anything more touchingly +beautiful than these, more perfectly in harmony with her whole nature. Of +anything approaching either coquetry or prudery she is incapable. The +utter absence of all self-consciousness, whether of external beauty or +inward loveliness; the ethereal purity, the childlike trustfulness, the +instinctive recognition of all that is true and earnest and high in +Ladislaw, through all the surface appearance of indecision, of vague +uncertain aim and purpose and limited object in life; no thought of what +is ordinarily called love toward him, of love on his part toward her--ever +dawns upon her guileless innocence. Through all her yearning to do +justice to him as regards the property of her dead husband, which she +looks upon as fairly and justly his, or at least to be shared with him, +there arises before her the determination of her dead husband that it +should not be so; and her sweet regretful pitifulness over that meagre +wasted life prevails. Anon, when at last through the will she is made +aware of the crowning act of that concentrated callousness of heart and +soul, and of the true nature of the benumbing grasp it had sought to lay +on her for life, and had so far succeeded in doing, then for the first +time her "tremulous" maiden purity and simplicity awakens, and for the +first time it enters her mind that Ladislaw could, under any +circumstances, become her lover; that another had thought of them in that +light, and that he himself had been conscious of such a possibility +arising. The later scenes between them are characterised by a quiet +beauty, a suppressed power and pathos, compared to which most other love- +scenes in fiction appear dull and coarse. The tremulous yearning of her +love, as it awakens more and more to distinct consciousness within; the +new-born shyness blent with the old, trustful, frank simplicity,--bring +before us a picture of love, in its purest and most beautiful aspect, +such as cannot easily be paralleled in fiction. + +Toward her late husband's parishioners there is the same wise instinctive +insight as to their true needs, the same thoughtful and provident +consideration that characterises her in every relation into which she is +brought. If she at once objects, on their behoof, to Mr Tyke's so-called +"apostolic" preaching, it is that she means by that, sermons about +"imputed righteousness and the prophecies in the Apocalypse. I have +always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is +taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than +any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the +most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it." +And in her final selection of Mr Farebrother, she is guided not alone by +her sense of his general and essential fitness for the work assigned to +him, but also in some degree by her desire to make whist-playing for +money, and the comparatively inferior society into which it necessarily +draws him, no longer a need of his outer life. + +Of all the less prominent relations into which Dorothea Brooke is +brought, there is not one more touchingly tender, or in which her whole +nature is drawn more beautifully out, than that to Rose Vincy. Between +these two, at least on the side of the hard unpenetrable incarnation of +self-inclusion and self-pleasing, any approach to harmony or sympathy is +impossible. There is not even any true ground of womanhood on which +Rosamond can meet Dorothea; for she is nearly as far removed from +womanhood as Tito Melema is from manliness or manhood. Yet even here the +tender pitifulness of Dorothea overpasses a barrier that to any other +would be impassable. In her sweet, instinctive, universal sympathy for +human sorrow and pain, she finds a common ground of union; and in no +fancied sense of superiority--solely from the sense of common human +need--she strives to console, to elevate, to lead back to hope and trust, +with a gentle yet steadfast simplicity all her own. + +Such, as portrayed by unquestionably the greatest fictionist of the +time--is it too much to say, the greatest genius of our English +nineteenth century?--is the nineteenth century St Theresa. + +The question may be raised by some of George Eliot's readers whether it +constitutes the best and completest ethical teaching that fiction can +attain, to bring before its readers such high ideals of the possibilities +of humanity--of the aim and purpose of life toward which it should ever +aspire. Were the author's canvas occupied with such portraitures +alone--with Romolas and Fedalmas, Dinah Morrises and Dorothea Brookes, +Daniel Derondas and Adam Bedes, even Mr Tryans and Mr Gilfils--the +question might call for full discussion, and a contrast might be +unfavourably drawn between the author and him whose emphatic praise it is +that he "holds the mirror up to nature." But the great