Chapter XIX (2)

It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of
verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which
they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with
any other form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable,
their literary men, tradespeople and cottagers are impossible; and
their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing
both what they _have_ seen and heard, and what they have _not_ seen
and heard, with equal faithfulness.

What is simple, natural, unaffected, she pleads for as the true material of fiction. How she would apply this idea may be seen in her condemnation of a novelist who devoted her pages to a defence of Evangelicalism. This writer is "tame and feeble" because she attempts to depict a form of society with which she is not familiar. That the common phases of religious life are capable of affording the richest material for the novelist, George Eliot has abundantly shown, and what she says of their value in this discussion of "Silly Novelists" is of great interest in view of her own success in this kind of portraiture. What she suggested as a fine field for the novelist was to be the one she herself was so well to occupy. Her success proved how clearly she comprehended the nature of novel-writing, and how well she understood the character of the material with which the best results can be attained.

It is less excusable in an Evangelical novelist than any other,
gratuitously to seek her subjects among titles and carriages. The real
drama of Evangelicalism--and it has abundance of fine drama for any one
who has genius enough to discern and reproduce it--lies among the
middle and lower classes; and are not Evangelical opinions understood
to give an especial interest in the weak things of the earth, rather
than in the mighty? Why, then, cannot our Evangelical novelists show
us the operation of their religious views among people (there really
are many such in the world) who keep no carriage, "not so much as a
brass-bound gig," who even manage to eat their dinner without a silver
fork, and in whose mouths the authoress's questionable English would be
strictly consistent? Why can we not have pictures of religious life
among the industrial classes in England as interesting as Mrs. Stowe's
pictures of religious life among the negroes?

Was this question a prophecy? It indicates that the writer's attention had already been directed to the richness of this material for the purposes of the novelist. After reading these words we see why she took up the common life of the English village as she had herself been familiar with it from childhood. In order to be true to her own conception of the novel, there was no other field she could occupy. That she understood the picturesqueness of this form of life no reader of her novels will doubt, or that she saw and understood its capacities for artistic delineation. The opening paragraphs of her _Westminster Review_ article on the "Natural History of German Life" afford further evidence of her insight and wisdom on this subject. They also afford evidence of her hatred of the conventional and the artificial in art, literature and life. The spirit of imitation and mannerism common to the eighteenth century was in every way repugnant to her. She could have had only contempt for the literary art of a Pope or a Boileau. The nature of her realism, and the conception she had of its importance, may be understood from these paragraphs, for in them she has unfolded her theory more clearly than in anything else she has written, and with that genius for sympathetic description which is so marked in her novels.

How little the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to
those who are outside them, how little their natural history has been
studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our art as well as by our
political and social theories. Where, in our picture exhibitions, shall
we find a group of true peasantry? What English artist even attempts to
rival in truthfulness such studies of popular life as the pictures of
Teniers or the ragged boys of Murillo? Even one of the greatest
painters of the pre-eminently realistic school, while in his picture of
"The Hireling Shepherd" he gave us a landscape of marvellous
truthfulness, placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who were not
much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our chimney
ornaments. Only a total absence of acquaintance and sympathy with our
peasantry could give a moment's popularity to such a picture as "Cross
Purposes," where we have a peasant girl who looks as if she knew
L.E.L.'s poems by heart, and English rustics whose costumes seem to
indicate that they are meant for ploughmen with exotic features that
remind us of a handsome _primo tenore_. Rather than such cockney
sentimentality as this as an education for the taste and sympathies, we
prefer the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. But
even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of
features, who are far above the effeminate feebleness of the "Keepsake"
style, treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and
prepossessions rather than of direct observation. The notion that
peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in a
smock-frock is when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound
teeth, that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and village children
necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge from
the artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into literature instead
of life. The painter is still under the influence of idyllic
literature, which has always expressed the imagination of the
cultivated and town-bred, rather than the truth of rustic life. Idyllic
ploughmen are jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic
shepherds make bashful love under hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers
dance in the chequered shade, and refresh themselves, not immoderately,
with spicy nut-brown ale. But no one who has seen much of actual
ploughmen thinks them jocund; no one who is well acquainted with the
English peasantry can pronounce them merry. The slow gaze, in which no
sense of beauty beams, no humor twinkles,-the slow utterance and the
heavy slouching walk, remind one rather of that melancholy animal, the
camel, than of the sturdy countryman with striped stockings, red waist
coat and hat aside, who represents the traditional English peasant.
Observe a company of haymakers, when you see them at a distance,
tossing up the forkfuls of hay in the golden light, while the wagon
creeps--slowly with its increasing burthen over the meadow, and the
bright green space which tells of work done gets larger and larger, you
pronounce the scene "smiling," and you think that these companions in
labor must be as bright and cheerful as the picture to which they give
animation. Approach nearer, and you will certainly find that haymaking
time is a time of joking, especially it there are women among the
laborers; but the coarse laugh that bursts out every now and then, and
expresses the triumphant taunt, is as far as possible from your idyllic
conception of idyllic merriment. That delicious effervescence of the
mind which we call fun has no equivalent for the northern peasant,
except tipsy revelry; the only realm of fancy and imagination for the
English clown exists at the bottom of the third quart-pot.

