Views and Reviews Part 6

"But all this is a mistake. To become adopted as a national poet, it is not enough to discard everything in particular and to accept everything in general, to ama.s.s crudity upon crudity, to discharge the undigested contents of your blotting-book into the lap of the public. You must respect the public which you address; for it has taste, if you have not.

It delights in the grand, the heroic, and the masculine; but it delights to see these conceptions cast into worthy form. It is indifferent to brute sublimity. It will never do for you to thrust your hands into your pockets and cry out that, as the research of form is an intolerable bore, the shortest and most economical way for the public to embrace its idols--for the nation to realise its genius--is in your own person.

"This democratic, liberty-loving, American populace, this stern and war-tried people, is a great civiliser. It is devoted to refinement. If it has sustained a monstrous war, and practised human nature's best in so many ways for the last five years, it is not to put up with spurious poetry afterwards. To sing aright our battles and our glories it is not enough to have served in a hospital (however praiseworthy the task in itself), to be aggressively careless, inelegant, and ignorant, and to be constantly preoccupied with yourself. It is not enough to be rude, lugubrious, and grim. You must also be serious. You must forget yourself in your ideas. Your personal qualities--the vigour of your temperament, the manly independence of your nature, the tenderness of your heart--these facts are impertinent. You must be _possessed_, and you must thrive to possess your possession. If in your striving you break into divine eloquence, then you are a poet. If the idea which possesses you is the idea of your country's greatness, then you are a national poet; and not otherwise."

THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT

I. A review of _The Spanish Gypsy_. _A Poem._ By George Eliot.

Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1868. Originally published in _North American Review_, October, 1868.

II. A review of _The Legend of Jubal, and other Poems_. By George Eliot. Wm. Blackwood and Sons: Edinburgh and London. 1874.

Originally published in _North American Review_, October, 1874.

THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT

I. THE SPANISH GYPSY

I know not whether George Eliot has any enemies, nor why she should have any; but if perchance she has, I can imagine them to have hailed the announcement of a poem from her pen as a piece of particularly good news. "Now, finally," I fancy them saying, "this sadly over-rated author will exhibit all the weakness that is in her; now she will prove herself what we have all along affirmed her to be--not a serene, self-directing genius of the first order, knowing her powers and respecting them, and content to leave well enough alone, but a mere showy rhetorician, possessed and prompted, not by the humble spirit of truth, but by an insatiable longing for applause." Suppose Mr. Tennyson were to come out with a novel, or Madame George Sand were to produce a tragedy in French alexandrines. The reader will agree with me, that these are hard suppositions; yet the world has seen stranger things, and been reconciled to them. Nevertheless, with the best possible will toward our ill.u.s.trious novelist, it is easy to put ourselves in the shoes of these hypothetical detractors. No one, a.s.suredly, but George Eliot could mar George Eliot's reputation; but there was room for the fear that she might do it. This reputation was essentially prose-built, and in the attempt to insert a figment of verse of the magnitude of _The Spanish Gypsy_, it was quite possible that she might injure its fair proportions.

In consulting her past works, for approval of their hopes and their fears, I think both her friends and her foes would have found sufficient ground for their arguments. Of all our English prose-writers of the present day, I think I may say, that, as a writer simply, a mistress of style, I have been very near preferring the author of _Silas Marner_ and of _Romola_,--the author, too, of _Felix Holt_. The motive of my great regard for her style I take to have been that I fancied it such perfect solid prose. Brilliant and lax as it was in tissue, it seemed to contain very few of the silken threads of poetry; it lay on the ground like a carpet, instead of floating in the air like a banner. If my impression was correct, _The Spanish Gypsy_ is not a genuine poem. And yet, looking over the author's novels in memory, looking them over in the light of her unexpected a.s.sumption of the poetical function, I find it hard at times not to mistrust my impression. I like George Eliot well enough, in fact, to admit, for the time, that I might have been in the wrong. If I had liked her less, if I had rated lower the quality of her prose, I should have estimated coldly the possibilities of her verse. Of course, therefore, if, as I am told many persons do in England, who consider carpenters and weavers and millers' daughters no legitimate subject for reputable fiction, I had denied her novels any qualities at all, I should have made haste, on reading the announcement of her poem, to speak of her as the world speaks of a lady, who, having reached a comfortable middle age, with her shoulders decently covered, "for reasons deep below the reach of thought," (to quote our author), begins to go out to dinner in a low-necked dress "of the period," and say in fine, in three words, that she was going to make a fool of herself.

But here, meanwhile, is the book before me, to arrest all this _a priori_ argumentation. Time enough has elapsed since its appearance for most readers to have uttered their opinions, and for the general verdict of criticism to have been formed. In looking over several of the published reviews, I am struck with the fact that those immediately issued are full of the warmest delight and approval, and that, as the work ceases to be a novelty, objections, exceptions, and protests multiply. This is quite logical. Not only does it take a much longer time than the reviewer on a weekly journal has at his command to properly appreciate a work of the importance of _The Spanish Gypsy_, but the poem was actually much more of a poem than was to be expected. The foremost feeling of many readers must have been--it was certainly my own--that we had hitherto only half known George Eliot. Adding this dazzling new half to the old one, readers constructed for the moment a really splendid literary figure. But gradually the old half began to absorb the new, and to a.s.similate its virtues and failings, and critics finally remembered that the cleverest writer in the world is after all nothing and no one but himself.

The most striking quality in _The Spanish Gypsy_, on a first reading, I think, is its extraordinary rhetorical energy and elegance. The richness of the author's style in her novels gives but an inadequate idea of the splendid generosity of diction displayed in the poem. She is so much of a thinker and an observer that she draws very heavily on her powers of expression, and one may certainly say that they not only never fail her, but that verbal utterance almost always bestows upon her ideas a peculiar beauty and fullness, apart from their significance. The result produced in this manner, the reader will see, may come very near being poetry; it is a.s.suredly eloquence. The faults in the present work are very seldom faults of weakness, except in so far as it is weak to lack an absolute mastery of one's powers; they arise rather from an excess of rhetorical energy, from a desire to attain to perfect fullness and roundness of utterance; they are faults of overstatement. It is by no means uncommon to find a really fine pa.s.sage injured by the addition of a clause which dilutes the idea under pretence of completing it. The poem opens, for instance, with a description of

"Broad-breasted Spain, leaning with equal love (A calm earth-G.o.ddess crowned with corn and vines) On the Mid Sea that moans with memories, And on the untravelled Ocean, _whose vast tides Pant dumbly pa.s.sionate with dreams of youth_."

The second half of the fourth line and the fifth, here, seem to me as poor as the others are good. So in the midst of the admirable description of Don Silva, which precedes the first scene in the castle:--

"A spirit framed Too proudly special for obedience, Too subtly pondering for mastery: Born of a G.o.ddess with a mortal sire, Heir of flesh-fettered, weak divinity, _Doom-gifted with long resonant consciousness And perilous heightening of the sentient soul_."

The transition to the lines in Italic is like the pa.s.sage from a well-ventilated room into a vacuum. On reflection, we see "long resonant consciousness" to be a very good term; but, as it stands, it certainly lacks breathing-s.p.a.ce. On the other hand, there are more than enough pa.s.sages of the character of the following to support what I have said of the genuine splendour of the style:--

"I was right!

These gems have life in them: their colours speak, Say what words fail of. So do many things,-- The scent of jasmine and the fountain's plash, The moving shadows on the far-off hills, The slanting moonlight and our clasping hands.

O Silva, there's an ocean round our words, That overflows and drowns them. Do you know.

Sometimes when we sit silent, and the air Breathes gently on us from the orange-trees, It seems that with the whisper of a word Our souls must shrink, get poorer, more apart?

Is it not true?

DON SILVA.

Yes, dearest, it is true.

Speech is but broken light upon the depth Of the unspoken: even your loved words Float in the larger meaning of your voice As something dimmer."

I may say in general, that the author's admirers must have found in _The Spanish Gypsy_ a presentment of her various special gifts stronger and fuller, on the whole, than any to be found in her novels. Those who valued her chiefly for her humour--the gentle humour which provokes a smile, but deprecates a laugh--will recognise that delightful gift in Blasco, and Lorenzo, and Roldan, and Juan,--slighter in quant.i.ty than in her prose-writings, but quite equal, I think, in quality. Those who prize most her descriptive powers will see them wondrously well embodied in these pages. As for those who have felt compelled to declare that she possesses the Shakespearian touch, they must consent, with what grace they may, to be disappointed. I have never thought our author a great dramatist, nor even a particularly dramatic writer. A real dramatist, I imagine, could never have reconciled himself to the odd mixture of the narrative and dramatic forms by which the present work is distinguished; and that George Eliot's genius should have needed to work under these conditions seems to me strong evidence of the partial and incomplete character of her dramatic instincts. An English critic lately described her, with much correctness, as a critic rather than a creator of characters. She puts her figures into action very successfully, but on the whole she thinks for them more than they think for themselves. She thinks, however, to wonderfully good purpose. In none of her works are there two more distinctly human representations than the characters of Silva and Juan. The latter, indeed, if I am not mistaken, ranks with t.i.to Melema and Hetty Sorrel, as one of her very best conceptions.

What is commonly called George Eliot's humour consists largely, I think, in a certain tendency to epigram and compactness of utterance,--not the short-clipped, biting, ironical epigram, but a form of statement in which a liberal dose of truth is embraced in terms none the less comprehensive for being very firm and vivid. Juan says of Zarca that

"He is one of those Who steal the keys from snoring Destiny, And make the prophets lie."

Zarca himself, speaking of "the steadfast mind, the undivided will to seek the good," says most admirably,--

"'Tis that compels the elements, _and wrings A human music from the indifferent air_."

When the Prior p.r.o.nounces Fedalma's blood "unchristian as the leopard's," Don Silva retorts with,--

"Unchristian as the Blessed Virgin's blood.

Before the angel spoke the word, 'All hail!'"

Zarca qualifies his daughter's wish to maintain her faith to her lover, at the same time that she embraces her father's fortunes, as

"A woman's dream,--who thinks by smiling well To ripen figs in frost."

This happy brevity of expression is frequently revealed in those rich descriptive pa.s.sages and touches in which the work abounds. Some of the lines taken singly are excellent:--

"And bells make Catholic the trembling air";

and,

"Sad as the twilight, all his clothes ill-girt";

and again

"Mournful professor of high drollery."

Here is a very good line and a half:--

"The old rain-fretted mountains in their robes Of shadow-broken gray."

Here, finally, are three admirable pictures:--

"The stars thin-scattered made the heavens large, Bending in slow procession; in the east, Emergent from the dark waves of the hills, Seeming a little sister of the moon, Glowed Venus all unquenched."

"Spring afternoons, when delicate shadows fall Pencilled upon the gra.s.s; high summer morns, When white light rains upon the quiet sea, And cornfields flush for ripeness."

"Scent the fresh breath of the height-loving herbs, That, trodden by the pretty parted hoofs Of nimble goats, sigh at the innocent bruise, And with a mingled difference exquisite Pour a sweet burden on the buoyant air."

But now to reach the real substance of the poem, and to allow the reader to appreciate the author's treatment of human character and pa.s.sion, I must speak briefly of the story. I shall hardly misrepresent it, when I say that it is a very old one, and that it ill.u.s.trates that very common occurrence in human affairs,--the conflict of love and duty. Such, at least, is the general impression made by the poem as it stands. It is very possible that the author's primary intention may have had a breadth which has been curtailed in the execution of the work,--that it was her wish to present a struggle between nature and culture, between education and the instinct of race. You can detect in such a theme the stuff of a very good drama,--a somewhat stouter stuff, however, than _The Spanish Gypsy_ is made of. George Eliot, true to that didactic tendency for which she has. .h.i.therto been remarkable, has preferred to make her heroine's predicament a problem in morals, and has thereby, I think, given herself hard work to reach a satisfactory solution. She has, indeed, committed herself to a signal error, in a psychological sense,--that of making a Gypsy girl with a conscience. Either Fedalma was a perfect Zincala in temper and instinct,--in which case her adhesion to her father and her race was a blind, pa.s.sionate, sensuous movement, which is almost expressly contradicted,--or else she was a pure and intelligent Catholic, in which case nothing in the nature of a struggle can be predicated. The character of Fedalma, I may say, comes very near being a failure,--a very beautiful one; but in point of fact it misses it.

It misses it, I think, thanks to that circ.u.mstance which in reading and criticising _The Spanish Gypsy_ we must not cease to bear in mind, the fact that the work is emphatically a _romance_. We may contest its being a poem, but we must admit that it is a romance in the fullest sense of the word. Whether the term may be absolutely defined I know not; but we may say of it, comparing it with the novel, that it carries much farther that compromise with reality which is the basis of all imaginative writing. In the romance this principle of compromise pervades the superstructure as well as the basis. The most that we exact is that the fable be consistent with itself. Fedalma is not a real Gypsy maiden. The conviction is strong in the reader's mind that a genuine Spanish Zincala would have somehow contrived both to follow her tribe and to keep her lover. If Fedalma is not real, Zarca is even less so. He is interesting, imposing, picturesque; but he is very far, I take it, from being a genuine _Gypsy_ chieftain. They are both ideal figures,--the offspring of a strong mental desire for creatures well rounded in their elevation and heroism,--creatures who should ill.u.s.trate the n.o.bleness of human nature divorced from its smallness. Don Silva has decidedly more of the common stuff of human feeling, more charming natural pa.s.sion and weakness. But he, too, is largely a vision of the intellect; his const.i.tution is adapted to the atmosphere and the climate of romance.

Juan, indeed, has one foot well planted on the lower earth; but Juan is only an accessory figure. I have said enough to lead the reader to perceive that the poem should not be regarded as a rigid transcript of actual or possible fact,--that the action goes on in an artificial world, and that properly to comprehend it he must regard it with a generous mind.