artist for all +time brings before us not only an Iago and an Edmund, an Angelo and an +Iachimo, a Regan and a Goneril, but a Miranda and an Imogen, an Isabella +and a Viola, a Cordelia and a Desdemona, with every conceivable +intermediate shade of human character and life; and in George Eliot we +have the same clearly-defined contrasts and endless variety. That a +Becky Sharp and a Beatrix Castlewood are drawn with the consummate skill +and force of the most perfect artist in his own special sphere our age +has produced, few will be disposed to deny: and that they have momentous +lessons to teach us all,--that they may by sheer antagonism rouse some +from dreams of selfish vanity and corruption, and awaken within some germ +of better and purer elements of life,--will scarcely be disputed. But it +is not from these, or such as these, that the highest and noblest, the +purest and most penetrative, the most extended and enduring teaching and +elevation of the world has come. That has come emphatically from Him +whose self-chosen name, "the Son of Man," designates Him the ideal of +humanity on earth; Him who is at once the "Lamb of God" and "the Lion of +the tribe of Judah," the "Good Shepherd," and the stern and fearless but +ever-righteous Judge--the concentration of all tender and holy love, and +of divinest scorn of, and revulsion from, everything mean and false in +humanity; Him who for the repentant sinner has no harsher word of rebuke +than "Go and sin no more," and who over the self-righteous, self-wrapt, +all-despising Pharisees thundered back, to His own ultimate destruction, +His terrible "Woe unto you _hypocrites_." He too stands out, not +isolated or severed, but prominent, amid every conceivable phase and +gradation of human character, from a John to a Judas; touches each and +all at some point of living contact; meets them with tender sympathy, +with gentle patience, and pitying love, over their weaknesses and falls. +Can the true artist err in aiming, according to his nature or to the +purity and elevation of his genius, to approach in his portraitures such +ideals as this great typical exemplar of our humanity, whose influence +has for eighteen centuries been stealing down into the hearts and souls +of men to elevate and refine, and who is now, and who is more and more +becoming, the paramount factor in individual character, and in social and +political relations? Or can such ideals, presented before us, fail to +arouse in some degree the better elements of our humanity, and to lead us +to strive toward the realisation of these? + +In wonderfully drawn and finished yet never obtruded contrast to this +beautiful creation comes before us Rosamond Vincy. Outwardly even more +characterised by every personal charm, save that one living and crowning +charm which outshines from the soul within; to the eye, therefore--such +eyes as can penetrate no deeper than the surface--prettier, more +graceful, more accomplished and fascinating, than Dorothea Brooke;--it is +difficult to conceive a more utterly unlovable example of womanhood, +whether as maiden or wife. Hard and callous of heart and dead of soul, +incapable of one thought or emotion that rises above or extends beyond +self, insistent on her own petty claims and ambitions to the exclusion of +all others, ever aiming to achieve these, now by dogged sullen +persistence, now by mean concealments and frauds, no more repellent +portraiture of womanhood has ever been placed before us. The fundamental +character of her entire home relations is, on her first appearance, drawn +by a single delicate touch--her objecting to her brother's red herring, +or rather to its presence after she enters the room, because its odour +jars on her sense of pseudo-refinement. In her relation to her husband +there is not from first to last one shadow of anything that can be called +love, no approach to sympathy or harmony of life. She looks on him +solely as a means for removing herself to what she considers a higher +social circle, securing to her greater ease, freedom, and luxury of daily +life, and ultimately withdrawing her to a wider sphere of petty and +selfish enjoyment. Seeking these ends, she resorts to every mean device +of deceit and concealment. Utterly callous and impenetrable to his +feelings, to every manlier instinct within him, as she is utterly +insensible of, and indeed incapable of, entering into his higher and +wider professional aims, she not only ignores these, but in her dull and +hard insensibility runs counter to, and tramples on them all. + +Even toward Mary Garth there is nothing approaching true friendship or +affection; no power of recognising her honesty, unselfishness, and +earnestness of nature. She is nothing to her but a tool and +_confidante_, the recipient of her own petty hopes and desires, worries +and cares. + +All Dorothea's gentle, unobtrusive