Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (939 page)

It is nature as affecting man, and man as transformed into a creature of feeling and passion by the mysterious conditions of his existence, which oftenest arouses the poetic fervor in her. The enthusiasm of high resolves, yearnings after the pure and beautiful, and love’s regenerating power, give to her themes which kindle poetic expression to a glow. The vision of Mordecai on Blackfriars’ bridge affords a fine example of her love of the ideal in moral purpose, and shows how stimulating it is to her imagination. It is a poetic picture of the finest quality she has given in this chapter, one that could easily have been made to find expression in verse of great beauty; but it is poetry in thought and spirit alone, not in form or structure. It is true prose in form, strong in its fulness of detail, knit together with words of the right texture, built up into a true prose image of beauty in thought.

Mordecai’s mind wrought so constantly in images that his coherent trains of thought often resembled the significant dreams attributed to sleepers by waking persons in their most inventive moments; nay, they often resembled genuine dreams in their way of breaking off the passage from the known to the unknown. Thus, for a long while, he habitually thought of the Being answering to his need as one distinctly approaching or turning his back toward him, darkly painted against a golden sky. The reason of the golden sky lay in one of Mordecai’s habits. He was keenly alive to some poetic aspects of London; and a favorite resort of his, when strength and leisure allowed, was to some one of the bridges, especially about sunrise or sunset. Even when he was bending over watch-wheels and trinkets, or seated in a small upper room looking out on dingy bricks and dingy cracked windows, his imagination spontaneously planted him on some spot where he had a far-stretching scene; his thought went on in wide spaces, and whenever he could, he tried to have in reality the influences of a large sky. Leaning on the parapet of Blackfriars’ bridge, and gazing meditatively, the breadth and calm of the river, with its long vista half hazy, half luminous, the grand dim masses or tall forms of buildings which were the signs of world-commerce, the on-coming of boats and barges from the still distance into sound and color, entered into his mood and blent themselves indistinguishably with his thinking, as a fine symphony to which we can hardly be said to listen, makes a medium that bears up our spiritual wings. Thus it happened that the figure representative of Mordecai’s longing was mentally seen darkened by the excess of light in the aerial background. But in the inevitable progress of his imagination toward fuller detail he ceased to see the figure with its back toward him. It began to advance, and a face became discernible; the words youth, beauty, refinement, Jewish birth, noble gravity, turned into hardly individual but typical form and color: gathered from his memory of faces seen among the Jews of Holland and Bohemia, and from the paintings which revived that memory. Reverently let it be said of this mature spiritual need that it was akin to the boy’s and girl’s picturing of the future beloved; but the stirrings of such young desire are feeble compared with the passionate current of an ideal life straining to embody itself, made intense by resistance to imminent dissolution. The visionary form became a companion and auditor, keeping a place not only in the waking imagination, but in those dreams of lighter slumber of which it is truest to say, “I sleep, but my heart is awake” — when the disturbing trivial story of yesterday is charged with the impassioned purpose of years. [Footnote: Daniel Deronda, chapter XXXVIII.]

Many times in her prose George Eliot has recognized the true character of poetry, and she has even given definitions of it which show how well she knew its real nature. She makes Will Ladislaw say that —

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion — a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter XXII.]

She thinks poetry and romance are as plentiful in the world as ever they were, that they exist even amidst the conditions created by invention and science; and if we do not find them there it is only because poetry and romance are absent from our own minds. If we have not awe and tenderness, wonder and enthusiasm, poetry cannot come near us, and we shall not be thrilled and exalted by it. [Footnote: Daniel Deronda, chanter XIX.] Yet it is not difficult to see that George Eliot is not a poet in the fullest sense, because hers is not thoroughly and always a poetic mind, because she reasons about things too much. The poet is impressed, moved, thrilled and exalted, and pours out his song from his feelings and transfused with emotion. George Eliot was given to speculation, loved exactness of expression, and kept too close to the real. She had not that lightness of touch, that deftness and flexibility of expression, and that versatility of imaging forth her ideas, which the real poet possesses. Her mind moved with a ponderous tread, which needed a prose style large and stately as its true medium of expression. While she had poetic ideas in abundance, and an imaginative discernment of nature and life, she had not the full gift of poetic speech. She lacked inspiration as well as flexibility of thought, her imagination was not sufficiently rich, and she had not the full sense of rhythmic harmony.

George Eliot first began to write in verse, as was to be expected of one gifted with an imagination vigorous as hers. Her love of music, her keen perception of the beauties of nature, her love of form and color, gave added attraction and impetus in the same direction. That she did not continue through many years to write poetry seems to have been partly the result of her intense interest in severer studies. The speculative cast of her mind predominated the poetical so nearly as to turn her away from the poetic side of life to find a solution for its graver and more intricate problems. Her return to the poetic form of expression may be accounted for partly as the result of a greater confidence in her own powers which came from success, and partly from a desire for a new and richer medium of utterance.

So far as can be judged from the dates of her poems, as appended to many of them, “How Lisa Loved the King” was the earliest written. This was written in the year of the publication of
Romola
, and was followed the next year by the first draft of
The Spanish Gypsy
. The poetical mottoes of
Felix Holt
, however, were the first to be published; and not until these appeared did the public know of her poetic gifts.
The Spanish Gypsy
was not published until 1868, and “How Lisa Loved the King” appeared the following year.

