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CONTENTS
Preface
General Introduction
Abbreviations
Use of Symbols in Textual Variants
Early Experiment in Verse
On Being Called a Saint
Knowing that shortly I must put off this tabernacle
Sonnet
Question and Answer
Mid the rich store of nature's gifts to man
As tu vu la lune se lever
The Legend of Jubal (1878) Poems
The Legend of Jubal
Agatha
Armgart
How Lisa Loved the King
A Minor Prophet
Editorial Notes
Textual Variants
PREFACE
Antonie Gerard van den Broek's edition of The Complete Shorter Poetry of
George Eliot makes available a fascinating and important genre by one of Victorian
Britain's greatest writers. George Eliot's poetry has been neglected. Part of this
neglect is due to the lack of access; so few of her poems are available in recent
selections from her writings. For instance, A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren's George
Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (1990) publishes three poetic
extracts. The first is the second scene from 'Armgart' (1870), a dramatic poem
focusing upon a woman who turns down marriage to concentrate on her singing
career and subsequently loses her voice. The second consists of a selection from the
first and third books of the lengthy dramatic poem set in Spain just before the 1492
expulsion of its Jewish population. Byatt and Warren choose the opening of The
Spanish Gypsy (written in 1867, published in 1868) and the passage where Fedalma,
the Gypsy princess, accepts the renunciation of her love for a Spanish Duke, Silva.
They also print, in their entirety, the eleven poems constituting Eliot's Shakespearean
sonnet sequence 'Brother and Sister'. Published in Jubal and Other Poems in 1874,
these sonnets are intensely autobiographical, having as their foundation Eliot's
complex relationship with her estranged brother Isaac. Written in 1869, Eliot draws
upon the same relationship as she did for the central plot of The Mill on the Floss,
published in 1860.
The eleven 'Brother and Sister' sonnets are included in Daniel Karlin's The
Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (1998), and in Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J.
Rundle's The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory (1999),
which also includes, with very sparse introduction and notation, 'O May I Join the
Choir Invisible', extracts from the first and third books of The Spanish Gypsy and
'Armgart'. Byatt and Warren provide brief overall introductions to their selections,
no more than a page each in length. Their annotations are limited to six explications
of lines from The Spanish Gypsy. This is at least more detailed than the annotation
provided in Lucien Jenkins's George Eliot Collected Poems, published in 1989. With
the exception of four notes on The Spanish Gypsy no other annotation is provided,
only a short 'Note on the Text' and an 'Introduction'. Before van den Broek's present
edition the most authoritative edition of Eliot's poetry was Cynthia Ann Secor's
unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Her 'The Poems of George Eliot: A Critical Edition with
Introduction and Notes' is a Cornell dissertation presented in September 1969. An
eight-page 'Preface to the Text' is followed by an 'Introductory Essay' of just under
one hundred pages. Each poem is prefaced by the instance of its first publication and
text collated. Textual variations follow at the foot of the page and there is an extensive
commentary on the poem. This encompasses date of composition, its biographical
context and other points of interest. The first poem in Secor's work is 'Knowing that
shortly I must put off this tabernacle'. First published in the Christian Observer in
January 1840, Eliot sent her teacher and friend, the Evangelical Maria Lewis, a copy
in a letter she wrote to her dated 17 July 1839. This poem is in fact the second in the
present edition; the first being 'On Being Called a Saint', omitted from Secor and first
published in Gordon S. Haight's definitive George Eliot: A Biography (1968). Found
in Eliot's notebook kept during her school days, it was 'probably written by Mary
Ann herself' and dates, from the paper evidence provided by the notebook, to the
early 1830s. Secor's unpublished edition is unavailable and, in view of the quality of
primary Eliot documentation which has been published since its appearance,
especially in the area of her notebooks, rather dated. It remained, until the publication
of van den Broek's edition, to which he has provided an introduction both scholarly
and critical, the most extensive, detailed and authoritative edition of Eliot's poetry.
Placing Eliot's poetic output in a wide context, she wrote poems, non-fiction
prose (letters, reviews and review essays, articles for Victorian periodicals) and, of
course, fiction. Her notebooks are a mixture of prose notation from various eclectic
sources in diverse languages and extracts from poems also from different languages in
addition to English. Unlike her contemporaries Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins,
Charles Reade and the slightly later Henry James, Eliot did not write for the theatre.
She writes in her poetry and fiction about actors, actresses and opera singers, but
refrained from theatrical ventures, unlike her partner George Henry Lewes, whose
theatrical experiments ceased with their union. Lewes wrote singly or collaborated in
at least ten plays belonging to the period of the 1840s or the early 1850s, but
noticeably not to the period past 1854 when he and Marian Evans left London for
Weimer, where he prepared his definitive biography of Goethe, published in 1855.
Lewes wrote in many genres, unlike his contemporary Matthew Arnold, whose output
is confined to non-fictional prose and poetry, although the latter ceases to be a major
preoccupation later on in Arnold's life. Amongst other contemporaries of Lewes and
Eliot, Thomas Carlyle primarily wrote non-fiction prose and, of course, the fictional
extravagant exuberant Sartor Resartus ('The Tailor Re-tailored'), first published in
1833 and 1834. He also produced around forty poems which, with his translations,
have been forgotten. Carlyle seems to have had an antipathy to the form, remarking in
a letter 'It is one of my constant regrets, in this generation that men to whom the gods
have given a genius ... will insist, in such an earnest time as ours has grown, in
bringing out their divine gift in the shape of verse, which now no man reads entirely
in earnest'. Of Eliot's other contemporaries, Robert Browning is remembered for his
verse, including dramatic monologues and lengthy poems, and he also produced
closet dramas. Of the Brontë sisters, all three wrote poetry in addition to creating a
most complex fictional world. Thomas Hardy, who lived on until the end of the
second decade of the twentieth century, and who primarily wished to be a poet,
devoted many years to his lengthy historically-based poetic drama The Dynasts, set at
the time of the Napoleonic Wars. George Eliot wrote poetry throughout her life, took
her poetry seriously, and allowed some of it to be published. The motivation to write
for the theatre was mixed. In the instances of Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade or Henry
James, to cite but three, they may well have wished to make a lot of money (certainly
Collins did) with a smash hit, gain recognition, or seek direct audience response (as in
the case of Henry James). Poetry, on the other hand, usually implies slower
recognition and no direct audience response. Response primarily coming in the form
of letters, of course, took time. Tennyson is an obvious case of a Victorian who made
a good deal of money from poetry and gained enormous celebrity status, but he is an
exception rather than the rule. Eliot naturally favoured poetry from her youth, and she
also wrote poetry for money. For instance, she received the relatively large sum of
£250 from Macmillan's Magazine in 1878 for the 838-line 'A College Breakfast-
Party', based on her May 1873 visit to Cambridge.
