might be perpetual when you, little short-nosed darling, can’t last at
the most more than nine or ten years!
_Theodora._ A book like _Daniel Deronda_ becomes part of one’s life; one
lives in it, or alongside of it. I don’t hesitate to say that I have
been living in this one for the last eight months. It is such a complete
world George Eliot builds up; it is so vast, so much-embracing! It has
such a firm earth and such an ethereal sky. You can turn into it and
lose yourself in it.
_Pulcheria._ Oh, easily, and die of cold and starvation!
_Theodora._ I have been very near to poor Gwendolen and very near to
that sweet Mirah. And the dear little Meyricks also; I know them
intimately well.
_Pulcheria._ The Meyricks, I grant you, are the best thing in the book.
_Theodora._ They are a delicious family; I wish they lived in Boston. I
consider Herr Klesmer almost Shakespearean, and his wife is almost as
good. I have been near to poor grand Mordecai----
_Pulcheria._ Oh, reflect, my dear; not too near!
_Theodora._ And as for Deronda himself I freely confess that I am
consumed with a hopeless passion for him. He is the most irresistible
man in the literature of fiction.
_Pulcheria._ He is not a man at all.
_Theodora._ I remember nothing more beautiful than the description of
his childhood, and that picture of his lying on the grass in the abbey
cloister, a beautiful seraph-faced boy, with a lovely voice, reading
history and asking his Scotch tutor why the Popes had so many nephews.
He must have been delightfully handsome.
_Pulcheria._ Never, my dear, with that nose! I am sure he had a nose,
and I hold that the author has shown great pusillanimity in her
treatment of it. She has quite shirked it. The picture you speak of is
very pretty, but a picture is not a person. And why is he always
grasping his coat-collar, as if he wished to hang himself up? The author
had an uncomfortable feeling that she must make him do something real,
something visible and sensible, and she hit upon that clumsy figure. I
don’t see what you mean by saying you have been _near_ those people;
that is just what one is not. They produce no illusion. They are
described and analysed to death, but we don’t see them nor hear them nor
touch them. Deronda clutches his coat-collar, Mirah crosses her feet,
Mordecai talks like the Bible; but that doesn’t make real figures of
them. They have no existence outside of the author’s study.
_Theodora._ If you mean that they are nobly imaginative I quite agree
with you; and if they say nothing to your own imagination the fault is
yours, not theirs.
_Pulcheria._ Pray don’t say they are Shakespearean again. Shakespeare
went to work another way.
_Constantius._ I think you are both in a measure right; there is a
distinction to be drawn. There are in _Daniel Deronda_ the figures
based upon observation and the figures based upon invention. This
distinction, I know, is rather a rough one. There are no figures in any
novel that are pure observation, and none that are pure invention. But
either element may preponderate, and in those cases in which invention
has preponderated George Eliot seems to me to have achieved at the best
but so many brilliant failures.
_Theodora._ And are _you_ turning severe? I thought you admired her so
much.
_Constantius._ I defy any one to admire her more, but one must
discriminate. Speaking brutally, I consider _Daniel Deronda_ the weakest
of her books. It strikes me as very sensibly inferior to _Middlemarch_.
I have an immense opinion of _Middlemarch_.
_Pulcheria._ Not having been obliged by circumstances to read
_Middlemarch_ to other people, I didn’t read it at all. I couldn’t read
it to myself. I tried, but I broke down. I appreciated Rosamond, but I
couldn’t believe in Dorothea.
_Theodora_ (very gravely). So much the worse for you, Pulcheria. I have
enjoyed _Daniel Deronda because_ I had enjoyed _Middlemarch_. Why should
you throw _Middlemarch_ up against her? It seems to me that if a book is
fine it is fine. I have enjoyed _Deronda_ deeply, from beginning to end.
_Constantius._ I assure you, so have I. I can read nothing of George
Eliot’s without enjoyment. I even enjoy her poetry, though I don’t
approve of it. In whatever she writes I enjoy her intelligence; it has
space and air, like a fine landscape. The intellectual brilliancy of
_Daniel Deronda_ strikes me as very great, in excess of anything the
author has done. In the first couple of numbers of the book this
ravished me. I delighted in its deep, rich English tone, in which so
many notes seemed melted together.
_Pulcheria._ The tone is not English, it is German.
_Constantius._ I understand that--if Theodora will allow me to say so.