attempts to soothe, to win her back to +truer and better relations with her husband, and to awaken to active life +and exercise the true womanhood, which she in her sweet instinct believes +to be inherent in all her sex, are met by hard indifference or dull +resistance. And in the one act of apparent friendliness or rather +explanation toward Dorothea, she is actuated far less by sympathy or +desire to clear away what has come between her and Ladislaw, than by +sullen resentment against the latter for his rejection of her unseemly +and unwifely advances to him. + +In the position she at last takes up toward Ladislaw, there is no +approach to anything in the very least resembling love--even illicit and +overmastering passion. Of that her very nature is incapable. She is +influenced solely by resentment against her husband, and his failure to +fulfil her vain and self-absorbed dreams; by the hope that he will remove +her to a sphere which will give wider scope to her heartless selfishness, +and take her away from the social disappointments and humiliations into +which that selfishness has mainly plunged her. In every relation of life +near or far, important or trivial, amid all environments, under all +impulsion toward anything purer and better, Rosamond Vincy is ever the +same; as consistent and unvarying in her hard unwomanliness and +impenetrable, insistent self-seeking, as is Dorothea in every opposite +characteristic. And even while the picture in one way fascinates the +reader, it is the fascination of ever-increasing contempt and loathing +where the extremest charity can hardly even pity; and from it we ever +turn to that of St Theresa with the more intense refreshment alike of +mind and heart, and the deeper sense of its elevating and refining +influence. + +Among the many clearly defined and vividly drawn portraits in this great +work, it would be easy, did space permit, to select others well worthy of +detailed examination, and illustrative of the salient aim and tendency of +all George Eliot's works. The homely yet beautiful family groups of the +Garths, Celia and Sir James Chettam, the Bulstrodes, {97} even the +wretched old Featherstone, and the crowd of vultures "waiting for death +around him," all more or less illustrate the fundamental principle of the +highest ethics--that self-abnegation is life, elevation, purity, +uplifting our humanity toward the Divine; that self-seeking and +self-isolation tend surely toward moral and spiritual death. Two, +however, stand out so delicately yet clearly defined and contrasting, +that they claim brief consideration before passing from this great +work--Lydgate and Farebrother. + +The whole character and career of Lydgate are brought before us with the +skill of the consummate artist. At first he appears as a man of massive +and energetic proportions, of high professional impulses and aims, +resolute to carry these through against all difficulty and amid all +indifference and opposition, and apparently seeking through these aims +the general good of humanity--the alleviation of suffering, and the +arrestment, it may be, of death. But even then there are signs of +inherent weakness, and all but certain decline and fall. There are +indications of arrogant self sufficiency and supercilious contempt for +others; of undue deference for Bulstrode, not from respect or esteem, but +as a tool to further his views; and a tendency to treat patients not as +human beings but as cases--objects to experiment on, and verify +hypotheses regarding pathology and disease, all which betray a nature not +attuned to the highest and noblest pitch, and that cannot be expected to +stand in the hour of trial. His first direct lapse is when, against his +secret conviction, he supports Tyke as hospital chaplain in opposition to +Farebrother; but mainly in mere defiance and resentment of the general +style of his reception at the Board meeting, and the opposition he +encounters there. Anon comes his marriage to Rosamond Vincy,--a marriage +prompted by no true affection, but solely by the fascination of her +prettiness, her external grace and accomplishments. Led on mainly by his +own taste for luxury and external show, he plunges into extravagances of +every kind. Debt inevitably follows, crippling his resources, cramping +his energies, fettering him as regards all his higher professional aims +and efforts. To his wife he looks in vain for sympathy or aid. She only +aggravates the difficulties and harassments of his life by her callous +selfishness, her dull obdurate insistance on all her own claims, her mean +deceits and concealments. Embarrassments of every kind thicken around +him; and at last in the all but universal estimation of his fellows, and +nearly in his own, in the hope of temporary relief he becomes accessory +to murder. His end is as sad a one for his character, and in