Eliot and Lewes, after their union, were regular theatre-goers, not to music halls,
comedy or farce, but to Shakespeare, serious drama and, of course, the opera. Lewes
protected her from the 'aves vehement'; the applause of the vulgar crowd, the London
theatrical mob and newspaper and journal criticism of her fiction. Growing up in the
East Midlands, removed from any major city, there were few opportunities in her
youth for theatrical experience, but many for private meditation, reflection and verse.
Inspiration came from the great poetry of the Bible and the mellifluous cadencies of
its translations. For instance, 'Knowing that shortly I must put off this tabernacle' is a
forty-line poetic meditation in ten stanzas of four lines each. Each quatrain concludes
with the single line 'Farewell!'. This meditation, based on the biblical line from '2
Pet. 1.16', was not republished in Eliot's lifetime. As van den Broek indicates in his
headnote commentary on the poem, sentiments in the verses echo biographical
problems its author experienced with her father. The poet, the 'I' of the poem,
expresses the 'somewhat unorthodox wish to take the bible with her to heaven' (this
volume, p. 000). This parallels comments she makes in letters to her teacher and
friend Maria Lewis, dated 17 July 1839 and slightly earlier, on 20 May 1839, when
she alludes to problems associated with church attendance.
Eliot's poetry dating from the late 1830s and early 1840s, the period when she
was in her late teens and early twenties, provides insight into her state of mind,
personal preoccupations and dilemmas. Some of the poems are found in letters written
to Maria Lewis and did not resurface until the publication, in 1954, of the first volume
of George Eliot's letters in the monumental edition edited by Gordon S. Haight. She
uses the traditional form, the sonnet, in a poem sent in the text of letter to Maria
Lewis on 4 September 1839. In her letter Eliot speaks of leading 'so unsettled a life
and [having] been so desultory in my employments'. She also revealingly observes
that 'her mind presents just such an assemblage of disjointed specimens of history,
ancient and modern, scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare, Cooper,
Wordsworth, and Milton'. Other sources include 'newspaper topics, morsels of
Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs', and so on 'all arrested and petrified and smothered
by the fast thickening every day accessions of actual events, relative anxieties, and
household cares and vexations'. In the 'Sonnet' there is no attempt at a persona:
'my' is used in the second and thirteenth line; 'me' in the sixth line. The first person
'I've' occurs twice - in the sixth and eleventh line. 'I' has a single occurrence - in
line nine. Rarely, if ever, in her later poetry does she use such personal forms or
subject matter. Her themes are childhood, loneliness, reflection, dreams and the
pilgrimage of life; all also themes of her fiction. She prefaces the poem in a self-
deprecatory tone, writing to Maria Lewis 'To prevent myself from saying anything
still more discreditable to my head and heart I will send you a something between
poetry and prose expressive of an idea that has often been before my child's eye. For
want of an humbler title I will call it a Sonnet' and the poem follows. This lack of
self-confidence rarely left Eliot. She had to be protected by Lewes from hostile
reviews and needed continuing encouragement. Interestingly the manuscript of Daniel
Deronda, her last completed novel, now in the British Library, contains lines from
Shakespeare's Sonnet 29. This is a sonnet full of self-doubt written by an isolated
person in need of reassurance. Her mature poetry is not, on the whole, short and is not
personal but focused on historical, musical or other subjects. She used recognized
conventional forms and diction often based on classical or other poetic models.
Translation from others, from other literature and tradition provided comfort and
models to follow. An early example is found in 'Question and Answer', a twelve-line
poetic translation from an unidentified German poetic source. Using couplets and
three quatrains she 'put the idea ... into English doggrel which', Eliot writes to Maria
Lewis in a letter dated 10 October 1840, 'quite fails to represent the beautiful
simplicity and nature of the original'. Following the translation Eliot reflects upon
lines in the thirty-first chapter of Isaiah. Many instances of translations and variations
upon translations are found throughout her poetic output, published and unpublished
and in her notebooks. The original, sometimes with a translation, at times recur in her
fiction. For instance, the epigraph for chapter fifty-five of Daniel Deronda, the
chapter in which Grandcourt drowns, is three lines from Dante, cited twice by Eliot in
her notebooks. Imagery in the translations, of entwined fingers, of the relationship
between a child and father, of appearances and deception, of individuality and social
pressures, prefigure again the novels. Many of her finest poems are based upon
translations. For instance, 'How Lisa Loved the King' was first published in
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in May 1869 and separately published in book
form by Ticknor and Fields in Boston. The poem, in 646 lines, is, as van den Broek
explains in his informative headnote, 'a more or less faithful rendering of Boccaccio's
Decameron X.7' (this volume, p. 000). The verse form reveals indebtedness to
Chaucerian metrical format and to the dexterous use of alexandrines, bringing the
verse paragraphs to a graceful conclusion.
Turning away from translations and moving to another period of George Eliot's
life and productivity, 'In a London Drawing Room' is indicative of mood, attitude and
poetic productivity. As van den Broek indicates in his headnote, the dating of these
nineteen lines is uncertain. It remained unpublished until Bernard J. Paris included it
in his 'George Eliot's Unpublished Poetry'. The poem's theme, 'the indifference of
the human world' clearly echoes elements in her letters and fiction. In his insightful
commentary on the poem in Experiments in Life: George Eliot's Quest for Value
(1965), Paris draws intertextual parallels with sentiments expressed by George Eliot
in a 4 June 1848 letter she wrote to her friend Sara Sophia Hennell. In her letter Eliot
writes: 'Alas for the fate of poor mortals which condemns them to wake up some fine
morning and find all the poetry in which their world was bathed only the evening
before utterly gone.' Instead they confront 'the hard angular world of chairs and tables
and looking-glasses staring at them in all its naked prose'.
The world of the poem is urban, commercial London. Its motifs are
sameness and hurry. Its dwellings are not human, individual; instead of
providing interest, room for speculation, allowing the consciousness to
expand and take hold of something outside itself, they will it in. There
is no variety of color, light and shade, for the factory smoke has
obscured the sun.
Paris adds 'Each human being is alone, self-enclosed, hurrying on, unconscious of the
things and people around him, preoccupied with his own private business or
mission'. Parallels may be made with character situations in the fabric of George
Eliot's fiction. In the opening chapter of Silas Marner the weaver 'has everything that
makes his life human and meaningful stripped away from him'. The novel depicts his
'despair and alienation from the human world; it is the story also of his slow
rehabilitation and integration into the life of Ravelve'. Experience of despair, of
social and moral isolation, frequently a product of the lack or disappearance of
communal associations, is also seen in Adam Bede, The Spanish Gypsy, Romola and
Daniel Deronda, to cite but four examples from many in Eliot's output. Hetty's
pregnancy forces her to depart from Hayslope. Don Silva, a Spanish military
commander in The Spanish Gypsy, is placed in an impossible position, forcing him to
leave his community and to kill the father of his beloved. Romola's realization that
Savonarola is not what he appears to be necessitates her leaving Florence. Gwendolen
Harleth, in despair following the drowning of Grandcourt, her husband, reveals to
Daniel Deronda that her life is one of personal entrapment. Deronda gives her a dose
of reality when he tells her 'some real knowledge would give you an interest in the
world beyond the small drama of personal desires'.
