DANIEL DERONDA.
'Daniel Deronda,' which appeared five years after 'Middlemarch,'
occupies a place apart among George Eliot's novels. In the spirit which
animates it, it has perhaps the closest affinity with the 'Spanish
Gypsy.' Speaking of this work to a young friend of Jewish extraction (in
whose career George Eliot felt keen interest), she expressed surprise at
the amazement which her choice of a subject had created. "I wrote about
the Jews," she remarked, "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. Only lately I have heard to my great
satisfaction that an influential member of the Jewish community is going
to start an emigration to Palestine. You will also be glad to learn that
Helmholtz is a Jew."
These observations are valuable as affording a key to the leading motive
of 'Daniel Deronda.' Mordecai's ardent desire to found a new national
state in Palestine is not simply the author's dramatic realisation of
the feeling of an enthusiast, but expresses her own very definite
sentiments on the subject. The Jewish apostle is, in fact, more or less
the mouthpiece of George Eliot's own opinions on Judaism. For so great
a master in the art of creating character, this type of the loftiest
kind of man is curiously unreal. Mordecai delivers himself of the most
eloquent and exalted views and sentiments, yet his own personality
remains so vague and nebulous that it has no power of kindling the
imagination. Mordecai is meant for a Jewish Mazzini. Within his
consciousness he harbours the future of a people. He feels himself
destined to become the saviour of his race; yet he does not convince us
of his greatness. He convinces us no more than he does the mixed company
at the "Hand and Banner," which listens with pitying incredulity to his
passionate harangues. Nevertheless the first and final test of the
religious teacher or of the social reformer is the magnetic force with
which his own intense beliefs become binding on the consciences of
others, if only of a few. It is true Mordecai secures one disciple--the
man destined to translate his thought into action, Daniel Deronda, as
shadowy, as puppet-like, as lifeless as Ezra Mordecai Cohen himself.
These two men, of whom the one is the spiritual leader and the other the
hero destined to realise his aspirations, are probably the two most
unsuccessful of George Eliot's vast gallery of characters. They are the
representatives of an idea, but the idea has never been made flesh. A
succinct expression of it may be gathered from the following passage:
"Which among the chief of the Gentile nations has not an ignorant
multitude? They scorn our people's ignorant observance; but the most
accursed ignorance is that which has no observance--sunk to the cunning
greed of the fox, to which all law is no more than a trap or the cry of
the worrying hound. There is a degradation deep down below the memory
that has withered into superstition. For the multitude of the ignorant
on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession of the
Divine Unity the Lord 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 towards 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, as 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."
This notion that the Jews should return to Palestine in a body, and once
more constitute themselves into a distinct nation, is curiously
repugnant to modern feelings. As repugnant as that other doctrine, which
is also implied in the book, that Jewish separateness should be still
further insured by strictly adhering to their own race in marriage--at
least Mirah, the most faultless of George Eliot's heroines, whose
character expresses the noblest side of Judaism, "is a Jewess who will
not accept any one but a Jew."
Mirah Lapidoth and the Princess Halm-Eberstein, Deronda's mother, are
drawn with the obvious purpose of contrasting two types of Jewish women.
Whereas the latter, strictly brought up in the belief and most minute
observances of her Hebrew father, breaks away from the "bondage of
having been born a Jew," from which she wishes to relieve her son by
parting from him in infancy, Mirah, brought up in disregard, "even in
dislike of her Jewish origin," clings with inviolable tenacity to the
memory of that origin and to the fellowship of her people. The author
leaves one in little doubt as towards which side her own sympathies
incline to. She is not so much the artist here, impartially portraying
different kinds of characters, as the special pleader proclaiming that
one set of motives are righteous, just, and praiseworthy, as well as
that the others are mischievous and reprehensible.
