(1868)
The Spanish Gypsy was written in 1867 and published in 1868. It had been conceived and largely written, in dramatic form, in 1864, when it caused its author so much distress that Lewes had to take it away from her. Eliot told William Blackwood, ‘It is not historic, but has merely historic connexions. The plot was wrought out entirely as an incorporation of my own ideas’ (Letters, Vol. IV, pp. 354–5).
It is set in Spain at the time when ‘the struggle with the Moors was attaining its climax’. Its heroine, Fedalma, is to marry Duke Silva, when she discovers that she is the daughter and heir of the captive gypsy chieftain, Zarca, who imposes on her the duty of leaving her love and leading her people. Silva, when he cannot move her resolve, attempts to become a Zincalo, but his own conflict of loyalties tears him apart, and he kills Zarca in a quarrel. Fedalma is left to lead the Zincali in her search for a national home in Africa, prefiguring Deronda’s search for a Jewish national home.
Eliot wrote that the poem was inspired by a
small picture of Titian’s [An Annunciation]. It occurred to me that here was a great dramatic motive of the same class as those used by the Greek dramatists, yet specifically differing from them. A young maiden, believing herself to be on the eve of the chief event of her life – marriage – about to share in the ordinary lot of womanhood, full of young hope, has suddenly announced to her that she is chosen to fulfil a great destiny, entailing a terribly different experience from that of ordinary womanhood. She is chosen, not by any arbitrariness, but as a result of foregoing hereditary conditions: she obeys. ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord.’ Here, I thought, is a subject grander than that of Iphigeneia, and it has never been used [Cross, pp. 42–3].
‘I required the opposition of race to give the need for renouncing the expectation of marriage,’ she wrote.
There is an excellent review of the poem by Henry James that is worth studying in full. It was published in the North American Review in October 1868. James admires the poem, with caveats, of which the most important are to do with the abstract nature of the characters and their problem. He wrote, ‘It is very possible that the author’s primary intention may have had a breadth which has been curtailed in the execution of the work, – that it was her wish to present a struggle between nature and culture, between education and the instinct of race.’ James points out that the poem is a romance, which might exonerate it from the hard-headed attention to realism of character or action. But he is pushed to be generous.
Fedalma is not a real Gypsy maiden. The conviction is strong in the reader’s mind that a genuine Spanish Zincala would have somehow contrived to follow her tribe and to keep her lover. If Fedalma is not real, Zarca is even less so. He is interesting, imposing, picturesque; but he is very far, I take it, from being a genuine Gypsy chieftain. They are both ideal figures, – the offspring of a strong mental desire for creatures well-rounded in their elevation and heroism, – creatures who should illustrate the nobleness of human nature divorced from its smallness… I have said enough to lead the reader to perceive that the poem should not be regarded as a rigid transcript of actual or possible fact, – that the action goes on in an artificial world, and that properly to comprehend it he must regard it with a generous mind.
We have printed the opening of the poem because it gives a good idea of Eliot’s rhetoric, whose faults, again according to James, ‘arise from an excess of rhetorical energy, from a desire to attain to perfect fulness and roundness of utterance; they are faults of overstatement’. The opening is a vigorous picture of a whirling clash and conflict of dead and living beliefs, cultures and ideas, and is interesting for that reason. The other passage we print is Fedalma’s acceptance of her renunciation from Book III. It contains four excellent lines:
No good is certain, but the steadfast mind,
The undivided will to seek the good:
’Tis that compels the elements, and wrings
A human music from the indifferent air.
From Book I
’TIS THE warm South, where Europe spreads her lands
Like fretted leaflets, breathing on the deep:
Broad-breasted Spain, leaning with equal love
(A calm earth-goddess crowned with corn and vines)1
On the Mid Sea that moans with memories,
And on the untravelled Ocean, whose vast tides
Pant dumbly passionate with dreams of youth.2
This river, shadowed by the battlements
And gleaming silvery towards the northern sky,
Feeds the famed stream that waters Andalus
And loiters, amorous of the fragrant air,
By Córdova and Seville to the bay
Fronting Algarva and the wandering flood
Of Guadiana. This deep mountain gorge
Slopes widening on the olive-plumèd plains
Of fair Granáda: one far-stretching arm
Points to Elvira, one to eastward heights
Of Alpujarras where the new-bathed Day
With oriflamme uplifted o’er the peaks
Saddens the breasts of northward-looking snows
That loved the night, and soared with soaring stars;
Flashing the signals of his nearing swiftness
From Almería’s purple-shadowed bay
On to the far-off rocks that gaze and glow –
On to Alhambra, strong and ruddy heart
Of glorious Morisma, gasping now,
A maimèd giant in his agony.