his +circumstances, as can well be conceived: falling from all his high if +somewhat arrogant professional aims, his hopes of elevating the general +practitioner, and of raising medicine from an art to a science, into the +fashionable London lady's doctor. + +Though Mr Farebrother occupies a somewhat less prominent place in the +narrative, he is delineated with not less consummate skill. He comes +before us at first a man of genial kindly sympathies, frankly alive to, +and frankly acknowledging, his own deficiencies. There is an utter +absence of pretence and affectation about him, a graceful and engaging +simplicity and frankness of whole nature, that can hardly fail to win the +heart. All his home relations--toward mother and sisters--are singularly +touching. Feeling all his defects as a clergyman, half laughing, half +apologetic over his devotion to his favourite Coleoptera, and admitting +that which is so far a necessity to him, not of choice, but of actual +external need in his narrow circumstances--admitting, too, the +comparatively inferior and uncongenial society into which he is drawn--the +full revelation of his nobler and higher nature begins. His true and +deep appreciation of Mary Garth, and tender, devoted, and unselfish love +for her, more clearly reveal his innate manliness, self-denial, and +simplicity of character. This revelation is still further unfolded +before us in his entire relations with Fred Vincy. That firm persistent +interview in the billiard-room, is actuated by the one absorbing and self- +abnegating desire that he may still be saved from the moral and spiritual +decay impending over him: and when, in answer to Fred's appeal for his +intercession, we discover the blighting of his own hopes, the shattering +of his love, the tender heart stricken to the core should Fred prove, as +he suspects, his successful rival, we discern in him a nature of the +finest capabilities, and surely tending on and up toward the noblest +ends; and we part from him as from a dear and valued friend, whose +society has cheered and elevated us, whose pure simplicity of nature has +refuted our vain pretensions, and whose memory clings to us as a +fragrance and refreshment. + +There now only remains the last yet published, and in the estimation of +many, the greatest, of George Eliot's works--'Daniel Deronda.' In it the +author takes up--not a new scope, but extends one that has all along been +present, and that indeed was inevitably associated with her great ethical +principle,--the bringing of that principle definitely and directly to +bear upon not only every domestic but every social and political relation +of human life. This tendency may be briefly expressed in the old and +profound words: "No man liveth to himself; no man dieth to himself." As +we aim toward the true and good and pure, or surrender ourselves the +slaves of self and sense, we live or die to God or to the devil. + +Before, however, proceeding to detailed examination of this remarkable +work, it seems necessary to draw attention to one objection which has +been urged against it--the prominent introduction of the Jewish element +into its scheme. Such objection could scarcely have been put forward by +any one who considers what the Jew has been in the past--what an enormous +factor his past and present have been and are, in the development and +progress of our highest civilisation. Historically, we first meet him +coming forth from the Arabian desert, a rude unlettered herdsman, in +intelligence, cultivation, and morality far below the tribes among whom +he is thrown. A terrible weapon arms him--a theism stern, hard, and +pitiless, beyond, perhaps, all the world has ever seen. To the bravest +and best of his race--a Moses and a Joshua, a Deborah and a Jephtha--this +presents ruthless massacre, the vilest treachery, offering up a sacrifice +the dearest and most loved, not as mere permissible acts, but as deeds of +religious homage solemnly enjoined by his Most High. This theism has one +central thought in which it practically stands alone, and which it was +the aim of all its supposed heads and legislators to keep inviolate amid +all surrounding antagonisms--the intense assertion of the Divine unity. +"Hear, O Israel! the Lord thy God is _one_ Lord." In these brief words +lies the very core of Judaism. So long as he holds fast by this central +truth, the Jew is exhibited to us as practically omnipotent. Seas and +floods divide before him; hosts numberless as the sands are scattered at +his appearance; cyclopean walls fall prone at his trumpet-blast. + +And this thought of the Divine unity, thus intensely pervading the +national life, upfolds within capacity of indefinite development. No +long time in the life of a nation elapses ere "The Lord thy God is a +jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children," +became "As