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+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***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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."
+
+
+
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