George Eliot's Ideal Art

Abstract

George Eliot’s poetry has often been considered apart from and subordinate to her prose. Her poetical characters have been labeled too unrealistic, her verse stilted, the content muddled with abstraction: Eliot’s early biographer Mathilde Blind states of The Spanish Gypsy (1868) that ‘Zarca, the gipsy chief, is perhaps the most vividly drawn of George Eliot’s purely ideal characters – characters which never have the flesh-and-blood reality of her Mrs. Poysers, her Silas Marners, and her dear little Totties and Eppies’. Blind states that Eliot’s ‘thoughts, instead of being naturally winged with melody, seem mechanically welded into song’. 1 For Eliot’s contemporaries, her poetry sits uneasily next to her prose, not only falling short of the realism of her novels but lacking the undefinable and transcendent quality that characterizes true poetry. But the assumption latent in Blind’s review and others was that Eliot was attempting to do in verse what she had so successfully done in her prose, when in fact, the impetus and essence of poetry, as Eliot understands it, is to transcend the form and function of prose writing. Take Eliot’s critique of Robert Browning’s Men and Women: ‘[Browning] rarely soars above a certain table-land – a footing between the level of prose and the topmost heights of poetry. He does not take possession of our souls and set them aglow, as the greatest poets – the greatest artists do’.