Chapter 2

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 onearth,—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 headof 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 pausethat 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 ofallthe 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, thoughthese 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 ofmy partyis 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 gentlemenChoosenot their task—they chooseto 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 Plaça, she presents herself as emphatically what her poet-worshipper Juan hymns her, the “child of light”—a creature so tremulously sensitive to all beauty, brightness, and joy, that it seems as if she could not co-exist with darkness and sorrow. But even then we have intimated to us that vital quality in her nature which makes all self-sacrifice possible; and which assures us that, whenever her life-choice shall come to lie between enjoyment and right, she shall choose the higher though the harder path. For her joy is essentially the joy of sympathy; mere self has no place in it. In her exquisite justification of the Plaça scene to Don Silva, she herself defines it in one line better than all words of ours can do—

“Iwas 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 meetthose eyes whose gaze, not to be so read by any nature lower and more superficial than hers—

“Seemed to say he boreThe 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 moreordinary 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 itwhatwe love, orhowwe 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 jealousfor 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 strungto 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 Plaça, is called on to forego all outward and possible hope on behalf of that love which is for her the concentration of all light and joy and triumph. Very touching are those heart-wrung pleadings by which she strives to avert the sacrifice; and we are oppressed almost as by the presence of the calm, loveless, hateless Fate of the old Greek tragedy, as Zarca’s inexorable logic puts them one by one aside, and leaves her as sole alternatives the offering up every hope, every present and possible joy of the love which is entwined with her life, or the turning away from that highest course to which he calls her. As her own young hopes die out under the pressure ofthat 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 countOn aught but being faithful. . . .I will seek nothing but to shun base joy.The saints were cowards who stood by to seeChrist crucified. They should have thrown themselvesUpon the Roman spears, and died in vain.The grandest death, to die in vain, for loveGreater than rules the courses of the world.Such death shall be my bridegroom. . . .Oh love! you were my crown. No other crownIs 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 byno 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 handShould 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 hearThrough 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 ofwhose 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 tohappiness. More nobly beautiful by far in her sad steadfastness than when she glowed before us as the “child of light” upon the Plaça,—

“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 thoughtsOf a forsaken better. . . .Oh, all my bliss was in our love, but nowI may not taste it; some deep energyCompels 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 Zíncala 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 bearsThe 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 betrue. When first she accepted this burden of her nobleness and her sorrow, she had said—

“I will not countOn 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 riteIs our resolve that we will each be trueTo 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 gazedOn aught but blackness overhung with stars”—

tell us how Fedalma passes away from the sight, thelife, 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, fastidiousIn his acceptance, dreading all delightThat speedy dies and turns to carrion.. . . . . .A nature half-transformed, with qualitiesThat oft bewrayed each other, elementsNot blent but struggling, breeding strange effects.. . . . . A spirit framedToo 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 poisedIn reach of storms, whose qualities may turnTo murdered virtues that still walk as ghostsWithin 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 everyquality 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 withFedalma, 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:—

“HaveInot made your place and dignityThe very height of my ambition?”

Her nobler nature recoils with chill foreboding terror from his first breach of trust,becauseit 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, butit 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 graspOf 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—

“Ourpoor faithAllows not rightful choice save of the rightOur 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 gentlemenChoose 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!”

“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 ghostsWithin 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 madeHis full-formed self, as the impregnant sapOf 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 meBy men’s perverseness:”

still the same impulses of mad, despairing self-assertion—

“I have arightto 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 oathThrusts 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 Zíncalo in alliance with the enemy and slaughterer, and associated with the havoc they have wrought. The “right to damn” himself which he had claimed is his in all its bitterness; and when he would charge the self damnation upon the Gypsy chief, the reply ofcalm withering scorn can but add keener pang to his awaking remorse: the self-damning

“Deed was doneBefore you took your oath, or reached our camp,Done when you slipped in secret from the post’Twas yours to keep, and not to meditateIf 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 ashis, 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 oneWhom ages watch for vainly,”

gives also to Don Silva himself to carry

“For ever with him what he fled—Hermurdered 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 morethan 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, andall 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 herby 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 latentbeauty 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, thewretched, 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 theimpossibilityof 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 amore 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 æsthetic culture—neglected in the past as a turning aside from life’s highest aims—she has looked forward to his guidance and support for the supply of this want as enlarging her whole being; broadening and deepening, refining and elevating all its sympathies. For all shadow of aid or sympathy here, she finds herself as utterly alone as if she were in a trackless and uninhabited desert. Nay, more: he who sits by her side is as cold and dead to all sensations or emotions that art can enkindle, as the glorious marbles amid which they wander. Soon she finds herself relegated to the society and fellowship of her maid; her husband is less to her, is incapableof 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 notto claim justice, butto 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 andalone. 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 mostintensely 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 undoubtingconscienceof 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 inhis “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 yetnaïveworldly 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 standaloof 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 istrue 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 pictureof 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 isimpossible. 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 whoseemphatic 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 forthe 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 youhypocrites.” 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 canpenetrate 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 andconfidante, 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 heartlessselfishness, 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.

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