George Eliot; a Critical Study of Her Life, Writings and Philosophy Part 23

I go to Rome, to seek The right to use my knightly sword again; The right to fill my place and live or die So that all Spaniards shall not curse my name.

I sate one hour upon the barren rock And longed to kill myself; but then I said, I will not leave my name in infamy, I will not be perpetual rottenness Upon the Spaniard's air. If I must sink At last to h.e.l.l, I will not take my stand Among the coward crew who could not bear The harm themselves had done, which others bore.

My young life yet may fill some fatal breach, And I will take no pardon, not my own, Not G.o.d's--no pardon idly on my knees; But it shall come to me upon my feet And in the thick of action, and each deed That carried shame and wrong shall be the sting That drives me higher up the steep of honor In deeds of duteous service to that Spain Who nourished me on her expectant breast, The heir of highest gifts. I will not fling My earthly being down for carrion To fill the air with loathing: I will be The living prey of some fierce n.o.ble death That leaps upon me while I move. Aloud I said, "I will redeem my name," and then-- I know not if aloud: I felt the words Drinking up all my senses--"She still lives.

I would not quit the dear familiar earth Where both of us behold the self-same sun, Where there can be no strangeness 'twixt our thoughts So deep as their communion." Resolute I rose and walked.--Fedalma, think of me As one who will regain the only life Where he is other than apostate--one Who seeks but to renew and keep the vows Of Spanish knight and n.o.ble. But the breach-- Outside those vows--the fatal second breach-- Lies a dark gulf where I have naught to cast, Not even expiation--poor pretence, Which changes naught but what survives the past, And raises not the dead. That deep dark gulf Divide us.

FEDALMA.

Yes, forever. We must walk Apart unto the end. Our marriage rite Is our resolve that we will each be true To high allegiance, higher than our love.

Our dear young love--its breath was happiness!

But it had grown upon a larger life Which tore its roots asunder. We rebelled-- The larger life subdued us. Yet we are wed; For we shall carry each the pressure deep Of the other's soul. I soon shall leave the sh.o.r.e.

The winds to-night will bear me far away.

My lord, farewell!

What has been said of _The Spanish Gypsy_ applies very nearly as well to all her other poems. They are thoughtful, philosophic, realistic; they are sonorous in expression, stately in style, and of a diction eloquent and beautiful. On the whole, the volume containing the shorter poems is a poetical advance on _The Spanish Gypsy_, containing more genuine poetry, more lyrical fire, and a greater proportion of humor, sympathy and pa.s.sion.

They are carefully polished and refined; and yet that indefinable something which marks the truest poetry is wanting. They are saturated with her ideas, the flavor of her thought impregnates them all, with but two or three exceptions.

Her artistic conceptions are more fully developed in some of these poems than in any of her novels, especially in "Armgart" and "The Legend of Jubal." The special thought of "Armgart" is, that no artistic success is of so much worth as a loving sympathy with others. The longing of Armgart was to be--

a happy spiritual star Such as old Dante saw, wrought in a rose Of light in Paradise, whose only self Was consciousness of glory wide-diffused, Music, life, power--I moving in the midst With a sublime necessity of good.

Her ambition runs very high.

May the day be near when men Think much to let my horses draw me home, And new lands welcome me upon their beach, Loving me for my fame. That is the truth Of what I wish, nay, yearn for. Shall I lie?

Pretend to seek obscurity--to sing In hope of disregard? A vile pretence!

And blasphemy besides. For what is fame But the benignant strength of One, transformed To joy of Many? Tributes, plaudits come As necessary breathing of such joy; And may they come to me!

Armgart is beloved of the Graf, and he tries to persuade her to abandon her artistic career and become his wife. He says to her,--

A woman's rank Lies in the fulness of her womanhood: Therein alone she is loyal.

Again he says to her,--

Pain had been saved, Nay, purer glory reached, had you been throned As woman only, holding all your art As attribute to that dear sovereignty-- Concentering your power in home delights Which penetrate and purify the world.

Armgart will not listen; her whole heart is enlisted in music. She says to the Graf,--

I will live alone and pour my pain With pa.s.sion into music, where it turns To what is best within my better self.

A year later Armgart's throat has failed, and her career has ended in nothing. Then her servant and friend, Walpurga, who has devoted her life to Armgart, speaks that lesson George Eliot would convey in this little story, that a true life is a life of service. Walpurga chides Armgart's false ambition in these words:

I but stand As a small symbol for the mighty sum Of claims unpaid to needy myriads; I think you never set your loss beside That mighty deficit. Is your work gone-- The prouder queenly work that paid itself And yet was overpaid with men's applause!

Are you no longer chartered, privileged, But sunk to simple woman's penury, To ruthless Nature's chary average-- Where is the rebel's right for you alone?

n.o.ble rebellion lifts a common load; But what is he who flings his own load off And leaves his fellows toiling? Rebel's right?

Say, rather, the deserter's.

Armgart learns from her master, the old and n.o.ble Leo, that he had also been ambitious, that he had won only small success, and that he now lived for the sake of the good he could do to those about him. He says to her,--

We must bury our dead joys, And live above them with a living world.

Then Armgart is brought to see that there is a n.o.ble privilege in living as her friend has lived, in making music a joy to others, and in doing what she can to make life better for humanity.

There are two very distinct ideas running through the poem, that a life guided by altruism is better than--a merely artistic life, and that woman is to find in home and wedded joys that opportunity for the development of her soul, without which no artistic career can be complete. The words of the Graf speak George Eliot's own thought, that Armgart's life and her art would have been both more perfect and more n.o.ble had she held all her art as attribute to the dear sovereignty of affection.

