BOOKS.

GEORGE ELIOT'S POEMS..

IN reading the poems for the first time published, and in reading again the poems republished, in this little volume, the thought which is uppermost in the mind is the same which Mr. Browning expresses so subtly in the "One word more" which closed his "Men and Women,"—where he tells how Rafael, after a life spent

• The Legend of Jabal, and other Poems. By George Eliot. London : William Blackwood and Sons. 1874.

in painting, desired to find a fresh medium without the atmosphere belonging to the well-worn tracks of professional association, into which to pour his soul, and accordingly wrote with the same silver-pointed pencil, which "else he only used to draw Madonnas," "A Century of Sonnets"; how Dante once, with the same mood upon him, proposed "to paint an angel "; and how he himself, though debarred any sphere of art except that of verse, had found a resource of the same kind in these "Men and Women," by paint- ing with a delicate camel's-hair brush in miniature, instead of with the flowing outline and large sweep of a fresco-painter's hand.

"He who works in fresco steals a hair-brush, Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly, Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little, Makes a strange art of an art familiar, Fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets.

He who blows through bronze may breathe through silver, Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess."

And certainly it is an even greater transposition from one to another province of the realm of Art, which our great novelist has experienced in writing these poems. Verse supplies her with a fresh, unhackneyed material in which to shape her more delicate conceptions, and lends to it the special fascinations proper to the new mould. The volume is, of course, a study in itself, if only because it shows where the great novelist seemed to feel most the need for recourse to poetry, and the kind of poetry to which, under these circumstances, she has recourse,—and this we could hardly have learnt from a long- poem like "The Spanish Gipsy," where she was committed to the poetic form throughout the story. Nevertheless, one feels in reading the volume that remarkable as these poems would be from any unknown hand, they are not the most impressive, though they may be the most characteristic expressions of the great mind that produced them,—nay, that they are only in one sense even the most characteristic, namely, in Mr. Browning's sense, that their author here deliberately prefers, instead of blowing "thror brass," "to breathe thro' silver,"—deliberately chooses the new medium for expressing this most individual and intense kind of thought and feeling.

What one notices specially in these minor poems, as in " The- Spanish Gipsy," is that George Eliot's marvellous dramatic power seems to fade away in great measure in the delicate medium of verse, that the ideal ends which draw her to verse absorb her while she is occupied in it, and prevent her from moulding her characters with anything like the force we expect from her. Jabal, Agatha, Armgart and her friends (Leo partly excepted), and Lisa, are all more or less the dreams- of ideal reverie. George Eliot's brooding fancies and her moral enthusiasms are expressed in them, but not her living imagination. We get fine lines, exquisite passages, great imagina- tive expressions here and there, which she could hardly have used in prose, but only one really perfect poem, and that a study, of the idyllic kind, of the relations of a sister and brother. "Jabal," the- poem in praise of death, the poem which expresses the idea that death in life is the great cause of life in death, that the good which the fear of death drives into the soul is the origin of that creative power which enables individual genius to live again in the blessings it confers on the world, is a reverie full of delicate touches and of a sedate melancholy ; but the oftener we read it, the more the close of it, which is of course its peroration and its moral, strikes us as unworthy, even in a: merely artistit. sense, of the conception of the poem. A death-vision, in which the first inventor of music sees the face of his "loved Past," and hears, from that somewhat strange impersonation, a Positivist lecture on the glory of living again in the souls of all the other men whom music is to bless, certainly makes a feeble end- ing to the melodious but rather monotonous poem which delineates so pathetically the origin of music and of song. All that contains what we may fairly regard as artistic autobiography is exceedingly fine and instructive,—like the following descriptions, for instance, of the mingled pain and joy of Jubal's consciousness of creative power :—

" But Jubal had a frame Fashioned to finer senses, which became A yearning for some hidden soul of things, Some outward touch complete on inner springs That vaguely moving bred a lonely pain, A want that did but stronger grow with gain Of ail good else, as spirits might be sad For lack of speech to tell us they are glad.

Jnbal sat lonely, all around was dim, Yet his face glowed with light revealed to him : For as the delicate stream of odour wakes The thought-wed sentience and some image makes From out the mingled fragments of the past, Finely compact in wholeness that will last, So streamed as from the body of each sound Subtler pulsations, swift as warmth, which found All prisoned germs and all their powers unbound, Till thought self-luminous flamed from memory, And in creative vision wandered free.

Then Jubal, standing, rapturous arms upraised, And on the dark with eager eyes he gazed, As had some manifested god been there.

It was his thought he saw : the presence fair Of unachieved achievement, the high task, The mighty unborn spirit that cloth ask With irresistible cry for blood and breath,

Till feeding its great life we sink in death."

But when we pass beyond those beautiful passages in the poem which describe the secrets of the writer's own imaginative experi-

ence, to the delineation of the moral,—that death is no evil, but a good, and that an impersonal immortality is better than a personal,—

we get sweet and fluent didactic verse, without either that keen psy- chological truth which arrests the attention as all vivid portraiture arrests it, or that bold flight of imagination which carries us with it into a purer and sublimer region. Such passages as the follow- ing have neither the ease nor the force which mark a great poem.

The effort in them is visible. They are verse, not poetry, and they throw their air of tremulous endeavour over the whole poem of which they form so important an element :—

" the face said, am thy loved Past,

The soul that makes thee one from first to last I am the angel of thy life and death, Thy outbreathed being drawing its last breath.

Am I not thine alone, a dear dead bride Who blest thy lot above all men's beside ?

Thy bride whom thou wonldst never change, nor take Any bride living, for that dead one's sake ?

