HER POEMS.
Few are the external events to be now recorded of George Eliot's life.
The publication of her successive works forms the chief landmarks. But
the year 1865 is distinguished by circumstances of some importance. In
this year Mr. Lewes, after assisting to found the _Fortnightly Review_,
assumed its editorship; and among the contributions to the first number
of the new Review was a short article from the pen of George Eliot on
Mr. Lecky's important work 'The Influence of Rationalism.'
In the course of the same year Mr. and Mrs. Lewes moved from 16
Blandford Square to the Priory, a commodious house in North Bank, St.
John's Wood, which has come to be intimately associated with the memory
of George Eliot. Here, in the pleasant dwelling-rooms decorated by Owen
Jones, might be met, at her Sunday afternoon receptions, some of the
most eminent men in literature, art, and science. For the rest, her life
flowed on its even tenor, its routine being rigidly regulated. The
morning till lunch time was invariably devoted to writing: in the
afternoon she either went out for a quiet drive of about two hours, or
she took a walk with Lewes in Regent's Park. There the strange-looking
couple--she with a certain weird, sibylline air, he not unlike some
unkempt Polish refugee of vivacious manners--might be seen, swinging
their arms, as they hurried along at a pace as rapid and eager as their
talk. Besides these walks, George Eliot's chief recreation consisted in
frequenting concerts and picture galleries. To music she was
passionately devoted, hardly ever failing to attend at the Saturday
afternoon concerts at St. James's Hall, besides frequenting various
musical reunions, such as the following extract from one of her letters
will show: "The other night we went to hear the Bach choir--a society of
ladies and gentlemen got together by Jenny Lind, who sings in the middle
of them, her husband acting as conductor. It is pretty to see people who
might be nothing but simply fashionables taking pains to sing fine music
in tune and time, with more or less success. One of the baritones we
know is a G----, who used to be a swell guardsman, and has happily taken
to good courses while still quite young. Another is a handsome young
G----, not of the unsatisfactory Co., but of the R---- G---- kin. A
soprano is Mrs. P----, wife of the Queen's Secretary, General P----, the
granddaughter of Earl Grey, and just like him in the face--and so on.
These people of 'high' birth are certainly reforming themselves a
little."
She likewise never omitted to visit the "Exhibition of Old Masters" at
Burlington House. To most people few things exercise so great a strain
on their mental and physical powers of endurance as the inspection of a
picture gallery, with its incessant appeal to the most concentrated
attention. Yet, in spite of physical weakness, George Eliot possessed
such inexhaustible mental energy that she could go on, hour after hour,
looking with the same unflagging interest at whatever possessed any
claim to attention, tiring out even vigorous men that were in her
company. In her works the allusions to art are much less frequent than
to music; but from a few hints here and there, it is possible to form
some idea of her taste, one very significant passage in 'Adam Bede'
showing her peculiar love of Dutch paintings, and her readiness to turn
without shrinking "from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and
heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flowerpot, or eating
her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a
screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her
spinning-wheel and her stone jug, and all those cheap common things
which are the precious necessaries of life to her."
Another favourite resort of George Eliot's was the Zoological Gardens.
She went there a great deal to study the animals, and was particularly
fond of the "poor dear ratel" that used to turn somersaults. In fact her
knowledge of, and sympathy with, animals was as remarkable as that which
she showed for human nature. Thus she astonished a gentleman farmer by
drawing attention to the fine points of his horses. Her intimate
acquaintance with the dog comes out in a thousand touches in her novels,
and her humorous appreciation of little pigs led her to watch them
attentively, and to pick out some particular favourite in every litter.
In her country rambles, too, she was fond of turning over stones to
inspect the minute insect life teeming in moist, dark places; and she
was as interested as Lewes himself in the creatures, frogs, etc., he
kept for scientific purposes, and which would sometimes, like the frog
in the fairy tale, surprise the household by suddenly making their
entrance into the dining-room. Her liking for the "poor brutes," as she
calls them, had its origin no doubt in the same source of profound pity
which she feels for "the twists and cracks" of imperfect human beings.
Her evenings were usually passed at home, and spent in reading, or in
playing and singing; but she and Lewes used to go to the theatre on any
occasion of special interest, as when Salvini appeared in 'Othello,' a
performance attended repeatedly by both with enthusiastic delight.
Otherwise they rarely left home, seldom visiting at other people's
houses, although they made an exception in the case of a favoured few.
