Viewed in this manner, as efficient figures in an essentially ideal and romantic drama, Fedalma and Zarca seem to gain vastly, and to shine with a brilliant radiance. If we reduce Fedalma to the level of the heroines of our modern novels, in which the interest aroused by a young girl is in proportion to the similarity of her circ.u.mstances to those of the reader, and in which none but the commonest feelings are required, provided they be expressed with energy, we shall be tempted to call her a solemn and cold-blooded jilt. In a novel it would have been next to impossible for the author to make the heroine renounce her lover. In novels we not only forgive that weakness which is common and familiar and human, but we actually demand it. But in poetry, although we are compelled to adhere to the few elementary pa.s.sions of our nature, we do our best to dress them in a new and exquisite garb. Men and women in a poetical drama are nothing, if not distinguished.
"Our dear young love,--its breath was happiness!
But it had grown upon a larger life, Which tore its roots asunder."
These words are uttered by Fedalma at the close of the poem, and in them she emphatically claims the distinction of having her own private interests invaded by those of a people. The manner of her kinship with the Zincali is in fact a very much "larger life" than her marriage with Don Silva. We may, indeed, challenge the probability of her relationship to her tribe impressing her mind with a force equal to that of her love,--her "dear young love." We may declare that this is an unnatural and violent result. For my part, I think it is very far from violent; I think the author has employed her art in reducing the apparently arbitrary quality of her preference for her tribe. I say reducing; I do not say effacing; because it seems to me, as I have intimated, that just at this point her art has been wanting, and we are not sufficiently prepared for Fedalma"s movement by a sense of her Gypsy temper and instincts. Still, we are in some degree prepared for it by various pa.s.sages in the opening scenes of the book,--by all the magnificent description of her dance in the Plaza:--
"All gathering influences culminate And urge Fedalma. Earth and heaven seem one, Life a glad trembling on the outer edge Of unknown rapture. Swifter now she moves, Filling the measure with a double beat And widening circle; now she seems to glow With more declared presence, glorified.
Circling, she lightly bends, and lifts on high The mult.i.tudinous-sounding tambourine, And makes it ring and boom, then lifts it higher, Stretching her left arm beauteous."
We are better prepared for it, however, than by anything else, by the whole impression we receive of the exquisite refinement and elevation of the young girl"s mind,--by all that makes her so bad a Gypsy. She possesses evidently a very high-strung intellect, and her whole conduct is in a higher key, as I may say, than that of ordinary women, or even ordinary heroines. She is natural, I think, in a poetical sense. She is consistent with her own prodigiously superfine character. From a lower point of view than that of the author, she lacks several of the desirable feminine qualities,--a certain womanly warmth and petulance, a graceful irrationality. Her mind is very much too lucid, and her aspirations too lofty. Her conscience, especially, is decidedly over-active. But this is a distinction which she shares with all the author"s heroines,--Dinah Morris, Maggie Tulliver, Romola, and Esther Lyon,--a distinction, moreover, for which I should be very sorry to hold George Eliot to account. There are most a.s.suredly women and women. While Messrs. Charles Reade and Wilkie Collins, and Miss Braddon and her school, tell one half the story, it is no more than fair that the author of _The Spanish Gypsy_ should, all una.s.sisted, attempt to relate the other.
Whenever a story really interests one, he is very fond of paying it the compliment of imagining it otherwise constructed, and of capping it with a different termination. In the present case, one is irresistibly tempted to fancy _The Spanish Gypsy_ in prose,--a compact, regular drama: not in George Eliot"s prose, however: in a diction much more nervous and heated and rapid, written with short speeches as well as long. (The reader will have observed the want of brevity, retort, interruption, rapid alternation, in the dialogue of the poem. The characters all talk, as it were, standing still.) In such a play as the one indicated one imagines a truly dramatic Fedalma,--a pa.s.sionate, sensuous, irrational Bohemian, as elegant as good breeding and native good taste could make her, and as pure as her actual sister in the poem,--but rushing into her father"s arms with a cry of joy, and losing the sense of her lover"s sorrow in what the author has elsewhere described as "the hurrying ardour of action." Or in the way of a different termination, suppose that Fedalma should for the time value at once her own love and her lover"s enough to make her prefer the latter"s destiny to that represented by her father. Imagine, then, that, after marriage, the Gypsy blood and nature should begin to flow and throb in quicker pulsations,--and that the poor girl should sadly contrast the sunny freedom and lawless joy of her people"s lot with the splendid rigidity and formalism of her own. You may conceive at this point that she should pa.s.s from sadness to despair, and from despair to revolt.
