The sensational fiction of the day has laboured hard in the production of great criminals; but it has produced no human being so vitally debased, no nature so utterly loathsome, no soul so hopelessly lost, as the handsome, smiling, accomplished, popular, viceless Greek, Tito Melema.  Yet is he the very reverse of what is called a monster of iniquity.  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.  It is almost impossible to define the subtle threads of indication through which, from the first, we are forced to distrust him.  Superficially, it might seem at this time as if with Tito the probabilities were equal as regards good and evil; and that with Romola’s love thrown into the scale, their preponderance on the side of good were all but irresistible.  Yet from the first we feel that it is otherwise—­that this light, genial, ease-loving nature has already, by its innate habitude of self-pleasing, foreordained itself to sink down into ever deeper and more utter debasement.  With the “slight, almost imperceptible start,” at the accidental words which connect the value of his jewels with “a man’s ransom,” we feel that some baseness is already within himself contemplated.  With the transference of their price to the goldsmith’s hands, we know that the baseness is in his heart resolved on.  When the message through the monk tells him that the ransom may still be available, we never doubt what the decision will be.  Present ease and enjoyment, the maintaining and improving the position he has won—­in short, the “something that is due to himself,” rather than a distant, dangerous, possibly fruitless duty, howsoever clear.

The one purer feeling in that corrupt heart—­his love for Romola—­is almost from the first tainted by the same selfishness.  From the first he recognises that his relation to her will give him a certain position in the city; and he feels that with his ready tact and Greek suppleness this is all that is needed to secure his further advancement.  The vital antagonism between his nature and hers bars the possibility of his foreseeing how her truthfulness, nobleness, and purity shall become the thorn in his ease-loving life.