Van den Broek's edition includes George Eliot's epigraphs to her last three
completed novels, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-2) and Daniel
Deronda (1876). Poetic fragments written by her are found scattered throughout her
notebooks. Her fiction also draws upon other writers. For instance, the epigraph to
Adam Bede (1859) is taken from the sixth book of William Wordsworth's The
Excursion, the section the 'Churchyard among the Mountains'. The lines pinpoint
powerful motifs such as remoteness, trials and suffering, present in both the novel and
the poem. The lines drawn from Wordsworth's 'Michael', with which Eliot prefaces
Silas Marner (1861), draw attention to, amongst other elements, the themes of
rejuvenation in both Wordsworth's poem and her novel. As George Eliot's art
matured she increasingly drew upon her own poetry. In addition, there are many
poetic lines in her poetry which she did not use in her fiction. For instance, unused
epigraphs, or as she prefers to call them 'mottoes', for Romola (1863) are available as
'Appendix B' in Andrew Sanders's edition. David L. Higdon's 'George Eliot and
the Art of the Epigraph', summarized by Antonie van den Broek, 'argues that Eliot
primarily used' her own epigraphs, and those she took from others, 'to create
structural allusions, abstractions, ironic refractions, and metaphoric evaluations'. Van
den Broek observes that Eliot uses epigraphs to 'describe characters indicating their
unconscious thoughts and arguing for realistic presentation'. George Eliot's own
mottoes are stylistically highly varied. In Daniel Deronda, for instance, they extend
from seven lines of blank verse, akin to lines from a Robert Browning poetic dramatic
monologue, prefacing each of the four separate volumes of the work, to five lines of
narrative verse introducing chapter nine. Sixteen lines of verse dialogue between two
'gentlemen' head the tenth chapter and, to take one other example, two cryptic poetic
lines, seemingly advocating altruism, preface chapter sixty seven: 'The godhead in us
wrings our nobler deeds / From our reluctant selves'. The inclusion in The Complete
Shorter Poetry of George Eliot of such epigraphs creates the opportunity to explore a
most neglected terrain of their creator's complex eclectic art.
In common with many of her other poems, a composition such as 'In a London
Drawing Room' illuminates the themes, preoccupations, images and situations in
Eliot's other writing. Recent authoritative studies of Victorian poetry unfortunately
have given George Eliot's poetry short shrift, although she herself makes interesting
observations on 'Versification', revealing her own concerns and those, too, of her
contemporaries. There are two essays on the subject of 'verse', both of which are
included in the present volumes. One, 'Notes on Form in Art' belongs to the period of
The Spanish Gypsy, 1868. The other, 'Versification', to the following year. Both
exhibit her thoughts on form and verse. In the first she clarifies what poetry means to
her: 'Poetry begins when passion weds thought by finding expression in an image, but
poetic form begins with a choice of elements, however meagre, as the accordant
expression of emotional states' (Vol. 2, p. 000). The form of poetry develops as 'the
beautiful expanding curves of a bivalve shell' (Vol. 2, p. 000). Her language is
pervaded with the scientific, psychological language and imagery found, for instance,
in George Henry Lewes's Seaside Studies (1858). A. S. Byatt perceptively indicates
in her introduction to George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, that
for George Eliot 'Poetry combines the particular with the ideal, the "true and
universal" in its rhythms, its images, its sequences. Poetry, she says has been defined
to mean fiction, but fiction itself is only the expression of predominant feeling in "an
arrangement of events in feigned correspondences"'.
'Versification' expands upon such ideas. It is a reaction, as van den Broek
indicates in his headnote, to, amongst other writings on verse forms, her friend James
J. Sylvester's The Laws of Verse: or, Principles of Versification, published in 1870,
which she had an advance copy of, and used when working on Middlemarch.
Sylvester's edited volume contains attempts to formulize, almost mathematically,
varieties of verse. For instance in her notebooks for Middlemarch, George Eliot
copies almost verbatim from Sylvester: 'I am satisfied that ... Edgar Poe is perfectly
right in his "Rationale of Versification", that the substitution of measure is time; that
an accented syllable is a long syllable, and that an unaccented syllable is a short one
of varying degrees of duration, & that feet in modern metre are of equal length'.
'Versification' reacts to contemporary poetic theoretical formulations and specifically
focuses upon what constitutes 'English blank verse'. It is replete with examples drawn
from such poets as technically and historically diverse as Byron, Shakespeare and
Milton.
The reprinting in the present volumes of 'Versification' is an interesting addition
to George Eliot's poetic reflections and deliberations. It also provides access to a by
no means insignificant nineteenth-century primary document. 'Versification' and
George Eliot herself are largely ignored in two recent influential studies of Victorian
poetry. Isobel Armstrong, in Victorian Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993), affords
Eliot only a passing reference. The lengthiest discussion in a work devoted to the
exploration of neglected Victorian poetry concerns explication of The Spanish Gypsy.
The choice of this work illustrates why Armstrong may well neglect Eliot's poetic
output. Armstrong is concerned with female poets and their importance. She does note
that 'questions of the status of women's experience ... dominate George Eliot's
poetry, perhaps more than they figure in her prose'. The poem 'is an attempt to see
how the feminine principle might be the source of a new humanist myth'. For
Armstrong, Eliot 'seems to have used poetry both to consider consolations which
were simpler than those of her novels and to explore a devastating scepticism which
was often harsher than her novels intimate'. Eliot, however, for Armstrong, is
ambivalent towards 'the "feminine tradition"'.
There is a single passing reference to George Eliot in the thirteen essays found in
Joseph Bristow's The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (2000), and this
reference is not to Eliot's poetic output but to her translations of Friedrich Strauss's
Life of Jesus. Even in the context of the exploration of Eliot's writing, there is still
neglect of her poetry. This is exemplified, for instance, in George Levine's The
Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (2001), which does not devote an essay to her
poetry. Poems, such as The Spanish Gypsy, are mentioned in passing reference. Signs
that the critical current is shifting, and the importance of George Eliot's poetic output
to Victorian poetry, and to an understanding of her own writing, is being recognized,
are evinced in the present edition and in other recent studies. Louise Hudd's 'The
Politics of Feminist Poetics: "Armgart" and George Eliot's Critical Response to
Aurora Leigh' reveals how important Eliot's verse drama, with its tale of the opera
singer who loses her voice, has become for feminist criticism. Charles La Porte's
'George Eliot, the Poetics as Prophet' draws from poems in the 1874 and 1878 Jubal
editions in order to demonstrate why Isobel Armstrong was so reluctant to afford
Eliot's poetry much attention. George Eliot's 'well-known ambivalence toward
"feminine" writing is amply documented'. For La Porte, 'Eliot's ambivalence
conceals what became a complex position on the feminine in art'. The explication of
ambiguities in 'O May I Join the Choir Invisible', 'The Legend of Jubal' and the
much neglected 'The Death of Moses', form part of an extensive illumination of 'the
prophetic element of Eliot's poetry'.