a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that +fear Him." "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not +have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, she _may_ forget; yet will +not _I_ forget thee." + +In no sense of the word was the Jew a creature of imagination. The stern +and hard realities of his life would seem to have crushed out every trace +of the aesthetic element within him. Yet from among these people arose a +literature, especially a hymnology, which has never been approached +elsewhere; and it arose emphatically and distinctly out of the great +central and animating thought of the Divine unity. To the Psalms +so-called of David, the glorious outbursts of sacred song in their +mythico-historical books, as in Isaiah {103} and some of the minor +prophets, the finest of the Vedic or Orphic hymns or the Homeric ballads +are cold and spiritless. These address themselves to scholars alone, or +chiefly to a cultivated few, and address themselves to them eloquently +and gloriously. The hymns of the Jews have so interpenetrated the very +heart of humanity, so identified themselves with the best longings, the +noblest aspirations, the purest hopes, and the deepest sorrows of man, +that still, after more than twenty centuries, that wonderful hymnology +breathes up day after day, week after week, from millions of households +and hearts. They outbreathe its fervid aspirations toward a purer and +diviner life. They give expression to its profound wailings over +degradation and fall. They give utterance on all the inscrutable +mysteries of existence; and ever and anon as the clouds and darkness +break away from the Infinite Love,--they burst forth into the exultant +cry, "God reigneth, let the earth be glad. . . . Give thanks at +remembrance of His _holiness_." + +But important as is this factor of Judaism, there is another generally +considered which has perhaps exercised a still more profound and +cumulative influence on the civilisation especially of the West. This +lies in the intense indestructible nationality of the race. Eighteen +centuries have passed since they became a people, "scattered and peeled," +their "holy and beautiful house" a ruin, their capital a desolation, +their land proscribed to the exile's foot. During these centuries deluge +after deluge of so-called barbarians has swept over Asia and Europe: Hun +and Tartar, Alan and Goth, Suev and Vandal,--we attach certain vague +meanings to the names, but can the most learned scholar identify one +individual of the true unmingled blood? All have disappeared, merged in +the race they overran, in the kingdoms they conquered and devastated. The +Jew alone, through these centuries, has remained the Jew: proscribed, +persecuted, hunted as never was tiger or wolf, he is as vividly defined, +as unchangeably national, as when he stood alone, everywhere without and +beyond the despised and hated Gentile. And this intense and conservative +nationality springs essentially out of the central conception of Judaism, +"God is _one_." Be He the incarnation of pitiless vengeance, hardening +Pharaoh's heart that He may execute sevenfold wrath on him and his +people; be He the Good Shepherd, who "gathers the lambs in His arms," and +for their sakes "tempers His rough wind in the day of His east wind;"--to +the Jew He has been and is, "I am the Lord; that is My name; and My glory +will I not give to another." + +Through those long ages of darkness, devil-worship, and polytheism (in +its grossest forms all around), the Jew stood up in unfaltering protest +against all. Persecutions, proscriptions, tortures in every form, were +of no avail. On the gibbet, on the rack, amid the flames, his last words +embodied the central confession of Judaism, "O Israel, the Lord _thy_ God +is one Lord." Christianity, the appointed custodier of the still more +central truth, "God is love," had to all appearance failed of its +mission; had not only merged its higher message in a theistic +presentation, dark and terroristic as that of Judaism at its dawn, but +had absorbed into its scheme, under other names, the gods many who swarm +all around it; till nowhere and never, save by some soul upborne by its +own fervour above these dense fogs and mists, could individual man meet +his God face to face, and realise that higher life of the soul which is +His free gift to all who seek it. Between this heathenised Christianity +and Judaism, the contrast was the sharpest, the contest the most +embittered and unvarying. Elsewhere we hear of times of toleration and +indulgence even for the hunted Monotheist,--in medieval Christendom, +never. The Inquisition plied its rack for the Jews with a more fiendish +zeal than even for the hated Morisco. The mob held him responsible for +plague and famine; and kings and nobles hounded the mob on to +indiscriminate massacre. The