The conventional countryman of the stage, who picks up pocket books and
never looks into them, and who is too simple even to know that honesty
has its opposite, represents the still lingering mistake that an
unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that
slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition. It is quite true
that a thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical
cheating, but he is not the less likely to carry home his master's corn
in his shoes and pocket; a reaper is not given to writing begging
letters, but he is quite capable of cajoling the dairy-maid into
filling his small-beer bottle with ale. The selfish instincts are not
subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least
established by that classic rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make
men moral, something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass.

Opera peasants, whose unreality excites Mr. Ruskin's indignation, are
surely too frank an idealization to be misleading; and since popular
chorus is one of the most effective elements of the opera, we can
hardly object to lyric rustics in elegant laced bodices and picturesque
motley, unless we are prepared to advocate a chorus of colliers in
their pit costume, or a ballet of charwomen and stocking-weavers. But
our social novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the
unreality of their representations is a grave evil. The greatest
benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is
the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations
and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already
in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can
give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention
to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material
of moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit's
cottage, or tells the story of The Two Drovers,--when Wordsworth
sings to us the reverie of Poor Susan,--when Kingsley shows us Alton
Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway
into the first wood he ever saw,--when Harnung paints a group of
chimney-sweepers,--more is done towards linking the higher classes
with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness,
than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations. Art is the
nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and
extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our
personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he
undertakes to paint the life of the people. Falsification here is far
more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not
so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent
fashions--about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses;
but it _is_ serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and
struggles, the toil, the tragedy and the humor in the life of our more
heavily laden fellow-men,--should be perverted, and turned towards a
false object instead of the true one.

This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepresentation
which gives rise to it has what the artist considers a moral end. The
thing for mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences
which the moralist thinks _ought_ to act on the laborer or the artisan,
but what are the motives and influences which do act on him. We want to
be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental
peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan
in all his suspicious selfishness.

We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of
rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could
give us their psychological character--their conceptions of life, and
their emotions--with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his
books would be the greatest contribution art has ever made to the
awakening of social sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Plornish's
colloquial style with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while
there is the same startling inspiration in his description of the
gestures and phrases of "Boots," as in the speeches of Shakspere's mobs
or numskulls, he scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to
the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his
unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness. But
for the precious salt of his humor, which compels him to reproduce
external traits that serve, in some degree, as a corrective to his
frequently false psychology, his preternaturally virtuous poor children
and artisans, his melodramatic bootmen and courtesans, would be as
noxious as Eugene Sue's idealized proletaires in encouraging the
miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow
out of harsh social relations, ignorance and want; or that the
working-classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial
state of _altruism_, wherein every one is caring for every one else,
and no one for himself.

If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our
sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and
direct us in their application. The tendency created by the splendid
conquests of modern generalization, to believe that all social
questions are merged in economical science, and that the relations of
men to their neighbors may be settled by algebraic equations,--the
dream that the uncultured classes are prepared for a condition which
appeals principally to their moral sensibilities,--the aristocratic
dilettantism which attempts to restore the "good old times" by a sort
of idyllic masquerading, and to grow feudal fidelity and veneration as
we grow prize turnips, by an artificial system of culture,--none of
these diverging mistakes can co-exist with a real knowledge of the
people, with a thorough study of their habits, their ideas, their
motives. The landholder, the clergyman, the mill-owner, the mining
agent, have each an opportunity for making precious observations on
different sections of the working-class, but unfortunately their
experience is too often not registered at all, or its results are too
scattered to be available as a source of information and stimulus to
the public mind generally. If any man of sufficient moral and
intellectual breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated by a
foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view, would devote
himself to studying the natural history of our social classes,
especially of the small shop-keepers, artisans and peasantry,--the
degree in which they are influenced by local conditions, their maxims
and habits, the points of view from which they regard their religious
teachers, and the degree in which they are influenced by religious
doctrines, the interaction of the various classes on each other, and
what are the tendencies in their position towards disintegration or
towards development,--and if, after all this study, he would give us
the result of his observations in a book well nourished with specific
facts, his work would be a valuable aid to the social and political
reformer.

