Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

GEORGE ELIOT

[MARY ANN EVANS, who wrote novels and poems under the name of George Eliot, was born in 1819 at Arbury Farm, Warwickshire, her father being a builder and estate agent. As a child and young girl she was chiefly remarkable for her passionate love of reading, and in the second degree, for her religious enthusiasm. Her first published writing was a religious poem which appeared in the Christian Observer, January, 1840. Her views became liberalized after her father's removal to Coventry in 1841, owing to her intimacy with the related families of Bray and Hennell, the heads of which were known as writers of rather heterodox books; and the result of this change of thought was her translation of Strauss's Leben Jesu (1846). A period of travel followed, and in 1851 Miss Evans came to London to act as assistant editor of the Westminster Review. This brought her into contact with many "advanced" literary people, and especially with G. H. Lewes, with whom, in 1854, she entered into marital relations which continued till his death, twenty-four years later, Lewes's domestic circumstances making a legal marriage impossible. Two years

later, after long travel abroad, she wrote the first of her stories, and this, as all the world knows, was in due course followed by books which placed her at once in the front rank of English novelists. The curious thing is that the first period of George Eliot's immensely successful novels lasted less than seven years (Adam Bede, 1859; Felix Holt, 1866); and afterwards the author during the greater part of four years devoted herself to writing poems. She published The Spanish Gypsy in 1868, and in 1869 there followed The Legend of Jubal, which some years afterwards was issued in a volume with various miscellaneous poems. The second period of George Eliot's novels followed immediately; it included Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, both of which met with amazing success. In 1878 G. H. Lewes died; in May, 1880, she married Mr. J. W. Cross, but died seven months later, on December 22, 1880.]

Leslie Stephen has put it on record that "neither critics nor general readers have been convinced that George Eliot was properly a poet, though she may be allowed to represent almost the highest excellence that can be attained in verse by one whose true strength lies elsewhere." The history of her first serious poem, The Spanish Gypsy, is a proof that verse composition did not come nat

urally to her, for she found the difficulties immense, almost insuperable; after eight months' work she became "ill and very miserable;" and finally Lewes induced her to give up the poem and to turn back to prose. So Felix Holt was written and published (1865-6); but afterwards, as she told Frederic Harrison, she found it "impossible to abandon" the poem, though she, who had "never recast anything before," found it necessary to recast and alter, which she did most thoroughly. Originally it had been written as a five-act drama; the new version, which occupied her for a couple of years, was a hybrid affair, the dramatic scenes being oddly connected by long passages of narrative. The result is as though some commentator on Shakespeare or Sophocles were to run his notes into metrical form, and print them in the text, between the scenes. We need dwell no longer on The Spanish Gypsy, leaving it with the remark that it shows, as might be expected, much learning, and that it abounds in passages of sonorous rhetoric. A higher claim to purely poetic distinction is made by some of the miscellaneous verse that followed later, especially by The Legend of Jubal and some of the poems now bound up with it. They all want spontaneity; of a lyrical gift there are few signs; but to say that they are too much interfused with philosophy is only to say that they express the thoughts which, ever since she and George Lewes came together, possessed the author's mind. We quote some passages from Jubal and the well-known O May I Join the Choir Invisible.

The Jubal extracts embody really poetical visions, the former of the first consciousness of death in the primeval world, and the latter of one of the first dawnings of civilization; while the Choir Invisible is noteworthy both for the quality of the blank verse and for its concentrated and beautiful expression of some of the central beliefs of the author and of the thousands of minds with which she was in close intellectual sympathy.

EDITOR.

[From The Legend of Jubal]

THE THOUGHT OF DEATH

Death was now lord of Life, and at his word
Time, vague as air before, new terrors stirred,
With measured wing now audibly arose

Throbbing through all things to some unknown close.

Now glad Content by clutching Haste was torn,
And Work grew eager, and Device was born.
It seemed the light was never loved before,
Now each man said, "Twill go and come no more.
No budding branch, no pebble from the brook,
No form, no shadow, but new dearness took
From the one thought that life must have an end;
And the last parting now began to send
Diffusive dread through love and wedded bliss,
Thrilling them into finer tenderness.
Then Memory disclosed her face divine,

That like the calm nocturnal lights doth shine
Within the soul, and shows the sacred graves,
And shows the presence that no sunlight craves,
No space, no warmth, but moves among them all;
Gone and yet here, and coming at each call,
With ready voice and eyes that understand,
And lips that ask a kiss, and dear responsive hand.