Little by little I began to feel that I cared less for certain notes
than for others. I say it under my breath--I began to feel an occasional
temptation to skip. Roughly speaking, all the Jewish burden of the story
tended to weary me; it is this part that produces the poor illusion
which I agree with Pulcheria in finding. Gwendolen and Grandcourt are
admirable--Gwendolen is a masterpiece. She is known, felt and presented,
psychologically, altogether in the grand manner. Beside her and beside
her husband--a consummate picture of English brutality refined and
distilled (for Grandcourt is before all things brutal), Deronda,
Mordecai and Mirah are hardly more than shadows. They and their fortunes
are all improvisation. I don’t say anything against improvisation. When
it succeeds it has a surpassing charm. But it must succeed. With George
Eliot it seems to me to succeed, but a little less than one would expect
of her talent. The story of Deronda’s life, his mother’s story, Mirah’s
story, are quite the sort of thing one finds in George Sand. But they
are really not so good as they would be in George Sand. George Sand
would have carried it off with a lighter hand.
_Theodora._ Oh, Constantius, how can you compare George Eliot’s novels
to that woman’s? It is sunlight and moonshine.
_Pulcheria._ I really think the two writers are very much alike. They
are both very voluble, both addicted to moralising and philosophising _à
tout bout de champ_, both inartistic.
_Constantius._ I see what you mean. But George Eliot is solid, and
George Sand is liquid. When occasionally George Eliot liquefies--as in
the history of Deronda’s birth, and in that of Mirah--it is not to so
crystalline a clearness as the author of _Consuelo_ and _André_. Take
Mirah’s long narrative of her adventures, when she unfolds them to Mrs.
Meyrick. It is arranged, it is artificial, _ancien jeu_, quite in the
George Sand manner. But George Sand would have done it better. The false
tone would have remained, but it would have been more persuasive. It
would have been a fib, but the fib would have been neater.
_Theodora._ I don’t think fibbing neatly a merit, and I don’t see what
is to be gained by such comparisons. George Eliot is pure and George
Sand is impure; how can you compare them? As for the Jewish element in
Deronda, I think it a very fine idea; it’s a noble subject. Wilkie
Collins and Miss Braddon would not have thought of it, but that does
not condemn it. It shows a large conception of what one may do in a
novel. I heard you say, the other day, that most novels were so
trivial--that they had no general ideas. Here is a general idea, the
idea interpreted by Deronda. I have never disliked the Jews as some
people do; I am not like Pulcheria, who sees a Jew in every bush. I wish
there were one; I would cultivate shrubbery. I have known too many
clever and charming Jews; I have known none that were not clever.
_Pulcheria._ Clever, but not charming.
_Constantius._ I quite agree with you as to Deronda’s going in for the
Jews and turning out a Jew himself being a fine subject, and this quite
apart from the fact of whether such a thing as a Jewish revival be at
all a possibility. If it be a possibility, so much the better--so much
the better for the subject, I mean.
_Pulcheria._ _A la bonne heure!_
_Constantius._ I rather suspect it is not a possibility; that the Jews
in general take themselves much less seriously than that. They have
other fish to fry. George Eliot takes them as a person outside of
Judaism--æsthetically. I don’t believe that is the way they take
themselves.
_Pulcheria._ They have the less excuse then for keeping themselves so
dirty.
_Theodora._ George Eliot must have known some delightful Jews.
_Constantius._ Very likely; but I shouldn’t wonder if the most
delightful of them had smiled a trifle, here and there, over her book.
But that makes nothing, as Herr Klesmer would say. The subject is a
noble one. The idea of depicting a nature able to feel and worthy to
feel the sort of inspiration that takes possession of Deronda, of
depicting it sympathetically, minutely and intimately--such an idea has
great elevation. There is something very fascinating in the mission that
Deronda takes upon himself. I don’t quite know what it means, I don’t
understand more than half of Mordecai’s rhapsodies, and I don’t perceive
exactly what practical steps could be taken. Deronda could go about and
talk with clever Jews--not an unpleasant life.
_Pulcheria._ All that seems to me so unreal that when at the end the
author finds herself confronted with the necessity of making him start
for the East by the train, and announces that Sir Hugo and Lady
Mallinger have given his wife “a complete Eastern outfit,” I descend to
the ground with a ludicrous jump.
