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
illustrious novelist, it is easy to put ourselves in the shoes of these
hypothetical detractors. No one, assuredly, 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 assumption 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 assimilate 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 assuredly 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 passage 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-goddess crowned with corn and vines)
On the Mid Sea that moans with memories,
And on the untravelled Ocean, _whose vast tides
Pant dumbly passionate 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 goddess 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 passage 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-space. On the other hand, there are more than enough
passages 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?