BOOKS.

THE SPANISH GYPSY.*

WE are not amongst those who can profess to determine out of hand the intellectual calibre of any considerable effort of an author of true genius. Such efforts require time, study, and the perspec- tive of quiet memory to gauge with anything like certainty or delicacy ; and no judgment, however careful and sincere, passed on them while they are still so fresh to us as the exigencies of periodical literature require, should be taken for more than a first impression is worth. That newspaper readers like to have the earliest and freshest impressions of such works is sufficient reason for giving them, but sufficient reason also why theyshould scarcely be allowed the full weight of matured and deliberate criticism. With this caution, we will attempt to define as clearly as we can the impression which George Eliot's only poem has made upon us. It is undoubtedly much the greatest poem of any wide scope and on a plan of any magnitude, which has ever proceeded from a woman, —a poem far superior to Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh, which, however, we hold to be by no means a fair specimen of its author's genius. A long poem requires, indeed, a grasp and steadiness of high imagination, a proportion in the parts, and an intellectual mastery in the whole, which are peculiarly rare as yet in the pro- ducts of feminine genius. But it is precisely in this masculine power of intellectual survey, in this grasp of imagination, in this perfect mastery of the significance of her materials, that George Eliot surpasses not merely all women, but most men of genius. It is not, therefdre, saying very much of any poem of hers, to say that it is far beyond any poem of equal scope or magnitude, that we know of, which was ever produced by woman. Whether it will rank among the great poems of English literature we will not as yet pretend to decide,—for that so many elements are wanting. We doubt even where it will rank among the works of the same author. That it is full to overflowing of thought and imaginative passion we need scarcely say. That the outlines of its intellectual design are bold and striking we have already implied. That it contains lines of shrewd, terse, and almost Shakespearian observation none who remember the mottoes to many of the chapters in Felix Holt will be surprised .to hear. What does impress us as defective in the poem on looking back upon it,—defective especially as tried by the standard to which George Eliot has herself accustomed us,— is the dramatic conception and delineation of most of the characters, which appear to us to move too much and too appar- ently in obedience to the intellectual wires which the reader at The Spanish Gov. A Poem. By George Eliot. London : Blackwood. ace discovers in relation with them. If we except, perhaps,—and ven there we are doubtful,—the Spanish Duke, Don Silva, whose character is certainly finely conceived both in outline and in detail, though the general effect is, we think, a little like " the misty Hyades," a haze of moral worlds melting into each other, —the chief characters of the story, especially the Gypsy chief and the Gypsy heroine, do not leave upon us any impression of dramatic power at all comparable to the leading figures of our author's greater prose works. Romola, we do not doubt, remains much her greatest imaginative effort, though there is, of course, ample oppor- tunity in the mere form of verse for imaginative beauties of a kind inadmissible and unadmitted in her novels.

The intellectual background of the tragedy,—for tragedy, with interspersed narrative links, it really is,—seems to us the greatest thing about it, and it is very great ; the figures which are painted in upon that background, and whose movements are intended to bring it for us fully into relief, are, we think, hardly living and real enough to assert fully their own independent vitality. They betray the intellectual analysis to which they have been subjected, and to illustrate which they were probably created. If we may venture to interpret so great a writer's thought, we should say that the Spanish. Gypsy is written to illustrate not merely doubly and trebly, but from four or five distinct points of view, the tragic veto which the inheritance of those definite streams of impulse and tra- dition, which are stored up in what we call race, puts upon any attempt of spontaneous individual emotion or volition to ignore or defy their control, and to emancipate itself from the tyranny of their disputable and apparently cruel law. You can see the influence, we may almost say of the recent Darwinian doctrines, so far as they are applicable at all to moral characteristics and causes, in almost every page of the book. How the threads of hereditary capacity and hereditary sentiment control as with invisible cords the orbits of even the most powerful characters,—how the fracture of those threads, so far as it can be accomplished by mere will, may have even a greater effect in wrecking character than moral degeneracy would itself produce,—how the man who trusts and uses the hereditary forces which natural descent has bestowed upon him, becomes a might and a centre in the world, while the man, perhaps intrinsically the nobler, who dissipates his strength by trying to swim against the stream of his past, is neutralized and paralyzed by the vain effort,—again, how a divided past, a past not really homogeneous, may weaken this kind of power, instead of strengthening it by the command of a larger experience, — all this George Eliot's poem paints with a tragical force that answers to Aristotle's fine definition of tragedy, — that which " purifies " by pity and by fear. The heroine of the book, an infant of gypsy birth, as she subsequently discovers, has been adopted by Duke Silva's mother, and when the poem opens the Duke is planning their immediate marriage. The motto of the story might be given in some of Fedalma, the heroine's, last words :- " Our dear young love,—its breath was happiness ! But it had grown upon a larger life

IVhich tore its roots asunder. We rebelled,— The larger life subdued us."

At the very opening of the poem the seeds of the constitutional difference of tendency between the free gypsy blood and the deeply furrowed Spanish pride and honour are beginning to flower. Though the love between the two is perfect, Fedalma frets against the restraints of the secluded Spanish grandeur, and yearns after a larger measure of popular sympathies. On a lovely Southern evening she even dances on the Placa, the public square of Bedmar, the garrison of which Duke Alva commands (for a Moorish force is in the neighbourhood),—and this she does from the mere yearning to express, after the Southern fashion, her spontaneous delight in the harmony of the evening, and her fullness of sympathy with the people who are looking on. This incident is the first made use of by our author to indicate the immense divergence between the inherited natures of the Gypsy and the Spanish Duke,—and this, though the difference is purely one of inheritance, for Fedalma has been brought up from her birth in the strict seclusion of a Spanish grandee. This is her excusd to her lover for the breach of conventional manners of which she has been guilty :—

" Yes, it is true. I was not wrong to dance.

The air was filled with music, with a song

That seemed the voice of the sweet eventide— The glowing light entering through eye and ear— That seemed our love—mine, yours—they are but one—

Trembling through all my limbs, as fervent words

Tremble within my soul and must be spoken.

And all the people felt a common joy

And shouted for the dance. A brightness soft As of the angels moving down to see

Illumined the broad space. The joy, the life Around, within me, were one heaven: I longed To blend them visibly : I longed to dance Before the people—be as mounting flame To all that burned within them ! Nay, I danced ; There was no longing : I but did the deed, Being moved to do it."

And here is the finest study of character in the poem, the Spanish Duke, who has a love in him that overflows the channels of Spanish tradition and convention, and whose wreck of mind, due to the impulse which seizes him to break with those traditions rather than with his love, is the true theme of the tragedy :- " A man of high-wrought strain, fastidious In his acceptance, dreading all delight

That speedy dies and. turns to carrion :

Ills senses much exacting, deep instilled

With keen imagination's difficult needs:—

Like strong-limbed monsters studded o'er with eyes, Their hunger checked by overwhelming vision,

Or that fierce lion in symbolic dream Snatched from the ground by wings and now-endowed With a man's thought-propelled relenting heart.

Silva was both the lion and the man ; First hesitating shrank, then fiercely sprang, Or having sprung, turned pallid at his deed And loosed the prize, paying his blood for naught.

A nature half-transformed, with qualities That oft bewrayed each other, elements Not blent but struggling, breeding strange effects, Passing the reckoning of his friends or foes.

Haughty and generous, grave and passionate ; With tidal moments of devoutost awe, Sinking anon to farthest ebb of doubt ; Deliberating ever, till the sting Of a recurrent ardour made him rush Right against reasons that himself had drilled

And marshalled painfully. 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."

When Fedalma is claimed by her father the Zincalo (or Gypsy) chief, and called upon by hint to break from her Spanish ties and aid him in the task he has set himself of forming his gypsy tribe into an independent nation on the shore of Africa, the struggle between the two natures,—the inherited obedience to a captain and father of Zarca's free, bold, and commanding nature, and the acquired nature, the passion for her Spanish lover,—begins. But in Fedalma it only appears as a struggle which is from the first decided in favour of the stronger nature she has inherited. Her love to the Duke is true and inexhaustible ; but she realizes at once that to wrap herself up in the subtle tendernesses of her ducal lover, and leave her father to wrestle alone with his great enterprise on a foreign shore, will make her utterly unworthy even of her own place in life, and so fill her with the conviction that she is mean, and selfish, and worthless ; that she would not be • worthy even of the part she would choose, and would sink in her own and Silva's esteem. So she goes with her father, broken-hearted but firm, and breaks away from Silva. The Duke, on the other hand, tramples on the ties of rank, family, and country for the sake of his love. He gives up his place as commander of the fortress to follow Fedalma, hoping to win her back to him. Finding the Gypsy chief firm, and his daughter inexorably resolved to sacrifice her love to what she thinks her duty, he sacrifices his own place in life alto- gether, and swears fealty to the Zincalo chief rather than lose his betrothed. In the meantime the latter has to earn his Moorish safe- conduct to Africa by taking the fortress of Bedmar which Silva had commanded, and Silva finds, to his unutterable horror and remorse, that the fortress has been surprised and all his own dearest companions in arms slain by the troop of Zincali with whom he had united himself. In his insanity of remorse he kills %arca,— Fedalma's father,—and the tragedy ends with their final separation, she to take, so far as she may, her father's place as ruler of the Gypsy people on the African shore ; he to get absolved for his sin, and to recover his knightly name as a Spanish soldier of the Cross. The point of the tragedy, however, is the contrast between the moral strength of the Gypsy chief, Zarca, whose inherited qualities of mind and body and whole life had been absolutely in harmony, and the comparative weakness of his daughter, in whom Spanish • training and Spanish ties bad partly neutralized her gypsy blood, and, again, between both of these and the absolute wreck of cha- racter in Silva when he breaks with his whole ancestral traditions, and tries to make a sacrifice of them to love.