This town that dips its feet within the stream,
And seems to sit a tower-crowned Cybele,3
Spreading her ample robe adown the rocks,
Is rich Bedmár: ’twas Moorish long ago,
But now the Cross is sparkling on the Mosque,
And bells make Catholic the trembling air.
The fortress gleams in Spanish sunshine now
(’Tis south a mile before the rays are Moorish) –
Hereditary jewel, agraffe bright
On all the many-titled privilege
Of young Duke Silva. No Castilian knight
That serves Queen Isabel has higher charge;
For near this frontier sits the Moorish king,
Not Boabdil the waverer, who usurps
A throne he trembles in, and fawning licks
The feet of conquerors, but that fierce lion
Grisly El Zagal, who has made his lair
In Guadix’ fort, and rushing thence with strength,
Half his own fierceness, half the untainted heart
Of mountain bands that fight for holiday,
Wastes the fair lands that lie by Alcalá,
Wreathing his horse’s neck with Christian heads.
To keep the Christian frontier – such high trust
Is young Duke Silva’s; and the time is great.
(What times are little? To the sentinel
That hour is regal when he mounts on guard.)
The fifteenth century since the Man Divine
Taught and was hated in Capernaum
Is near its end – is falling as a husk
Away from all the fruit its years have ripened.
The Moslem faith, now flickering like a torch
In a night struggle on this shore of Spain,
Glares, a broad column of advancing flame,
Along the Danube and the Illyrian shore
Far into Italy, where eager monks,
Who watch in dreams and dream the while they watch,
See Christ grow paler in the baleful light,
Crying again the cry of the forsaken.
But faith, the stronger for extremity,
Becomes prophetic, hears the far-off tread
Of western chivalry, sees downward sweep
The archangel Michael with the gleaming sword,
And listens for the shriek of hurrying fiends
Chased from their revels in God’s sanctuary.
So trusts the monk, and lifts appealing eyes
To the high dome, the Church’s firmament,
Where the blue light-pierced curtain, rolled away,
Reveals the throne and Him who sits thereon.
So trust the men whose best hope for the world
Is ever that the world is near its end:
Impatient of the stars that keep their course
And make no pathway for the coming Judge.
But other futures stir the world’s great heart.
Europe is come to her majority,
And enters on the vast inheritance
Won from the tombs of mighty ancestors,
The seeds, the gold, the gems, the silent harps
That lay deep buried with the memories
Of old renown.
No more, as once in sunny Avignon,
The poet-scholar spreads the Homeric page,
And gazes sadly, like the deaf at song;
For now the old epic voices ring again
And vibrate with the beat and melody
Stirred by the warmth of old Ionian days.
The martyred sage, the Attic orator,4
Immortally incarnate, like the gods,
In spiritual bodies, wingèd words
Holding a universe impalpable,
Find a new audience. For evermore,
With grander resurrection than was feigned
Of Attila’s fierce Huns, the soul of Greece
Conquers the bulk of Persia. The maimed form
Of calmly-joyous beauty, marble-limbed,
Yet breathing with the thought that shaped its lips,
Looks mild reproach from out its opened grave
At creeds of terror; and the vine-wreathed god5
Rising, a stifled question from the silence,6
Fronts the pierced Image with the crown of thorns.
The soul of man is widening towards the past:
No longer hanging at the breast of life
Feeding in blindness to his parentage –
Quenching all wonder with Omnipotence,
Praising a name with indolent piety –
He spells the record of his long descent,
More largely conscious of the life that was.
And from the height that shows where morning shone
On far-off summits pale and gloomy now,
The horizon widens round him, and the west
Looks vast with untracked waves whereon his gaze
Follows the flight of the swift-vanished bird
That like the sunken sun is mirrored still
Upon the yearning soul within the eye.
And so in Córdova through patient nights
Columbus watches, or he sails in dreams
Between the setting stars and finds new day;
Then wakes again to the old weary days,
Girds on the cord and frock of pale Saint Francis,
And like him zealous pleads with foolish men.
‘I ask but for a million maravedis:
Give me three caravels to find a world,
New shores, new realms, new soldiers for the Cross.
Son cosas grandes!’ Thus he pleads in vain;
Yet faints not utterly, but pleads anew,
Thinking, ‘God means it, and has chosen me.’
For this man is the pulse of all mankind
Feeding an embryo future, offspring strange
Of the fond Present, that with mother-prayers
And mother-fancies looks for championship
Of all her loved beliefs and old-world way
From that young Time she bears within her womb.
The sacred places shall be purged again,
The Turk converted, and the Holy Church,
Like the mild Virgin with the outspread robe,
Shall fold all tongues and nations lovingly.