Jew lived on through it all,--lived, +multiplied, and prospered, and became more and more emphatically the Jew. +Is it too much to say that in the West in particular, where this contrast +and contest were keenest, Judaism was, during these long ages of terror +and darkness, the great conservator of the vital truth of the Divine +unity, under whatever forms science or philosophy may now attempt to +define this; and in being so, became the conservator of that thought, +without the vivifying power of which, howsoever imperfectly apprehended, +all human advance is impossible? Is it exaggerating the importance of +the Jew and his intense nationality, based on such a truth, to say that, +but for his presence, "scattered and peeled," among all nations, the +Europe we now know could not have been? And this indestructible +nationality, for whose existence miracle has been called into account--has +it no significance in the future equal to what it has had in the past? +There seems an impression that the Jew is being absorbed by other races. +We hear much of relaxing Judaisms; of rituals and beliefs assimilating to +those around them; of peculiarities being laid aside, that have withstood +the wear and tear of centuries. The inference is sought to be drawn that +the Jew is beginning to feel his isolation, and to sink his own national +life amid that among which he dwells. We accept all the facts; but can +only see in them that, under the influence of the profound thought and +research of its great leaders, Judaism is shaking off the dust of ages, +and is more vividly awaking to its mission upon earth. We believe it is +coming forth from all this superficial change, more intensely and +powerfully Judaical, more penetrated and vivified by that thought which +for untold centuries has been the life of its life. What is to be its +specific future as a leader in the advancement and redemption of +humanity, none can foresee. But it seems the reverse of strange that a +genius like George Eliot's should have been powerfully attracted by this +problem; and that, in one of her noblest works, she should have very +prominently addressed herself to at least a partial solution of it. That +the solution she suggests is a noble one, few who carefully consider the +subject will, we think, deny. The establishment of a Jewish polity, in +the true sense of the word a theocracy, where the Infinite Holiness is +supreme, and in its supremacy is included a reign of justice, purity, and +love;--the establishment of such a polity locally between the +materialistic proclivities of the West and the psychological subtleties +of the East, mediative between them, communicating from each to each of +those essentials to human life in which the other is deficient, is a +conception worthy of her genius. + +Another minor and very trivial objection to the presence of this Jewish +element need be no more than adverted to. It is the presence of such +different types as the mean-souled scoundrel Lapidoth; the shrewd self- +approving trader Cohen, with the inimitable picture of a home-life so +pleasant and kindly; the vague intense enthusiasm, the ardent aspirations +and fervent hopes of Mordecai; the absorbing Judaism of the Physician; +the fierce revulsion of his daughter against her race and name; the meek, +delicate, ethereal purity of Mirah; the innate Jewish yearnings and +aspirations of Deronda, expanded by all the breadth that could be given +by the highest Anglo-Saxon culture and training. To those who take +exception to this, it is answer more than sufficient that, as an artist, +it was necessary to present every typical phase of Jewish character and +life; and we confess there are other passages in the work we could better +spare than these delicious pictures of a London-Jewish pawnbroker at +home. + +Of all the characters portrayed in fiction, there is perhaps not one so +difficult to analyse and define as that which stands out so prominently +in this wonderful work, Gwendolen Harleth. At once attractive and +repellent--fascinating in no ordinary degree, and yet, in the estimation +of all around her, hard, cold, and worldly-minded--bewitching, alike from +her beauty, grace, and accomplishments, yet a superficial and seemingly +heartless coquette,--she presents a combination of at once some of the +finest and some of the meanest qualities of woman. Her hardness towards +her fond, doting mother, and her contempt for her sisters, are +conspicuous almost from her first appearance. Her arrogant defiance of +Deronda in the gambling-house, and the fierce revulsion of pride with +which she received the return of her necklace, are entirely in keeping +with these characteristics. And the news of the reduction of her family +to utter poverty awakens no emotion save on her own behalf alone. Yet, +ever and anon, faint gleams of tenderness towards her gentle mother