This seems carrying the principle of nationality to an extreme, if not
pernicious length. If there were never any breaking up of old forms of
society, any fresh blending of nationalities and races, we should soon
reduce Europe to another China. This unwavering faithfulness to the
traditions of the past may become a curse to the living. A rigidity as
unnatural as it is dangerous would be the result of too tenacious a
clinging to inherited memories. For if this doctrine were strictly
carried out, such a country as America, where there is a slow
amalgamation of many allied and even heterogeneous races into a new
nation, would practically become impossible. Indeed, George Eliot does
not absolutely hold these views. She considers them necessary at present
in order to act as a drag to the too rapid transformations of society.
In the most interesting paper of 'Theophrastus Such,' that called 'The
Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!' she remarks: "The tendency of things is towards
quicker or slower fusion of races. It is impossible to arrest this
tendency; all we can do is to moderate its course so as to hinder it
from degrading the moral status of societies by a too rapid effacement
of those national traditions and customs which are the language of the
national genius--the deep suckers of healthy sentiment. Such moderating
and guidance of inevitable movement is worthy of all effort."
Considering that George Eliot was convinced of this modern tendency
towards fusion, it is all the more singular that she should, in 'Daniel
Deronda,' have laid such stress on the reconstruction, after the lapse
of centuries, of a Jewish state; singular, when one considers that many
of the most eminent Jews, so far from aspiring towards such an event,
hardly seem to have contemplated it as a desirable or possible prospect.
The sympathies of Spinoza, the Mendelssohns, Rahel, Meyerbeer, Heine,
and many others, are not distinctively Jewish but humanitarian. And the
grandest, as well as truest thing that has been uttered about them is
that saying of Heine's: "The country of the Jews is the ideal, is God."
Indeed, to have a true conception of Jewish nature and character, of its
brilliant lights and deep shadows, of its pathos, depth, sublimity,
degradation, and wit; of its infinite resource and boundless capacity
for suffering--one must go to Heine and not to 'Daniel Deronda.' In
'Jehuda-ben-Halevy' Heine expresses the love and longing of a Jewish
heart for Jerusalem in accents of such piercing intensity that compared
with it, "Mordecai's" fervid desire fades into mere abstract rhetoric.
Nature and experience were the principal sources of George Eliot's
inspiration. And though she knew a great deal about the Jews, her
experience had not become sufficiently incorporated with her
consciousness. Otherwise, instead of portraying such tame models of
perfection as Deronda and Mirah, she would have so mixed her colours as
to give us that subtle involvement of motive and tendency--as of
cross-currents in the sea--which we find in the characters of nature's
making and in her own finest creations, such as Maggie, Silas Marner,
Dorothea Casaubon, and others.
In turning to the English portion of the story there is at once greater
play of spontaneity in the people depicted. Grandcourt, Gascoigne, Rex,
Mrs. Davilow, Sir Hugh Mallinger, and especially Gwendolen, show all the
old cunning in the psychological rendering of human nature. Curiously
enough, this novel consists of two perfectly distinct narratives; the
only point of junction being Daniel Deronda himself, who, as a Jew by
birth and an English gentleman by education, stands related to both sets
of circumstances. The influence he exerts on the spiritual development
of Gwendolen seems indeed the true _motif_ of the story. Otherwise there
is no intrinsic connection between the group of people clustering round
Mordecai, and that of which Gwendolen is the centre: unless it be that
the author wished to show the greater intensity of aim and higher moral
worth of the Jews as contrasted with these purposeless, worldly, unideal
Christians of the nineteenth century.
Compared with the immaculate Mirah, Gwendolen Harleth is a very naughty,
spoiled, imperfect specimen of maidenhood. But she has life in her; and
one speculates as to what she will say and do next, as if she were a
person among one's acquaintances. On that account most readers of
'Daniel Deronda' find their interest engrossed by the fate of
Gwendolen, and the conjugal relations between her and Grandcourt. This
is so much the case, that one suspects her to have been the first idea
of the story. She is at any rate its most attractive feature. In
Gwendolen, George Eliot once remarked, she had wished to draw a girl of
the period. Fascinating, accomplished, of siren-like beauty, she has
every outward grace combined with a singular inward vacuity. The deeper
aspects of life are undreamed of in her philosophy. Her religion
consists in a vague awe of the unknown and invisible, and her ambition
in the acquisition of rank, wealth, and personal distinction. She is
selfish, vain, frivolous, worldly, domineering, yet not without sudden
impulses of generosity, and jets of affection. Something there is in her
of Undine before she had a soul--something of a gay, vivacious,
unfeeling sprite, who recks nothing of human love or of human misery,
but looks down with utter indifference on the poor humdrum mortals
around her, whom she inspires at once with fear and fondness: something,
also, of the "princess in exile, who in time of famine was to have her
breakfast-roll made of the finest bolted flour from the seven thin ears
of wheat, and in a general decampment was to have her silver fork kept
out of the baggage."
