Part 7
The most striking quality in _The Spanish Gypsy_, on a first reading, I think, is its extraordinary rhetorical energy and elegance. The richness of the author's style in her novels gives but an inadequate idea of the splendid generosity of diction displayed in the poem. She is so much of a thinker and an observer that she draws very heavily on her powers of expression, and one may certainly say that they not only never fail her, but that verbal utterance almost always bestows upon her ideas a peculiar beauty and fullness, apart from their significance. The result produced in this manner, the reader will see, may come very near being poetry; it is assuredly eloquence. The faults in the present work are very seldom faults of weakness, except in so far as it is weak to lack an absolute mastery of one's powers; they arise rather from an excess of rhetorical energy, from a desire to attain to perfect fullness and roundness of utterance; they are faults of overstatement. It is by no means uncommon to find a really fine passage injured by the addition of a clause which dilutes the idea under pretence of completing it. The poem opens, for instance, with a description of
"Broad-breasted Spain, leaning with equal love (A calm earth-goddess crowned with corn and vines) On the Mid Sea that moans with memories, And on the untravelled Ocean, _whose vast tides Pant dumbly passionate with dreams of youth_."
The second half of the fourth line and the fifth, here, seem to me as poor as the others are good. So in the midst of the admirable description of Don Silva, which precedes the first scene in the castle:--
"A spirit framed Too proudly special for obedience, Too subtly pondering for mastery: Born of a goddess with a mortal sire, Heir of flesh-fettered, weak divinity, _Doom-gifted with long resonant consciousness And perilous heightening of the sentient soul_."
The transition to the lines in Italic is like the passage from a well-ventilated room into a vacuum. On reflection, we see "long resonant consciousness" to be a very good term; but, as it stands, it certainly lacks breathing-space. On the other hand, there are more than enough passages of the character of the following to support what I have said of the genuine splendour of the style:--
"I was right! These gems have life in them: their colours speak, Say what words fail of. So do many things,-- The scent of jasmine and the fountain's plash, The moving shadows on the far-off hills, The slanting moonlight and our clasping hands. O Silva, there's an ocean round our words, That overflows and drowns them. Do you know. Sometimes when we sit silent, and the air Breathes gently on us from the orange-trees, It seems that with the whisper of a word Our souls must shrink, get poorer, more apart? Is it not true?
DON SILVA.
Yes, dearest, it is true. Speech is but broken light upon the depth Of the unspoken: even your loved words Float in the larger meaning of your voice As something dimmer."
I may say in general, that the author's admirers must have found in _The Spanish Gypsy_ a presentment of her various special gifts stronger and fuller, on the whole, than any to be found in her novels. Those who valued her chiefly for her humour--the gentle humour which provokes a smile, but deprecates a laugh--will recognise that delightful gift in Blasco, and Lorenzo, and Roldan, and Juan,--slighter in quantity than in her prose-writings, but quite equal, I think, in quality. Those who prize most her descriptive powers will see them wondrously well embodied in these pages. As for those who have felt compelled to declare that she possesses the Shakespearian touch, they must consent, with what grace they may, to be disappointed. I have never thought our author a great dramatist, nor even a particularly dramatic writer. A real dramatist, I imagine, could never have reconciled himself to the odd mixture of the narrative and dramatic forms by which the present work is distinguished; and that George Eliot's genius should have needed to work under these conditions seems to me strong evidence of the partial and incomplete character of her dramatic instincts. An English critic lately described her, with much correctness, as a critic rather than a creator of characters. She puts her figures into action very successfully, but on the whole she thinks for them more than they think for themselves. She thinks, however, to wonderfully good purpose. In none of her works are there two more distinctly human representations than the characters of Silva and Juan. The latter, indeed, if I am not mistaken, ranks with Tito Melema and Hetty Sorrel, as one of her very best conceptions.
What is commonly called George Eliot's humour consists largely, I think, in a certain tendency to epigram and compactness of utterance,--not the short-clipped, biting, ironical epigram, but a form of statement in which a liberal dose of truth is embraced in terms none the less comprehensive for being very firm and vivid. Juan says of Zarca that
"He is one of those Who steal the keys from snoring Destiny, And make the prophets lie."
Zarca himself, speaking of "the steadfast mind, the undivided will to seek the good," says most admirably,--
"'Tis that compels the elements, _and wrings A human music from the indifferent air_."
When the Prior pronounces Fedalma's blood "unchristian as the leopard's," Don Silva retorts with,--
"Unchristian as the Blessed Virgin's blood. Before the angel spoke the word, 'All hail!'"
Zarca qualifies his daughter's wish to maintain her faith to her lover, at the same time that she embraces her father's fortunes, as
"A woman's dream,--who thinks by smiling well To ripen figs in frost."
This happy brevity of expression is frequently revealed in those rich descriptive passages and touches in which the work abounds. Some of the lines taken singly are excellent:--
"And bells make Catholic the trembling air";
and,
"Sad as the twilight, all his clothes ill-girt";
and again
"Mournful professor of high drollery."
Here is a very good line and a half:--
"The old rain-fretted mountains in their robes Of shadow-broken gray."
Here, finally, are three admirable pictures:--
"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 declaréd 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 _père 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 mediæval; 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 Alcaÿde, 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:--