break +forth, though soon obscured by the bitter insistance with which her own +claims to station, wealth, and luxury assert themselves. Her first +acceptance of Grandcourt represents this phase of her twofold nature; her +rejection of him and flight from him, after her interview with Mrs +Glasher, are equally characteristic of the second. That rejection is +actuated much more by resentment against Mrs Glasher, that she should +have dared to anticipate her in anything resembling affection he had to +give, and against him, that he should have presumed to offer to her a +heart already sealed to anything resembling love, than by the faintest +approach to it in her own. The leap, as it were, by which she ultimately +accepts him, is merely a quick, half-conscious instinct to secure her own +deliverance from poverty, and the attainment of those higher external +enjoyments of life for which she conceived herself formed; and if, in +addition, a thought of relieving the wants of her mother and sisters +obtrudes, it holds only a very secondary place in her mind. Deeming +herself born for dominion over every male heart, in her utter childish +ignorance of human character, she deems that Grandcourt also shall be her +slave. + +But through all her relations with that magnificent incarnation of self- +isolation and self-love, she is compelled to cower before him. Again and +again she attempts to turn, only to be crushed under his heel as +ruthlessly as a worm. During the yachting voyage it is the same; intense +inward revulsion on the one side--cold, inexorable despotism on the +other. + +The drowning scene first begins to stir the better nature within her. The +intensity of terror with which she regards the involuntary murderous +thought, and which prompted her leap into the water, the fervour of +remorse which followed, all begin to indicate a nature which may yet be +attuned to the highest qualities. On the other hand, the sweet clinging +trust with which she hangs on Deronda, looks up to him, feels that for +her every possibility of good lies in association with him, are those of +a guileless, artless child. She has been called a hard-hearted, callous +woman of the world: her worldliness is on the surface alone. Her first +cry to Deronda is the piteous wail of a forsaken child; the letter with +which their relations close is the fond yearning of a child towards one +whom she looks up to as protector and saviour. + +Grandcourt is portrayed before us in more massive and simple proportions +as a type of concentrated selfishness. We dare not despise him, we +cannot loathe him--we stand bowed and awe-stricken before him. He never +for a moment falls from that calm dignity of pride and +self-isolation--never for a moment softens into respect for anything +without himself. Without a moment's exception he is ever consistent, +imperturbable in his self-containedness, ruthlessly crushing all things +from dog to wife, under his calm, cold, slighting contempt. He stands up +before us, not so much indomitable as simply unassailable. We cannot +conceive the boldest approaching or encroaching on him--all equally +shiver and quail before that embodiment of the devil as represented by +human self-love. + +Fain would we linger over the Jewish girl, Mirah. She has been spoken of +as characterless; to us it seems as if few characters of more exquisite +loveliness have ever been portrayed. From her first appearance robed in +her meek despair, through all her subsequent relations with Deronda, her +brother, and Gwendolen, there is the same delicate purity, the same +tender meekness, the same full acceptance of the life of a Jewess as--in +harmony with the life of her race--one of "sufferance." Even as her +spirits gladden in that sunny Meyrick home, with its delicious interiors, +and brighten under the noble-hearted musician Klesmer's encouragement, +the brightness refers to something entirely without herself. In one +sense far more acquainted with the evil that is in the world than +Gwendolen with all her alleged worldliness, it is her shrinking from the +least approach to this that prompts her strange, apparently hopeless +flight in search of the mother she had loved so dearly. Her sad, humble +complaints that she has not been a good Jewess, because she has been +inevitably cut off from the use of Jewish books, and restrained by her +scoundrel father from attendance at Jewish worship, find their answer in +her deep unfailing sense of her share in the national doom of suffering. +We feel with Mrs Meyrick "that she is a pearl, and the mud has only +washed her." In her startling interview with Gwendolen, the sudden +indignant protest which the inquiry of the latter calls out is a protest +against even a hint of evil being directed towards that which has been +best and highest to her. Her love for Deronda steals into the maiden +purity of her