Here the catastrophe may occur in a dozen different ways. Fedalma may die before her husband"s eyes, of unsatisfied longing for the fate she has rejected; or she may make an attempt actually to recover her fate, by wandering off and seeking out her people. The cultivated mind, however, it seems to me, imperiously demands, that, on finally overtaking them, she shall die of mingled weariness and shame, as neither a good Gypsy nor a good Christian, but simply a good figure for a tragedy. But there is a degree of levity which almost amounts to irreverence in fancying this admirable performance as anything other than it is.
After Fedalma comes Zarca, and here our imagination flags. Not so George Eliot"s: for as simple imagination, I think that in the conception of this impressive and unreal figure it appears decidedly at its strongest.
With Zarca, we stand at the very heart of the realm of romance. There is a truly grand simplicity, to my mind, in the outline of his character, and a remarkable air of majesty in his poise and att.i.tude. He is a _pere n.o.ble_ in perfection. His speeches have an exquisite eloquence. In strictness, he is to the last degree unreal, illogical, and rhetorical; but a certain dramatic unity is diffused through his character by the depth and energy of the colours in which he is painted. With a little less simplicity, his figure would be decidedly modern. As it stands, it is neither modern nor mediaeval; it belongs to the world of intellectual dreams and visions. The reader will admit that it is a vision of no small beauty, the conception of a stalwart chieftain who distils the cold exaltation of his purpose from the utter loneliness and obloquy of his race:--
"Wanderers whom no G.o.d took knowledge of, To give them laws, to fight for them, or blight Another race to make them ampler room; A people with no home even in memory, No dimmest lore of giant ancestors To make a common hearth for piety";
a people all ignorant of
"The rich heritage, the milder life, Of nations fathered by a mighty Past."
Like Don Silva, like Juan, like Sephardo, Zarca is decidedly a man of intellect.
Better than Fedalma or than Zarca is the remarkably beautiful and elaborate portrait of Don Silva, in whom the author has wished to present a young n.o.bleman as splendid in person and in soul as the dawning splendour of his native country. In the composition of his figure, the real and the romantic, brilliancy and pathos, are equally commingled. He cannot be said to stand out in vivid relief. As a piece of painting, there is nothing commanding, aggressive, brutal, as I may say, in his lineaments. But they will bear close scrutiny. Place yourself within the circ.u.mscription of the work, breathe its atmosphere, and you will see that Don Silva is portrayed with a delicacy to which English story-tellers, whether in prose or verse, have not accustomed us. There are better portraits in Browning, but there are also worse; in Tennyson there are none as good; and in the other great poets of the present century there are no attempts, that I can remember, to which we may compare it. In spite of the poem being called in honour of his mistress, Don Silva is in fact the central figure in the work. Much more than Fedalma, he is the pa.s.sive object of the converging blows of Fate.
The young girl, after all, did what was easiest; but he is entangled in a network of agony, without choice or compliance of his own. It is an admirable subject admirably treated. I may describe it by saying that it exhibits a perfect aristocratic nature (born and bred at a time when democratic aspirations were quite irrelevant to happiness), dragged down by no fault of its own into the vulgar mire of error and expiation. The interest which attaches to Don Silva"s character revolves about its exquisite human weakness, its manly scepticism, its antipathy to the trenchant, the absolute, and arbitrary. At the opening of the book, the author rehea.r.s.es his various t.i.tles:--
"Such t.i.tles with their blazonry are his Who keeps this fortress, sworn Alcade, Lord of the valley, master of the town, Commanding whom he will, himself commanded By Christ his Lord, who sees him from the cross, And from bright heaven where the Mother pleads; By good Saint James, upon the milk-white steed, Who leaves his bliss to fight for chosen Spain; By the dead gaze of all his ancestors; And by the mystery of his Spanish blood, Charged with the awe and glories of the past."
