despair is reached when the
Prior, the man whom he has impeached as the true author of all his sin,
is led forth to die. Then all sophistries are swept away, and the full
import of his deed glares up before him, and its import as _his_, only
and wholly his. Zarca, in his high self-possession of soul, almost
pitying while he cannot but despise, presents a fitting object on which
all the fierce conflicting passions of wrath, self-accusing remorse, and
despair, may vent themselves; and the sudden and treacherous deed, which

"Strangles one
Whom ages watch for vainly,"

gives also to Don Silva himself to carry

"For ever with him what he fled--
_Her_ murdered love--her love, a dear wronged ghost,
Facing him, beauteous, 'mid the throngs of hell."

Few authors or artists but George Eliot could have won us again to look
on Don Silva except with revulsion or disgust; and it is characteristic
of more than all ordinary power that through the deep impressive
solemnity of the closing scene, he, the renegade and murderer, almost
divides our interest and sympathy with Fedalma herself; and this by no
condoning of his guilt, no extenuation of the depth of his fall, for
these are here, most of all, kept ever before our eyes. But the better
and nobler elements of his nature, throughout all his degradation
revealed to us as never wholly overborne, as ever struggling to assert
themselves, have begun to prevail, and to put down from supremacy that
meaner self which has led him into such abysses of faithlessness,
apostasy, and sin. The wild despair of remorse is giving way to the self-
renunciation of repentance; the storm of conflicting passions and
emotions is stilled; the fearful battle between good and evil through
which he has passed has left him exhausted of every hope and aim save to
die, repentant and absolved, for the country and faith he had abjured.
The self-assertion, too, of love is gone, and only its deep purity and
tenderness remain. Without murmur or remonstrance, he acquiesces in the
doom of hopeless separation; accepting all that remains possible to him
of that "high allegiance higher than our love," which is thenceforth the
only bond of union between these two. In that last sad interview with
her for whom he had so fearfully sinned, and so all but utterly fallen,
we can regard Don Silva with a fuller and truer sympathy than we dare
accord to him in all the height of his greatness, and a