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George Eliot's Poetry

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SOURCE: "George Eliot's Poetry," in George Eliot's Poetry and Other Studies, Funk and Wagnalls, 1885, pp. 9-23.

[In the following excerpt, Cleveland contends that Eliot's verses lack the lyricism and vision which, she argues, are marks of genuine poetry.]

I come at once to the consideration of George Eliot's verse in the mention of two qualities which it seems to me to lack, and which I hold to be essentials of poetry.

The first of these two qualities has to do with form, and is a property, if not the whole, of the outside, that which affects and (if anything could do this) stops with the senses. Yet here, as elsewhere in this department of criticism, it is diffcult to be exact. I ask myself, Is it her prosody? and am obliged to find it faultless as Pope's. There is never in her metres a syllable too much or too little. Mrs. Browning's metre is often slovenly, her rhymes are often false. Yet, explain it who will, Elizabeth Browning's verse has always poetry and music, which George Eliot's lacks.

What was work to write is work to read. Ruskin's dictum—"No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort"—I suspect to be wholly true, and that it is pre-eminently true in the production of poetry. Poetry must be the natural manner of the poet, and can never be assumed. I do not mean by this to ignore the aids which study gives to genius; I only mean to say that no mere labor and culture can simulate poetic fire, or atone for its absence. George Eliot puts her wealth of message into the mould of poetic form by continuous effort. No secret of hydraulics could cause a dewdrop to hang upon a rose-leaf in a cube. Her torrents of thought were predestined to a cubical deliverance. Never was the Calvinistic dilemma more intrusive. Her free will cannot squeeze them spherical.

George Eliot's prose carries easily its enormous burdens of concentrated gift. It is like the incomparable trained elephants of Eastern monarchs, which bear at once every treasure—the iron of agriculture, the gem of royalty; and in its cumbrous momentum it out-distances all competitors. But poesy should betray no burdens. Its rider should sit lightly, with no hint of spur. It should sport along its course and reach its goal unwearied.

The born poet has no agony in the deliverance of his song. The uttering is to him that soothing balm which the utterance is to his reader. Burns said, "My passions when once lighted raged like so many devils till they got vent in rhyme; and then the conning over my verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet." But where will one find a lullaby in George Eliot's verses?

Poets do, indeed, learn in suffering what they teach in song; but the singing quiets the suffering. It is the weeping, not the tear wept, that gives relief. Mrs. Browning makes no secret of the headache.

If heads that hold a rhythmic thought must ache perforce,
Then I, for one, choose headaches.

In a private letter she writes: "I have not shrunk from any amount of labor where labor could do anything." Where labor could do anything! There it is!

George Eliot has been said to possess Shakespearian qualities. Perhaps just here, in the relation of manner to matter, is seen her greatest resemblance and greatest difference. No writer, all concede, ever carried and delivered so much as Shakespeare. Never was human utterance so packed with wealthy meaning, so loaded with all things that can be thought or felt, inferred or dreamed, as his. And it all comes with gush and rush, or with gentle, murmuring flow, just as it can come, just as it must come. He takes no trouble, and he gives none. From one of his plays, replete with his incomparable wit, wisdom, and conceit, you emerge as from an ocean bath, exhilarated by the tossing of billows whose rough embrace dissolves to tenderest caress, yet carries in itself hints of central fire, of utmost horizon, of contact with things in heaven and earth undreamt of in our philosophy. You come from one of George Eliot's poems as from a Turkish bath of latest science and refinement,—appreciative of benefit, but so battered, beaten, and disjointed as to need repose before you can be conscious of refreshment.

The irony of fate spares not one shining mark. George Eliot cared most to have the name of poet. But her gait betrays her in the borrowed robe. It is as if the parish priest should insist on wearing in his desk my lady's evening costume. It is too much and not enough. He cannot achieve my lady's trick which causes the queenly train to float behind her like the smoke-plume of a gliding engine. He steps on it and stumbles. You step on it and fall….

A second quality which George Eliot's poetry lacks is internal and intrinsic, pertaining to matter rather than manner, though, as will be suggested later on, standing, perhaps, in the relation to manner of cause to effect. It is that, indeed, which all her works lack, but which prose, as prose, can get along without; call it what you will, faith or transcendentalism; I prefer to define it negatively as the antipode of agnosticism.

No capable student of her works but must admit the existence of this deficiency. Everywhere and in all things it is apparent. Between all her lines is written the stern, self-imposed thus far and no farther. Her noblest characters move, majestic and sad, up to a—stone-wall! There is no need that argument be brought to establish this proposition. It demands—nay, admits of, no proof, for it is self-evident.

The question which concerns us here is simply, What has this fact to do with George Eliot's poetry?

I answer, Much, every way. Herein, indeed, is matter. But my suspicions must not be disclosed in their full heterodoxy. I venture, however, to affirm that agnosticism can never exist in true poetry. Let verse have every quality which delights sense, captivates intellect, and stirs the heart, yet lack that ray which, coming from a sun beyond our system, reaches, blends with, vivifies, and assures the intimation of and longing for immortality in man—lacking this, you have not poetry.