The estimates given in these essays of the writings of Jane Austen, George Sand, Charlotte Brontë and Thackeray, show the soundness of George Eliot's critical judgment. She fully appreciated Jane Austen's artistic skill, as she did George Sand's impassioned love of liberty and naturalness. She also saw how tame are Miss Austen's scenes, how humanly imperfect are Thackeray's characters. Her own work is wanting in Jane Austen's artistic skill and finish, but there is far more of originality and character in her books, more of thought and purpose. Miss Austen tells her story wonderfully well, but her books are all on the same level of social mediocrity and flatness. No fresh, strong, natural, aspiring life is to be found in one of them. George Eliot has not Jane Austen's artistic skill, but she has thought, depth of purpose, originality of expression and conception, and a marvellous creative insight into character. She is less passionate and bold than George Sand, not the same daring innovator, more rational and sensible. She is not so much a poet, has little of George Sand's power of improvisation, much less of eloquence and abandon. She has more literary skill than Charlotte Brontë, less originality, but none of her crudeness. She has not so much of the subtle element of genius, but more of solidity and thought.

Her theories concerning the novel place George Eliot fully in sympathy with what may very properly be called the British school of fiction. The natural history of man is the subject matter used by this school; and to describe accurately, minutely, some portion of the human race, some social community, is its main object. Richardson, Fielding, Miss Austen and Thackeray are the masters in this school, who have given direction to its aims and methods. They have sought to accomplish in novel-writing somewhat the same results as those aimed at by Wordsworth and Browning in poetry, to follow the natural, to make much of the common, to describe things as they are. They are realists both in method and philosophy, though differing widely from the minuteness and coarseness of Tourguénief and Zola, in that they show a large element of the ideal interfused with the real. This school is seldom coarse, vulgar or sensuous, does not mistake the depraved and beastly for the natural. Its members delight in simple scenes, plain life, common joys; the scenes, life and joys which are open to every Englishman. They have made use of the facts lying immediately about them, those with which they were the most familiar. They have broken away from the traditional theories of life, the manners of books of etiquette and the rules of fashionable society, for the life which is natural and instinct with impulses of its own. The life of the professions is described, local dialects and provincialisms appear, places and scenery are carefully painted, and the disagreeable and painful become elements in these novels, because common to humanity.

To this special theory of the novel, as it had been worked out by the English masters of prose-poetry, George Eliot added nothing essential. Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, Miss Austen, Miss Mitford, Fielding and Richardson had preceded her along the way she was to follow. Their methods became hers, she accepted their influence, and her work was done in the spirit they had so ably illustrated. In one direction, however, she far surpassed any one of her masters, and gave to the novel a richness of power and fulness of aim it had not attained to with any of her predecessors. George Eliot combined other methods with that of naturalism, not adhering rigidly to the purpose of painting life as it appears on the surface. Not only from the pre-Raphaelites, but from such romanticists as Scott, did she learn much. Past scenes became natural, and history was discovered to be a vast element in the thought of the present. Scott's power of reviving the past in all its romantic and picturesque features, which gave him such capacity for re-creating the life that had once passed away, was not possessed by George Eliot. Still, if not a romancist, she realized how mighty is the shaping power of the past over the present. For this reason, she endeavored to recast old scenes, to revive in living shapes the times that had gone by. The living movements of the present, its efforts at reform, its cries for liberty, its searchings after a freer and purer life, also became a prominent element in her novels. If in this tendency she somewhat enlarged upon the methods of her masters, yet she was quite in sympathy with many who came just before her, and with many more who were her contemporaries. In another direction she kept along the way followed by many of her co-workers, and brought philosophy and socialistic speculation to the aid of the naturalistic method. Indeed, she so far departed from that method, and from the soundest theories of art, as to become to some extent a _doctrinaire_.