A judicious overall assessment of Eliot's poetry and its relation to her fiction is
found in Margaret Reynolds's entry on the 'Poetry of George Eliot' in John Rignall's
Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot. Reynolds writes that 'George Eliot's
poetry functions as a parallel text to the novels; many of the same concerns and
themes are taken up there, and quite often a poetic text, composed at about the same
time as a novel, will reflect and enlarge upon the prose'. The obvious well-cited
instance of this is 'Armgart', written whilst she was at work on Middlemarch.
Reynolds observes 'the connected web of images in "O, May I Join the Choir
Invisible"' relating to 'poetry, music, singing, breath, and self-expressiveness'
constitute 'a recurring theme which is particularly notable in George Eliot's poetry',
as it is in her fiction. The sonnet sequence 'Brother and Sister' is preoccupied with
'questions to do with the constrictions of gender and the conventions of contemporary
sexual difference [which] dominate in the poetry to be closely followed with related
questions of race and identity'. The Spanish Gypsy and other poems explore the
themes of 'social conditioning and cultural expectations' prevalent in the novels.
George Eliot is buried not amongst the great poets and other national worthies in
Westminster Abbey. She lies alongside philosophers such as Herbert Spencer, George
Henry Lewes and poets such as James Thomson, buried in Highgate Cemetery in
1882, and Christina Rossetti in 1894, amongst others representative of 'the middle -
and upper middle-class respectable market' for burial. Van den Broek's edition of
The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot provides an invaluable service. His
scrupulous and thorough editing of her otherwise inaccessible poems presents the
evidence for the continuing revaluation of George Eliot's oeuvre. An important
addition to Victorian scholarship in general, it presents the documentation for an
assessment of the importance of poetry to her own work, and to a revaluation of its
place in Victorian poetry as a whole. Above all, van den Broek's edition ensures that
Eliot's poetry is not destined to 'rest in unvisited tombs'.
Dr William Baker
Presidential Research Professor
Department of English/University Libraries
Northern Illinois University
Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford and New York, Oxford
University Press, 1968), p. 20.
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, eds Charles Richard
Sanders, Kenneth J. Fielding, et. al., 30 vols (Durham, NC, Duke University Press,
1970-2003), Vol. 22, p. 16.
The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, Yale
University Press; London, Oxford University Press, 1954-78), Vol. 1, p. 29.
Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 30; see also this volume, p. 000.
Letters, Vol. 1, p. 69; see also this volume, p. 000.
See George Eliot, A Writer's Notebook, 1854-1879, and Uncollected Writings, ed.
Joseph Wiesenfarth (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1981), p. xxxviii.
See William Baker and John C. Ross, George Eliot: A Bibliographical History
(New Castle, DE, Oak Knoll Press; London, British Library, 2002), pp. 387-9.
Bernard J. Paris, 'George Eliot's Unpublished Poetry', Studies in Philology, LVI
(1959), pp. 539-58.
Letters, Vol. I, p. 138; cf. Bernard J. Paris, Experiments in Life: George Eliot's
Quest for Value (Detroit, MI, Wayne State University Press, 1965), p. 138.
Ibid., p. 137.
Ibid., pp. 138, 140.
Daniel Deronda, ed. Graham Handley (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988),
Oxford World's Classics, p. 387.
George Eliot, Romola, ed. Andrew Sanders (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1980).
David L. Higdon, 'George Eliot and the Art of the Epigraph', Nineteenth Century
Fiction, 25 (1970), pp. 127-51.
Antonie van den Broek, 'Epigraphs' in John Rignall, Oxford Reader's Companion
to George Eliot (2000), p. 100.
George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, eds A. S. Byatt and
Nicholas Warren, intro. A. S. Byatt (London, Penguin Books, 1990), p. xxxi.
See Baker and Ross, Bibliographical History, p. 459.
Cited in George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' Notebooks: A Transcription, eds John
Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979),
pp. 87, 164. Eliot is reacting to Sylvester's Laws of Verse, pp. 64-8.
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London and New
York, Routledge, 1993), pp. 370, 372, 371, 370.
Daniel Brown, 'Victorian Poetry and Science' in Joseph Bristow (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2000), pp. 137-58; p. 150.
Louise Hudd, 'The Politics of a Feminist Poetics: "Armgart" and George Eliot's
Critical Response to Aurora Leigh' in Kate Flint (ed.), Poetry and Politics
(Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 62-83.
Charles La Porte, 'George Eliot, the Poetics as Prophet', Victorian Literature and
Culture (2003), pp. 159-79; pp. 159, 174.
Margaret Reynolds, 'Poetry of George Eliot' in John Rignall (ed.), Oxford
Reader's Companion to George Eliot (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.
304-8; pp. 304, 305, 306.
Samantha Matthews, Poetical Remains: Poets' Graves, Bodies, and Books in the
Nineteenth Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 190.
Middlemarch, eds Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (London, Dent, 1997),
Everyman Series, p. 747.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
These two volumes bring together all of George Eliot's shorter poetry, including
unascribed novel and chapter epigraphs, with a complete set of textual variants and
editorial notes. Also included are Eliot's essays, 'Notes on Form in Art (1868)',
'Versification (1869)' and 'Leaves from a Note-Book' (no date), because they shed
interesting light on her views regarding poetry. Such an edition has not been produced
since Cynthia Ann Secor wrote her unpublished doctoral dissertation for Cornell
University in 1969. The only other authoritative editions of some of Eliot's poetry are
the two that Eliot oversaw in 1874 and 1878. It is, therefore, high time that a
comprehensive, readily accessible edition is made available. Eliot was very keen to
see her mature poems in print, and these extensive products of a major nineteenth-
century writer deserve to be brought to the attention of twenty-first-century readers -
together with the necessary apparatus to help them better appreciate the poems'
artistic and intellectual merits.
Some readers may still question why I have bothered. Eliot's poems have been largely
neglected because they are seen as inferior verse, certainly not in the same artistic
category as her novels. Like many others, I have wondered why she published her
poetry. It is one thing to write verse for private consumption; another for the public.