Throughout the poem, we are conscious, during the evolution of his character, of the presence of these high mystical influences, which, combined with his personal pride, his knightly temper, his delicate culture, form a splendid background for pa.s.sionate dramatic action. The finest pages in the book, to my taste, are those which describe his lonely vigil in the Gypsy camp, after he has failed in winning back Fedalma, and has pledged his faith to Zarca. Placed under guard, and left to his own stern thoughts, his soul begins to react against the hideous disorder to which he has committed it, to proclaim its kinship with "customs and bonds and laws," and its sacred need of the light of human esteem:--
"Now awful Night, Ancestral mystery of mysteries, came down Past all the generations of the stars, And visited his soul with touch more close Than when he kept that closer, briefer watch, Under the church"s roof, beside his arms, And won his knighthood."
To be appreciated at their worth, these pages should be attentively read. Nowhere has the author"s marvellous power of expression, the mingled dignity and pliancy of her style, obtained a greater triumph.
She has reproduced the expression of a mind with the same vigorous distinctness as that with which a great painter represents the expression of a countenance.
The character which accords best with my own taste is that of the minstrel Juan, an extremely generous conception. He fills no great part in the drama; he is by nature the reverse of a man of action; and, strictly, the story could very well dispense with him. Yet, for all that, I should be sorry to lose him, and lose thereby the various excellent things which are said of him and by him. I do not include his songs among the latter. Only two of the lyrics in the work strike me as good: the song of Pablo, "The world is great: the birds all fly from me"; and, in a lower degree, the chant of the Zincali, in the fourth book. But I do include the words by which he is introduced to the reader:--
"Juan was a troubadour revived, Freshening life"s dusty road with babbling rills Of wit and song, living "mid harnessed men With limbs ungalled by armour, ready so To soothe them weary and to cheer them sad.
Guest at the board, companion in the camp, A crystal mirror to the life around: Flashing the comment keen of simple fact Defined in words; lending brief lyric voice To grief and sadness; hardly taking note Of difference betwixt his own and others"; But, rather singing as a listener To the deep moans, the cries, the wildstrong joys Of universal Nature, old, yet young."
When Juan talks at his ease, he strikes the note of poetry much more surely than when he lifts his voice in song:--
"Yet if your graciousness will not disdain A poor plucked songster, shall he sing to you?
_Some lay of afternoons,--some ballad strain Of those who ached once, but are sleeping now Under the sun-warmed flowers?_"
Juan"s link of connection with the story is, in the first place, that he is in love with Fedalma, and, in the second, as a piece of local colour.
His att.i.tude with regard to Fedalma is indicated with beautiful delicacy:--
"O lady, constancy has kind and rank.
One man"s is lordly, plump, and bravely clad, Holds its head high, and tells the world its name: Another man"s is beggared, must go bare, And shiver through the world, the jest of all, But that it puts the motley on, and plays Itself the jester."
Nor are his merits lost upon her, as she declares, with no small force,--
"No! on the close-thronged s.p.a.ces of the earth A battle rages; Fate has carried me "Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand,-- Nor shrink, and let the shaft pa.s.s by my breast To pierce another. O, "tis written large, The thing I have to do. But you, dear Juan, Renounce, endure, are brave, unurged by aught Save the sweet overflow of your good-will."
In every human imbroglio, be it of a comic or a tragic nature, it is good to think of an observer standing aloof, the critic, the idle commentator of it all, taking notes, as we may say, in the interest of truth. The exercise of this function is the chief ground of our interest in Juan. Yet as a man of action, too, he once appeals most irresistibly to our sympathies: I mean in the admirable scene with Hinda, in which he wins back his stolen finery by his lute-playing. This scene, which is written in prose, has a simple realistic power which renders it a truly remarkable composition.
