Studies in Early Victorian Literature Part 9

O the sweet sweet prime Of the past spring-time!)--

with its strange alternations of action and narration, its soliloquies of 150 unbroken lines, and all its other incongruities. The important point is, that it has a really grand scheme, that the characters of Zarca and of Fedalma are lofty, impressive, and n.o.bly dramatic, that the whole poem is, in conception, a work of power and true imagination.

Just as Kingsley, who had far greater poetic faculty than George Eliot, mistook in making the _Saint's Tragedy_ a drama, when he might have made it a grand historical romance, so George Eliot made a cruel mistake in writing the _Spanish Gypsy_ as a poem, when she might have written it as an historical romance--a romance, it may be, much superior to _Romola_, as the subject and the conception were on grander lines.

It is to me a truly melancholy duty to have to admit that so much in the n.o.ble conceptions and rich thought of George Eliot was not a complete success in ultimate execution--and that, in great measure, because the conception and aim were so great and the execution so profoundly conscientious. I knew her well, I was amongst those who had the deepest regard for her mental power and her moral insight. I always recognised her as one of the best and most cultured minds of her time. I had great faith in her judgment, and could respect her courage even when I repudiated her opinions. But I never was one of those who exaggerated her gifts as an artist. I never could count anything later than _Silas Marner_ as a complete and unqualified masterpiece. One may have the imaginative power shown by Michael Angelo in his Sistine Chapel, or his Medicean tombs, and yet, if one is not complete master of the brush and the chisel, no imagination, no thought, will produce a masterpiece in fresco or in marble. George Eliot was a most thoughtful artist, but she was more of a thinker than an artist; she was always more the artist when she was least the thinker; and when she conceived a work of art in her sublimest aspirations (as notably in _The Spanish Gypsy_), she almost makes us doubt if she were an artist at all.

She was an artist; and the younger generations will make an unpardonable error if they fail to do justice to the permanent survival of her best and earliest work. They will also be guilty of unpardonable blindness if they fail to note how completely she stands above all her contemporary rivals in romance, by thought, by knowledge, by n.o.bility of aim. She raised the whole art of romance into a higher plane of thought, of culture, and of philosophic grasp. And when she failed, it was often by reason of the n.o.bility of her aim itself, of the volume of her own learning, of the intensity of her own standard of perfection. Her pa.s.sages in prose are studied with the care that men usually bestow on a sonnet; her accessories and landscapes are patient and conscientious transcripts of actual spots of country and town; her drama is a problem of ethical teaching, subtly elaborated, and minutely probed. In these high aims and difficult ambitions, she not seldom failed, or achieved a somewhat academic and qualified success. But the task was not seldom such that even to have fallen short of complete success was a far from ign.o.ble triumph.

She raised the whole art of romance to a higher plane, I say; and, although in this ambitious aim she too often sacrificed freshness, ease, and simplicity, the weight of the limits she imposed on herself must fairly be counted in the balance. Romance had never before in England been written with such a sense of responsibility, with such eager subtlety of form, and with such high ethical purpose. The sense of responsibility wearies many readers, and at last crushed the writer; the form became "precious," and at last pedantic; and the ethical purpose was sometimes more visible than the ethical life. In the French drama Corneille had great conceptions, n.o.ble types of character, stately verse, and tragic situations; but English readers too often find him mannered, artificial, dull. Corneille, I freely admit, is not Shakespeare: I greatly prefer Shakespeare; but I prefer Corneille to Ibsen. We have plenty of Ibsenites to-day, and rather a plethora than a dearth of ign.o.ble creatures in squalid situations who expose to us their mean lives with considerable truth to nature. In such an age, it is just as well that the lessons of _Adam Bede_, _Romola_, Fedalma and Zarca, should not be quite forgotten.

The art of romance, in the widest and loftiest sense of the term, is even yet in its infancy. Ancient literature, mediaeval literature, knew nothing of it. Nor indeed did modern literature entirely conceive it in all its fulness until the days of Le Sage, Richardson, Fielding, and Goldsmith. Nay, we may say that its power was not quite revealed before Scott, Goethe, Manzoni, Jane Austen, Balzac, Thackeray, d.i.c.kens, and George Sand. Its subtlety, its flexibility, its capacity for a.n.a.lytic research, its variety of range, and facility for reaching all hearts and all minds--all this is simply incalculable. And we may be sure that the star of romance has not yet reached its zenith. It is the art of the future--and an art wherein women are quite as likely to reign as men. It would be treason to Art to pretend that George Eliot came near to such perfection. But she had certain qualities that none of her predecessors had quite possessed, and she strove for an ideal which may one day become something more than a dream--a dream that as yet eludes and escapes from the mind as it struggles to grasp it and to fix it.