The same striking theme is illustrated from several other points.

of view. Silva's uncle, Father Isidor, the prior of San Domingo, the priest of the Spanish Inquisition, whose nature is all held within the deep-cut channels of Spanish tradition, within the ideas which dominated the Spanish chivalry and the Spanish faith, is the moral foil to his nephew. He stands out,—keen, hard, loyal to his own ideas, domineering without hesitation, and crushing without a scruple all even in himself which tends to divide himself,—as the model of the morality which acts rigidly and severely, volition and nature being in perfect unison, on a fixed and customary type. But apart even from these leading characters, perpetually recurring touches throughout the whole poem show how entirely this theme had occupied George Eliot's imagination. Take but as one instance, this, on the inherited forces which form the charac- ters of monkeys it propos of the juggler's ape: "Man thinks Brutes have no wisdom, since they know not his: Can we divine their world?—the hidden life That mirrors us as hideous shapeless power, Cruel supremacy of sharp-edged death, Or fate that leaves a bleeding mother robbed ? Oh, they have long tradition and swift speech, Can tell with touches and sharp darting cries Whole histories of timid races taught

To breathe in terror by red-handed man."

It is impossible, indeed, to speak too highly of the intellectual con- ception at the basis of the poem, and the finish 'and power with which it is worked out and adorned. Thus, how fine for its pur- pose is the scene between Don Silva and the Jewish astrologer, Sephardo, who perceives so clearly the scientific limits to astrolo- gical prediction, that he refines away and distinguishes till his science is but, as Silva tells him, to pinch

" With confident selection these few grains And call them verity, from out tho dust Of crumbling error."

This discussion between Silva and the Jewish astrologer on the decaying science of astral influence, and on those contingencies of human life which its clearest visions left unsolved,—and again, this glimpse of a subtle scientific mind which, while it had lost con- fidence in the boasted power of the science, still clung cautiously to the dwindling grain of truth which it still believed that the science contained, are, as it were, poetical glosses and commen- taries on the main theme of the story, showing how the past of Europe in that age of religious inquisition and scientific discovery was pressing upon the present, how much of it was crumbling away beneath the intellectual dissection of the new thought, and yet how keenly the most vigilant and subtle minds of the age felt the dan- ger of breaking,—even intellectually,—with the past, and how anxiously, as they shred away the superfluous traditions, they held to everything which had not yet been disproved. This fading belief, like other fading beliefs, is intended to have its effect on Silva's mind, disposing him to distrust both the social and reli- gious traditions in which he had been brought up, and therefore to trust more amply the passion of love in his heart which he knew to be both noble and true. Yet even from the first he, too, cannot keep his mind off the danger of the schism in his life which he feels approaching, and of which his mere love for a nature so untram- melled by tradition as Fedalma's cannot but warn him. How finely, he says, in his first love scene with Fedalma :—

" Ah, yes! all preciousness

To mortal hearts is guarded by a fear.

All love fears loss, and most that loss supreme, Its own perfection—seeing, feeling, change From high to lower, dearer to loss dear.

Can love be careless ? If we lost our love What should we find ?—with this sweet Past torn off, Our lives deep scarred just where their beauty lay? The best we found thenceforth wore still a worse : The only better is a Past that lives On through an added Present, stretching still

In hope unchecked by shaming memories

To life's last breath."

We have exhausted our space without indicating any of the minor beauties of the poem, and without more than indicating what seem to us its faults. While the intellectual ground-plan of the tragedy is exquisitely worked out, the characters are to us faint, misty, imperfectly executed,—and this applies especially to the Gypsy chief and his daughter. The lyrics, too, though one or two are of great beauty, do not captivate us like the reflective poetry. It is a great meditative, not a great dramatic poem,— meditation inlaid, as all true meditation must be, with keen and clear observation. Of touches of fine humour of George Eliot's grave kind there are many. Of wise apophthegms there are still more, and of exquisitely tender sentiment and fancy as much as heart could wish. We cannot venture to say what place the poem

will take in English literature. Amongst the author's own works we think it must certainly rank below Romola, though it proves what Romola did not,—that she can command the rhythm and movement of stately and melodious verse.