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.
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