And yet, if the quality and interest of the poems are so uneven or indifferent, is it
possible that the woman who wrote the sometimes scathing 'Silly Novels by Silly
Women Novelists' (October 1856) could have been so blind about her own poetic
abilities? Did she write poetry for money, knowing that her reputation as a novelist
would ensure publication? They certainly made money (see below and the headnotes
to 'Agatha', 'How Lisa Loved the King', 'Jubal', 'A College Breakfast Party' and
'Armgart'). However, that intent seems unlikely, given the reverence with which she
approached all art. Besides, she wrote poetry most of her life and did not try to
publish everything. And as she told Cara Bray, in a letter dated 7 May 1868, in which
she expressed her gratitude that George Henry Lewes always encouraged her literary
interests, regardless of financial gain, she could earn hundreds of pounds for her
poems but thousands for her novels.1 Other possible reasons, put forward but
dismissed by an early commentator, George W. Creel, are Lewes urging her on, her
wish to emulate writers like Fielding and Scott, who also turned their hands to verse,
and because she enjoyed the role of poet.2 From Eliot's 'How I Came to Write
Fiction' we know that Lewes was there from the very beginning of her novelistic
career,3 and he remained on hand to support her in all her endeavours. If Eliot partly
turned to poetry because she believed it her artistic right to be as versatile as other
literary figures, that conviction did not impress her contemporary critic, W. Fraser
Rae:
Great writers are exposed to a double temptation (1) they are tempted to try
whether they can succeed in a new field as well as they have done in that
wherein their laurels were won; and (2) they are tempted to believe that their
friends are not deceived in pronouncing the new effort a splendid triumph.
Citing the plays of Scott and Tennyson as cases in point, he asked, 'who reads these
plays now? How many readers can honestly admire them, or refrain from wishing that
they had never been written?'4 Secor has some very plausible things to say about
Eliot's motive in writing verse: that she was seeking a prophetic voice, wanting 'to
achieve poetic stature of the kind described in Shelley's A Defence of Poetry'.5 What
is certain is that she valued her poetry. In a letter to her friend François D'Albert-
Durade, written in July 1868, she said about it, 'I seem to have gained a new organ, a
new medium that my nature had languished for',6 and the textual variants alone
indicate how much time and effort she spent practising and honing her new
organ/medium, sometimes returning to revise aspects years later. I address the
question of poetry's importance to Eliot in the headnote to Appendix C, but here I
want to outline the history of how some of the poems came into print, how critics
received them, and to suggest that all the poems have intrinsic interest when seen as
integral to our understanding of George Eliot the artist.
Early Verse
These poems are mainly of interest because they pre-date 'George Eliot' and reflect
some of Mary Anne Evans's thoughts and feelings during the 1830s and 1840s. Her
early poem 'Question and Answer' is a translation from German, 'As tu vu la lune se
lever' an attempt at French verse, while the rest are 'largely derivative in sentiment
and style', as Margaret Reynolds has said. Like many other young women of her time,
Mary Anne learned certain 'formulas and themes' from the 'many annuals and album
books designed for female readership'.7 Her School Notebook furnishes plenty of
copied-out examples: 'The Forsaken', 'He whispered praises in my ear / Oh! I
remember well', 'The Unwilling Bride', 'Forget Thee?', 'My Father's at the Helm',
'Death hath been there since last we met', 'If sometimes in the haunts of men / Thine
image from my breast may fade' - and so on.8 The speaker in 'Sonnet' sounds a little
like another adolescent, in the 'The Indian Girl's Song', who pines for home, despite
being 'in a lovely clime / Of bright and glowing flowers', presumably England: 'This
bright clime throws no spell o'er me / Oh! none like my native land! (ll. 1-2, 15-16).9
Of particular interest, however, are 'On Being Called a Saint', because it may well be
one of Eliot's first poems; 'Knowing that shortly I must put off this tabernacle', her
first published work; and 'Mid the rich store of nature's gifts to man', written at the
time when she had turned her back on Christianity. Given the pressure brought to bear
on her by family and friends to change her mind about not attending church, it is little
wonder that she urged 'sympathy', the 'best image' of the 'Great Spirit [bidding]
creation teem / With conscious being and intelligence' ('Mid the rich store', ll. 10, 4-
5). Generally, however, it is the later poems of the 1860s and beyond that merit closer
study.
The 1874 and 1878 editions of Jubal
On 6 March 1874 George Eliot sent her publisher, John Blackwood, a small collection
of poems, including 'Agatha' (1869), 'How Lisa Loved the King' (1869), 'The
Legend of Jubal' (1870) and 'Armgart' (1871), which had 'already been printed in
fugitive form'.10 She told Blackwood, 'Mr. Lewes wishes me to get [them] published
in May ... and every one of those I now send you represents an idea which I care for
strongly and wish to propagate as far as I can. Else I should forbid myself from
adding to the mountainous heap of poetical collections.'11 When he and Eliot were
compiling the Cabinet edition of her collected works (1878-80), four more poems
were added to Jubal, this time for more pragmatic reasons. John Blackwood's
nephew, William, who had begun to take over the publishing business from his ailing
uncle, wrote to her on 7 August 1878, 'The other Volume [of shorter poems] will take
some planning and scheming to swell it out to the required length unless you have any
other poems you wish to insert in it. Will you kindly let me know as to this at your
early convenience?' Two days later, she wrote back, 'As to the "Jubal" volume, there
will, I hope be added enough to save you from difficulty as to the size'. Her reply
indicates she had already completed or, perhaps, was still composing, one or two of
the additional poems. She wrote again to William Blackwood on 15 August, 'For the
volume of miscellaneous poems, there will be (retaining the present page of 20 lines)
enough additional material to make the volume about 300 pages, which I see from the
volumes of "Scenes of Clerical Life" will be a suitable size to run with the other
works'. John Blackwood advised her on 29 September, 'Willie tells me they are ready
in the printing office for the additional matter you propose for the second volume of
poetry so will you send it to Edinburgh'; and she wrote to William Blackwood once
more on 3 October, 'I send by today's post the additional matter for the reprint of
"Jubal" etc.'12 The additional poems were 'A College Breakfast-Party',13 'Self and
Life', 'Sweet Evenings Come and Go, Love' and 'The Death of Moses'.
