Page:The poems of George Eliot (Crowell, 1884).djvu/21

 by her recent writings; but, assuredly, this moral is thrust upon us everywhere, in a way which implies, if not intention, very eager belief.

Leaving the workmanship and the intellectual conception, or interwoven moral criticism, of the poem, and coming to the story, I am sure of only echoing what all the world will say when I call this in the highest degree poetic; and poetically dramatic, too. I must add, and with emphasis, that the story seems to me to gain, as a story, by this mode of presentation,—as I firmly believe "Romola" would have gained, if the question of perfect poetic expression could have been got over. In other words, although the manner of the novelist too often obtrudes itself in "The Spanish Gypsy," the author has told the story more affectingly, and with much more of truthfulness and local color and manner, than she would have done if she had been writing it as a novel. Compare, for example, what I think are among the very finest things George Eliot has ever done,—the scene between Juan the troubadour and the Gypsy girls, at the opening of Book III., and the scene in which Don Amador reads to the retainers of Don Silva from "Las Siete Partidas" the passage beginning, "Et esta gentileza aviene en tres maneras" (the critical reader who stumbles at the "et" must be informed that this is thirteenth-century Spanish),—compare these two scenes, I say, with the first scene in the barber's shop, and the scene of the Florentine joke, in "Romola," and note how very much the author gains by assuming the dramatic form. I have heard readers of much critical ability, and much poetic and dramatic instinct, too, complain that they did not see the force of those scenes in "Romola; " but it must be an incredibly dull person that misses the force of those scenes in "The Spanish Gypsy." The love-passages, also, are exquisitely beautiful; and in them again the author has gained by using the dramatic form. I dare to add that