Chapter IX (4)

Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally
beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse
struggling under prosaic conditions. Among the many remarks passed on
her mistakes, it was never said in the neighborhood of Middlemarch that
such mistakes could not have happened if the society into which she was
born had not smiled on propositions of marriage from a sickly man to a
girl less than half his own age--on modes of education which make a
woman's knowledge another name for motley ignorance--on rules of
conduct which are in flat contradiction with its own loudly asserted
beliefs. While this is the social air in which mortals begin to
breathe, there will be collisions such as those in Dorothea's life,
where great feelings take the aspect of error, and great faith the
aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so
strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new
Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual
life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in
daring all for the sake of a brother's burial; the medium in which
their ardent deeds took place is forever gone. But we insignificant
people with our daily words and acts, are preparing the lives of many
Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that
of the Dorothea whose story we know.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were
not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Alexander
broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on
the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was
incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly
dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you
and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived
faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The influence of social environment is also presented in _Felix Holt_ as a chief determining agent in the lives of individuals. However high the aims and noble the purposes of the individual, he must succumb to those social influences which are more powerful than he. In the third chapter we are told that--

This history is chiefly concerned with the private lot of a few men
and women; but there is no private life which has not been determined
by a wider public life, from the time when the primeval milkmaid had
to wander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she
milked was one of a herd which had made the pastures bare. Even
in that conservatory existence where the fair Camelia is sighed
for by the noble young Pineapple, neither of them needing to care
about the frost or rain outside, there is a nether apparatus of
hot-water pipes liable to cool down on a strike of the gardeners or
a scarcity of coal. And the lives we are about to look back upon do
not belong to those conservatory species; they are rooted in the
common earth, having to endure all the ordinary chances of past and
present weather. As to the weather of 1832, the Zadkiel of that time
had predicted that the electrical condition of the clouds in the
political hemisphere would produce unusual perturbations in organic
existence, and he would perhaps have seen a fulfilment of his
remarkable prophecy in that mutual influence of dissimilar destinies
which we shall see gradually unfolding itself. For if the mixed
political conditions of Treby Magna had not been acted on by the
passing of the Reform Bill, Mr. Harold Transome would not have
presented himself as a candidate for North Loamshire, Treby would
not have been a polling-place, Mr. Matthew Jermyn would not have
been on affable terms with a Dissenting preacher and his flock, and
the venerable town would not have been placarded with handbills,
more or less complimentary and retrospective--conditions in this
case essential to the "where" and the "what," without which, as the
learned know, there can be no event whatever.

In the case of Lydgate, if the ambition was less noble and pure, the fall was greater, and the disaster sadder to contemplate. He, too, was hindered by his "environment," but it was much more of his own creating, the result of his own nature, than in the case of Dorothea. We are told that "he was fired with the possibility that he might work out the proof of an anatomical conception, and make a link in the chain of discovery." That he was fully capable of achieving such a result is made to appear by the author. The account given of the discovery he wished to make, abundantly confirms this opinion of him; it also shows how large was George Eliot's learning, and how well she could use it for the novelist's purposes.

To show how a person capable of such work could be entangled in the ordinary affairs of life and lose sight of his youthful vision, or at least the power of realizing it, is the purpose developed in the career of Lydgate. There were "spots of commonness" in his nature. These--

lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble
intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in ordinary
men of the world: that distinction of mind which belonged to his
intellectual ardor did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about
furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known (without
his telling) that he was better born than other country surgeons.

The egotism of his nature, his incapacity for hard, severe economy and the exclusion of luxury and refined pleasure, proved his destruction. Along with this egotism went a too susceptible impressiveness in the presence of beautiful women of soft, delicate ways. He meant to do great things in science, but he could not endure the discipline, the sacrifice, the long years of waiting, by which the great result was to be attained. Even if he could have done this, he lost the power of doing it through the social environment of marriage. How a man's love for a woman may corrupt the heroic purposes of his life is hinted at in one of the paragraphs in which George Eliot describes Lydgate, and the vision which enamoured his young life until the woman turned all his gold into dross.

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to
fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally
parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we
are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's "makdom
and her fairnesse," never weary of listening to the twanging of the old
Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other
kind of "makdom and fairnesse" which must be wooed with industrious
thought and renunciation of small desires? In the story of this
passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious
marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom
the catastrophe is wound up with the other passion, sung by the
Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their
vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as
the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant
to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of
their coming to be shapen after the average, and fit to be packed by
the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness for perhaps
their ardor for generous, unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the
ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked
like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly.
Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual
change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may
have sent some of our breath toward infecting them when we uttered our
conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions; or perhaps it came
with the vibration from a woman's glance.

The pathetic and saddening tragedy of a man's failure to realize the possibilities of his own nature was never more clearly and minutely told than in the case of Lydgate. We see all the steps of his fall, we know all the reasons why it came, we comprehend fully what he might have been and done. The bitterness of his own failure made him call his wife a basil plant--"a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains." His hair never became white, but having won a large practice in his profession, he had his life heavily insured, and died at the age of fifty. He regarded his own life as a failure, though he was outwardly successful and "his skill was relied on by many paying patients." Against his will, by ways and causes he could not foresee, through the tenderness and ease of his own nature, the vision of his youth did not come true.

Perhaps _Middlemarch_ is the most perfect example among George Eliot's novels of her purpose to show how we are guided, controlled and modified in our thought and action by the whole society of which the individual forms a single atom. Many characters appear in _Middlemarch_, drawn with wonderful skill and finish, each having some part to perform in the complicated, play of life, and each some subtle, scarce-understood influence on all. Tragedy and comedy, selfishness and renunciation, greed and charity, love and jealousy, mingle here as in life. Many of these characters, such as Caleb Garth, Farebrother, Mrs. Cadwallader and Mr. Brooke, are remarkable portraitures, original and well conceived; but they all have their place in the social structure, and serve a purpose in the moral issue to be worked out.

It has been said of _Felix Holt_, and justly, that its characters are too typical, too much representative of a class, and too little personal in their natures and individual in their actions. Yet this method of treating character is consistent with the purpose of the novel, which is quite as much ethical as literary. Here we have imbruted and ignorant workingmen, laborers who would elevate their class, pious Dissenters, typical clergymen of the Church of England, old hereditary families with the smouldering evils which accumulate about them, ambitious and unscrupulous adventurers, and all the other phases of character likely to be found in such a town as Treby Magna. Each person stands for a class; and the aim of the novel is to indicate how the relative position of the classes represented may be changed with as little as possible of disorder and disruption.

It should be borne in mind, however, that the aim of George Eliot is not exclusively ethical. _Felix Holt_ and _Middlemarch_ are not ethical or socialistic treatises, and the whole purpose does not run in these directions. She ever keeps in mind, however, the great fact that on the ethical basis of right and wrong rests all the tragedy and comedy of the world. Her ideas are made alive with genius, and her ethical purposes take color in the glow of a brilliant imagination. She never did violence to the rule which she stated in her essay on the poet Young.

On its theoretic and perceptive side, morality touches science; on its
emotional side, art. Now the products of art are great in proportion as
they result from that immediate prompting of innate power which we call
genius, and not from labored obedience to a theory or rule; and the
presence of genius, or innate prompting, is directly opposed to the
perpetual consciousness of a rule. The action of faculty is imperious,
and excludes the reflection _why_ it should act. In the same way, in
proportion as morality is emotional, _i.e._, has affinity with art, it
will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and action, and not
as the recognition of a rule. Love does not say, "I ought to love"--it
loves. Pity does not say, "It is right to be pitiful"--it pities.
Justice does not say, "I am bound to be just"--it feels justly. It is
only where moral emotion is comparatively weak that the contemplation
of a rule or theory habitually mingles with its action; and in
accordance with this; we think experience, both in literature and life,
has shown that the minds which are pre-eminently didactic--which insist
on a "lesson," and despise everything that will not convey a moral, are
deficient in sympathetic emotion.

The moral and social problems of life seem to fire her creative powers, kindle her imagination, and give rein to her genius. While the thoughtful reader may find in _Felix Holt_ and _Middlemarch_ more that interests his speculative faculties than of what will satisfy his sentiments and imagination, yet he must keep in mind the fact that these are works depending largely for their effect on the mind to their poetic qualities. There is in them both a large and thoughtful contemplation of life, but with a constant reference to its passion, sentiment and ideal aims. If they are realistic it is not to the exclusion of spiritual elements; and the poetic, sentimental phases of human existence are never ignored.

XVI.

DANIEL DERONDA.

The purpose of George Eliot's last novel is distinctly constructive. While there is much of criticism in its pages, and criticism of the severest kind, its aim is that of spiritual renewal and upbuilding. It unfolds her conception of social growth, and of the influence of tradition and the national idea, much more completely than any other of her works. Moreover, it is all aglow with moral enthusiasm and spiritual ardor. It indicates a greater spontaneity than any of her books after _The Mill on the Floss_, and gives ample evidence that it possessed and absorbed the author's mind with its purpose and spirit. It is written from a great depth of conviction and moral earnestness. That it is her greatest book, artistically considered, there is no reason for believing; that it has its serious limitations as a literary creation all the critics have said. Yet it remains also to be said, that for largeness of aim, wealth of sentiment, and purity of moral teaching, no other book of George Eliot's surpasses _Daniel Deronda_. Indeed, in its realization of the spiritual basis of life, and in its portrayal of the religious sentiment, as these are understood by positivism, this book surpasses every other, by whomsoever written.

_Daniel Deronda_ is a romance, and hence differs in kind, conception, scope, circumstance and form from her other works. It is less a study of character than most of her other works, has more of adventure and action; and while it is no less realistic, yet it has higher ideal aims, and seeks to interpret what ought to be.

At least three distinct purposes may be seen running through the book, which blend into and confirm each other: to show the all-powerful influence of heredity, that blood will assert itself as more effective than any conditions of social environment or education; to indicate that ideals, subjective feelings and sentiments form the reality and the substance of religion, and that tradition affords the true medium of its expression; and to contrast a form of social life based on individualism with one based on tradition. The aim of _Daniel Deronda_, however, is many-sided, and cannot be expressed in a few phrases. It is too vital with life, touches the emotions and sentiments too often, has an ideal motive too large, to be dismissed with a quickly spoken word of contempt. Professor Dowden, one of her best and most sympathetic critics, has said that it is "an homage to the emotions rather than to the intellect of man. Her feeling finds expression not only in occasional gnomic utterances in which sentiments are declared to be the best part of the world's wealth, and love is spoken of as deeper than reason, and the intellect is pronounced incapable of ascertaining the validity of claims which rest upon loving instincts of the heart, or else are baseless. The entire work possesses an impassioned aspect, an air of spiritual prescience, far more than the exactitude of science. The main forces which operate in it are sympathies, aspirations, ardors; and ideas chiefly as associated with these." The object aimed at is ideal and religious, much more than intellectual and scientific, to show how necessary is religion, how weak and imperfect is man when the ideal side of his nature is undeveloped. It makes clear the author's conviction concerning the importance of religion, that she prized its spiritual hopes, found satisfaction in its enthusiasms and aspirations. When Gwendolen was cast down in utter dejection, all of joy and delight the world had afforded her gone, and she felt the greatest need of something to comfort and sustain her in her distrust of self and the world, Deronda said to her, "The refuge you are needing from personal trouble is the higher, the religious life, which holds an enthusiasm for something more than our own appetites and vanities."

The religion inculcated, to be sure, is not that of faith in a personal God and a personal immortality, but that which is based on the mystery of life and nature, impressed on the sensitive soul of man in fears, sorrows, hopes, aspirations, and built up into great ideals and institutions through tradition. _Daniel Deronda_ gives us the gospel of altruism, a new preaching of love to man. _Daniel Deronda_ proves as no other writing has ever done, what is the charm and the power of these ideas when dissociated from any spiritual hopes which extend beyond humanity.

In order to give the most adequate expression to her ideas, and to show forth the power of the spiritual life as she conceived it, George Eliot made use of that race and religion which presents so remarkable an illustration of the influence of tradition and heredity. She saw in Judaism a striking confirmation of her theories, and a proof of what ideal interests can do to preserve a nation. To vindicate that race in the eyes of the world, to show what capacity there is in its national traditions, was also a part of her purpose. That this was her aim may be seen in what she said to a young Jew in whom she was much interested.

I wrote about the Jews because I consider them a fine old race who have
done great things for humanity. I feel the same admiration for them as
I do for the Florentines.

The same idea is to be seen very clearly in the last essay in the _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_. She regarded the great memories and traditions of this people as a priceless legacy which may and ought to draw all the scattered Israelites together and unite them again in a common national life.

A people having the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering
thrill when it is adjured by the deaths of its heroes who died to
preserve its national existence; when it is reminded of its small
beginnings and gradual growth through past labors and struggles, such
as are still demanded of it in order that the freedom and well-being
thus inherited may be transmitted unimpaired to children and children's
children; when an appeal against the permission of injustice is made to
great precedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in
its institutions. It is this living force of sentiment in common which
makes a national consciousness. Nations so moved will resist conquest
with the very breasts of their women, will pay their millions and their
blood to abolish slavery, will share privation in famine and all
calamity, will produce poets to sing "some great story of a man," and
thinkers whose theories will bear the test of action. An individual
man, to be harmoniously great, must belong to a nation of this order,
if not in actual existence, yet existing in the past, in memory, as a
departed, invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be
restored. A common humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of
various activity which makes a complete man. The time is not come for
cosmopolitanism to be highly virtuous, any more than for communism to
suffice for social energy.

This was one of the favorite ideas of George Eliot, which she has again and again expressed. She was impressed with the conviction that such a national life is necessary to the world's growth and welfare, that the era of a common brotherhood, dissociated from national traditions and hopes, has not yet come. Hence her belief that Judaism ought to speak the voice of a united race, occupying the old home of this people, and sending forth its ideas as a national inheritance and inspiration. This belief inspires the concluding words of her essay, as well as the last chapters of the novel.

There is still a great function for the steadfastness of the Jew: not
that he should shut out the utmost illumination which knowledge can
throw on his national history, but that he should cherish the store of
inheritance which that history has left him. Every Jew should be
conscious that he is one of a multitude possessing common objects of
piety in the immortal achievements and immortal sorrows of ancestors
who have transmitted to them a physical and mental type strong enough,
eminent enough in faculties, pregnant enough with peculiar promise, to
constitute a new beneficent individuality among the nations, and, by
confuting the traditions of scorn, nobly avenge the wrongs done to
their fathers.

There is a sense which the worthy child of a nation that has brought
forth industrious prophets, high and unique among the poets of the
world, is bound by their visions.

Is bound?

Yes; for the effective bond of human action is feeling, and the worthy
child of a people owning the triple name of Hebrew, Israelite and Jew,
feels his kinship with the glories and the sorrows, the degradation and
the possible renovation of his national family.

Will any one teach the nullification of this feeling and call his
doctrine a philosophy? He will teach a blinding superstition--the
superstition that a theory of human well-being can be constructed in
disregard of the influences which have made us human.

The purpose of _Daniel Deronda_, however, is not merely to vindicate Judaism. This race and its religion are used as the vehicles for larger ideas, as an illustration of the supreme importance to mankind of spiritual aims concentrated into the form of national traditions and aspirations. Her own studies, and personal intercourse with the Jews, helped to attract her to this race; but the main cause of her use of them in this novel is their remarkable history. Their moral and spiritual persistence, their wonderful devotedness to their own race and its aims, admirably adapted them to develop for her the ideas she wished to express. What nation could she have taken that would have so clearly illustrated her theory of national memories and traditions? In the forty-second chapter of _Daniel Deronda_ she has put into the month of Mordecai her own theories on this subject. He vindicates his right to call himself a _rational_ Jew, one who accepts what is reasonable and true.

"It is to see more and more of the hidden bonds that bind and
consecrate change as a dependent growth--yea, consecrate it with
kinship; the past becomes my parent, and the future stretches toward me
the appealing arms of children. Is it rational to drain away the sap of
special kindred that makes the families of man rich in interchanged
wealth, and various as the forests are various with the glory of the
cedar and the palm?"

He declares that each nation has its own work to do in the world, in the uplifting and maintenance of some special idea which is necessary to the welfare and development of humanity. The place he assigns to Judaism is precisely that which made it dear to George Eliot, because it embodied her conception of religion and its social functions.

"Israel is the heart of mankind, if we mean by heart the core of
affection which binds a race and its families in dutiful love, and the
reverence for the human body which lifts the needs of our animal life
into religion, and the tenderness which is merciful to the poor and
weak and to the dumb creature that wears the yoke for us."

Again, he utters words which are simply an expression of George Eliot's own sentiments.

"Where else is there a nation of whom it may be as truly said that
their religion and law and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in
the heart and made one growth--where else a people who kept and
enlarged their spiritual store at the very time when they were hunted
with a hatred as fierce as the forest fires that chase the wild beast
from his covert? There is a fable of the Roman that, swimming to save
his life, he held the roll of his writings between his teeth and saved
them from the waters. But how much more than that is true of our race?
They struggled to keep their place among the nations like heroes--yea,
when the hand was hacked off, they clung with the teeth; but when the
plow and the harrow had passed over the last visible signs of their
national covenant, and the fruitfulness of their land was stifled with
the blood of the sowers and planters, they said, 'The spirit is alive,
let us make it a lasting habitation--lasting because movable--so that
it may be carried from generation to generation, and our sons unborn
may be rich in the things that have been, and possess a hope built on
an unchangeable foundation.' They said it and they wrought it, though
often breathing with scant life, as in a coffin, or as lying wounded
amid a heap of slain. Hooted and scared like the unowned dog, the
Hebrew made himself envied for his wealth and wisdom, and was bled of
them to fill the bath of Gentile luxury; he absorbed knowledge, he
diffused it; his dispersed race was a new Phoenicia working the mines
of Greece and carrying their products to the world. The native spirit
of our tradition was not to stand still, but to use records as a seed,
and draw out the compressed virtues of law and prophecy."

Then Mordecai unfolds his theory of national unity and of a regenerated national life; and it is impossible to read his words attentively without accepting them as an expression of George Eliot's own personal convictions. As an embodiment of her conception of the functions of national life they are full of interest aside from their place in the novel.

"In the multitudes of the ignorant on three continents who observe our
rites and make the confession of the Divine Unity, the soul of Judaism
is not dead. Revive the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which
has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality.
Looking toward a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the
ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a
voice among the peoples of the East and the West--which will plant the
wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be, us of old, a medium of
transmission and understanding. Let that come to pass, and the living
warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel, and superstition
will vanish, not in the lawlessness of the renegade, but in the
illumination of great facts which widen feeling, and make all knowledge
alive as the young offspring of beloved memories.... The effect of our
separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation
unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality. That is
the fulfilment of the religious trust that moulded them into a people,
whose life has made half the inspiration of the world. What is it to me
that the ten tribes are lost untraceably, or that multitudes of the
children of Judah have mixed themselves with the Gentile populations as
a river with rivers? Behold our people still! Their skirts spread afar;
they are torn and soiled and trodden on; but there is a jewelled
breast-plate. Let the wealthy men, the monarchs of commerce, the
learned in all knowledge, the skilful in all arts, the speakers, the
political counsellors, who carry in their veins the Hebrew blood which
has maintained its vigor in all climates, and the pliancy of the Hebrew
genius for which difficulty means new device--let them say, 'We will
lift up a standard, we will unite in a labor hard but glorious like
that of Moses and Ezra, a labor which shall be a worthy fruit of the
long anguish whereby our fathers maintained their separateness,
refusing the ease of falsehood.' They have wealth enough to redeem the
soil from debauched and paupered conquerors; they have the skill of the
statesman to devise, the tongue of the orator to persuade. And is there
no prophet or poet among us to make the ears of Christian Europe tingle
with shame at the hideous obloquy of Christian strife which the Turk
gazes at as at the fighting of beasts to which he has lent an arena?
There is store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand,
simple, just, like the old--a republic where there is equality of
protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our
ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western
freedom amidst the despotisms of the East. Then our race shall have an
organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the
outraged Jew shall have a defence in the court of nations, as the
outraged Englishman or American. And the world will gain as Israel
gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which
carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its
bosom; there will be a land set for a halting-place of enmities, a
neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West. Difficulties? I
know there are difficulties. But let the spirit of sublime achievement
move in the great among our people, and the work will begin....

"What is needed is the leaven--what is needed is the seed of fire. The
heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in
their veins as a power without understanding, like the morning
exultation of herds; it is the inborn half of memory, moving as in a
dream among writings on the walls, which it sees dimly but cannot
divide into speech. Let the torch of visible community be lighted! Let
the reason of Israel disclose itself in a great outward deed, and let
there be another great migration, another choosing of Israel to be a
nationality whose members may still stretch to the ends of the earth,
even as the sons of England and Germany, whom enterprise carries afar,
but who still have a national hearth, and a tribunal of national
opinion. Will any say, 'It cannot be'? Baruch Spinoza had not a
faithful Jewish heart, though he had sucked the life of his intellect
at the breasts of Jewish tradition. He laid bare his father's nakedness
and said, 'They who scorn him have the higher wisdom.' Yet Baruch
Spinoza confessed he saw not why Israel should not again be a chosen
nation. Who says that the history and literature of our race are dead?
Are they not as living as the history and literature of Greece and
Home, which have inspired revolutions, enkindled the thought of Europe
and made the unrighteous powers tremble? These were an inheritance dug
from the tomb. Ours is an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver
in millions of human frames....

"I cherish nothing for the Jewish nation, I seek nothing for them, but
the good which promises good to all the nations. The spirit of our
religious life, which is one with our national life, is not hatred of
aught but wrong. The masters have said an offence against man is worse
than an offence against God. But what wonder if there is hatred in the
breasts of Jews who are children of the ignorant and oppressed--what
wonder, since there is hatred in the breasts of Christians? Our
national life was a growing light. Let the central fire be kindled
again, and the light will reach afar. The degraded and scorned of our
race will learn to think of their sacred land not as a place for
saintly beggary to await death in loathsome idleness, but as a republic
where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order founded on the
old, purified, enriched by the experience our greatest sons have
gathered from the life of the ages. How long is it?--only two centuries
since a vessel earned over the ocean the beginning of the great North
American nation. The people grew like meeting waters; they were various
in habit and sect. There came a time, a century ago, when they needed a
polity, and there were heroes of peace among them. What had they to
form a polity with but memories of Europe, corrected by the vision of a
better? Let our wise and wealthy show themselves heroes. They have the
memories of the East and West, and they have the full vision of a
better. A new Persia with a purified religion magnified itself in art
and wisdom. So will a new Judea, poised between East and West--a
covenant of reconciliation. Will any say the prophetic vision of your
race has been hopelessly mixed with folly and bigotry; the angel of
progress hag no message for Judaism--it is a half-buried city for the
paid workers to lay open--the waters are rushing by it as a forsaken
field? I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human
choice. The sons of Judah have to choose, that God may again choose
them. The Messianic time is the time when Israel shall will the
planting of the national ensign. The Nile overflowed and rushed onward;
the Egyptian could not choose the overflow, but he chose to work and
make channels for the fructifying waters, and Egypt became the land of
corn. Shall man, whose soul is set in the royalty of discernment and
resolve, deny his rank and say, I am an onlooker, ask no choice or
purpose of me? That is the blasphemy of this time. The divine principle
of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. Let us contradict the
blasphemy, and help to will our own better future and the better future
of the world--not renounce our higher gift and say, 'Let us be as if we
were not among the populations;' but choose our full heritage, claim
the brotherhood of our nation, and carry into it a new brotherhood with
the nations of the Gentiles. The vision is there: it will be
fulfilled."

These words put into the mouth of Mordecai, indicate how thoroughly George Eliot entered into the spirit of Judaism. She read Hebrew with ease, and had delved extensively in Jewish literature, besides being familiar with the monumental works in German devoted to Jewish history and opinions. The religious customs, the home life, the peculiar social habits of the race, she carefully studied. The accuracy of her information has been pointed out by her Jewish critics, by whom the book has been praised with the utmost enthusiasm. One of these, Prof. David Kaufmann, of Buda-Pesth, in an excellent notice of _Daniel Deronda_, bears testimony to the author's learning and to the faithfulness of her Jewish portraitures. He says that, "led by cordial and loving inclination to the profound study of Jewish national and family life, she has set herself to create Jewish characters, and to recognize and give presentment to the influences which Jewish education is wont to exercise--to prove by types that Judaism is an intellectual and spiritual force, still misapprehended and readily overlooked, but not the less an effective power, for the future of which it is good assurance that it possesses in the body of its adherents a noble, susceptible and pliant material which only awaits its final casting to appear in a glorious form." He also says of the author's learning, that it is loving and exact, that her descriptions of Jewish life are always faithful and her characters true to nature.

"Leader of the present so-called realistic school, our author keeps up in this work the reputation she has won of possessing the most minute knowledge of the subjects she handles, by the manner in which she has described the Jews--the great unknown of humanity. She has penetrated into their history and literature affectionately and thoroughly; and her knowledge in a field where ignorance is still venial if not expressly authorized, has astonished even experts. In her selection of almost always unfamiliar quotations, she shows a taste and a facility of reference really amazing. When shall we see a German writer exhibiting the courteous kindliness of George Eliot, who makes Deronda study Zunz's _Synagogale Poesie_, and places the monumental words which open his chapter entitled 'Leiden,' at the head of the passage in which she introduces us to Ezra Cohen's family, and at the club-meeting at which Mordecai gives utterance to his ideas concerning the future of Israel? She is familiar with the views of Jehuda-ha-Levi as with the dreams and longings of the cabalists, and as conversant with the splendid names of our Hispano--Arabian epoch as with the moral aphorisms of the Talmud and the subtle meaning contained in Jewish legends.... It is by the piety and tenderness with which she treats Jewish customs that the author shows how supreme her cultivation and refinement are; and the small number of mistakes which can be detected in her descriptions of Jewish life and ritual may put to blush even writers who belong to that race." Again this critic says of the visionary Mordecai, who has been pronounced a mere dreamer and untrue to nature, that he is an altogether probable character and portrayed with a true realistic touch." Mordecai is carved of the wood from which prophets are made, and so far as the supersensuous can be rendered intelligible, it may even be said that in studying him we are introduced into a studio or workshop of the prophetic mind. He is one of the most difficult as well as one of the most successful essays in psychological analysis ever attempted by an author; and in his wonderful portrait, which must be closely studied, and not epitomized or reproduced in extracts, we see glowing enthusiasm united to cabalistic profundity, and the most morbid tension of the intellectual powers united to clear and well-defined hopes. How has the author succeeded in making Mordecai so human and so true to nature? By mixing the gold with an alloy of commoner metal, and by giving the angelic likeness features which are familiar to us all."

Another Jew has borne equally hearty testimony to the faithfulness with which George Eliot has described Jewish life and the spirit of the Jewish religion. "She has acquired," this writer says, "an extended and profound knowledge of the rites, aspirations, hopes, fears and desires of the Israelites of the day. She has read their books, inquired into their modes of thought, searched their traditions, accompanied them to the synagogue; nay, she has taken their very words from their lips, and, like Asmodeus, has unroofed their houses. To say that some slight errors have crept into _Daniel Deronda_ is to say that no human work is perfect; and these inaccuracies are singularly few and unimportant." [Footnote: James Picciotto, author of "sketches of Anglo-Jewish History," in the Gentleman's Magazine for November, 1876.] Still another Jewish critic says that in her gallery of portraits she "gives in a marvellously full and accurate way all the many sides of the Jewish complex national character." He also says that Mordecai is a true successor of the prophets and moral leaders of the race, that the national spirit and temper are truly represented in him. [Footnote: Joseph Jacobs, in Macmillian's Magazine for 1877.]

That the main purpose of _Daniel Deronda_ is not that of defending Judaism, must be apparent to every attentive reader. The Jewish race is made use of for purposes of illustration, as a notable example in proof of her theories. There is a deeper purpose conspicuous throughout the hook, which rests on her conceptions of the spiritual life as a development of tradition. This larger purpose also jests on her altruistic conception of the moral and spiritual life. As Professor Kaufmann has pointed out, the story falls into two widely separated portions, in one of which the Jewish element appears, in the other the English. Jewish life and its religious spirit are contrasted with English life and a common type of its religion. This is not a contrast, however, which is introduced for the purpose of disparaging Christianity or English social life, but with the object of comparing those whose life is anchored in the spiritual traditions of a great people, with those who find the centre of their life in egotism and an individualistic spirit. Grandcourt is a type of pure egotism; Gwendolen is a creature who lives for self and with no law outside of her own happiness. This is the spirit of the society in which they both move. On the other hand, Mordecai lives in his race, Deronda gives his life constantly away for others, and Mirah is unselfishness and simplicity itself. So distinctly is this contrast drawn, so clearly are these two phases of life brought over against each other, that the book seems to be divided in the middle, and to be two separate works joined by a slender thread. This artistic arrangement has been severely criticised, but its higher purpose is only understood when this comparison and antagonism is recognized. Then the true artistic arrangement vindicates itself, and the unity of the book becomes apparent. Deronda moves in both these worlds, and their influence on him is finely conceived. He finds no spiritual aim and motive for his life until he is led into the charmed circle of a traditional environment, and learns to live in and for his race. Living for self, the life of Gwendolen is blasted, her hopes crushed, and she finds no peace or promise except in the steadfast spiritual strength yielded her by Deronda. That such a contrasting of the two great phases of life was a part of George Eliot's purpose she has herself acknowledged. A comparison of the spiritual histories of Gwendolen and Deronda will show how earnest was this purpose of the author. Gwendolen is a type of those souls who have no spiritual anchorage in the religious life and traditions of their people. At the opening of chapter third we are told she had no home memories, that "this blessed persistence in which affection can take root had been wanting in Gwendolen's life." At the end of the sixth chapter we are also told that she had no insight into spiritual realities, that the bonds of spiritual power and moral retribution had not been made apparent to her mind.

Her ideal was to be daring in speech and reckless in braving dangers,
both moral and physical; and though her practice fell far behind her
ideal, this shortcoming seemed to be due to the pettiness of
circumstances, the narrow theatre which life offers to a girl of
twenty, who cannot conceive herself as anything else than a lady, or as
in any position which would lack the tribute of respect. She had no
permanent consciousness of other fetters, or of more spiritual
restraints, having always disliked whatever was presented to her under
the name of religion, in the same way that some people dislike
arithmetic and accounts: it had raised no other emotion in her, no
alarm, no longing; so that the question whether she believed it, had
not occurred to her, any more than it had occurred to her to inquire
into the conditions of colonial property and banking, on which, as she
had had many opportunities of knowing, the family fortune was
dependent. All these facts about herself she would have been ready to
admit, and even, more or less indirectly, to state. What she
unwillingly recognized, and would have been glad for others to be
unaware of, was that liability of hers to fits of spiritual dread,
though this fountain of awe within her had not found its way into
connection with the religion taught her, or with any human relations.
She was ashamed and frightened, as at what might happen again, in
remembering her tremor on suddenly feeling herself alone, when, for
example, she was walking without companionship and there came some
rapid change in the light. Solitude in any wide scene impressed her
with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her, in
the midst of which she was helplessly incapable of asserting herself.
The little astronomy taught her at school used sometimes to set her
imagination at work in a way that made her tremble; but always when
some one joined her she recovered her indifference to the vastness in
which she seemed an exile; she found again her usual world, in which
her will was of some avail, and the religious nomenclature belonging to
this world was no more identified for her with those uneasy impressions
of awe than her uncle's surplices seen out of use at the rectory. With
human ears and eyes about her, she had always hitherto recovered her
confidence, and felt the possibility of winning empire.

Her difficulties all came out of this egoistic spirit, this want of spiritual anchorage and religious faith. Gradually her bitter experiences awakened in her a desire for a purer life, and the influence of Deronda worked powerfully in the same direction. She is to be regarded, however, as simply a representative of that social, moral and spiritual life bred in our century by the disintegrating forces everywhere at work. No moral ideal, no awe of the divine Nemesis, no spiritual sympathy with the larger life of the race, is to be found in her thought. The radicalism of the time, which neglects religious training, which scorns the life of the past, which lives for self and culture, is destroying all that is best in modern society. Gwendolen is one of the results of these processes, an example of that impoverished life which is so common, arising from religious rebellion and egotism.

Another motive and spirit is represented in the character of Deronda. As a boy, his mind was full of ideal aspirations, he was chivalrous and eager to help and comfort others. He would take no mean advantages in his own behalf, he loved the comradeship of those whom he could help, he was always ready with his sympathy.

He was early impassioned by ideas, and burned his fire on those
heights.

He would not regard his studies as instruments of success, but as the means whereby to feed motive and opinion. He had a strong craving for comprehensiveness of opinion, and was not content to store up knowledge that demanded a mere act of memory in its acquisition. He had a craving after a larger life, an ideal aim of the most winning attractiveness. Though Deronda was educated amidst surroundings almost identical with those which helped to form Gwendolen's character, yet a very different result was produced in him because of his _inherited_ tendencies of mind. After he had seen his mother, learned that he was a Jew, he said to Mordecai,--

"It is you who have given shape to what I believe was an inherited
yearning--the effect of brooding, passionate thoughts in my ancestors--
thoughts that seem to have been intensely present in my grandfather.
Suppose the stolen offspring of some mountain tribe brought up in a
city of the plain, or one with an inherited genius for painting, and
born blind--the ancestral life would be within them as a dim longing
for unknown objects and sensations, and the spell-bound habit of their
inherited frames would be like a cunningly wrought musical instrument
never played on, but quivering throughout in uneasy, mysterious
moanings of its intricate structure that, under the right touch, gives
music. Something like that, I think, has been my experience. Since I
began to read and know, I have always longed for some ideal task in
which I might feel myself the heart and brain of a multitude--some
social captainship which would come to me as a duty, and not be striven
for as a personal prize. You have raised the image of such a task for
me--to bind our race together in spite of heresy."

This inherited sense of a larger life made Deronda what he was, and developed in him qualities absent in Gwendolen. This inherited power made him a new Mazzini, a born leader of men, a new saviour of society, a personal magnet to attract and inspire other souls. A magnetic power of influence drew Gwendolen to him from the first time they met, he shamed her narrow life by his silent presence, and he quickened to life in her a desire for a purer and nobler existence. George Eliot probably meant to indicate in his character her conception of the true social reformation which is needed to-day, and how it is to be brought about. The basis on which it is to be built is the traditional and inherited life of the past, inspired with new energies and meanings by the gifted souls who have inherited a large and pure personality, and who are inspired by a quickened sense of what life ought to be. On the one side a life of altruism, on the other a life of egotism, teach that the liner social and moral qualities come out of an inheritance in the national ideals and conquests of a worthy people, while the coarser qualities come of the neglect of this source of spiritual power and sustenance. Two letters written to Professor David Kaufmann indicate that this was the purpose of the hook. At the same time, they show George Eliot's mind on other sides, and give added insights into her character. As an indication of her attitude towards Judaism, and her faith in the work she had done in Daniel Deronda, they are of great value.

THE PRIORY, 21 NORTH BANK, May 31, '77.

MY DEAR SIR,--Hardly, since I became an author, have I had a deeper satisfaction, I may say a more heartfelt joy, than you have given me in your estimate of _Daniel Deronda_. [Footnote: George Eliot and Judaism: an Attempt to Appreciate Daniel Deronda. By Prof. David Kaufmann, of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Buda-Pesth.]

I must tell you that it is my rule, very strictly observed, not to read the criticisms on my writings. For years I have found this abstinence necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as an artist which ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends to produce in me. For far worse than any verdict as to the proportion of good and evil in our work, is the painful impression that we write for a public which has no discernment of good and evil.

My husband reads any notices of me that come before him, and reports to me (or else refrains from reporting) the general character of the notice, or something in particular which strikes him as showing either an exceptional insight or an obtuseness that is gross enough to be amusing. Very rarely, when he has read a critique of me, he has handed it to me, saying, "_You_ must read this." And your estimate of _Daniel Deronda_ made one of these rare instances.

Certainly, if I had been asked to choose _what_ should be written about my book and _who_ should write it, I should have sketched--well, not anything so good as what you have written, but an article which must be written by a Jew who showed not merely sympathy with the best aspirations of his race, but a remarkable insight into the nature of art and the processes of the artistic mind. Believe me, I should not have cared to devour even ardent praise if it had not come from one who showed the discriminating sensibility, the perfect response to the artist's intention, which must make the fullest, rarest joy to one who works from inward conviction and not in compliance with current fashions. Such a response holds for an author not only what is best in "the life that now is," but the promise of "that which is to come." I mean that the usual approximative, narrow perception of what one has been intending and professedly feeling in one's work, impresses one with the sense that it must be poor perishable stuff without roots to hike any lasting hold in the minds of men; while any instance of complete comprehension encourages one to hope that the creative prompting has foreshadowed, and will continue to satisfy, a need in other minds.