has not modified the view, that even when such lofty qualifications as those just enumerated have been put in action, there is still an element, not ascertainable beforehand, which must indispensably form part of the reckoning. That mysterious element – which is as well called inspiration as by any other name – was not found present in the work. It is read with interest, with pleasure, with admiration, but it is not among the poems which the lovers of poetry quote and cherish. It will continue to be of interest, we imagine, not altogether as a poem, but as an exposition of a theory which had for her an extraordinary attraction. When writing 'The Mill on the Floss,' she said, "My stories grow in me like plants." All the best stories in the world, we imagine, have so grown. But it was natural, as time went on, that the incessant engagement of her mind in problems of life should have led to the evolution of theories, and consequently, in her future works, to a new method of construction – namely, that of making the exposition of the theory the basis of the work, and bending character and incident to fit the theory; a change which seems to us to tell of diminished vividness of conception and diminished power of invention. In her notes on the 'Spanish Gypsy,' first published in these volumes, the new process is set forth at large. She had seen a picture which inspired her with an idea : –
"I came home with this in my mind, meaning to give the motive a clothing in some suitable set of historical and local conditions. My reflections brought me nothing that would serve me except that moment in Spanish history when the struggle with the Moors was attaining its climax, and when there was the gypsy race present under such conditions as would enable me to get my heroine and the hereditary claim on her among the gypsies. I required the opposition of race to give the need for renouncing the expectation of marriage. I could not use the Jews or the Moors, because the facts of their history were too conspicuously opposed to the working out of my catastrophe. Meanwhile the subject had become more and more pregnant to me. I saw it might be taken as a symbol of the part which is played in the general human lot by hereditary conditions in the largest sense, and of the fact that what we call duty is entirely made up of such conditions; for even in cases of just antagonism to the narrow view of hereditary claims, the whole background of the particular struggle is made up of our inherited nature. Suppose for a moment that our conduct at great epochs was determined entirely by reflection, without the immediate intervention of feeling which supersedes reflection, our determination as to the right would consist in an adjustment of our individual needs to the dire necessities of our lot, partly as to our natural constitution, partly as sharers of life with our fellow-beings. Tragedy consists in the terrible difficulty of this adjustment –
'The dire strife
Of poor Humanity's afflicted will,
Struggling in vain with ruthless
destiny.'Looking at individual lots, I seemed to see in each the same story, wrought out with more or less of tragedy, and I determined the elements of my drama under the influence of these ideas. ...
"The consolatory elements in 'The Spanish Gypsy' are derived from two convictions or sentiments which so conspicuously pervade it, that they may be said to be its very warp on which the whole action is woven. These are, – (1) The importance of individual deeds; (2) The all-sufficiency of the soul's passions in determining sympathetic action.
"In Silva is presented the claim of fidelity to social pledges; in Fedalma, the claim constituted by an hereditary lot less consciously shared."
