That
which gives its deep and awful power to the picture is its simple,
unstrained, unvarnished truthfulness. He knows little of himself who
does not recognise as existent within himself, and as always battling for
supremacy there, that principle of evil which, accepted by Tito as his
life-law, and therefore consummating itself in him, "bringeth forth
death;" death the most utter and, so far as it is possible to see, the
most hopeless that can engulf the human soul.
The conception of Tito as one great central figure in a work of art would
scarcely, we think, have occurred to any one whose moral aim was other
than that which it is the endeavour of these remarks to trace out in
George Eliot's works. The working out of that conception, as it is here
worked out, would, we believe, have been impossible to any one who had
less strongly realised wherein all the true nobleness and all the true
debasement of humanity lie.
Outwardly, on his first appearance, there is not merely nothing repellent
about Tito; in person and manner, in genial kindly temper, in those very
forms of intelligence and accomplishment that specially suit the city and
the time, there is superficially everything to conciliate and attract.
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