self-devotion to the highest and
holiest that knows no change for ever.

"A man of high-wrought strain, fastidious
In his acceptance, dreading all delight
That speedy dies and turns to carrion.
. . . . . .
A nature half-transformed, with qualities
That oft bewrayed each other, elements
Not blent but struggling, breeding strange effects.
. . . . . A spirit framed
Too proudly special for obedience,
Too subtly pondering for mastery:
Born of a goddess with a mortal sire;
Heir of flesh-fettered weak divinity.
. . . A nature quiveringly poised
In reach of storms, whose qualities may turn
To murdered virtues that still walk as ghosts
Within the shuddering soul and shriek remorse."

Such is Duke Silva: and in this portraiture is up-folded the dark and
awful story of his life. Noble, generous, chivalrous; strong alike by
mind and by heart to cast off the hard and cruel superstition of his age
and country; capable of a love pure, deep, trustful, and to all
appearance self-forgetting, beyond what men are usually capable of;
trenching in every quality close on the true heroic: he yet falls as
absolutely short of it as a man can do who has not, like Tito Melema, by
his own will coalescing with the unchangeable laws of right, foreordained
himself to utter and hopeless spiritual death. It was, perhaps, needful
he should be portrayed as thus nearly approaching true nobility;
otherwise such perfect love from such a nature as Fedalma's were
inexplicable, almost impossible. But this was still more needful toward
the fulfilment of the author's purpose: the showing how the one deadly
plague-spot shall weaken the strongest and vitiate the purest life. Every
element of the heroic is there except that one element without which the
truly heroic is impossible: he cannot "deny himself." Superficially,
indeed, it might seem that self was not the object of his regard, but
Fedalma: and by much of the distorted, distorting, and radically immoral
fiction of the day, his sacrifice of everything for her love's sake would
have been held up to us as the crowning glory of his heroism, and the
consummation of his claims upon our sympathy and admiration. George
Eliot has seen with a different and a clearer eye: and in Duke Silva's
placing--not his love, but--the earthly fulfilment of his love above
honour and faith, she finds at the root the same vital corruption of self-
pleasing which conducts Ti