Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (983 page)

      ”To walk as ghosts
Within the shuddering soul and shriek remorse.”

The past returns on him with tyrannous power, — early associations, the taking up of his knightly vows with all its grand religious and heroic accompaniments, the delegated and accepted trust which he has by forsaking betrayed —

      ”The life that made
His full-formed self, as the impregnant sap
Of years successive frames the full-branched tree” —

all come back with stern reproach and denunciation of the apostate who, in hope of the outward realisation of a human love, has cast off and forsworn them all.  Fiercely he fronts and strives to silence the accusing throng.  Still the same plea —

      ”My sin was made for me
By men’s perverseness:”

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

   ”I have a
right
to choose my good or ill,
A right to damn myself!” —

still the same vain imagination that union is any longer possible between Fedalma’s high self-abnegating truth and his self-seeking abnegation of all truth, coupled with the arrogant assumption that he, morally so weak and fallen, can sustain her steadfast and heroic strength — “I with my love will be her providence.”

When with the fearful Gypsy chant and curse

      ”The newer oath
Thrusts its loud presence on him,”

we feel that any madness of act the wild conflict within may dictate has become possible; and we follow to that presence of Fedalma which is now the only goal life has left to him, prepared for such outbreak of despair as shall be commensurate with a life called to such nobleness of deed and fallen to such a depth of ruin.  We see the trust he has deserted in the hands of the foe against whom he had accepted commission to guard it; his friends slaughtered at the post he had forsaken; himself as the sworn Zíncalo in alliance with the enemy and slaughterer, and associated with the havoc they have wrought.  The “right to damn” himself which he had claimed is his in all its bitterness; and when he would charge the self damnation upon the Gypsy chief, the reply of calm withering scorn can but add keener pang to his awaking remorse: the self-damning

      ”Deed was done
Before you took your oath, or reached our camp,
Done when you slipped in secret from the post
‘Twas yours to keep, and not to meditate
If others might not fill it.”

The climax of his revulsion, remorse, and despair is reached when the Prior, the man whom he has impeached as the true author of all his sin, is led forth to die.  Then all sophistries are swept away, and the full import of his deed glares up before him, and its import as
his
, only and wholly his.  Zarca, in his high self-possession of soul, almost pitying while he cannot but despise, presents a fitting object on which all the fierce conflicting passions of wrath, self-accusing remorse, and despair, may vent themselves; and the sudden and treacherous deed, which

      ”Strangles one
Whom ages watch for vainly,”

gives also to Don Silva himself to carry

      ”For ever with him what he fled —
Her
murdered love — her love, a dear wronged ghost,
Facing him, beauteous, ‘mid the throngs of hell.”

Few authors or artists but George Eliot could have won us again to look on Don Silva except with revulsion or disgust; and it is characteristic of more than all ordinary power that through the deep impressive solemnity of the closing scene, he, the renegade and murderer, almost divides our interest and sympathy with Fedalma herself; and this by no condoning of his guilt, no extenuation of the depth of his fall, for these are here, most of all, kept ever before our eyes.  But the better and nobler elements of his nature, throughout all his degradation revealed to us as never wholly overborne, as ever struggling to assert themselves, have begun to prevail, and to put down from supremacy that meaner self which has led him into such abysses of faithlessness, apostasy, and sin.  The wild despair of remorse is giving way to the self-renunciation of repentance; the storm of conflicting passions and emotions is stilled; the fearful battle between good and evil through which he has passed has left him exhausted of every hope and aim save to die, repentant and absolved, for the country and faith he had abjured.  The self-assertion, too, of love is gone, and only its deep purity and tenderness remain.  Without murmur or remonstrance, he acquiesces in the doom of hopeless separation; accepting all that remains possible to him of that “high allegiance higher than our love,” which is thenceforth the only bond of union between these two.  In that last sad interview with her for whom he had so fearfully sinned, and so all but utterly fallen, we can regard Don Silva with a fuller and truer sympathy than we dare accord to him in all the height of his greatness, and all the wealth, beauty, and joy of his yet unshadowed love.

* * * * *

In the next of this series of great works, and the one which to many of her readers is and will remain the most fascinating — ‘Middlemarch’ — George Eliot has stretched a broader and more crowded canvas, on which, however, every figure, to the least important that appears, is — not sketched or outlined, but — filled in with an intense and lifelike vividness and precision that makes each stand out as if it stood there alone.  Quote but a few words from any one of the speakers, and we know in a moment who that speaker is.  And each is the type or representative of a class; we have no monsters or unnatural creations among them.  To a certain extent all are idealised for good or for evil, — it cannot be otherwise in fiction without its ceasing to be fiction; but the essential elements of character and life in all are not peculiar to them, but broad and universal as our humanity itself.  Dorothea and her sister, Mr Brooke and Sir James Chettam, Rosamond Vincy and her brother, Mr Vincy and his wife, Casaubon and Lydgate, Farebrother and Ladislaw, Mary Garth and her parents, Bulstrode and Raffles, even Drs Sprague and Minchin, old Featherstone and his kindred — all are but representative men and women, with whose prototypes every reader, if gifted with the subtle power of penetration and analysis of George Eliot, might claim personal acquaintance.

This richly-crowded canvas presents to us such variety of illustration of the two great antagonistic principles of human life — self-pleasing and self-abnegation, love of pleasure and the love of God more or less absolute and consummate — that it is no easy task to select from among them.  But two figures stand out before us, each portrayed with such finished yet unlaboured art — living, moving, talking before us — contrasted with such exquisite yet unobtrusive delicacy, and so subtilely illustrating the two great phases of human inspiration and life — that which centres in self, and that which yearns and seeks to lose itself in the infinite of truth, purity, and love — that instinctively and irresistibly the mind fixes upon them.  These are Dorothea and Rosamond Vincy.

