Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/174

168 before it began to appear, she had published, with Blackwood, the one-volume novel of 'Silas Marner,' a tale of old-fashioned village life, arising out of her dim recollection of having once seen a weaver carrying a bag on his back. In dealing with the religious fraternity in Lantern Yard, she was once more completely at home. The scenes at Squire Cass's Christmas-party, and at the village alehouse, are as good as any she has drawn; the central incident of the robbery of Marner's gold, and the substitution thereupon of a human for a sordid interest in his life, is new and striking; and Nancy Lammeter is a very pleasant and original heroine. Short as it is, it is probably counted among her best pieces of work.

In her next picture of English life there was an important change of plan. Hitherto, while making use of her own observations and experience, she had cast her tales in a time just before her own childhood. She derived much of her material from what her father told her about his early life. "The time of my father's youth," she says, "never seemed prosaic, for it came to my imagination first through his memories, which made a wondrous perspective to my little daily world of discovery." It was by setting her subject at a certain distance that she saw it at the right focus. "My mind," she says again, "works with most freedom, and the keenest sense of poetry, in my remotest past, and there are many strata to be worked through before I can begin to use, artistically, any material I can gather in the present." She now thought the time had come for adventuring into a later period, and 'Felix Holt' is of the time of the Reform Bill of 1832, when the world was wakening up, and bidding a long farewell to leisure and repose. It cannot be doubted that the earlier epoch best suited her cast of thought. The mellow atmosphere that bathed her pictures of bygone years, faded, with the change of period, into the light of common day. Felix himself is not very distinct; Jermyn is unpleasant throughout, which is a different thing from being bad – a fact not sufficiently accepted by novelists. A minister who, like Rufus Lyon, habitually pitches his discourse in the "peradventure" key, becomes more than ever an anachronism in the later epoch. For these and other reasons, we do not imagine that this novel is now placed among her best; but it was received at the time with no less applause than its predecessors, and its many striking points found eager appreciation.

Of a very ambitious nature – ambitious, that is to say, of the attainment of various excellence and of the praise due to it – she was now impelled to an altogether different enterprise in letters. Another novel, however successful, could scarcely add to her fame, – but what if she could achieve a great poem! She had sound reasons for thinking she could maintain a high pitch in poetry. Her prose had the condensity, the felicity, the subtle suggestiveness in epithet and phrase, of fine verse. Her works had been filled with thoughts, imagery, and pictures of the true poetic cast. They seemed to want only the accomplishment of verse to be converted from high prose into high poetry. The change of vehicle was in itself, perhaps, a relief after so much toil, and the 'Spanish Gypsy' was accomplished. It was received favourably by the large audience which was accustomed to greet her: nevertheless it was apparent then, and time