They were both fond of travelling, and, whenever it was possible, would
take trips to the Continent, or seek some quiet English rural retreat
away from the sleepless tumult of London. "For," says Lewes incidentally
in a letter, "Mrs. Lewes never seems at home except under a broad sweep
of sky and the _greenth_ of the uplands round her." So we find them
frequently contriving a change of scene; and the visits to foreign
countries, the pleasant sauntering on long summer days through
Continental towns, "dozing round old cathedrals," formed delightful
episodes in George Eliot's strenuously active life. The residence in
Germany in 1854, and again in 1858, has already been alluded to. Now, in
the year 1865, they paid a short visit to France, in the course of which
they saw Normandy, Brittany, and Touraine, returning much refreshed at
the beginning of the autumn. Two years afterwards they went to Spain, a
country that must have possessed a peculiar interest for both; for in
1846 Lewes had published a charming, if one-sided, little book on 'The
Spanish Drama,' with especial reference to Lope de Vega and Calderon;
and in 1864, only a year after the appearance of 'Romola,' George Eliot
produced the first draught of 'The Spanish Gypsy.' On becoming
personally acquainted with this land of "old romance," however, her
impressions were so far modified and deepened that she re-wrote and
amplified her poem, which was not published till 1868.
The subject of the gypsies was probably suggested to George Eliot by her
own memorable adventure in childhood, which thus became the germ of a
very impressive poem. Be that as it may, it is worth noticing that the
conception of 'The Spanish Gypsy' should have followed so closely on the
completion of the Italian novel, both being foreign subjects, belonging
to much the same period of history. In both the novelist has departed
from her habitual track, seeking for "pastures new" in a foreign soil.
After inculcating on the artist the desirability of giving "the loving
pains of a life to the faithful representation of commonplace things,"
she remarks in 'Adam Bede' that "there are few prophets in the world,
few sublimely beautiful women, few heroes," and that we cannot afford to
give all our love and reverence to such rarities. But having followed
this rule, and given the most marvellously truthful delineations of her
fellow-men as they are ordinarily to be met with, she now also felt
prompted to draw the exceptional types of human character, the rare
prophets, and the sublime heroes.
To her friend Miss Simcox, George Eliot one day mentioned a plan of
giving "the world an ideal portrait of an actual character in history,
whom she did not name, but to whom she alluded as an object of possible
reverence unmingled with disappointment." This idea was never carried
out, but at any rate Dinah Morris, Savonarola, Zarca, and Mordecai are
all exceptional beings--beings engrossed by an impersonal aim, having
the spiritual or national regeneration of their fellow-men for its
object. Dinah and Savonarola are more of the nature of prophets; Zarca
and Mordecai of that of patriots. Among these the fair Methodist
preacher, whose yearning piety is only a more sublimated love of her
kind, is the most vividly realised; while Mordecai, the patriot of an
ideal country, is but the abstraction of a man, entirely wanting in that
indefinable solidity of presentation which gives a life of its own to
the creations of art.
On the whole, Zarca, the gipsy chief, is perhaps the most vividly drawn
of George Eliot's purely ideal characters--characters which never have
the flesh-and-blood reality of her Mrs. Poysers, her Silas Marners, and
her dear little Totties and Eppies. Yet there is an unmistakable
grandeur and power of invention in the heroic figure of Zarca, although,
in spite of this power, we miss the convincing stamp of reality in him,
and not only in him, but more or less in all the characters of the
'Spanish Gypsy.' George Eliot's feeling for the extraordinary and
romantic was very subordinate to that which she entertained for the more
familiar aspects of our life. For, although she here chose one of the
most romantic of periods and localities, the Spain of Ferdinand and
Isabella, with the mingled horror and magnificence of its national
traditions, she does not really succeed in resuscitating the spirit
which animated those devout, cruel, fanatical, but ultra-picturesque
times. The Castilian noble, the Jewish astrologer, Zarca, and the
Spanish Inquisitor, even the bright, gloriously-conceived Fedalma
herself, think and speak too much like sublimated modern positivists.
For example, would, could, or should any gipsy of the fifteenth century
have expressed himself in the following terms:
"Oh, it is a faith
Taught by no priest, but by this beating heart:
Faith to each other: the fidelity
Of fellow-wanderers in a desert place,
Who share the same dire thirst, and therefore share
The scanty water: the fidelity
Of men whose pulses leap with kindred fire,
Who in the flash of eyes, the clasp of hands,
The speech that even in lying tells the truth
Of heritage inevitable as birth,
Nay, in the silent bodily presence feel
The mystic stirring of a common life
Which makes the many one: fidelity
To the consecrating oath our sponsor Fate
Made through our infant breath when we were born
The fellow-heirs of that small island, Life,
Where we must dig and sow and reap with brothers.
Fear thou that oath, my daughter--nay, not fear,
But love it; for the sanctity of oaths
Lies not in lightning that avenges them,
But in the injury wrought by broken bonds
And in the garnered good of human trust."