Unfortunately, Eliot's diary for 1878 has disappeared,14 making it impossible to verify
if any of the additional poems were written that year.15
The sales of Jubal started off well. In early May 1874, Blackwood had 1,609 copies
of the first edition on sale for six shillings each.16 (A second printing of 1,313 copies
of the first edition, with minor corrections, followed in July 1874.)17 Later in May,
John Blackwood reported they had already sold 800 copies; by August 1874, 1,609
copies; and on 16 September 1874, William Blackwood told Eliot that Jubal was still
selling well.18 In 1875, Blackwood's ledger charges recorded 742 copies still
'boarding', but a further 257 copies were sold in 1875 and the rest by 1880.19
American, German and Canadian editions of Jubal also appeared in 1874.20 The 1878
Jubal was priced five shillings, and a total of 3,414 copies were printed for the
nineteen- and then twenty-volume Cabinet editions published between December
1878 and May 1881.21 Blackwood sent Eliot a bank order for £777.12.6 on 27 January
1879, of which £212.11.4 was for the Cabinet edition of her collected works, which,
he said, had been selling extremely well.22 However, on 13 February 1880, William
Blackwood's statement of sales to Eliot recorded only four copies of the 1878 Jubal
sold, compared with thousands of copies of her novels, the declining sales mirroring
Jubal's critical reception.23
Early Criticism
During her lifetime, what Eliot was keen to propagate in poetry received polite
reviews; immediately after her death, it tended to be dismissed altogether. A brief
anonymous notice in the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review announced that
the 1874 Jubal will 'assuredly take a foremost place in the literature, not only of our
day, but of the world'. Noting that the poetry is concerned with the doctrine of self-
sacrifice, a common theme in Eliot's novels, the reviewer said Jubal treats it with
'greater power and deeper insight'. He added, 'The whole teaching of the "Legend of
Jubal" ... is summed up in lines which certainly are unequalled in modern literature
for power, depth of thought, and beauty of language'. Other poets simply do not
measure up. 'Will any one of the writers of the thin little octavos before us read
George Eliot's "Brother and Sister," and then their own compositions? If this
experiment does not convince them that they have not the "faculty divine" no words
of ours can.'24 However, even before this glowing endorsement by someone
apparently unwilling to criticize Britain's greatest living novelist, the tone had been
set for the sort of criticism that has predominated ever since. H. Buxton Forman,
better known today as Thomas J. Wise's partner in 'forgery' than as an astute literary
critic,25 wrote an article in Tinsley's Magazine in December 1868, in which he
considered Eliot's unascribed epigraphs in Felix Holt. He predicted that it was
unlikely she would 'surpass, or even equal, her prose achievements by anything
produced in verse ... and that opinion has been recently confirmed by the publication
of The Spanish Gypsy' (June 1868). The epigraphs, he said, are 'charming' instances
of high prose reared up into verse 'for the sake of a holiday, and no more'. Some are
'forcible' and 'admirable in thought and applicability to the respective chapters', but
they lack all 'traces of that clearly-defined individuality of style which all great
serious, and accomplished practitioners of verse betray in even so small a compass as
these headings'. Some of the epigraphs, he went on, are marked by 'condensation',
but even here they are imitative of Shakespeare, Samuel Butler, Wordsworth and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 'it is hardly necessary to enforce here that the power of
assimilation, or reproduction, however large, is far from an infallible index of self-
existent poetic faculty'.26 and Edward Dowden, Professor of English at Trinity
College, Dublin, considered the 'fugitive' poems in an article for the Contemporary
Review (1872) and judged them 'honest failures':
The poems are conspicuously inferior to the novels, and a striking indication
that poetry is not George Eliot's element as artist is this, that in her poems the
idea and the matter do not really interpenetrate; the idea stands above the
matter as a master above a slave, and subdues the matter to its will ... A large
rhythm sustains the verse, similar to the movement of a calmly musical period
of prose; but at best the music of the lines is a measurable music; under the
verse there lies no living heart of music, with curious pulsation, and rhythm,
which is a miracle of the blood ... The author was acquainted with the precise
position of the vocal organs in singing; the pity is she could not sing.27
The novelist and critic Henry James followed Dowden's lead, highlighting the
problem of form and spontaneity in the poems. He called them 'interesting failures':
'Our author's verse is a mixture of spontaneity of thought and excessive reflectiveness
of expression, and its value is generally more in the idea than in the form ... you get
the substance of her thought in the short poems, without the somewhat rigid envelope
of her poetic diction' that you get in, say, 'Armgart', which, although 'the best thing',
would have been even better had it been written in prose.28
For James, and some others mentioned below, it was not just the absence of music in
the verse but also Eliot's agnosticism that undermined her poetry. Armgart shares the
'almost gratuitously sad' fate of Eliot's other heroines, James said, because even
though Eliot has 'an ardent desire and faculty for positive, active, constructive belief
of the old-fashioned kind ... she has fallen upon a critical age and felt its contagion
and dominion'. Had she been blessed with 'passionate faith', she 'would have
achieved something incalculably great'.29 In an obituary, the writer in the London
Quarterly Review focused on the lines 'The faith that life on earth ... / Throbbing
responsive to the far-off orbs' ('A Minor Prophet', ll. 286-325), citing them as
evidence of Eliot's 'instinctive belief in development of good, as of other things,
which seems to have been especially bestowed on the nineteenth century to comfort it
in its many sorrows'. But this, he went on to say, is a poor substitute for a belief in
Christ. Even the promise of immortality through 'joining that choir invisible' is not
enough, since it is accessible 'only if genius of intellect or character has been
vouchsafed to him'.30 Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, in George Eliot's Poetry and Other
Studies, found the verse
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.
This is partly, according to Cleveland, because poetry and agnosticism are
incompatible. Real poetry always offers at the very least some glimpse of immortality,
which agnosticism denies.31 In the Spectator's obituary, the writer also felt Eliot's
poetry lacking in 'inspiration' and full of the 'speculative melancholy' found in the
novels, except that in the verse it 'predominates fatally'. 'Throughout her poems she
is always plumbing the deep waters for an anchorage, and reporting "no soundings"'.
'Jubal' is a case in point, he said. It tries to teach us that our moral standing is
improved in death, 'as though the loss of self were the loss of selfishness, which it not
only is not, but never could be, since selfishness can only be morally extinguished in a
living self'. Eliot's teaching, he added, amounts to 'a moral gloss put on the face of a
bad business'.32
Social Evolution and Immortality
However, at least two of Eliot's best critics saw that her verse returns again and again
to ideas of social evolution and the consolation of immortality. Concentrating on the
'tragic aspect of life' in the poems, Dowden, despite his lament about the singer,
valued Eliot's song. In his review he talks about the self-renunciation that heroines in
Eliot's novels and poetry variously experience. Maggie, Romola, Fedalma and
Armgart, he said, are alike insofar as they are suddenly, or after long ordeals, forced
to renounce the talents, passions and joys which help to distinguish them. Why?
Because, Eliot teaches us, there is no individual life after death, although the larger
life in which we all participate goes on. Individual life is short, filled with joy and
suffering, and the only immortality on offer is through binding ourselves to the
'higher rule' of this world. By contributing to the needs of others, instead of
themselves, Eliot's heroines go on to enrich their larger worlds. Their personal hopes
and aspirations are crushed and this is painfully sad, but then 'The world is sad ... and
being sad, the world needs sympathy more than it needs joy - joy which in its
blindness is cruel'. Jubal's joy is cruel, too, returning home only to be beaten and
rejected by the people singing his praises. 'This is tragic', Dowden says, 'His
apotheosis and martyrdom were one'; his consolation, however, is being 'incorporate
in
A strong persistent life
Panting through generations as one breath,
And filling with its soul the blank of death. [ll. 245-7]33
The critic Charles Gardner, writing in the early years of the twentieth century, when
Eliot's entire critical reputation was in steep decline, also saw that her poetry deals
with immortality above all else. As he put it, for Eliot, 'Man's immortality is in his
after effects'. We see this in the stories of Jubal and Moses: one lived on in 'the larger
life of Music', the other 'as Law', and the idea of living on is summed up and given
concise expression in 'O May I Join the Choir Invisible'.34 'Self and Life' similarly
articulates in abstract terms the philosophy of living on through love. Self demands
that 'Changeful' Life 'Justify thyself to me' (ll. 1, 6), since age has mainly brought
'Fear' and 'loathing' for 'the law' (ll. 19, 57, 60) before which Self has been made to
bow down. Life's answer is, 'I brought a love' that 'Filled, o'erflowed [thee] with
tenderness' (ll. 61, 69), which assuages Self to accept that 'Life is justified by love' (l.