_Constantius._ Unreal, if you please; that is no objection to it; it
greatly tickles my imagination. I like extremely the idea of Mordecai
believing, without ground of belief, that if he only wait, a young man
on whom nature and society have centred all their gifts will come to him
and receive from his hands the precious vessel of his hopes. It is
romantic, but it is not vulgar romance; it is finely romantic. And there
is something very fine in the author’s own feeling about Deronda. He is
a very liberal creation. He is, I think, a failure--a brilliant failure;
if he had been a success I should call him a splendid creation. The
author meant to do things very handsomely for him; she meant apparently
to make a faultless human being.
_Pulcheria._ She made a dreadful prig.
_Constantius._ He _is_ rather priggish, and one wonders that so clever a
woman as George Eliot shouldn’t see it.
_Pulcheria._ He has no blood in his body. His attitude at moments is
like that of a high-priest in a _tableau vivant_.
_Theodora._ Pulcheria likes the little gentlemen in the French novels
who take good care of their attitudes, which are always the same
attitude, the attitude of “conquest”--of a conquest that tickles their
vanity. Deronda has a contour that cuts straight through the middle of
all that. He is made of a stuff that isn’t dreamt of in their
philosophy.
_Pulcheria._ Pulcheria likes very much a novel which she read three or
four years ago, but which she has not forgotten. It was by Ivan
Turgénieff, and it was called _On the Eve_. Theodora has read it, I
know, because she admires Turgénieff, and Constantius has read it, I
suppose, because he has read everything.
_Constantius._ If I had no reason but that for my reading, it would be
small. But Turgénieff is my man.
_Pulcheria._ You were just now praising George Eliot’s general ideas.
The tale of which I speak contains in the portrait of the hero very much
such a general idea as you find in the portrait of Deronda. Don’t you
remember the young Bulgarian student, Inssaroff, who gives himself the
mission of rescuing his country from its subjection to the Turks? Poor
man, if he had foreseen the horrible summer of 1876! His character is
the picture of a race-passion, of patriotic hopes and dreams. But what a
difference in the vividness of the two figures. Inssaroff is a man; he
stands up on his feet; we see him, hear him, touch him. And it has taken
the author but a couple of hundred pages--not eight volumes--to do it.
_Theodora._ I don’t remember Inssaroff at all, but I perfectly remember
the heroine, Helena. She is certainly most remarkable, but, remarkable
as she is, I should never dream of calling her as wonderful as
Gwendolen.
_Constantius._ Turgénieff is a magician, which I don’t think I should
call George Eliot. One is a poet, the other is a philosopher. One cares
for the aspect of things and the other cares for the reason of things.
George Eliot, in embarking with Deronda, took aboard, as it were, a far
heavier cargo than Turgénieff with his Inssaroff. She proposed,
consciously, to strike more notes.
_Pulcheria._ Oh, consciously, yes!
_Constantius._ George Eliot wished to show the possible
picturesqueness--the romance, as it were--of a high moral tone. Deronda
is a moralist, a moralist with a rich complexion.
_Theodora._ It is a most beautiful nature. I don’t know anywhere a more
complete, a more deeply analysed portrait of a great nature. We praise
novelists for wandering and creeping so into the small corners of the
mind. That is what we praise Balzac for when he gets down upon all fours
to crawl through _Le Père Goriot_ or _Les Parents Pauvres_. But I must
say I think it a finer thing to unlock with as firm a hand as George
Eliot some of the greater chambers of human character. Deronda is in a
manner an ideal character, if you will, but he seems to me triumphantly
married to reality. There are some admirable things said about him;
nothing can be finer than those pages of description of his moral
temperament in the fourth book--his elevated way of looking at things,
his impartiality, his universal sympathy, and at the same time his fear
of their turning into mere irresponsible indifference. I remember some
of it verbally: “He was ceasing to care for knowledge--he had no
ambition for practice--unless they could be gathered up into one current
with his emotions.”
_Pulcheria._ Oh, there is plenty about his emotions. Everything about
him is “emotive.” That bad word occurs on every fifth page.
_Theodora._ I don’t see that it is a bad word.
_Pulcheria._ It may be good German, but it is poor English.
_Theodora._ It is not German at all; it is Latin. So, my dear!
_Pulcheria._ As I say, then, it is not English.
_Theodora._ This is the first time I ever heard that George Eliot’s
style was bad!