Of the different parts of _The Spanish Gypsy_ I have spoken with such fullness as my s.p.a.ce allows: it remains to add a few remarks upon the work as a whole. Its great fault is simply that it is not a genuine poem. It lacks the hurrying quickness, the palpitating warmth, the bursting melody of such a creation. A genuine poem is a tree that breaks into blossom and shakes in the wind. George Eliot"s elaborate composition is like a vast mural design in mosaic-work, where great slabs and delicate morsels of stone are laid together with wonderful art, where there are plenty of n.o.ble lines and generous hues, but where everything is rigid, measured, and cold,--nothing dazzling, magical, and vocal. The poem contains a number of faulty lines,--lines of twelve, of eleven, and of eight syllables,--of which it is easy to suppose that a more sacredly commissioned versifier would not have been guilty.
Occasionally, in the search for poetic effect, the author decidedly misses her way:--
"All her being paused In resolution, _as some leonine wave_," etc.
A "leonine" wave is rather too much of a lion and too little of a wave.
The work possesses imagination, I think, in no small measure. The description of Silva"s feelings during his sojourn in the Gypsy camp is strongly pervaded by it; or if perchance the author achieved these pa.s.sages without rising on the wings of fancy, her glory is all the greater. But the poem is wanting in pa.s.sion. The reader is annoyed by a perpetual sense of effort and of intellectual tension. It is a characteristic of George Eliot, I imagine, to allow her impressions to linger a long time in her mind, so that by the time they are ready for use they have lost much of their original freshness and vigour. They have acquired, of course, a number of artificial charms, but they have parted with their primal natural simplicity. In this poem we see the landscape, the people, the manners of Spain as through a gla.s.s smoked by the flame of meditative vigils, just as we saw the outward aspect of Florence in _Romola_. The brightness of colouring is there, the artful chiaroscuro, and all the consecrated properties of the scene; but they gleam in an artificial light. The background of the action is admirable in spots, but is cold and mechanical as a whole. The immense rhetorical ingenuity and elegance of the work, which const.i.tute its main distinction, interfere with the faithful, uncompromising reflection of the primary elements of the subject.
The great merit of the characters is that they are marvellously well _understood_,--far better understood than in the ordinary picturesque romance of action, adventure, and mystery. And yet they are not understood to the bottom; they retain an indefinably fact.i.tious air, which is not sufficiently justified by their position as ideal figures.
The reader who has attentively read the closing scene of the poem will know what I mean. The scene shows remarkable talent; it is eloquent, it is beautiful; but it is arbitrary and fanciful, more than unreal,--untrue. The reader silently chafes and protests, and finally breaks forth and cries, "O for a blast from the outer world!" Silva and Fedalma have developed themselves so daintily and elaborately within the close-sealed precincts of the author"s mind, that they strike us at last as acting not as simple human creatures, but as downright _amateurs_ of the morally graceful and picturesque. To say that this is the ultimate impression of the poem is to say that it is not a great work. It is in fact not a great drama. It is, in the first place, an admirable study of character,--an essay, as they say, toward the solution of a given problem in conduct. In the second, it is a n.o.ble literary performance.
It can be read neither without interest in the former respect, nor without profit for its signal merits of style,--and this in spite of the fact that the versification is, as the French say, as little _reussi_ as was to be expected in a writer beginning at a bound with a kind of verse which is very much more difficult than even the best prose,--the author"s own prose. I shall indicate most of its merits and defects, great and small, if I say it is a romance,--a romance written by one who is emphatically a thinker.
II. THE LEGEND OF JUBAL AND OTHER POEMS
When the author of _Middlemarch_ published, some years since, her first volume of verse, the reader, in trying to judge it fairly, asked himself what he should think of it if she had never published a line of prose.
