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 class 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 massive 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 illustrate 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 entitled "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 God 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_.
Many persons will probably pronounce "A Minor Prophet" the gem of this
little collection, and it is certainly interesting, for a great many
reasons. It may seem to characterise the author on a number of sides. It
illustrates vividly, in the extraordinary ingenuity and flexibility of
its diction, her extreme provocation to indulge in the verbal licence
of verse. It reads almost like a close imitation of Browning, the great
master of the poetical grotesque, except that it observes a discretion
which the poet of _Red-Cotton Night-caps_ long ago threw overboard. When
one can say neat things with such rhythmic felicity, why not attempt it,
even if one has at one's command the magnificent vehicle of the style of
_Middlemarch_?
The poem is a kindly satire upon the views and the person of an American
vegetarian, a certain Elias Baptist Butterworth,--a gentleman,
presumably, who under another name, as an evening caller, has not a
little retarded the flight of time for the author. Mr. Browning has
written nothing better than the account of the Butterworthian "Thought
Atmosphere":--
"And when all earth is vegetarian,
When, lacking butchers, quadrupeds die out,
And less Thought-atmosphere is re-absorbed
By nerves of insects parasitical,
Those higher truths, seized now by higher minds,
But not expressed (the insects hindering),
Will either flash out into eloquence,
Or, better still, be comprehensible,
By rappings simply, without need of roots."
The author proceeds to give a sketch of the beatific state of things
under the vegetarian _regime_ prophesied by her friend in
"Mildly nasal tones,
And vowels stretched to suit the widest views."
How, for instance,
"Sahara will be populous
With families of gentlemen retired
From commerce in more Central Africa,
Who order coolness, as we order coal,
And have a lobe anterior strong enough
To think away the sand-storms."
Or how, as water is probably a non-conductor of the Thought-atmosphere,
"Fishes may lead carnivorous lives obscure,
But must not dream of culinary rank
Or being dished in good society."
Then follows the author's own melancholy head-shake and her reflections
on the theme that there can be no easy millennium, and that
"Bitterly
I feel that every change upon this earth
Is bought with sacrifice";
and that, even if Mr. Butterworth's axioms were not too good to be true,
one might deprecate them in the interest of that happiness which is
associated with error that is deeply familiar. Human improvement, she
concludes, is something both larger and smaller than the vegetarian
bliss, and consists less in a realised perfection than in the sublime
dissatisfaction of generous souls with the shortcomings of the actual.
All this is unfolded in verse which, if without the absolute pulse of
spontaneity, has at least something that closely resembles it. It has
very fine passages.
Very fine, too, both in passages and as a whole, is "The Legend of
Jubal." It is noteworthy, by the way, that three of these poems are on
themes connected with music; and yet we remember no representation of a
musician among the multitudinous figures which people the author's
novels. But George Eliot, we take it, has the musical sense in no small
degree, and the origin of melody and harmony is here described in some
very picturesque and sustained poetry.
Jubal invents the lyre and teaches his companions and his tribe how to
use it, and then goes forth to wander in quest of new musical
inspiration. In this pursuit he grows patriarchally old, and at last
makes his way back to his own people. He finds them, greatly advanced in
civilisation, celebrating what we should call nowadays his centennial,
and making his name the refrain of their songs. He goes in among them
and declares himself, but they receive him as a lunatic, and buffet him,
and thrust him out into the wilderness again, where he succumbs to their
unconscious ingratitude.
"The immortal name of Jubal filled the sky,
While Jubal, lonely, laid him down to die."
In his last hour he has a kind of metaphysical vision which consoles
him, and enables him to die contented. A mystic voice assures him that
he has no cause for complaint; that his use to mankind was everything,
and his credit and glory nothing; that being rich in his genius, it was
his part to give, gratuitously, to unendowed humanity; and that the
knowledge of his having become a part of man's joy, and an image in
man's soul, should reconcile him to the prospect of lying senseless in
the tomb. Jubal assents, and expires.
"A quenched sun-wave,
The all-creating Presence for his grave."
This is very noble and heroic doctrine, and is enforced in verse not
unworthy of it for having a certain air of strain and effort; for surely
it is not doctrine that the egoistic heart rises to without some
experimental flutter of the wings. It is the expression of a pessimistic
philosophy which pivots upon itself only in the face of a really
formidable ultimatum. We cordially accept it, however, and are tolerably
confident that the artist in general, in his death-throes, will find
less repose in the idea of a heavenly compensation for earthly neglect
than in the certainty that humanity is really assimilating his
productions.
"Agatha" is slighter in sentiment than its companions, and has the vague
aroma of an idea rather than the positive weight of thought. It is very
graceful. "How Lisa loved the King" seems to us to have, more than its
companions, the easy flow and abundance of prime poetry; it wears a
reflection of the incomparable naturalness of its model in the
_Decameron_. "Armgart" we have found extremely interesting, although
perhaps it offers plainest proof of what the author sacrifices in
renouncing prose. The drama, in prose, would have been vividly dramatic,
while, as it stands, we have merely a situation contemplated, rather
than unfolded, in a dramatic light. A great singer loses her voice, and
a patronising nobleman, who, before the calamity, had wished her to
become his wife, retire from the stage, and employ her genius for the
beguilement of private life, finds that he has urgent business in
another neighbourhood, and that he has not the mission to espouse her
misfortune. Armgart rails tremendously at fate, often in very striking
phrase. The Count of course, in bidding her farewell, has hoped that
time will soften her disappointment:--
"That empty cup so neatly ciphered, 'Time,'
Handed me as a cordial for despair.
Time--what a word to fling in charity!
Bland, neutral word for slow, dull-beating pain,--
Days, months, and years!"
We must refer the reader to the poem itself for knowledge how
resignation comes to so bitter a pain as the mutilation of conscious
genius. It comes to Armgart because she is a very superior girl; and
though her outline, here, is at once rather sketchy and rather rigid,
she may be added to that group of magnificently generous women,--the
Dinahs, the Maggies, the Romolas, the Dorotheas,--the representation of
whom is our author's chief title to our gratitude. But in spite of
Armgart's resignation, the moral atmosphere of the poem, like that of
most of the others and like that of most of George Eliot's writings, is
an almost gratuitously sad one.
It would take more space than we can command to say how it is that at
this and at other points our author strikes us as a spirit mysteriously
perverted from her natural temper. We have a feeling that, both
intellectually and morally, her genius is essentially of a simpler order
than most of her recent manifestations of it. Intellectually, it has run
to epigram and polished cleverness, and morally to a sort of conscious
and ambitious scepticism, with which it only half commingles. The
interesting thing would be to trace the moral divergence from the
characteristic type. At bottom, according to this notion, the author of
_Romola_ and _Middlemarch_ has an ardent desire and faculty for
positive, active, constructive belief of the old-fashioned kind, but she
has fallen upon a critical age and felt its contagion and dominion. If,
with her magnificent gifts, she had been borne by the mighty general
current in the direction of passionate faith, we often think that she
would have achieved something incalculably great.