The poetic mode of treatment corresponds to the exalted theme of the
'Spanish Gypsy,' a subject certainly more fitted for drama or romance
rather than for the novel, properly so called. Nothing could apparently
be better adapted for the purposes of a noble, historical poem than the
conception of a great man such as Zarca, whose aim is nothing less than
the fusion of the scattered, wandering, lawless gypsy tribes into one
nation, with common traditions and a common country: the romantic
incident of the discovery of his lost daughter in the affianced bride of
Silva, Duke of Bedmar: the supreme conflict in Fedalma's breast between
love and duty, her renunciation of happiness in order to cast in her lot
with that of her outcast people: Silva's frantic grief, his desertion of
his country, his religion, and all his solemn responsibilities to turn
gypsy for Fedalma's sake, and having done so, his agony of remorse on
seeing the fortress committed to his trust taken by the gypsies he has
joined, his dearest friends massacred, his nearest of kin, Isidor, the
inquisitor, hanged before his very eyes, a sight so maddening that,
hardly conscious of his act, he slays Zarca, and so divides himself for
ever, by an impassable gulf, from the woman for whose sake he had turned
apostate.
Clearly a subject containing the highest capabilities, and, if great
thoughts constituted a great poem, this should be one of the greatest.
But with all its high merits, its sentiments imbued with rare moral
grandeur, its felicitous descriptions, the work lacks that best and
incommunicable gift which comes by nature to the poet. Here, as in her
novels, we find George Eliot's instinctive insight into the primary
passions of the human heart, her wide sympathy and piercing keenness of
vision; but her thoughts, instead of being naturally winged with melody,
seem mechanically welded into song. This applies to all her poetic work,
although some of it, especially the 'Legend of Jubal,' reaches a much
higher degree of metrical and rhythmical excellence. But although
George Eliot's poems cannot be considered on a par with her prose, they
possess a distinctive interest, and should be carefully studied by all
lovers of her genius, as affording a more intimate insight into the
working of her own mind. Nowhere do we perceive so clearly as here the
profound sadness of her view of life; nowhere does she so emphatically
reiterate the stern lesson of the duty of resignation and
self-sacrifice; or that other doctrine that the individual is bound
absolutely to subordinate his personal happiness to the social good,
that he has no rights save the right of fulfilling his obligations to
his age, his country, and his family. This idea is perhaps more
completely incorporated in Fedalma than in any other of her
characters--Fedalma, who seems so bountifully endowed with the fullest
measure of beauty, love and happiness, that her renunciation may be the
more absolute. She who, in her young joy suddenly knows herself as "an
aged sorrow," exclaiming:
"I will not take a heaven
Haunted by shrieks of far-off misery.
This deed and I have ripened with the hours:
It is a part of me--a wakened thought
That, rising like a giant, masters me,
And grows into a doom. O mother life,
That seemed to nourish me so tenderly,
Even in the womb you vowed me to the fire,
Hung on my soul the burden of men's hopes,
And pledged me to redeem!--I'll pay the debt.
You gave me strength that I should pour it all
Into this anguish. I can never shrink
Back into bliss--my heart has grown too big
With things that might be."
This sacrifice is the completer for being without hope; for not
counting "on aught but being faithful;" for resting satisfied in such a
sublime conviction as--
"The grandest death, to die in vain--for love
Greater than sways the forces of the world."
Limit forbids me dwell longer on this poem, which contains infinite
matter for discussion, yet some of the single passages are so full of
fine thoughts felicitously expressed that it would be unfair not to
allude to them. Such a specimen as this exposition of the eternal
dualism between the Hellenic and the Christian ideals, of which Heine
was the original and incomparable expounder, should not be left unnoted:
"For evermore
With grander resurrection than was feigned
Of Attila's fierce Huns, the soul of Greece
Conquers the bulk of Persia. The maimed form
Of calmly-joyous beauty, marble-limbed,
Yet breathing with the thought that shaped its limbs,
Looks mild reproach from out its opened grave
At creeds of terror; and the vine-wreathed god
Fronts the pierced Image with the crown of thorns."
And again how full of deep mysterious suggestion is this line--
"Speech is but broken light upon the depth
Of the unspoken."
And this grand saying--
"What times are little? To the sentinel
That hour is regal when he mounts on guard."
Quotations of this kind might be indefinitely multiplied; while showing
that exaltation of thought properly belonging to poetry, they at the
same time indubitably prove to the delicately-attuned ear the absence
of that subtle intuitive music, that "linked sweetness" of sound and
sense which is the birthright of poets. If an intimate and profound
acquaintance with the laws and structure of metre could bestow this
quality, which appertains to the elemental, George Eliot's verse ought
to have achieved the highest success. For in mere technical knowledge
concerning rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and the manipulation of blank
verse according to the most cunning distribution of pauses, she could
hold her own with the foremost contemporary poets, being no doubt far
more versed than either Shelley or Byron in the laws governing these
matters.