But since God works by armies, who shall be
The modern Cyrus? Is it France most Christian,
Who with his lilies and brocaded knights,
French oaths, French vices, and the newest style
Of out-puffed sleeve, shall pass from west to east,
A winnowing fan to purify the seed
For fair millennial harvests soon to come?
Or is not Spain the land of chosen warriors? –
Crusaders consecrated from the womb,
Carrying the sword-cross stamped upon their souls
By the long yearnings of a nation’s life,
Through all the seven patient centuries
Since first Pelayo and his resolute band
Trusted the God within their Gothic hearts
At Covadunga, and defied Mahound;
Beginning so the Holy War of Spain
That now is panting with the eagerness
Of labour near its end. The silver cross
Glitters o’er Malaga and streams dread light
On Moslem galleys, turning all their stores
From threats to gifts. What Spanish knight is he
Who, living now, holds it not shame to live
Apart from that hereditary battle
Which needs his sword? Castilian gentlemen
Choose not their task – they choose to do it well.
From Book III
ZARCA: Will then to stay!
Say you will take your better, painted such
By blind desire, and choose the hideous worse
For thousands who were happier but for you.
My thirty followers are assembled now
Without this terrace: I your father wait
That you may lead us forth to liberty –
Restore me to my tribe – five hundred men
Whom I alone can save, alone can rule,
And plant them as a mighty nation’s seed.
Why, vagabonds who clustered round one man,
Their voice of God, their prophet and their king,
Twice grew to empire on the teeming shores
Of Africa, and sent new royalties
To feed afresh the Arab sway in Spain,
My vagabonds are a seed more generous,
Quick as the serpent, loving as the hound,
And beautiful as disinherited gods.
They have a promised land beyond the sea:
There I may lead them, raise my standard, call
All wandering Zincali to that home,
And make a nation – bring light, order, law,
Instead of chaos. You, my only heir,
Are called to reign for me when I am gone.
Now choose your deed: to save or to destroy.
You, woman and Zincala, fortunate
Above your fellows – you who hold a curse
Or blessing in the hollow of your hand –
Say you will loose that hand from fellowship,
Let go the rescuing rope, hurl all the tribes,
Children and countless beings yet to come,
Down from the upward path of light and joy,
Back to the dark and marshy wilderness
Where life is nought but blind tenacity
Of that which is. Say you will curse your race!
FEDALMA (rising and stretching out her arms in deprecation):
No, no – I will not say it – I will go!
Father, I choose! I will not take a heaven
Haunted by shrieks of far-off misery.
This deed and I have ripened with the hours:
It is a part of me – a wakened thought
That, rising like a giant, masters me,
And grows into a doom. O mother life,
That seemed to nourish me so tenderly,
Even in the womb you vowed me to the fire,
Hung on my soul the burden of men’s hopes,
And pledged me to redeem! – I’ll pay the debt.
You gave me strength that I should pour it all
Into this anguish. I can never shrink
Back into bliss – my heart has grown too big
With things that might be. Father, I will go.
I will strip off these gems. Some happier bride
Shall wear them, since I should be dowered
With nought but curses, dowered with misery
Of men – of women, who have hearts to bleed
As mine is bleeding.
(She sinks on a seat, and begins to take off her jewels.)
Now, good gems, we part.
Speak of me always tenderly to Silva.
(She pauses, turning to ZARCA.)
O father, will the women of our tribe
Suffer as I do, in the years to come
When you have made them great in Africa?
Redeemed from ignorant ills only to feel
A conscious woe? Then – is it worth the pains?
Were it not better when we reach that shore
To raise a funeral-pile and perish all?
So closing up a myriad avenues
To misery yet unwrought? My soul is faint –
Will these sharp pangs buy any certain good?
ZARCA: Nay, never falter: no great deed is done
By falterers who ask for certainty.
No good is certain, but the steadfast mind,
The undivided will to seek the good:
’Tis that compels the elements, and wrings
A human music from the indifferent air.
The greatest gift the hero leaves his race
Is to have been a hero. Say we fail! –
We feed the high tradition of the world,
And leave our spirit in Zincalo breasts.
FEDALMA (unclasping her jewelled belt, and throwing it down):
Yes, I will say that we shall fail! I will not count
On aught but being faithful. I will take
This yearning self of mine and strangle it.
I will not be half-hearted: never yet
Fedalma did aught with a wavering soul.
Die, my young joy – die, all my hungry hopes –
The milk you cry for from the breast of life
Is thick with curses. Oh, all fatness here
Snatches its meat from leanness – feeds on graves
I will seek nothing but to shun base joy.
The saints were cowards who stood by to see
Christ crucified: they should have flung themselves
Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain –
The grandest death, to die in vain – for love
Greater than sways the forces of the world!
That death shall be my bridegroom. I will wed
The curse of the Zincali. Father, come!