Her novels, like much of the poetry of the same period, are eclectic in spirit, combining with the naturalistic methods those of the historic, socialistic, culture and speculative schools. Art and culture for their own sake combined in her novels with the purpose to use history and social life obedient to a distinct conception of their meanings. To describe life accurately there must be a clear conception of what life means. Genius never works aimlessly; and in seeing life as it is, always sees that it has a tendency and direction. A mind so thoughtful as George Eliot's, with so strong a love of speculative interest in it, was likely to give to novel-writing done by her a large philosophic element. Yet her philosophy is nearly always subject to her imagination and to her naturalism. Her love of nature, her intimate interest in life and its elemental problems, her passionate sympathy with all human passions and experiences, saves her from becoming a mere _doctrinaire_, and gives to her speculations a pathetic, living interest. The poetic elements of her novels are so many as to subordinate the philosophic to the true purposes of art.

In one direction George Eliot departed from the methods of her predecessors, and to so great an extent as to be herself the originator of a new school of fiction. She followed the bent of her time for analysis and psychologic interpretation. It is here more than anywhere else she differs from Charlotte Brontë and George Sand. These two great novelists create character by direct representation, by making their persons live and act. George Eliot shows her characters to the reader by analyzing their motives and by giving the history of their development. The disadvantages of the analytic method are apparent when George Eliot is compared with Scott. Unique, personal and human are his creations, instinct with all human emotions, and profoundly real. It is only the poetic side of life which he sees, not its philosophic. George Eliot wanted to know the meanings of things, and this very desire brings a largeness into her books which is not found in Scott's. She was much the more thoughtful of the two, the one who tried to realize to the intellect what life means. Yet her method of doing this is not always the best one for the poet or the novelist. Scott was no realist, and yet George Eliot has not been more accurate than he. Indeed, he is far more truly accurate in so far as he paints the soul as well as the body of life. The sad endings of her novels grew out of a false theory, and from her inability to see anything of spiritual reality beyond the little round of man's earthly destiny. She did not accept the doctrine that art is to be cultivated only for art's sake, for art was always to her the vehicle of moral or philosophic teaching. The limitations of her art largely lay in the direction of her agnosticism. Scott and George Sand gain for their work a great power and effect by their acceptance of the spiritual as real. There is a light, a subtle aroma, a width of vision, a sense of reality, in their work from this source, which is wanting in George Eliot's. The illimitable mystery beyond the region of the real is the greatest fact man has presented to him, and that region is a reality in all the effects it works on humanity. No poet can ignore it or try to limit it to humanity without a loss to his work. It is this subtle, penetrative, aromatic and mystic power of the ideal which is most to be felt as lacking in the works of George Eliot. Much as we may praise her, we can but feel this limitation. Great as is our admiration, we can but feel that there is a higher range of poetic and artistic creation than any she reached.

The quotations presented from her early writings prove that George Eliot began her career as a novelist with a fully elaborated conception of the purposes of the novel and of the methods to be followed in its production. She had thoroughly studied the subject, had read many of the best works of the best writers, and had formed a carefully digested theory of the novel. That she could do this is rather an indication of critical than of creative power. Her novels everywhere betray the greatness of her reasoning powers, that she was a thinker, that she had strong powers of intellectual analysis, and that she had a logical, accurate mind. Had her mind taken no other direction than this, however, she never could have become a great novelist. These essays indicated something beside powers of reasoning and psychological analysis. They also indicated her capacity for imaginative insight into the motives and impulses of human nature, and an intuitive comprehension of what is most natural to human thought and action. They showed appreciation of sympathy and feeling, and delicate perception of the finer cravings and tendencies of even the commonest souls. They gave promise of so much creative power, her friends saw that in novel-writing she was to find the true expression of her large qualities of mind and heart. The person who could so skilfully point out the faults in the poor novels rapidly issuing from the press, and realize the true indications of a master's power in the creations of the literary artists, might herself possess the genius necessary to original work of her own. Her early essays are now chiefly of value for this promise they give of larger powers than those which could be fully expressed in such work. They prophesied the future, and made her friends zealous to overcome her own reluctance to enter upon a larger work. She doubted her own genius, but it was not destined to remain unfruitful.

VIII.

POETIC METHODS.

Had George Eliot written nothing else than the poems which bear her name, she would have been assigned a permanent place among the poets. Having first attained her rank in the highest order of novelists, however, her poetry suffers in comparison with her prose. The critics tell us that no person gifted with supreme excellence in one form of creative expression has ever been able to attain high rank in another. They forget that Goethe was great both in prose and poetry; that his _Wilhelm Meister_ is of scarcely inferior genius to his _Faust_. They also forget that Victor Hugo holds the first place among the French poets of the present century, at the same time that he is the greatest of all French novelists. It would be well for them also to remember that Scott held high rank as a poet before he began his wonderful career as a novelist. A contemporary of George Eliot's, to name a single instance of another kind, was equally excellent as poet and painter. Dante Rossetti made for himself a lasting place in both directions, and in both he did work of a high order.