To not a few of George Eliot’s readers, we believe that Dorothea is and will always be a fairer and more attractive form than Dinah Morris or Romola di Bardi, Fedalma or Mirah Cohen.  In her sweet young enthusiasm, often unguided or misguided by its very intensity, but always struggling and tending on toward the highest good; in the touching maidenly simplicity with which she at once identifies and accepts Mr Casaubon as her guide and support toward a higher, less self-contained and self-pleasing, more inclusive and all-embracing life; in the yearning pain with which the first dread of possible disappointment dawns and darkens over her, and the meek humility of her repentance on the one faint betrayal — wrung from her by momentary anguish — of that disappointment; in the tender wifely patience, reticence, forbearance, with which she hides from all, the heart-gnawings of shattered and expiring hope; the sense which she can no longer veil from her own deepest consciousness that in Mr Casaubon there is no help or stay for her and the unwearied though too soon unhoping earnestness with which she labours to establish true relations between herself and her uncongenial mate; in the patient yet crushing anguish of that long night’s heart-struggle which precedes the close — a struggle not against her own higher self, but whether she dare bind down that higher self to a lifelong, narrow, worthless task, and the aching consciousness of what — almost against conscience and right — her answer must be; — there is an inexpressible charm and loveliness in all this which no one, not utterly dead to all that is fairest and best in womanhood, can fail to recognise.

Not less wonderfully depicted is the guileless frankness which, from first to last, characterises her whole relations to Ladislaw.  If there is one flaw in this noble work, it is that Ladislaw on first examination is scarcely equal to this exquisite creation.  Yet it might have been nearly as difficult even for George Eliot to satisfy our instinctive cravings in this particular with regard to Dorothea, as in respect to Romola or Fedalma.  And when we study her portrait of Ladislaw more carefully, there is a latent beauty and nobleness about him; an innate and intense reverence for the highest and purest, and an unvarying aim and struggle toward it; an utter scorn and loathing of everything mean and base, — that almost makes us cancel the word flaw.  We recognise this nobleness of nature almost on his first appearance, in the deep reverence with which he regards Dorothea, the fulness with which he penetrates the guileless candour of the relation she assumes to him, the entireness of his trust in the spotless purity of her whole nature.  And in him we have presented all those essential and fundamental elements of nature which give assurance that, Dorothea by his side, he shall be no unfitting helpmeet to her, no drag or hindrance on her higher life; that he shall rise to the elevation and purity of her self-consecration, and shall stand by her side sustaining, guiding, expanding that life of ever-growing fulness and human helpfulness to which each is dedicated.

But the essence of all this moral and spiritual loveliness is its unconsciousness.  Self has no place in it.  From the first the one absorbing life aim and action is toward others — toward aiding the toils, advancing the well-being, relieving the suffering, elevating the life, of all around her.  And this in no spirit of self-satisfied and vainglorious self-estimation, but in that utter unconsciousness which is characteristic of her whole being.  Of the social reformer, the purposed philanthropist, the benefactor of the poor, the wretched, and the fallen, there is no trace in Dorothea Brooke.  Grant that, as she is first presented to us, that aim is for the time apparently concentrated in improved cottage accommodation for the poor; even here there is no thought of displaying the skill of the design and contriver: there is thought alone of the object she seeks — ameliorating the condition of those she yearns to benefit.

In her very first interview with Casaubon, there is something inexpressibly touching in the humility of childlike trust with which she accepts him and his “great mind,” and the innocent purity with which she allows herself to indulge the vision of a life passed by his side; a life which he, by his influence and guidance, is to make more full and free, and delivered from those conventionalities of custom and fashion which restrict it.  At last his cold, formal proposal of marriage is made.  She sees nothing of its true character — that he is but seeking, not an helpmeet for life and soul in all their higher requirements, but simply and solely a kind of superior, blindly submissive dependant and drudge.  In the
impossibility
of marriage presenting itself to her purity of maiden innocence as a mere establishment in life, or in any of those meaner aspects in which meaner natures regard it, she sees nothing of all this — nothing save that the yearning of her heart is fulfilled, and that henceforth her life shall pass under a higher guardianship, sustained by a holier strength, animated by a more self-expansive fulness, guided toward nobler and fuller aims.

Picturing to some extent, in degree as we are capable of entering into a nature like hers, the anguish that such an awakening must be to her, it is exquisitely painful to follow in imagination the slow sure process of her awakening to what this man, who “has no good red blood in his body,” really is — a cold, shallow pedant, whose entire existence is bound up in researches, with regard to which he even shrinks from inquiry as to whether all he has for years been vaguely attempting has not been anticipated, and whose intense and absorbing egoism makes the remotest hint of depreciation pierce like a dagger.  The first faint dawn of discovery breaks on her almost immediately on their arrival at Rome.  Conscious of her want of mere æsthetic culture — neglected in the past as a turning aside from life’s highest aims — she has looked forward to his guidance and support for the supply of this want as enlarging her whole being; broadening and deepening, refining and elevating all its sympathies.  For all shadow of aid or sympathy here, she finds herself as utterly alone as if she were in a trackless and uninhabited desert.  Nay, more: he who sits by her side is as cold and dead to all sensations or emotions that art can enkindle, as the glorious marbles amid which they wander.  Soon she finds herself relegated to the society and fellowship of her maid; her husband is less to her, is incapable of being other than less, amid those transcendant treasures of architecture, painting, and sculpture, than a hired guide or cicerone would be.