Was I not all thy yearning and delight, Thy chosen search, thy senses' beauteous Right, Which still had been the hunger of thy frame In central heaven, hadst thou been still the same ?

Wouldst thou have asked aught else from any god—

Whether with gleaming feet on earth he trod Or thundered through the skies—aught else for share Of mortal good, than in thy soul to bear The growth of song, and feel the sweet unrest Of the world's spring-tide in thy conscious breast? ' "

" Agatha " and " Armgart " seem to us less imperfect than the "Legend of Juba]," partly because they do not aim so high, and partly because there is more of the dramatic form and less of the purely poetic form in them. "Agatha," indeed, is little more than an effort to paint a 'beautiful soul' of the humbler South- German kind, in its old-fashioned piety and mystic, but not the less beneficent, saintliness ; and the picture is very beautiful, though rather slight. It gains a certain idyllic grace from its poetic form ; and the little village night-song with which it con- cludes is full of simple beauty. But it seems to us that it is a success mainly because it passes so little beyond the idyllic aims of many of the author's sketches in prose. We see a very delicate picture framed in melodious verse, but the poem hardly attempts

to give expression to anything deeper than George Eliot's always sensitive appreciation of moral simplicity and loveliness. That which chiefly drives her into poetry, the desire for a fitter medium

of intense feeling than any which prose can afford, is hardly perceivable here. In " Armgart," however, the moral yearning is uppermost again. On the whole, it seems to us the most successful of those of George Eliot's poems which she would not have thought of giving us in any shape if she could not have given them in verse. It contains sentences of extraordinary gran- deur,—again, in all probability, sentences representing the author's own personal experience of the artistic life,—and it paints the necessary limitation and apparent selfishness of genius, and the exorbitant claim of right divine which exclusive gifts are apt to breed in the minds of those who possess them, with marvellous force. No one has ever shown so powerfully how even a genius which delights in itself merely for the joy it diffuses amongst mankind, thinks not of mankind, but of itself, as the great loser, when the gift is withdrawn ; and no one has ever enforced so earnestly the lesson of disinterested sympathy with those "toiling millions of men" who are "sunk in labour and pain." What a fine expression is this of the inborn feeling of power (Armgart, we need hardly say, by way of explanation, is a great singer) :—

" For herself,

She often wonders what her life had been Without that voice for channel to her soul.

She says, it must have leaped through all her limbs—

Made her a Msanad—made her snatch a brand And fire some forest, that her rage might mount In crashing, roaring flames through half a land, Leaving her still and patient for a while. 'Poor wretch!' she says, of any murderess-

' The world was cruel, and she could not sing:

I carry my revenges in my throat ; I love in singing, and am loved again."

And what, again, can be more Shakespearian than this reply to Leo's remark, that a great artist in the moment of success knows not "pain from pleasure in such joy " 2—

" 0, pleasure has cramped dwelling in our souls, And when full Being comes must call on pain To lend it liberal space."

And here, again, is another such terse saying, in which we hardly know whether the form or the thought is the finer :—

" True greatness ever wills— It lives in wholeness, if it live at all,

And all its strength is knit with constancy."

Still even in " Armgart," the nearest, we think, to a poetic whore of all the poems not purely idyllic, there is a sense of defect, of

fragmentariness, and baldness at the end, which tells one that the poetic form is not the form which is the most appropriate to its- author's genius. What remains in the mind of the reader as he- looks back on it, is not form and thought fused perfectly together, but the thought glimmering somewhat vaguely through an im- perfect form. " Lisa " is the least good of all the longer poems.

It is eloquent verse and tender narrative, and nothing more. The most complete and successful of the poems is the series of twelve Shakespearian sonnets called "Brother and Sister.' This is indeed the "soul of a dead past" revisiting the world

with a true imaginative beauty. But it is a poem of the idyllic order,—an exalted form of some of the pure idylls in the Mitt on the Floss, hardly a poem written from the depth of ideal emotions

which could choose no form but poetry. No picture of a sister's-. childish delight in common joys with her brother was ever more delicate ; but what is more beautful still is the air of dreamy wonder, partly, no doubt, a feeling reflected back from a later age, but partly remembered, in which the first recollections of natural+ beauty are steeped. What can be lovelier than this?—

" Oar brown canal was endless to my thought ; And on its banks I sat in dreamy peace, Unknowing how the good I loved was wrought, Untroubled by the fear that it would cease. Slowly the barges floated into view, Rounding a grassy hill to me sublime With some Unknown beyond it, whither flew The parting cuckoo toward a fresh spring-time. The wide-arched bridge, the scented elder-flowers, The wondrous watery rings that died too soon, The echoes of the quarry, the still hours With white robe sweeping-on the shadeless noon,

Were but my growing self, are part of me, My present Past, my root of piety."

On the whole, it seems to us that this little volume of poems is strongest where it keeps to realistic pictures steeped in emotion, and weakest where it springs into the ardour of the ideal life. The verse is too sedate, and almost too tame for the language of passion, and adequate to the thought only when it is the reflection of deeply felt experience. There is a want of ease and swiftness and motion in it, whenever it tries to soar. While the author invests her real self-knowledge or memories in a liquid cloud of soft external beauty, she is truly poetical, though in a modest region, of poetry. But when she embodies an impassioned faith of her own in an imaginative form, she seems to us to show how far her visionary power lags behind her imaginative insight. Its meditative melancholy, in tender recollection, she can reach a point of true poetic beauty ; but she is too self-conscious, too intrinsically sober-minded, too sensible of the urgent limits upon her thought, too true to the world she knows, for those flights of genius beyond the region of experience in which only the higher- kind of poets succeed. George Eliot's poems will add great interesb to her novels. But her name and genius will always be identified with her delineations of life.