Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (982 page)

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 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