_Constantius._ It is admirable; it has the most delightful and the most
intellectually comfortable suggestions. But it is occasionally a little
too long-sleeved, as I may say. It is sometimes too loose a fit for the
thought, a little baggy.
_Theodora._ And the advice he gives Gwendolen, the things he says to
her, they are the very essence of wisdom, of warm human wisdom, knowing
life and feeling it. “Keep your fear as a safeguard, it may make
consequences passionately present to you.” What can be better than that?
_Pulcheria._ Nothing, perhaps. But what can be drearier than a novel in
which the function of the hero--young, handsome and brilliant--is to
give didactic advice, in a proverbial form, to the young, beautiful and
brilliant heroine?
_Constantius._ That is not putting it quite fairly. The function of
Deronda is to make Gwendolen fall in love with him, to say nothing of
falling in love himself with Mirah.
_Pulcheria._ Yes, the less said about that the better. All we know about
Mirah is that she has delicate rings of hair, sits with her feet
crossed, and talks like an article in a new magazine.
_Constantius._ Deronda’s function of adviser to Gwendolen does not
strike me as so ridiculous. He is not nearly so ridiculous as if he were
lovesick. It is a very interesting situation--that of a man with whom a
beautiful woman in trouble falls in love and yet whose affections are so
preoccupied that the most he can do for her in return is to enter kindly
and sympathetically into her position, pity her and talk to her. George
Eliot always gives us something that is strikingly and ironically
characteristic of human life; and what savours more of the essential
crookedness of our fate than the sad cross-purposes of these two young
people? Poor Gwendolen’s falling in love with Deronda is part of her own
luckless history, not of his.
_Theodora._ I do think he takes it to himself rather too little. No man
had ever so little vanity.
_Pulcheria._ It is very inconsistent, therefore, as well as being
extremely impertinent and ill-mannered, his buying back and sending to
her her necklace at Leubronn.
_Constantius._ Oh, you must concede that; without it there would have
been no story. A man writing of him, however, would certainly have made
him more peccable. As George Eliot lets herself go, in that quarter, she
becomes delightfully, almost touchingly, feminine. It is like her making
Romola go to housekeeping with Tessa, after Tito Melema’s death; like
her making Dorothea marry Will Ladislaw. If Dorothea had married any one
after her misadventure with Casaubon, she would have married a trooper.
_Theodora._ Perhaps some day Gwendolen will marry Rex.
_Pulcheria._ Pray, who is Rex?
_Theodora._ Why, Pulcheria, how can you forget?
_Pulcheria._ Nay, how can I remember? But I recall such a name in the
dim antiquity of the first or second book. Yes, and then he is pushed to
the front again at the last, just in time not to miss the falling of the
curtain. Gwendolen will certainly not have the audacity to marry any one
we know so little about.
_Constantius._ I have been wanting to say that there seems to me to be
two very distinct elements in George Eliot--a spontaneous one and an
artificial one. There is what she is by inspiration and what she is
because it is expected of her. These two heads have been very
perceptible in her recent writings; they are much less noticeable in her
early ones.
_Theodora._ You mean that she is too scientific? So long as she remains
the great literary genius that she is, how can she be too scientific?
She is simply permeated with the highest culture of the age.
_Pulcheria._ She talks too much about the “dynamic quality” of people’s
eyes. When she uses such a phrase as that in the first sentence in her
book she is not a great literary genius, because she shows a want of
tact. There can’t be a worse limitation.
_Constantius._ The “dynamic quality” of Gwendolen’s glance has made the
tour of the world.
_Theodora._ It shows a very low level of culture on the world’s part to
be agitated by a term perfectly familiar to all decently-educated
people.
_Pulcheria._ I don’t pretend to be decently educated; pray tell me what
it means.
_Constantius_ (promptly). I think Pulcheria has hit it in speaking of a
want of tact. In the manner of the book, throughout, there is something
that one may call a want of tact. The epigraphs in verse are a want of
tact; they are sometimes, I think, a trifle more pretentious than really
pregnant; the importunity of the moral reflections is a want of tact;
the very diffuseness is a want of tact. But it comes back to what I said
just now about one’s sense of the author writing under a sort of
external pressure. I began to notice it in _Felix Holt_; I don’t think I
had before. She strikes me as a person who certainly has naturally a
taste for general considerations, but who has fallen upon an age and a
circle which have compelled her to give them an exaggerated attention.