78).
In the words of 'Ex Oriente Lux', since the early days of our planet, life has evolved
towards 'sublimer union': 'While yet the western half was cold and sad', 'Asia was
the earliest home of light' (ll. 20, 7, 9). In time, Earth's young race 'Clove sense &
image subtilly in twain, / Then wedded them, till heavenly Thought was born' (ll. 21-
2). That same belief in social evolution lies behind the assertion in 'A Minor Prophet'
that things are 'being shaped / To glorious ends':
that great faith
Is but the rushing and expanding stream
Of thought, of feeling, fed by all the past.
Our finest hope is finest memory (ll. 286-
92)35
And 'finest memory' is best achieved through the legacy of love, as the sonnet
sequence 'Brother and Sister' illustrates. Recalling the many times brother and sister
went rambling through the countryside, the sister-narrator says
Those hours were seed to all my after good;
My infant gladness, through eye, ear, and touch,
Took easily as warmth a various food
To nourish the sweet skill of loving much. (Sonnet V, ll. 5-8)
All the sights, sounds and textures of those early days 'are part of me, / My present
Past, my root of piety' (Sonnet VI, ll. 13-14), even now after the 'dire years whose
awful name is Change / Had grasped our souls still yearning in divorce' (Sonnet XI,
ll. 9-10). Nevertheless, in the words of 'Self and Life', 'Half man's truth must hidden
lie / If unlit by Sorrow's eye', and Sorrow teaches 'Willing pain of ministry' (ll. 51-2,
54), or love in the widest sense of that word. Having learned from pain to love, and
having seen the connection with memory, the sister finishes the sonnets with 'But
were another childhood-world my share, / I would be born a little sister there' (Sonnet
XI, ll. 13-14).
'Agatha', 'How Lisa Loved the King' and 'Stradivarius' offer more proof of the
legacy of love. Agatha's saint-like goodness is celebrated in the song sung at feasts
and weddings, which includes the verse full of 'gentle jesting with the three old
maids' (l. 311):
Here the three old maidens dwell,
Agatha and Kate and Nell;
See, the moon shines on the thatch,
We will go and shake the latch.
Heart of Mary, cup of joy,
Give us mirth without alloy! (ll.
342-7)
The nobility, purity and unselfishness of Lisa's love, expressed in the music and
words of Minuccio and Mico, move King Pedro to take notice of a lowly maid,
thereby ensuring that she will be remembered. For his part, Stradivarius's unwavering
devotion to his craft guarantees that he is remembered long after his death. Thus, not
only Bach and Joachim
made our joy to-day:
Another soul was living in the air
And swayed it to true deliverance
Of high invention and responsive skill (ll.
16-19)
Hearing with Eyes
Music is a predominant theme in the poems, closely linked to the idea of immortality.
'It is noteworthy, by the way', Henry James wrote, 'that three of these poems [in the
1874 Jubal] are on themes connected with music, and yet we remember no
representation of a musician among the multitudinous figures which people the
author's novels'.36 In the novels before 1874 there are no musicians resembling
Armgart, Arion, Jubal, Klesmer, Mirah and the Princess Leonora Halm-Eberstein, but,
as Beryl Gray rightly says, commenting on an extract from Eliot's Journal, 14 April
1858,
'music that stirs all one's devout emotions blends everything into harmony, -
makes one feel part of one whole, which one loves all alike, losing the sense
of a separate self'. This sense of music-engendering unity is conveyed to the
novels (and poems) as an organising principle.37
That stirring of 'devout emotions' is achieved through 'hearing with eyes', which
Jubal illustrates.
In a section on music in one of George Eliot's Pforzheimer notebooks, comprising
extracts and paraphrases from John Pike Hullah's The History of Modern Music, A
Course of Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institute of Great Britain (1862), Eliot
indicates what she means by 'hearing with eyes'. Specifically, the notebook includes a
comment on Guido Aretino's emphasis on 'hearing with the eye', resulting in an
'absolutely timeless' music, a 'plain-song', '[extolling] a kind of respect' whenever it
is heard.38 'Hearing with eyes' is based on the last line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 23,
'To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit'. In Felix Holt, Eliot misquotes
Shakespeare's line in one of the double epigraphs to chapter XXVII: 'To hear with
eyes is part of love's rare wit'. Nevertheless, the epigraph is apt since Felix, in the
language of the sonnet, is like the frightened 'unperfect actor' or some 'fierce thing
replete with too much rage' who 'decays' in his 'own love's strength'; and Esther,
ennobled by his often severe, moral example and the story of Rufus Lyon and
Annette, eloquently pleads for love's 'dumb presages' - first in the courtroom scene
when she speaks on Felix's behalf and later when she comforts the ruined Transomes
and brings mother and son together. In Middlemarch the line is misquoted again, this
time to describe Mrs Vincy's feelings towards the ailing Fred: '"to hear with eyes
belongs to love's rare wit", and the mother in the fullness of her heart not only
divined Fred's longing, but she felt ready for any sacrifice in order to satisfy him'.39
The variations on Shakespeare's line in Felix Holt and Middlemarch indicate that
Eliot quoted it from memory - which, in turn, points to the power of its abiding
influence on her.
Eliot's interest in hearing with eyes points to her moral vision. Aretino and
Shakespeare gave her a metaphor for the human experience of very real and direct
feelings of love, respect, sympathy, understanding, tolerance, reverence. Why such
feelings occur remains a mystery, but that they occur is undeniable, since music and
poetry often bring them about. For Eliot, I suspect, the same feelings could be
prompted by any revelatory experience making intelligible life's mysterious
workings. Most of Eliot's characters are 'unperfect actors on the stage[s]' of her
novels and poetry, experiencing some sort of 'despair' as they reflect on their lives
with a 'widening retrospect' (cf. 'O May I Join the Choir Invisible', l. 15). Often they
inflict pain and suffering on themselves and others, because they do not hear with
eyes, yet they are redeemed or at least consoled after learning to use this
extraordinary, verifiable faculty. Throughout her fiction Eliot emphasized the
difficulties involved in the struggle towards right moral conduct, but, insofar as she
believed in its attainability, she remained optimistic about the future.40
That philosophy of life is clearly articulated in 'The Legend of Jubal', tracing the
origin of music and its redemptive power. Jubal quite literally hears with eyes while
observing Tubalcain hammering away at his forge:
Jubal, too, watched the hammer, till his eyes,
No longer following its fall or rise,
Seemed glad with something that they could not see,
But only listened to - some melody,
Wherein dumb longings inward speech had found,
Won from the common store of struggling sound. (ll. 248-
53)
Hearing with eyes results in him grasping
That love, hope, rage, and all experience,
Were fused in vaster being, fetching thence
Concords and discords, cadences and cries
That seemed from some world-shrouded soul to rise
Some rapture more intense, some mightier rage,
Some living sea that burst the bounds of man's brief age. (ll. 262-7)
In other words, he intuits a 'higher rule', to which everyone is necessarily subject, but
which simultaneously offers individuals escape from the 'unnamed discontent' - of
the sort that continues to gnaw away at Cain and his people in their land of plenty (cf.