How incalculable she felt the poet's influence to be, and how fain she
would have had him wield this influence only for the loftiest ends, is
well shown in a beautiful letter, hitherto unpublished, now possessing
an added pathos as addressed to one who has but lately departed, at the
very time when his rare poetic gifts were beginning to be more widely
recognised. James Thomson, the author of "The City of Dreadful Night," a
poem which appeared first in the pages of the 'National Reformer,' with
the signature of "B. V.," was thus addressed by George Eliot:
"DEAR POET,--I cannot rest satisfied without telling you that my mind
responds with admiration to the distinct vision and grand utterance in
the poem which you have been so good as to send me.
"Also, I trust that an intellect informed by so much passionate energy
as yours will soon give us more heroic strains, with a wider embrace of
human fellowship, such as will be to the labourers of the world what,
the Odes of Tyrtaeus were to the Spartans, thrilling them with the
sublimity of the social order and the courage of resistance to all that
would dissolve it. To accept life and write much fine poetry, is to take
a very large share in the quantum of human good, and seems to draw with
it necessarily some recognition, affectionate, and even joyful, of the
manifold willing labours which have made such a lot possible."
These words are of peculiar interest, because, although the writer of
them is almost as much of a pessimist as its recipient, they are so with
a difference. The pessimism of "The City of Dreadful Night," in its
blank hopelessness, paralyses the inmost nerve of life by isolating the
individual in cold obstruction. Whereas George Eliot, while recognising
to the utmost "the burthen of a world, where even the sunshine has a
heart of care," insists the more on the fact that this common suffering
binds man more indissolubly to man; that so far from justifying him in
ending his life "when he will," the groaning and travailing generations
exact that he should stand firm at his post, regardless of personal
consideration or requital, so long only as he can help towards making
the fate of his fellow mortals less heavy for them to bear. In fact, the
one is a theory of life, the other a disease of the soul.
The same stoic view, in a different form, finds expression in this
answer to a dear friend's query: "I cannot quite agree that it is hard
to see what has been the good of your life. It seems to me very clear
that you have been a good of a kind that would have been sorely missed
by those who have been nearest to you, and also by some who are more
distant. And it is this kind of good which must reconcile us to life,
and not any answer to the question, 'What would the universe have been
without me?' The point one has to care for is, 'Are A, B, and C the
better for me?' And there are several letters of the alphabet that could
not have easily spared you in the past, and that can still less spare
you in the present."
This lesson of resignation, which is enforced more and more stringently
in her writings, is again dwelt upon with peculiar emphasis in the
interesting dramatic sketch entitled 'Armgart.' The problem here is not
unlike that in 'Silas Marner.' It is that of an individual, in
exceptional circumstances, brought back to the average condition of
humanity; but whereas Silas, having sunk below the common standard, is
once more united to his fellow-men by love, the magnificently endowed
Armgart, who seems something apart and above the crowd, is reduced to
the level of the undistinguished million by the loss of her peerless
voice. 'Armgart' is the single instance, excepting, perhaps, the
Princess Halm-Eberstein, where George Eliot has attempted to depict the
woman-artist, to whom life's highest object consists in fame--
"The benignant strength of one, transformed
To joy of many."
But in the intoxicating flush of success, the singer, who has refused
the love of _one_ for that "sense transcendent which can taste the joy
of swaying multitudes," loses her glorious gift, and so sinks
irretrievably to a "drudge among the crowd." In the first delirium of
despair she longs to put an end to herself, "sooner than bear the yoke
of thwarted life;" but is painfully startled from her defiant mood by
the indignant query of Walpurga, her humble cousin--
"Where is the rebel's right for you alone?
Noble 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. Oh, you smiled
From your clear height on all the million lots
Which yet you brand as abject."
It may seem singular that having once, in 'Armgart,' drawn a woman of
the highest artistic aims and ambitions, George Eliot should imply that
what is most valuable in her is not the exceptional gift, but rather
that part of her nature which she shares with ordinary humanity. This
is, however, one of her leading beliefs, and strongly contrasts her, as
a teacher, with Carlyle. To the author of 'Hero Worship' the promiscuous
mass--moiling and toiling as factory hands and artisans, as miners and
labourers--only represents so much raw material, from which is produced
that final result and last triumph of the combination of human
forces--the great statesman, great warrior, great poet, and so forth. To
George Eliot, on the contrary--and this is the democratic side of her
nature--it is the multitude, so charily treated by destiny, which claims
deepest sympathy and tenderest compassion; so that all greatness, in her
eyes, is not a privilege, but a debt, which entails on its possessor a
more strenuous effort, a completer devotion to the service of average
humanity.