She does not strike me as naturally a critic, less still as naturally a
sceptic; her spontaneous part is to observe life and to feel it, to feel
it with admirable depth. Contemplation, sympathy and faith--something
like that, I should say, would have been her natural scale. If she had
fallen upon an age of enthusiastic assent to old articles of faith, it
seems to me possible that she would have had a more perfect, a more
consistent and graceful development, than she has actually had. If she
had cast herself into such a current--her genius being equal--it might
have carried her to splendid distances. But she has chosen to go into
criticism, and to the critics she addresses her work; I mean the critics
of the universe. Instead of feeling life itself, it is “views” upon life
that she tries to feel.
_Pulcheria._ She is the victim of a first-class education. I am so glad!
_Constantius._ Thanks to her admirable intellect she philosophises very
sufficiently; but meanwhile she has given a chill to her genius. She has
come near spoiling an artist.
_Pulcheria._ She has quite spoiled one. Or rather I shouldn’t say that,
because there was no artist to spoil. I maintain that she is not an
artist. An artist could never have put a story together so monstrously
ill. She has no sense of form.
_Theodora._ Pray, what could be more artistic than the way that
Deronda’s paternity is concealed till almost the end, and the way we are
made to suppose Sir Hugo is his father?
_Pulcheria._ And Mirah his sister. How does that fit together? I was as
little made to suppose he was not a Jew as I cared when I found out he
was. And his mother popping up through a trap-door and popping down
again, at the last, in that scrambling fashion! His mother is very bad.
_Constantius._ I think Deronda’s mother is one of the unvivified
characters; she belongs to the cold half of the book. All the Jewish
part is at bottom cold; that is my only objection. I have enjoyed it
because my fancy often warms cold things; but beside Gwendolen’s history
it is like the empty half of the lunar disk beside the full one. It is
admirably studied, it is imagined, it is understood, but it is not
embodied. One feels this strongly in just those scenes between Deronda
and his mother; one feels that one has been appealed to on rather an
artificial ground of interest. To make Deronda’s reversion to his native
faith more dramatic and profound, the author has given him a mother who
on very arbitrary grounds, apparently, has separated herself from this
same faith and who has been kept waiting in the wing, as it were, for
many acts, to come on and make her speech and say so. This moral
situation of hers we are invited retrospectively to appreciate. But we
hardly care to do so.
_Pulcheria._ I don’t _see_ the princess, in spite of her flame-coloured
robe. Why should an actress and prima-donna care so much about religious
matters?
_Theodora._ It was not only that; it was the Jewish race she hated,
Jewish manners and looks. You, my dear, ought to understand that.
_Pulcheria._ I do, but I am not a Jewish actress of genius; I am not
what Rachel was. If I were I should have other things to think about.
_Constantius._ Think now a little about poor Gwendolen.
_Pulcheria._ I don’t care to think about her. She was a second-rate
English girl who got into a flutter about a lord.
_Theodora._ I don’t see that she is worse than if she were a first-rate
American girl who should get into exactly the same flutter.
_Pulcheria._ It wouldn’t be the same flutter at all; it wouldn’t be any
flutter. She wouldn’t be afraid of the lord, though she might be amused
at him.
_Theodora._ I am sure I don’t perceive whom Gwendolen was afraid of. She
was afraid of her misdeed--her broken promise--after she had committed
it, and through that fear she was afraid of her husband. Well she might
be! I can imagine nothing more vivid than the sense we get of his
absolutely clammy selfishness.
_Pulcheria._ She was not afraid of Deronda when, immediately after her
marriage and without any but the most casual acquaintance with him, she
begins to hover about him at the Mallingers’ and to drop little
confidences about her conjugal woes. That seems to me very indelicate;
ask any woman.
_Constantius._ The very purpose of the author is to give us an idea of
the sort of confidence that _Deronda_ inspired--its irresistible
potency.
_Pulcheria._ A lay father-confessor--horrid!
_Constantius._ And to give us an idea also of the acuteness of
Gwendolen’s depression, of her haunting sense of impending trouble.
_Theodora._ It must be remembered that Gwendolen was in love with
Deronda from the first, long before she knew it. She didn’t know it,
poor girl, but that was it.
_Pulcheria._ That makes the matter worse. It is very disagreeable to see
her hovering and rustling about a man who is indifferent to her.
_Theodora._ He was not indifferent to her, since he sent her back her
necklace.