It is the necessity of the poet, his raison d'être, to meet and join the moving of men's minds toward the hereafter. For all minds tend thither. The dullest mortal spirit must at times grope restlessly and expectantly in the outer darkness for something beyond; and this something must exist, will exist, in a true poem. It need not be defined as Heaven, or Paradise, or Hades, or Nirvâna; but we must not be confronted with silence; there must be in some way recognition of and sympathy with this deepest yearning of the soul. Many a one, not knowing what, not seeing where, but trusting in somewhat and trusting in somewhere, has been a poet and an inspiration to his race. The simplest bead-telling Margaret is appeased with the creedless faith of her Faust, though it be told in "phrases slightly different" from the parish priest's. Faust, the lore-crammed, the knowledge-sated, yet feels the unseen, and longs and trusts. His proud will brings no cold, impenetrable extinguisher to place upon this leaping flame of spirit, which sends its groping ray far beyond his finite horizon, ever moving, moving in its search; because he feels assurance of the existence of the something toward which it moves.

George Eliot, confronted by Margaret's question, answers sadly, with submission born of a proud ignorance, "I do not know. My feeling that there is something somewhere is, itself, unaccountable, and proves nothing. I simply do—not—know. I will not conjecture. It is idle and impertinent to guess. There is that of which you and I both do know, because we have experience of it. Of this only will I speak. All else is but verbiage. We stop here."

And she stops here, before a great stone-wall, higher than we can see over, thicker than we can measure, so cold that we recoil at the touch. There is no getting any farther. It is the very end.

Now, this can never be poetry; for the poet must ever open and widen our horizon. He need not be on the wing, but his wings must be in sight. He need not—nay, he must not, deal with man-made creeds and dogmas. He need not deal with ethics even. Homer knows nothing of most of George Eliot's sweet humanities, and confuses shockingly all things which, since his poor day, have come to be catalogued under the heads of virtue and vice….

George Eliot, with brain surcharged with richest thought and choicest, carefulest culture; with heart to hold all humanity, if that could save; with tongue of men and angels to tell the knowledge of her intellect, the charity of her heart—yet, having not faith, becomes, for all of satisfaction that she gives the soul, but sounding brass and tinkling cymbal! She will not bid me hope when she herself has no assurance of the thing hoped for. She must not speak of faith in the unknown. She cannot be cruel, but she can be dumb; and so her long procession of glorious thoughts, and sweet humanities, and noblest ethics, and stern renunciations, and gracious common lots, and lofty ideal lives, with their scalding tears, and bursting laughter, and flaming passion—all that enters into mortal life and time's story-—makes its matchless march before our captured vision up to—the stone-wall. "And here," she says, "is the end!" We may accept her dictum and be brave, silent, undeceived, and undeceiving agnostics; but, as such, we must say to her (of The Spanish Gypsy, for instance), "This is not poetry! It is the richest realism, presenting indubitable phenomena from which you draw, with strictest science, best deduction and inference concerning the known or the knowable. But, by virtue of all this, it is not poetry. The flattering lies and pretty guesses are not there, and will be missed. You must put them in as do the Christians, the transcendentalists, and the fools generally. The 'poet' comes from these ranks. If you will persist in this sheer stop when you reach the confines of the known, you must not attempt to pass your work off as poetry. Even pagans will not be attracted by such verse. They want and will have predication. It is not so much that you do not know—nobody knows—as that you will not guess, or dream, or fancy, to their whim; that you will be so plainly, simply silent concerning the hereafter. Your readers will not endure that in poetry. There was John Milton, his learning as great as yours, his metres not more exact, yet nothing saves his Paradises from being theological treatises except the imagination in them, which stops not with the seen, but invades and appropriates the unseen. This blind old Titan sees and interprets the heavens by his inner vision. His sublime audacity of faith aërates the ponderous craft of his verse and keeps it from sinking into the abyss of théologie pedantry….

George Eliot herself says, in a private letter lately given to the public, referring to the evolution of her Dinah from the germ sown in her mind years before by the person of an aunt, and speaking of the unlikeness of the two, as well as the likeness, "The difference was not merely physical. No difference is."

No one knows better than George Eliot knew how the spiritual body gives curve, and feature, and expression to the material body. Mrs. Browning herself did not more keenly realize and everywhere acknowledge the truth that spirit makes the form.

No one bows with profounder recognition to the dictum "it is the spirit which quickeneth" than does the author of Adam Bede and The Spanish Gypsy. It is this which she thinks it worth while to teach, without which she would have no heart to teach at all. But her teaching takes its shape from the attitude of her own soul.

To epitomize, then. George Eliot's pages are a labyrinth of wonder and beauty; crowded with ethics lofty and pure as Plato's; with human natures fine and fresh as Shakespeare's; but a labyrinth in which you lose the guiding cord! With the attitude and utterance of her spirit confronting me, I cannot allow her verse to be poetry. She is the raconteur, not the vates; the scientist, not the seer.

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