The same artistic conception pervades "The Legend of Jubal." That fame for which Jubal also yearns comes to him, he is taught, in the good which he leaves behind him for humanity to enjoy. He dies, and ceases to be as a personal being. At least this may be inferred from the concluding lines.

Quitting mortality, a quenched sun-wave, The All-creating Presence for his grave.

A _sun-wave_ while living, his being is now _quenched_. But he lives on in the life of the race, lives on in man's joy of music, in the deeper life which music awakens in all bosoms through all ages. He is told that he has no need of--

aught else for share Of mortal good, than in his soul to bear The growth of song, and feel the sweet unrest Of the world's springtide in his conscious breast.

His own loved Past says to him,--

This was thy lot, to feel, create, bestow, And that immeasurable life to know From which the fleshly self falls shrivelled, dead, A seed primeval that has forests bred.

This poem views death as positivism conceives it, and gives a poetic interpretation of that subjective immortality, or that immortality in the race, in which George Eliot so heartily believed. No other artistic presentation of this theory has ever been made which equals that given in this poem, and in the one beginning, "O may I join the choir invisible."

This latter poem is not only beautiful in itself, but it has made altruism attractive and lovely. Its tone of thought is elevated, its spirit lofty and n.o.ble, and its ideal pure and gracious. All that can be said to make altruism lovely and winning, to inspire men with its spirit and motive, is here said. The thought presented in these two poems is repeated in "The Death of Moses." Here we have Moses living forever in the human influence he created.

He dwells not with you dead, but lives as Law.

For her ideas about resignation we must turn to the pages of _The Mill on the Floss and Romola_, for those about heredity and the past to _The Spanish Gypsy_ and _Daniel Deronda_; but in these shorter poems she has completely unfolded the positivist conception, as she accepted it, of death and immortality. The degree to which she was moved and inspired by this belief in an immortality in humanity is seen in the greater ardor and poetic merit of these poems than any others she wrote.

It is interesting to note that she introduces music into "The Legend of Jubal" and "Armgart". It was the art she most loved. She even said that if she could possess the power most satisfactory to her heart, it would be that of making music the instrument of the homage which the great performers secure. Yet she teaches in "Armgart" that there is a power higher than this, the power of affectionate service. Her books are full of the praise of music. She makes Maggie Tulliver express her own delight in it.

"I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs, and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music."

In _Adam Bede_ she becomes most poetic when extolling the power of exquisite music to work on the soul.

To feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life wherein memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being, past and present, in one unspeakable vibration, melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love, that has been scattered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learnt lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy.

In the "Minor Prophet" is to be found George Eliot's theory of progress.

That poem also repeats her faith in common humanity, and gives new emphasis to her joy in the common toils and affections of men. In the "College Breakfast Party" and "Self and Life," her thoughts take a more truly philosophic form than in any of her other poems, but the first of these is the poorest piece of poetic work she gave to the public. Nothing new in the way of teaching appears in these or her other poems.

George Eliot is the poet of positivism. What is beautiful, touching and inspiring in that conception of the world she has sung, and in as poetic a manner as that philosophy is ever likely to inspire. Her poetry is full of the thoughts and sentiments of the time. It reflects the mood of her generation. Prof. Sidney Colvin has truly said that "there is nothing in the literature of the day so rousing--to the mind of the day there is scarcely anything so rousing in all literature--as her writing is. What she writes is full of her time. It is full of observation, imagination, pathos, wit and humor, all of a high cla.s.s in themselves; but what is more, all saturated with modern ideas poured into a language of which every word bites home with peculiar sharpness to the contemporary consciousness." This is true even more of her poetry than of her prose. That poetry lacks where the age lacks, in true poetic quality. The ideal, the breath of eternal spring, is not in it.

XVIII.

LATER ESSAYS.

The later essays of George Eliot have the same characteristics as the earlier ones, and are mainly of interest because they furnish additional evidences of her philosophical, ethical and political opinions. While they indicate the profound thoughtfulness of her mind, her deep concern about the largest problems of human existence, and her rare ethical tone and purpose, they add little or nothing to her literary reputation. It is very plain that while George Eliot was not a poet in the largest, truest sense, she was still less an essayist in that genial, widely sympathetic sense which has adorned English literature with so many n.o.ble books of comment on the foibles and the virtues of man. Her manner is heavy, her thoughts philosophical, her purpose doctrinal: and the result is far from satisfactory to the lover of fine essay-writing.

She needs the glow of her imagination, the depth of her emotions, to relieve and lighten the burden of her thoughts. But in her essays she is less wise, less racy and expressive, than in the didactic pa.s.sages of her novels. She could best make her comment on the ways of life while describing a character or studying an action. These additions to her narrative and conversation are, to the thoughtful reader, among the best portions of her novels, for they give meaning to all the rest, and throw a flood of light on the hidden facts of life. She is never so great, so wise, so profoundly inspired by her theme, as in many of these pa.s.sages.

There is need, however, in her case, of the large surrounding life of her novels in order to draw out this wisdom and inspiration. Her essays lack in the fine sentiment and the fervid eloquence of the chorus-utterances in her novels. They give little evidence that she would have attained to great things had she followed the early purpose of her life. In view of what she has written in the shape of essays, no one can regret that she confined her chief efforts to her imaginative prose creations. Yet her essays have a special value on account of their subjects, and they will be read by many with a hearty appreciation, simply because they were George Eliot's. No one thoroughly interested in the work done by the great realistic novelist can afford to overlook her essays, even if they do not nearly touch the highest mark in their kind.