ll. 404-9). Once Jubal's music is heard, the younger generation 'Thrilled towards the
future' (l. 433), while Cain 'who had lived through twice three centuries',
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. (ll. 424-
32)
Thus, Jubal's music is a trigger, a means to an end: it reveals to his people a form of
immortality, 'their larger soul' (l. 469), offering hope to some and consolation to
others. The mistake Jubal makes is thinking that his discovery somehow exempts him
from obedience to that 'higher rule'. In As You Like It, one of Eliot's most frequently
quoted Shakespearean plays, Duke Senior 'Finds tongues in trees, books in the
running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything' (II.i.16-17) precisely
because he has humbled himself before nature. Jubal sets off on a similar quest of
learning, but he is mistakenly intent on appropriating nature for selfish ends, so that
'My life shall grow like trees both tall and fair' (l. 487). Predictably, he fails and
returns home a bruised soul, doubly so when his unwitting votaries reject him. For
their part, they have made the mistake Ludwig Feuerbach talks of in The Essence of
Christianity, turning Jubal into a god and hence rejecting him when he appears in the
flesh.41 It is left to the Voice of his Past to console him: he will die, but, thanks to his
gift of music, he will achieve immortality by living on in the memory of future
generations (ll. 778-9).
Significantly, the stories of Jubal and Moses resemble each other: Jubal lies 'tombless
on this sod' ('Jubal', l. 776); Moses 'has no tomb' ('The Death of Moses', l. 121);
angels lift Moses to heaven (cf. 'Moses', ll. 109-14); and the deliberately ambiguous
last nine lines of 'Jubal' just about avoid saying that he is similarly rewarded. The
parallels are surely deliberate. For Eliot, Jubal is as important as Moses because he
unlocked a timeless, universal language, which can move people to see that there is
goodness beyond frequently unhappy lives. In that sense, the myth of Jubal, which
originated with Eliot, is like the story of Moses, since it also looks forward to the
promise of a better future and freedom from human bondage, despite moments of
bitter personal disappointment.42
It is against this understanding of immortality that 'Arion' should be read. The song
the titular hero sings moments before his death is a sort of secular prayer to the 'All-
creating Presence', which Jubal is dimly aware of as he '[quits] mortality' ('Jubal', ll.
790-1). Fortified with 'inward fire' (l. 42), Arion sang, 'Fearless of death or other
wrong' (l. 50), and majestically 'leaped on high' (l. 61), sure of his sublimation. This
is also the consolation Walpurga and Leo impress on Armgart. Like Jubal, she is
initially wrong to think her extraordinary gift of music gives her dispensation from the
'higher rule'. The extra 'trill' in her magnificent performance of Gluck's Orfeo ed
Euridice, which exercises Leo and is laughingly dismissed by her (cf. ll. 72-97), hints
at her Jubal-like arrogance. Similarly, there is a touch of vanity in the scene where she
turns down the Graf's proposal of marriage, telling him 'I sing for love of song and
that renown / Which is the spreading act, the world-wide share, / Of good that I was
born with' (ll. 276-8). Loving song is commendable; loving renown, though
understandable, is not.43 All this is not to dismiss the genuine conflict of interests
Armgart experiences, and to which I refer in my headnote to the poem, but to dwell
too much on Armgart's sorrow is to ignore her consolation.
Recent Criticism and Conclusion
In the past twenty-five years or so, and mainly among feminist critics, 'Armgart' has
been Eliot's most frequently considered poem, the rest mostly neglected.44 This is
because, together with Daniel Deronda's Princess Leonora Halm-Eberstein, Armgart
bitterly comments on '"The Woman's Lot: a Tale of Everyday"' ('Armgart', l. 689),
suggesting that there may be more than ameliorative teaching in Eliot's attitude to
gender. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar briefly look at 'Jubal' and 'Self and Life'
before turning to the heroine they call Eliot's 'Satanic Eve'.45 Like some other Eliot
heroes and heroines, Armgart's 'divine powers', they say, are 'never fully achieved';
she is 'cursed' for being far from 'paternal grace', she has 'demonic energy' and she
ends up in a 'secondary position'.46 For Kathleen Blake, 'Armgart' offers 'a double
critique of the conflict of love and art for a woman': on the one hand, love and art are
reconciled when Armgart determines to teach music in the Freiburg where Walpurga
was born; on the other hand, love and art remain divided insofar as Armgart remains
contemptuous of the common lot of women that she has necessarily had to reconcile
herself to, following the loss of her voice.47 Louise Hudd develops a point raised by
Kathleen Blake: seeing 'Armgart' as part of Eliot's extensive response to Elizabeth
Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857), which began with 'Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story'
(1857) and ended with Daniel Deronda (1876). Specifically, Hudd says, 'Armgart'
questions Barrett Browning's 'problematic depiction of class politics and social
reform'. By insisting that Romney's blinding 'had to be', by encouraging fellow poets
to focus on their artistic vision and nothing else, and by having Marian reject
Romney's offer of marriage, Barrett Browning propounded a theory of art and politics
both unrealistic and elitist. In contrast, 'Armgart' explores the 'obligations of the
exceptional woman to her society and to other women, raising the issue of what it
means to be marginalized in the interest of a political action which might liberate only
the exceptional few rather than the many'. Most of the criticism on 'Armgart' has
drawn attention to the 'egoism of artistic ambition' that Eliot is often seen to have
experienced herself, Hudd goes on to argue; however, 'Armgart' is more than 'just a
psychodrama; its discourse of revolution reveals that egoism has serious political, not
just moral, consequences'. Armgart's egoism is not only associated with Graf
Dornberg but also Walpurga and, in letting Walpurga criticize Armgart's egoism, the
poem attacks the attitude that accepts that ordinary women like Walpurga are in some
way inferior or subservient to the gifted, artistic woman. In so doing, Eliot champions
the ordinary woman and 'broadens the base of Barrett Browning's feminist aims'.48
Thus, a few of the ideas that Eliot cared for strongly and wished to propagate still
continue to spawn limited debate, while the poetry as a whole continues to be
dismissed.49 That is surely a pity, because, as the writer of her obituary in
Blackwood's Magazine put it:
If George Eliot fell short of being a poet, it was not for want of many of the
higher qualities of the poetic faculty. Apart, however, from their intrinsic
merits, her poems derive an interest from her prose works, and will continue to
be read by all who desire to fathom the fullness of her genius, and to
comprehend the true character of the power which she was able to put forth in
her prose writings.50
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