The original mottoes in
Felix Holt
gave good hint of George Eliot’s poetic gifts. They are solid with thought, pregnant with the ripe wisdom of daily experience, significant for dramatic expression, or notable for their humor. They are rather heavy and ponderous in style, though sonorous in expression. A stately tread, a largeness of expression, an air of weighty meaning, appear in nearly all these mottoes. As a specimen of the more philosophic, the following will indicate the truthfulness of this description: —

  Truth is the precious harvest of the earth,
  But once, when harvest waved upon a land,
  The noisome cankerworm and caterpillar,
  Locusts, and all the swarming, foul-born broods,
  Fastened upon it with swift, greedy jaws,
  And turned the harvest into pestilence,
  Until men said, What profits it to sow?

Her capacity for dramatic expression, in which a rich comprehension of life is included, may be seen in these lines:

    1ST CITIZEN. Sir, there’s a hurry in the veins of youth
                 That makes a vice of virtue by excess.

     2D CITIZEN. What if the coolness of our tardier veins
                 Be loss of virtue?

    1ST CITIZEN. All things cool with time —
                 The sun itself, they say, till heat shall find
                 A general level, nowhere in excess.

     2D CITIZEN. ‘Tis a poor climax, to my weaker thought,
                 That future middlingness.

Wisdom alloyed with humor appears in another motto:

  ”It is a good and soothfast saw;
  Half-roasted never will be raw;
  No dough is dried once more to meal.
  No crock new-shapen by the wheel;
  You can’t turn curds to milk again
  Nor Now, by wishing, back to Then;
  And having tasted stolen honey,
  You can’t buy innocence for money.”

Mr. Buxton Forman says, that “in the charming headings to the chapters of
Felix Holt
it seemed as though the strong hand which had, up to that point, exercised masterly control over the restive tendency of high prose to rear up into verse, had relaxed itself just for the sake of a holiday, and no more. These headings did not bear the stamp of original poetry upon them. Forcible as were some, admirable in thought and applicability to the respective chapters as were all, none bore traces of that clearly defined individuality of style betrayed by all great and accomplished practitioners of verse, in even so small a compass as these headings. Some of them possess the great distinctive technical mark of poetry, — condensation; but this very condensation is compassed not in an original and individual method, but in the method of some pre-existent model; and it is hardly necessary to enforce that power of assimilation or reproduction, however large, is no infallible index of self-existent poetical faculty.” This critic finds traces of Shakspere, Wordsworth and Mrs. Browning in these mottoes, and thinks they are all imitative, even when they are best. It is too easy, however, to dispose of a piece of literary work in this manner, and such criticism is very apt to have little meaning in it. George Eliot has proven herself far too original, both in prose and poetry, to make such a criticism of much value. Even if the charge of imitation is a valid one, it is far more probable that it was conscious and purposed, than that George Eliot’s poetic gifts could only be exercised when impelled by the genius of some other. To give the impression of quotation may have been a part of George Eliot’s purpose in writing these mottoes, which are original enough, and thoughtful enough, to have been attributed to any of the great poets. The real defects of her poetry lie in quite another direction than that of a lack of originality. She has enough to say that is fresh and interesting, she has no need to consult others for what she is to utter; but she has not the fervor of expression, the impressive touch, which separates poetry from prose. There is intellectual power enough, thought even in excess, but she does not soar and sing. She walks steadily, majestically along on the ground, she has no wings for the clear ether. Indeed, she is too much a realist to breathe in that upper air of pure song; it is too fine and delicate for one who loves the solid facts of earth so well as she.

If George Eliot often wrote prose which is almost poetry, she also wrote poetry which is almost prose. The concentrated, image-bearing phrases of poetry are wanting oftentimes in her verse. There is meter but no other quality of poetry, and not a few passages could be printed as prose with scarce a suspicion to the reader that they were intended for poetry. Mr. Buxton Forman has given a passage from
The Spanish Gypsy
in this way, adding only six insignificant words, and restoring
i
to
is
in two instances. He rightly says that the passage printed in prose “would surely be read by any one who saw it for the first time, without any suspicion that it merely required the excision of six little words and two letters to transform it to verse; no single expression betraying the secret that the passage is from a poem.”

Do
you hear the trumpet! There
is
old Eamon’s blast. No bray but his can shake the air so well. He takes his trumpeting as solemnly as
an
angel charged to wake the dead; thinks war was made for trumpeters, and
that
their great art
was
made solely for themselves who understand it. His features have all shaped themselves to blowing, and when his trumpet
is either
bagged or left at home he seems
like
a chattel in a broker’s booth, a spoutless watering-can, a promise to pay no sum particular!

George Eliot had not full command of poetic expression. This frequently appears, not only in the fact that many lines are simply prose in thought, but in the defects of the poetic form. Some lines are too short and others too long, some having four and some six feet. An instance of the former is to be found in these words between Don Silva and the Prior, forming one line:

  Strong reasons, father.
                              Ay, but good?

Of the latter:

And starry flashing steel and pale vermilion.

Still more suggestive are the expedients she resorts to in order to complete the line. Lopez is made to say, —

  Santiago! Juan, thou art hard to please.
  I speak not for my own delighting, I.
  I can be silent, I.