How this bewitching creature, whose "iridescence of character" makes her
a psychological problem, is gradually brought to accept Henleigh
Grandcourt, in spite of the promise she has given to Lydia Glasher (his
discarded victim), and her own fleeting presentiments, is described with
an analytical subtlety unsurpassed in George Eliot's works. So, indeed,
is the whole episode of the married life of Grandcourt. This
territorial magnate, who possesses every worldly advantage that
Gwendolen desired, is worthy, as a study of character, to be placed
beside that of Casaubon himself. Gwendolen's girlish type of egoism,
which loves to be the centre of admiration, here meets with that far
other deadlier form of an "exorbitant egoism," conspicuous for its
intense obstinacy and tenacity of rule, "in proportion as the varied
susceptibilities of younger years are stripped away." This cold,
negative nature lies with a kind of withering blight on the susceptible
Gwendolen. Roused from the complacent dreams of girlhood by the
realities of her married life, shrinking in helpless repulsion from the
husband whom she meant to manage, and who holds her as in a vice, the
unhappy woman has nothing to cling to in this terrible inward collapse
of her happiness, but the man, who, from the first moment when his eye
arrests hers at the gaming table at Leubronn, becomes, as it were, a
conscience visibly incarnate to her. This incident, which is told in the
first chapter of the novel, recalls a sketch by Dante Rossetti, where
Mary Magdalene, in the flush of joyous life, is held by the Saviour's
gaze, and in a sudden revulsion from her old life, breaks away from
companions that would fain hold her back, with a passionate movement
towards the Man of Sorrow. This impressive conception may have
unconsciously suggested a somewhat similar situation to the novelist,
for that George Eliot was acquainted with this drawing is shown by the
following letter addressed in 1870 to Dante Rossetti:
"I have had time now to dwell on the photographs. I am especially
grateful to you for giving me the head marked June 1861: it is
exquisite. But I am glad to possess every one of them. The subject of
the Magdalene rises in interest for me, the more I look at it. I hope
you will keep in the picture an equally passionate type for her. Perhaps
you will indulge me with a little talk about the modifications you
intend to introduce."
The relation of Deronda to Gwendolen is of a Christlike nature. He is
her only moral hold in the fearful temptations that assail her now and
again under the intolerable irritations of her married life, temptations
which grow more urgent when Grandcourt leads his wife captive, after his
fashion, in a yacht on the Mediterranean. For "the intensest form of
hatred is that rooted in fear, which compels to silence, and drives
vehemence into a constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary annihilation
of the detested object, something like the hidden rites of vengeance,
with which the persecuted have made a dark vent for their rage, and
soothed their suffering into dumbness. Such hidden rites went on in the
secrecy of Gwendolen's mind, but not with soothing effect--rather with
the effect of a struggling terror. Side by side with dread of her
husband had grown the self-dread which urged her to flee from the
pursuing images wrought by her pent-up impulse."
The evil wish at last finds fulfilment, the murderous thought is
outwardly realised. And though death is not eventually the result of the
criminal desire, it yet seems to the unhappy wife as if it had a
determining power in bringing about the catastrophe. But it is precisely
this remorse which is the redeeming quality of her nature, and awakens a
new life within her. In this quickening of the moral consciousness
through guilt we are reminded, although in a different manner, of a
similar process, full of pregnant suggestions, described in Nathaniel
Hawthorne's 'Transformation.' It will be remembered that Donatello leads
a purely instinctive, that is to say animal, existence, till the
commission of a crime awakens the dormant conscience, and a soul is born
in the throes of anguish and remorse.
