asks the question--

"But is it _what_ we love, or _how_ we love,
That makes true good?"

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