* * * * *

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.  For the warm and swift Italian we have the yet warmer and swifter Gypsy blood; for the long line of noble ancestry, descent from an outcast and degraded race; for the nurture amid the environments, almost in the creed of classicism, the upbringing under noble female charge in a household of that land where the Roman Church had just sealed its full supremacy by the establishment of the Inquisition; for the era when Italian subtleties of thought, policy, and action had attained their highest elaboration, the grander and simpler time when

            “Castilian gentlemen
   Choose not their task—­they choose to do it well.”

But howsoever modified through these and other accessories of existence are the more superficial aspects of character, and the whole outward form and course of life, the great vital principle is the same in both;—­clearness to see, nobleness to choose, steadfastness to pursue, the highest good that life presents, through whatsoever anguish, darkness, and death of all joy and hope the path may lead.

On Fedalma’s first appearance on the wonderful scene upon the Placa, she presents herself as emphatically what her poet-worshipper Juan hymns her, the “child of light”—­a creature so tremulously sensitive to all beauty, brightness, and joy, that it seems as if she could not co-exist with darkness and sorrow.  But even then we have intimated to us that vital quality in her nature which makes all self-sacrifice possible; and which assures us that, whenever her life-choice shall come to lie between enjoyment and right, she shall choose the higher though the harder path.  For her joy is essentially the joy of sympathy; mere self has no place in it.  In her exquisite justification of the Placa scene to Don Silva, she herself defines it in one line better than all words of ours can do—­

   “I was not, but joy was, and love and triumph.”