In reality, the novel much resembles the narrative or epic poem; and if a work of true genius, it is difficult to distinguish it from the poem except as they differ in external form. The novel has for its main elements those qualities of imagination, description, high-wrought purpose, which are also constituents of much of the best poetry. The novel is more expansive than the poem, one of the chief characteristics of which is condensation; its theme may take a wider range, and it may embrace those cruder and more common features of life which are inappropriate to the poem. The novelist can make a greater use of humor, he can give more detail to description, and portrayal of character can be carried to a much greater extent, than is usual with the poet. The poet requires a subject more sublime, inspiring and naturally beautiful than the novelist, who seeks what is the more human, nearer the level of daily social existence, and full of the affecting even if ruder interests and passions of life. The novel is so similar to the poem, and in so many ways requires such similar qualities of mind for its production, that there is no inherent reason why the same person cannot do equally good work in both. The supposition is that the poet may become a novelist, or the novelist a poet, in all cases except where there is some outward disqualification. The novelist may not have the sense of rhythmical form and of metrical expression; and the poet may not possess that constructive faculty which builds up plots, incidents and characters. In nearly all respects but these the two forms of creative genius so nearly assimilate each other, it is to be expected a novelist may turn poet if he have a large imagination and a stimulating capacity for metrical expression.

Novelists of strong imagination and a ready command of expressive words, barely escape writing poetry when they only purpose to write prose. This is true of Hugo, Auerbach, Dickens and George Eliot, again and again. The glow of creation, the high-wrought impulse of imagination, the ideal conception of life, all move the novelist in the direction of poetry. With much effort he keeps meter and rhyme out of his prose, but simile and metaphor, condensed expression, unusual words, poetic compounds, alliteration, sublime and picturesque expression, will intrude themselves. Dickens even permits meter and rhyme to conquer him, and weakens his style in consequence. He grows sentimental, and the real strength of pure prose is lost. George Eliot is often poetical in expression, touches the very borders of poetry continually, but she seldom permits herself to lapse from the strong, energetic and impressive prose which she almost uniformly writes. Specimens of this noble poetic-prose may be found very often in her pages. While it would be difficult by any transposition of words to turn it into poetry, as may often be done in the case of Dickens's prose, yet it contains most of the elements of a high order of poetry. In the account of the death of Maggie and Tom is to be found a fine specimen of her style, the last words being good iambics.

The boat reappeared, but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace
never to be parted; living through again, in one supreme moment, the
days when they _had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the
daisied fields together_.

In the first paragraph of the thirty-third chapter of _Adam Bede_ is a sentence which makes a successful stanza in iambics by the addition of a single word.

The woods behind the chase,
And all the hedgerow trees,
Took on a solemn splendor _then_
Under the dark low-hanging skies.

It is very seldom, however, that George Eliot permits anything like meter in her prose, and she is usually very reticent of rhythm. There is fervor and enthusiasm, imagination and poetic insight, but all kept within the limits of robust and manly prose. This capacity of prose to serve most of the purposes of poetry may be seen in a marked degree in all of George Eliot's novels. In the account of Adam Bede's love for Hetty this subtle power of words and ideas to give the charm and impression of poetry without rhythm or rhyme is exhibited in a characteristic manner.

I think the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded, blossom-like,
dark-eyed Hetty, of whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came
out of the very strength of his nature, and not out of any inconsistent
weakness. Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite
music? to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings
of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can
penetrate, and binding together your whole being, past and present, in
one unspeakable vibration; melting you in one moment with all the
tenderness, all the love that has been scattered through the toilsome
years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation
all the hard-learned lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your
present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your
past joy? If not, then neither is it a weakness to be so wrought upon
by the exquisite curves of a woman's cheek and neck and arms, by the
liquid depths of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet childish pout of her
lips. For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music; what can one say
more? Beauty has an expression beyond and far above the one woman's
soul that it clothes, as the words of genius have a wider meaning than
the thought that prompted them; it is more than a woman's love that
moves us in a woman's eyes--it seems to be a far-off, mighty love
that has come near to us, and made speech for itself there; the
rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their
prettiness--by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness
and peace. [Footnote: Adam Bede, chapter XXXIII.]

