Most seriously and solemnly is the question answered through her after-life.  To love less wholly, purely, unselfishly—­yet still holding the outward claims of that love subordinate to a possible still higher and more imperative claim—­to such a nature as hers is no love and no true good at all.  And this thirst for the highest alike in love and life includes her lover as well as herself.  The darkest terror that overtakes her in all those after-scenes comes when he is about to abjure country, honour, and God on her account.  To her, the Gypsy, without a country, without a faith save faithfulness to the highest right, without a God such as the Spaniards’ God, this might be a small thing.  But for him, Spanish noble and Christian knight, she knows it to be abnegation of nobleness, treason to duty, dishonour and shame.  She is jealous for his truth, but the more that its breach might seem to secure her own happiness.

The first and decisive scene with her Gypsy father is so true in conception, and so full of poetic force and grandeur throughout, that no analysis, nothing short of extracting the whole, can do justice to it.  Seldom before has art in any guise placed the grand, heroic, self-devoting purpose of a grand, heroic, self-devoting nature more impressively before us than in the Gypsy chief.  It is easy to think and speak of such an enterprise as Quixotic and impossible.  There is a stage in every great enterprise humanity has ever undertaken when it might be so characterised:  and the greatest of all enterprises, when an obscure Jew stood forth to become light and life, not to a tribe or a race, but to humanity, was to the judgers according to appearance of His day, the most Quixotic and impossible of all.

It has been felt and urged as an objection to this scene, and consequently to the whole scheme of the drama, that such influence, so immediately exerted over Fedalma by a father whom till then she had never known, is unnatural if not impossible.  If it were only as father and daughter they thus stand face to face, there might be force in the objection.  But this very partially and inadequately expresses the relation between these two.  It is the father possessed with a lofty, self-devoting purpose, who calls to share in, and to aid it, the daughter whose nature is strung to the same lofty, self-devoting pitch.  It is the saviour of an oppressed, degraded, outcast race, who calls to share his mission her who could feel the brightness of her joy of love brightened still more by the hope of assuaging sorrow and redressing evil.  It is the appeal through the father of that which is highest and noblest in humanity to that which is most deeply inwrought into the daughter’s soul.  To a narrower and meaner nature the appeal would have been addressed by any father in vain:  for a narrower and meaner end, the appeal even by such a father would have been addressed to Fedalma in vain.  With her it cannot but prevail, unless she is content to forego—­not merely her father’s love and trust, but—­her own deepest and truest life.