soul with an unconscious delicacy which cannot be +surpassed; and as she parts from us by his side, we feel that she is no +Judith or Esther, but the meek Mary of the annunciation, going forth on +her unknown mission of love with the words, "Behold the handmaid of the +Lord." + +Beside the exquisitely meek child-figure, with the small delicate head +faintly drooping under the sorrow which is the heritage of her race, +stands up Deronda in his calm dignity. As he lies on the grass, and the +first faint glimmering of the possible origin of his life breaks upon +him, even the first inevitable risings of resentment against Sir Hugo are +softened and toned down by the old yearning affection; and the longings +for the unknown mother, intense as they are, yet shrink from full +discovery of what she may have been or may still be. He and he alone, in +unconscious dignity, stands up uncowering before Grandcourt. His whole +relations to Mordecai are characterised by a deep suppressed enthusiasm, +that fully responds to the enthusiast's soul. Towards Gwendolen every +word he speaks, every act he does, is marked by the fervour of his whole +nature; but it is beside the fair head drooping under its burden of +hereditary sorrow that Deronda passes from our sight, the fitting type of +him who shall yet, sooner or later, re-establish that great Jewish +theocracy so long dreamt of, and reaffirm that Judaism yet holds a great +place in human life and civilisation. + +We have throughout had no intention of dealing with George Eliot merely +as the artist; but if we have succeeded in showing this unity of moral +purpose and aim as pervading all her works, as giving rise to their +variety by reason of the varieties and modifications it necessitates in +order to its full illustration, and as ministered to, directly or +indirectly, by all the accessory characters and incidents of these +creations,--the question naturally arises, whether this does not +constitute her an artist of the highest possible order. + +But the true worth of George Eliot's works rests, we think, on higher +grounds than any mere perfection of artistic finish; on this ground, +specially, that among all our fictionists she stands out as the deepest, +broadest, and most catholic illustrator of the true ethics of +Christianity; the most earnest and persistent expositor of the true +doctrine of the Cross, that we are born and should live to something +higher than the love of happiness; the most subtle and profound +commentator on the solemn words, "He that loveth his soul shall lose it: +he that hateth his soul shall keep it unto life eternal." + + + + +Footnotes: + + +{15} The translators of our English Bible, possibly perplexed by the +seeming paradox involved in these remarkable words, have taken an +unwarrantable freedom with the original, in rendering the Greek [Greek +text], invariably the synonym of the soul, the spiritual and undying +element in man, by "life"--the [Greek text] of all Greek literature so- +called, sacred and profane alike; the synonym of that life which is his +in common with the beast of the field and the tree of the forest. + +{29} Perhaps no finer and more subtle illustration of this "instinct of +the gentleman" can be found in literature than when, at the moment of +Harold Transome's deepest humiliation, where Jermyn claims him as his +son, good old Sir Marmaduke, not only his political opponent but +personally disliking him, for the first and only time in all their +intercourse addresses him by his Christian name, "Come, _Harold_." + +{97} In connection with Bulstrode occurs one of those delicate +indications of character, condensed into a few words, which others would +expand into pages, peculiar to George Eliot. It occurs in the depth of +his humiliation, when his wife, hitherto comparatively characterless, in +full token of her acceptance of their fallen lot, "takes off all her +ornaments, and puts on a plain gown, and instead of wearing her much +adorned-cap and large bows of hair, brushes down her hair, and puts on a +plain bonnet-cap, which makes her look like an early Methodist." + +{103} Does all poetry ancient or modern, so-called sacred or profane, +contain an image more impressive and majestic than that in the "doom of +Babylon," as the great incarnation of pride and luxury descends to its +place: "Hades from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: +it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; +it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations." + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ETHICS OF GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS*** + + +******* This file should be named 17172.txt or 17172.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/7/1/7/17172 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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