And loiters, amorous of the fragrant air.
The whole introduction of some 400 lines is full of beautiful images,
fine thoughts, and striking phrases, but it is crowded, artificial,
brocaded to excess with _trop de choses_; and it suddenly breaks into
drama, with dialogue in person. This alternation of dramatic form and
dialogue with epical narrative, interlarding the tragedy in parts with
portentously long explanatory comment, is perhaps the most unlucky
novelty which was ever attempted in verse. What would one say if even
fine passages out of Wordsworth's _Excursion_ had been accidentally
bound up between the pages of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_?
But it is needless to enlarge on all the metrical and poetic defects of
this medley of nearly 10,000 lines, with its lip-twisting,
ear-torturing lyrics--(was there ever such a cacophony as--
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 nobly 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 noble 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 nobility 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 nobility of her aim itself, of
the volume of her own learning, of the intensity of her own standard of
perfection. Her passages 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 ignoble 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, noble 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 ignoble 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, Dickens,
and George Sand. Its subtlety, its flexibility, its capacity for
analytic 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.