The Ethics of George Eliot's Works — Themes and Context

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.