In 'Daniel Deronda' there is an entire absence of that rich, genial
humour which seemed spontaneously to bubble up and overflow her earlier
works. Whether George Eliot's conception of the Jews as a peculiarly
serious race had any share in bringing about that result, it is
difficult to say. At any rate, in one of her essays she remarks that,
"The history and literature of the ancient Hebrews gives the idea of a
people who went about their business and pleasure as gravely as a
society of beavers." Certainly Mordecai, Deronda, and Mirah, are
preternaturally solemn; even the Cohen family are not presented with any
of those comic touches one would have looked for in this great humorist;
only in the boy Jacob are there gleams of drollery, such as in this
description of him by Hans Meyrick: "He treats me with the easiest
familiarity, and seems in general to look at me as a second-hand
Christian commodity, likely to come down in price; remarking on my
disadvantages with a frankness which seems to imply some thoughts of
future purchase. It is pretty, though, to see the change in him if Mirah
happens to come in. He turns child suddenly--his age usually strikes one
as being like the Israelitish garments in the desert, perhaps near
forty, yet with an air of recent production."
A certain subdued vein of humour is not entirely absent from the
portraiture of the Meyrick family, a delightful group, who "had their
little oddities, streaks of eccentricity from the mother's blood as well
as the father's, their minds being like mediaeval houses with unexpected
recesses and openings from this into that, flights of steps, and sudden
outlooks." But on the whole, instead of the old humour, we find in
'Daniel Deronda' a polished irony and epigrammatic sarcasm, which were
afterwards still more fully developed in the 'Impressions of
Theophrastus Such.'
Soon after the publication of this novel, we find the following allusion
to it in one of George Eliot's letters to Mrs. Bray: "I don't know what
you refer to in the _Jewish World_. Perhaps the report of Dr. Hermann
Adler's lecture on 'Deronda' to the Jewish working-men, given in the
_Times_. Probably the Dr. Adler whom you saw is Dr. Hermann's father,
still living as Chief Rabbi. I have had some delightful communications
from Jews and Jewesses, both at home and abroad. Part of the Club scene
in 'D. D.' is flying about in the Hebrew tongue through the various
Hebrew newspapers, which have been copying the 'Maga.' in which the
translation was first sent to me three months ago. The Jews naturally
are not indifferent to themselves."
This Club scene gave rise at the time to quite a controversy. It could
not fail to be identified with that other club of philosophers out at
elbows so vividly described by G. H. Lewes in the 'Fortnightly Review'
of 1866. Nor was it possible not to detect an affinity between the Jew
Cohen, the poor consumptive journeyman watchmaker, with his weak voice
and his great calm intellect, and Ezra Mordecai Cohen, in precisely
similar conditions; the difference being that the one is penetrated by
the philosophical idea of Spinozism, and the other by the political
idea of reconstituting a Jewish State in Palestine. This difference of
mental bias, no doubt, forms a contrast between the two characters,
without, however, invalidating the surmise that the fictitious
enthusiast may have been originally suggested by the noble figure of the
living Jew. Be that as it may, Lewes often took the opportunity in
conversation of "pointing out that no such resemblance existed, Cohen
being a keen dialectician and a highly impressive man, but without any
specifically Jewish enthusiasm."
When she undertook to write about the Jews, George Eliot was deeply
versed in Hebrew literature, ancient and modern. She had taught herself
Hebrew when translating the _Leben Jesu_, and this knowledge now stood
her in good stead. She was also familiar with the splendid utterances of
Jehuda-ben-Halevy; with the visionary speculations of the Cabbalists,
and with the brilliant Jewish writers of the Hispano-Arabic epoch. She
had read portions of the Talmud, and remarked one day in conversation
that Spinoza had really got something from the Cabbala. On her friend
humbly suggesting that by ordinary accounts it appeared to be awful
nonsense, she said "that it nevertheless contained fine ideas, like
Plato and the Old Testament, which, however, people took in the lump,
being accustomed to them."