"The stars thin-scattered made the heavens large,
Bending in slow procession; in the east,
Emergent from the dark waves of the hills,
Seeming a little sister of the moon,
Glowed Venus all unquenched."
"Spring afternoons, when delicate shadows fall
Pencilled upon the grass; high summer morns,
When white light rains upon the quiet sea,
And cornfields flush for ripeness."
"Scent the fresh breath of the height-loving herbs,
That, trodden by the pretty parted hoofs
Of nimble goats, sigh at the innocent bruise,
And with a mingled difference exquisite
Pour a sweet burden on the buoyant air."
But now to reach the real substance of the poem, and to allow the reader
to appreciate the author's treatment of human character and passion, I
must speak briefly of the story. I shall hardly misrepresent it, when I
say that it is a very old one, and that it illustrates that very common
occurrence in human affairs,--the conflict of love and duty. Such, at
least, is the general impression made by the poem as it stands. It is
very possible that the author's primary intention may have had a breadth
which has been curtailed in the execution of the work,--that it was her
wish to present a struggle between nature and culture, between education
and the instinct of race. You can detect in such a theme the stuff of a
very good drama,--a somewhat stouter stuff, however, than _The Spanish
Gypsy_ is made of. George Eliot, true to that didactic tendency for
which she has hitherto been remarkable, has preferred to make her
heroine's predicament a problem in morals, and has thereby, I think,
given herself hard work to reach a satisfactory solution. She has,
indeed, committed herself to a signal error, in a psychological
sense,--that of making a Gypsy girl with a conscience. Either Fedalma
was a perfect Zincala in temper and instinct,--in which case her
adhesion to her father and her race was a blind, passionate, sensuous
movement, which is almost expressly contradicted,--or else she was a
pure and intelligent Catholic, in which case nothing in the nature of a
struggle can be predicated. The character of Fedalma, I may say, comes
very near being a failure,--a very beautiful one; but in point of fact
it misses it.
It misses it, I think, thanks to that circumstance which in reading and
criticising _The Spanish Gypsy_ we must not cease to bear in mind, the
fact that the work is emphatically a _romance_. We may contest its being
a poem, but we must admit that it is a romance in the fullest sense of
the word. Whether the term may be absolutely defined I know not; but we
may say of it, comparing it with the novel, that it carries much farther
that compromise with reality which is the basis of all imaginative
writing. In the romance this principle of compromise pervades the
superstructure as well as the basis. The most that we exact is that the
fable be consistent with itself. Fedalma is not a real Gypsy maiden. The
conviction is strong in the reader's mind that a genuine Spanish Zincala
would have somehow contrived both to follow her tribe and to keep her
lover. If Fedalma is not real, Zarca is even less so. He is interesting,
imposing, picturesque; but he is very far, I take it, from being a
genuine _Gypsy_ chieftain. They are both ideal figures,--the offspring
of a strong mental desire for creatures well rounded in their elevation
and heroism,--creatures who should illustrate the nobleness of human
nature divorced from its smallness. Don Silva has decidedly more of the
common stuff of human feeling, more charming natural passion and
weakness. But he, too, is largely a vision of the intellect; his
constitution is adapted to the atmosphere and the climate of romance.
Juan, indeed, has one foot well planted on the lower earth; but Juan is
only an accessory figure. I have said enough to lead the reader to
perceive that the poem should not be regarded as a rigid transcript of
actual or possible fact,--that the action goes on in an artificial
world, and that properly to comprehend it he must regard it with a
generous mind.
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 circumstances 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 passions 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
passages 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 multitudinous-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 assuredly 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 unassisted, 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 passionate,
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 pass 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 attitude. He is a _pere
noble_ 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 God 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 nobleman 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 circumscription 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 passive 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 rehearses his various titles:--
"Such titles with their blazonry are his
Who keeps this fortress, sworn Alcayde,
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 passionate 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 attitude 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 spaces 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 pass 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 space 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 noble 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
passages without rising on the wings of fancy, her glory is all the
greater. But the poem is wanting in passion. 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 glass 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 constitute 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 factitious 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 noble 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.