The question, perhaps, was not altogether a help to strict fairness of judgment, but the author was protected from illiberal conclusions by the fact that, practically, it was impossible to answer it. George Eliot belongs to that cla.s.s of pre-eminent writers in relation to whom the imagination comes to self-consciousness only to find itself in subjection. It was impossible to disengage one"s judgment from the permanent influence of _Adam Bede_ and its companions, and it was necessary, from the moment that the author undertook to play the poet"s part, to feel that her genius was all of one piece.
People have often asked themselves how they would estimate Shakespeare if they knew him only by his comedies, Homer if his name stood only for the _Odyssey_, and Milton if he had written nothing but "Lycidas" and the shorter pieces. The question of necessity, inevitable though it is, leads to nothing. George Eliot is neither Homer nor Shakespeare nor Milton; but her work, like theirs, is a ma.s.sive achievement, divided into a supremely good and a less good, and it provokes us, like theirs, to the fruitless attempt to estimate the latter portion on its own merits alone.
The little volume before us gives us another opportunity; but here, as before, we find ourselves uncomfortably divided between the fear, on the one hand, of being bribed into favour, and, on the other, of giving short measure of it. The author"s verses are a narrow manifestation of her genius, but they are an unmistakeable manifestation. _Middlemarch_ has made us demand even finer things of her than we did before, and whether, as patented readers of _Middlemarch_, we like "Jubal" and its companions the less or the more, we must admit that they are characteristic products of the same intellect.
We imagine George Eliot is quite philosopher enough, having produced her poems mainly as a kind of experimental entertainment for her own mind, to let them commend themselves to the public on any grounds whatever which will help to ill.u.s.trate the workings of versatile intelligence,--as interesting failures, if nothing better. She must feel they are interesting; an exaggerated modesty cannot deny that.
We have found them extremely so. They consist of a rhymed narrative, of some length, of the career of Jubal, the legendary inventor of the lyre; of a short rustic idyl in blank verse on a theme gathered in the Black Forest of Baden; of a tale, versified in rhyme, from Boccaccio; and of a series of dramatic scenes called "Armgart,"--the best thing, to our sense, of the four. To these are added a few shorter pieces, chiefly in blank verse, each of which seems to us proportionately more successful than the more ambitious ones. Our author"s verse is a mixture of spontaneity of thought and excessive reflectiveness of expression and its value is generally more in the idea than in the form. In whatever George Eliot writes you have the comfortable certainty, infrequent in other quarters, of finding an idea, and you get the substance of her thought in the short poems, without the somewhat rigid envelope of her poetic diction.
If we may say, broadly, that the supreme merit of a poem is in having warmth, and that it is less and less valuable in proportion as it cools by too long waiting upon either fastidious skill or inefficient skill, the little group of verses ent.i.tled "Brother and Sister" deserve our preference. They have extreme loveliness, and the feeling they so abundantly express is of a much less intellectualised sort than that which prevails in the other poems. It is seldom that one of our author"s compositions concludes upon so simply sentimental a note as the last lines of "Brother and Sister":--
"But were another childhood-world my share, I would be born a little sister there!"
This will be interesting to many readers as proceeding more directly from the writer"s personal experience than anything else they remember.
George Eliot"s is a personality so enveloped in the mists of reflection that it is an uncommon sensation to find one"s self in immediate contact with it. This charming poem, too, throws a grateful light on some of the best pages the author has written,--those in which she describes her heroine"s childish years in _The Mill on the Floss_. The finest thing in that admirable novel has always been, to our taste, not its portrayal of the young girl"s love-struggles as regards her lover, but those as regards her brother. The former are fiction,--skilful fiction; but the latter are warm reality, and the merit of the verses we speak of is that they are coloured from the same source.
In "Stradivarius," the famous old violin-maker affirms in every pregnant phrase the supreme duty of being perfect in one"s labour, and lays down the dictum, which should be the first article in every artist"s faith:--
""Tis G.o.d gives skill, But not without men"s hands: He could not make Antonio Stradivari"s violins Without Antonio."
This is the only really inspiring working-creed, and our author"s utterance of it justifies her claim to having the distinctively artistic mind, more forcibly than her not infrequent shortcomings in the direction of an artistic _ensemble_.