Love, music and beautiful landscapes continually inspire the poetic side of her nature; and these themes, which are constantly recurring in her chapters, draw forth her imagination and give fervor and enthusiasm to her expression. Her love of nature is deep and most appreciative of all its transformations and beauties. This sensitiveness to the changes of the outward world is a large element in her mind, and indicates the reality of her poetic gifts. This may be seen in a passage such as the following:--

The ride to Stone Court, which Fred and Rosamond took the next morning,
lay through a pretty bit of midland landscape, almost all meadows and
pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty, and to
spread out coral fruit for the birds. Little details gave each field a
particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from
childhood; the pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and
trees leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in
mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew; the sudden slope
of the old marl-pit making a red background for the burdock; the
huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without a traceable way of
approach; the gray gate and fences against the depths of the bordering
wood; and the stray hovel, its old, old thatch full of mossy hills and
valleys, with wondrous modulations of light and shadow, such as we
travel far to see in later life, and see larger, but not more
beautiful. These are the things that made the gamut of joy in landscape
to midland-bred souls--the things they toddled among, or perhaps
learned by heart, standing between their father's knees while he drove
leisurely. [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter XII.]

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.

Very near this, Lopez is spoken of in this line:

That was not what he drew his sword at--he!

Such defects as these are not, certainly, of vital importance, and may doubtless be found in even the greatest poets; but they are noticeable here because of one texture with that which limits the quality of her poetic art. The principal criticism to be made on her poetry is that it was composed and did not create itself out of a full poetic mind. It was wrought out, was the result of study and composition, is wanting in spontaneity and enthusiasm. The most serious defect of her poetry is also the most marked defect of her prose, and this is a want of the ideal element. She was a realist by nature, and could not free herself from the tendency to look at the world on its surface only.

In her poetry George Eliot is much more a _doctrinaire_ than in her novels. All her poems, except a few of the shorter ones, are devoted to the inculcation of some moral or philosophic teaching. The very effort she was obliged to make to give herself utterance in poetry predisposed her to intellectual subjects and those of a controversial nature. For this reason her verse has a special interest for those who are attracted to her teachings. Her pen was freer, more creative, in her great novels than in her poems. In fact, her novels, especially _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill on the Floss_, are much more poetical than much she did in verse. In her verse she tried to present the more spiritual side of life, to make living and effective her own conceptions of the unseen and eternal. Yet she was burdened constantly in this effort by the fact that she had a new theory of the spiritual and ideal side of life to interpret. The poets who win the homage of mankind, and conquer all hearts to themselves, take the accepted interpretations of the great spiritual problems of life as the basis of their work and give those a larger, loftier meaning through their poetic and ideal insight and capacity of interpretation. They shun theories which must be expounded and interpretations for which no one is prepared. It is here George Eliot is seriously at fault as a poet, however much she may be commended as a teacher and reformer. Perhaps the truest piece of poetic work she did was _Agatha_, in which, however, there is a greater reliance than in most of her poems, on the accepted interpretations of spiritual beliefs. In portraying the trust, childlike and simple, of an old woman, and in endeavoring to realize the poetic elements of that trust and simplicity, she was very effective. In such work as this she would have been much more successful, from the strictly poetic point of view, than she has been, if she had not attempted to give her theories a clothing in verse. In her "Brother and Sister" she was also very successful, but especially so in the "Two Lovers." There is an exquisite charm and power in some of these minor poems. Where the heart was free, and the intellect was not dominant and insistent on the importance of its theories, there was secured a genuine poetic beauty. There is true poetry in these lines:

Two lovers by a moss-grown spring:
They lean soft cheeks together there,
Mingled the dark and sunny hair,
And heard the wooing thrushes sing.
Oh budding time!
Oh love's blest prime!

Two wedded from the portal stept:
The bells made happy carrollings,
The air was soft as passing wings,
White petals on the pathway slept.
Oh pure-eyed bride!
Oh tender pride!

There is a beauty and majesty in the poem on subjective immortality which is likely to make it, as it has already become, the one popular poem among all she wrote. There is a stimulus, enthusiasm and abandon about it which is attained but seldom in her other verses. The love of humanity, its passionate longing to sacrifice self for the good of all, is acceptable to much of the thought and purpose of the present time; and its spirit of sacrifice is one which may commend it to all earnest souls. In the more extended poems there is genuine accomplishment just in proportion as the leading purpose was artistic rather than philosophic or moral.