THE EFFECT OF MUSIC

Then Jubal poured his triumph in a song-
The rapturous word that rapturous notes prolong
As radiance streams from smallest things that burn,
Or thought of loving into love doth turn.
And still his lyre gave companionship
In sense-taught concert as of lip with lip.
Alone amid the hills at first he tried

His winged song; then with adoring pride
And bridegroom's joy at leading forth his bride,
He said, "This wonder which my soul hath found,
This heart of music in the might of sound,
Shall forthwith be the share of all our race
And like the morning gladden common space:
The song shall spread and swell as rivers do,
And I will teach our youth with skill to woo
This living lyre, to know its secret will,
Its fine division of the good and ill.
So shall men call me sire of harmony,

And where great Song is, there my life shall be."

Thus glorying as a god beneficent,

Forth from his solitary joy he went
To bless mankind. It was at evening,

When shadows lengthen from each westward thing,
When imminence of change makes sense more fine
And light seems holier in its grand decline.
The fruit-trees wore their studded coronal,
Earth and her children were at festival,
Glowing as with one heart and one consent-

Thought, love, trees, rocks, in sweet warm radiance blent.

The tribe of Cain was resting on the ground,
The various ages wreathed in one broad round.
Here lay, while children peeped o'er his huge thighs,
The sinewy man embrowned by centuries:
Here the broad-bosomed mother of the strong
Looked, like Demeter, placid o'er the throng

Of young lithe forms whose rest was movement too-
Tricks, prattle, nods, and laughs that lightly flew,
And swayings as of flower-beds where Love blew.
For all had feasted well upon the flesh

Of juicy fruits, on nuts, and honey fresh,
And now their wine was health-bred merriment,
Which through the generations circling went,
Leaving none sad, for even father Cain
Smiled as a Titan might, despising pain.
Jubal sat climbed on by a playful ring

Of children, lambs and whelps, whose gambolling,
With tiny hoofs, paws, hands, and dimpled feet,
Made barks, bleats, laughs, in pretty hubbub meet.
But Tubal's hammer rang from far away,

Tubal alone would keep no holiday,

His furnace must not slack for any feast,

For of all hardship work he counted least;

He scorned all rest but sleep, where every dream
Made his repose more potent action seem.

Yet with health's nectar some strange thirst was blent,
The fateful growth, the unnamed discontent,
The inward shaping toward some unborn power,
Some deeper-breathing act, the being's flower.
After all gestures, words, and speech of eyes,

The soul had more to tell, and broke in sighs.
Then from the east, with glory on his head
Such as low-slanting beams on corn-waves spread,
Came Jubal with his lyre: there 'mid the throng,
Where the blank space was, poured a solemn song,
Touching his lyre to full harmonic throb

And measured pulse, with cadences that sob,
Exult and cry, and search the inmost deep
Where the dark sources of new passion sleep.
Joy took the air, and took each breathing soul,
Embracing them in one entrancèd whole,
Yet thrilled each varying frame to various ends,
As Spring new-waking through the creature sends
Or rage or tenderness; more plenteous life
Here breeding dread, and there a fiercer strife.
He who had lived through twice three centuries,
Whose months monotonous, like trees on trees
In hoary forests, stretched a backward maze,
Dreamed himself dimly through the travelled days
Till in clear light he paused, and felt the sun
That warmed him when he was a little one;
Felt that true heaven, the recovered past,
The dear small Known amid the Unknown vast,
And in that heaven wept. But younger limbs

Thrilled toward the future, that bright land which swims
In western glory, isles and streams and bays,
Where hidden pleasures float in golden haze.
And in all these the rhythmic influence,
Sweetly o'ercharging the delighted sense,

Flowed out in movements, little waves that spread
Enlarging, till in tidal union led

The youths and maidens both alike long-tressed,
By grace-inspiring melody possessed,

Rose in slow dance, with beauteous floating swerve
Of limbs and hair, and many a melting curve
Of ringed feet swayed by each close-linked palm:
Then Jubal poured more rapture in his psalm,
The dance fired music, music fired the dance,
The glow diffusive lit each countenance,
Till all the gazing elders rose and stood

With glad yet awful shock of that mysterious good.

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »