CHAPTER XIII.
DANIEL DERONDA.
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GEORGE ELIOT was to write one more novel, and one
which was intended to give most clearly her message
to mankind. In June 1874 she is "brewing her
future big book." In February 1876 the first part
was published; it came out in the same form as
Middlemarch, in eight monthly parts, and had from
the first a larger sale than its predecessor. Here
again we have the doctrine of ideals, and expounded
with even more emphasis. The story is really two
stories put side by side and intersecting at intervals.
Each gives a life embodying a principle, and each
illustrates its opposite by the contrast. Gwendolen
Harleth, a young lady with aspirations in a latent
state, is misled into a worldly marriage, and though
ultimately saved, is saved "as by fire." Daniel Deronda
is throughout true to his higher nature, and is, in
George Eliot's works, what Sir Charles Grandison is
in Richardson's--the type of human perfection. The
story of Gwendolen's marriage shows undiminished
power. Here and there, perhaps, we have a little too
much psychological analysis; but, after all, the reader
who objects to psychology can avoid it by skipping a
paragraph or two. It is another version of the old
tragic motive: the paralysing influence of unmitigated
and concentrated selfishness, already illustrated by
Tito and Rosamond. Grandcourt, to whom Gwendolen
sacrifices herself, is compared to a crab or a
boa-constrictor slowly pinching its victim to death:
to appeal to him for mercy would be as idle as to
appeal to "a dangerous serpent ornamentally coiled
on her arm." He is a Tito in a further stage of
development--with all better feelings atrophied, and
enabled, by his fortune, to gratify his spite without
exerting himself in intrigues. Like Tito, he suggests,
to me at least, rather the cruel woman than the male
autocrat. Some critic remarked, to George Eliot's
annoyance, that the scenes between him and his parasite
Lush showed the "imperious feminine, not the masculine
character." She comforted herself by the
statement that Bernal Osborne--a thorough man of
the world--had commended these scenes as specially
lifelike. I can, indeed, accept both views, for the
distinction is rather too delicate for definite application.
One feels, I think, that Grandcourt was
drawn by a woman; but a sort of voluptuous
enjoyment of malignant tyranny is unfortunately not
confined to either sex. Anyhow, Gwendolen's ordeal
is pathetic, and she excites more sympathy than any of
George Eliot's victims. Perhaps she excites a little
too much. At least, when she comes very near homicide
(like Caterina in the Clerical Scenes and Bulstrode
in Middlemarch), and withholds her hand from her
drowning husband, one is strongly tempted to give
the verdict, "Served him right." She, however, feels
some remorse; and Daniel Deronda, who becomes her
confessor, is much too admirable a being to give any
sanction to this immoral source of consolation. She is
so charming in her way that we feel more interest in
the criminal than in the confessor. "I have no sympathy,"
she says on one occasion, "with women who
are always doing right." Perhaps that is the reason
why we cannot quite bow the knee before Daniel Deronda.
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That young gentleman is a model from the first.
He has a "seraphic face." There is "hardly a delicacy
of feeling" of which he is not capable--even when he
is at Eton. He is so ethereal a being that we are a
little shocked when he is mentioned in connection with
entrées. One can't fancy an angel at a London
dinner table. That is, indeed, the impression which he makes
upon his friend. A family is created expressly to pay
homage to him. They are supposed to have a sense of
humour to make their worship more impressive; but
they certainly keep it in the background when speaking
of him. People, says one of the young ladies,
must be content to take our brothers for husbands,
because they can't get Deronda. "No woman ought
to want to marry him," replies her sister ... "fancy
finding out that he had a tailor's bill and used boot-hooks,
like our brother." Angels don't employ tailors.
They compare him to his face to Buddha, who gave
himself to a famishing tigress to save her and her cubs
from starvation. To Gwendolen this peerless person
naturally becomes an "outer conscience"; and when he
exhorts her to use her past sorrow as a preparation for
life, instead of letting it spoil her life, the words are
to her "like the touch of a miraculous hand." She
begins "a new existence," but it seems "inseparable
from Deronda," and she longs that his presence may
be permanent. Happily she does not dare to love him,
and hopes only to be bound to him by a "spiritual
tie." That is just as well, because by a fortunate
accident he has picked a perfect young Jewess out of
the Thames, into which she had thrown herself, like
Mary Wollstonecraft. Moreover, by another providential
accident--Providence interferes rather to excess--he
has walked into the city and stumbled upon a
virtuous Jewish pawnbroker; and at the pawnbroker's
has met the Jewess's long-lost brother Mordecai, who
turns out to be as perfect as Deronda himself.
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It must be admitted that the Jewish circle into
which Deronda is admitted does not strike one as
drawn from the life. That is only natural, as Mordecai
is the incarnated pursuit of an ideal. Mordecai is
devoted to the restoration of the Jewish nationality--a
scheme which to the vulgar mind seems only one
degree less chimerical than Zarca's plan for a gypsy
nationality in Africa. It gives a chance to Deronda,
however. For a perfect young man in a time of
"social questions," he has hitherto been rather oddly
at a loss for an end to which he can devote his powers.
This is explained by a lengthy dissertation on his
character. He is too good. "His plenteous flexible
sympathy had ended by falling into one current with
that reflective analysis which tends to neutralise sympathy."
He is not vicious, but he "takes even vices
mildly"; he is "fervidly democratic" from sympathy
with the people, and yet "intensely conservative"
from imagination and affection. He likes to be on the
losing side in order to have the pleasure of martyrdom;
but he is afraid that too much martyrdom will make
him bitter. The solution comes by the discovery,
strangely delayed by a combination of circumstances,
that he was a genuine Jew by birth. Now he can
accept Mordecai for his prophet and take "heredity"
for his guide. "You," he says to that inspired person,
"have given shape to what, I believe, was an inherited
yearning--the effect of brooding passionate thoughts
in many ancestors--thoughts that seem to have been
intensely present with my grandfather." He has
always longed for an 'ideal task'--some "captainship,
which should come to him as a duty and not
be striven for as a personal prize." The "idea that
I am possessed with," as he afterward explains, is
"that of restoring a political existence to my people,
making them a nation again, giving them a national
centre such as the English, though they too are
scattered over the face of the globe." It seems from
her volume of essays (Theophrastus Such) that George
Eliot considered this to be a reasonable investment
of human energy. As we cannot all discover that
we belong to the chosen people, and some of us might,
even then, doubt the wisdom of the enterprise, one
feels that Deronda's mode of solving his problem is
not generally applicable. George Eliot's sympathy for
the Jews, her aversion to Anti-Semitism, was thoroughly
generous, and naturally welcomed by its objects.
But taken as the motive of a hero it strikes one as
showing a defective sense of humour. "One may
understand jokes without liking them," says the
musician Klesmer; and adds, "I am very sensible
to wit and humour." There can be no doubt that
George Eliot was very sensible to those qualities, and
yet she refuses to perceive that Daniel Deronda is an
amiable monomaniac and occasionally a very prosy
moralist.
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I must repeat that George Eliot was intensely feminine,
though more philosophical than most women.
She shows it to the best purpose in the subtlety and
the charm of her portraits of women, unrivalled in some
ways by any writer of either sex; and shows it also,
as I think, in a true perception of the more feminine
aspects of her male characters. Still, she sometimes
illustrates the weakness of the feminine view. Daniel
Deronda is not merely a feminine but, one is inclined
to say, a schoolgirl's hero. He is so sensitive and
scrupulously delicate that he will not soil his hands by
joining in the rough play of ordinary political and
social reformers. He will not compromise, and yet he
shares the dislike of his creator for fanatics and the
devotees of "fads." The monomaniac type is certainly
disagreeable, though it may be useful. Deronda contrives
to avoid its more offensive peculiarities, but at
the price of devoting himself to an unreal and dreamy
object. Probably, one fancies, he became disgusted in
later life by finding that, after Mordecai's death, the
people with whom he had to work had not the charm
of that half-inspired visionary. He is, in any case, an
idealist, who can only be provided with a task by a
kind of providential interposition. The discovery that
one can be carrying out one's grandfather's ideas is
not generally a very powerful source of inspiration.
"heredity" represents an important factor in life, but
can hardly be made into a religion. So far, therefore,
as Deronda is an aesthetic embodiment of an ethical
revelation--a judicious hint to a young man in search
of an ideal--he represents an untenable theory. From
the point of view of the simple novel reader he fails from
unreality. George Eliot, in later years, came to know
several representatives in the younger generation of
the class to which Deronda belonged. She speaks, for
example, with great warmth of Henry Sidgwick. His
friends, she remarks, by their own account, always
"expected him to act according to a higher standard"
than they would attribute to any one else or adopt
for themselves. She sent Deronda to Cambridge soon
after she had written this, and took great care to
give an accurate account of the incidents of Cambridge
life. I have always fancied--though without any
evidence--that some touches in Deronda were drawn
from one of her friends, Edmund Gurney, a man
of remarkable charm of character, and as good-looking
as Deronda. In the Cambridge atmosphere of
Deronda's days there was, I think, a certain element
of rough commonsense which might have knocked
some of her hero's nonsense out of him. But, in any
case, one is sensible that George Eliot, if she is thinking
of real life at all, has come to see through a
romantic haze which deprives the portrait of reality.
The imaginative sense is declining, and the characters
are becoming emblems or symbols of principle, and composed
of more moonshine than solid flesh and blood.
The Gwendolen story taken by itself is a masterly
piece of social satire; but in spite of the approval of
learned Jews, it is impossible to feel any enthusiastic
regard for Deronda in his surroundings.
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