Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (986 page)

Through those long ages of darkness, devil-worship, and polytheism (in its grossest forms all around), the Jew stood up in unfaltering protest against all.  Persecutions, proscriptions, tortures in every form, were of no avail.  On the gibbet, on the rack, amid the flames, his last words embodied the central confession of Judaism, “O Israel, the Lord
thy
God is one Lord.”  Christianity, the appointed custodier of the still more central truth, “God is love,” had to all appearance failed of its mission; had not only merged its higher message in a theistic presentation, dark and terroristic as that of Judaism at its dawn, but had absorbed into 6its scheme, under other names, the gods many who swarm all around it; till nowhere and never, save by some soul upborne by its own fervour above these dense fogs and mists, could individual man meet his God face to face, and realise that higher life of the soul which is His free gift to all who seek it.  Between this heathenised Christianity and Judaism, the contrast was the sharpest, the contest the most embittered and unvarying.  Elsewhere we hear of times of toleration and indulgence even for the hunted Monotheist, — in medieval Christendom, never.  The Inquisition plied its rack for the Jews with a more fiendish zeal than even for the hated Morisco.  The mob held him responsible for plague and famine; and kings and nobles hounded the mob on to indiscriminate massacre.  The Jew lived on through it all, — lived, multiplied, and prospered, and became more and more emphatically the Jew.  Is it too much to say that in the West in particular, where this contrast and contest were keenest, Judaism was, during these long ages of terror and darkness, the great conservator of the vital truth of the Divine unity, under whatever forms science or philosophy may now attempt to define this; and in being so, became the conservator of that thought, without the vivifying power of which, howsoever imperfectly apprehended, all human advance is impossible?  Is it exaggerating the importance of the Jew and his intense nationality, based on such a truth, to say that, but for his presence, “scattered and 7peeled,” among all nations, the Europe we now know could not have been?  And this indestructible nationality, for whose existence miracle has been called into account — has it no significance in the future equal to what it has had in the past?  There seems an impression that the Jew is being absorbed by other races.  We hear much of relaxing Judaisms; of rituals and beliefs assimilating to those around them; of peculiarities being laid aside, that have withstood the wear and tear of centuries.  The inference is sought to be drawn that the Jew is beginning to feel his isolation, and to sink his own national life amid that among which he dwells.  We accept all the facts; but can only see in them that, under the influence of the profound thought and research of its great leaders, Judaism is shaking off the dust of ages, and is more vividly awaking to its mission upon earth.  We believe it is coming forth from all this superficial change, more intensely and powerfully Judaical, more penetrated and vivified by that thought which for untold centuries has been the life of its life.  What is to be its specific future as a leader in the advancement and redemption of humanity, none can foresee.  But it seems the reverse of strange that a genius like George Eliot’s should have been powerfully attracted by this problem; and that, in one of her noblest works, she should have very prominently addressed herself to at least a partial solution of it.  That the solution she suggests is a noble one, few who carefully consider 8the subject will, we think, deny.  The establishment of a Jewish polity, in the true sense of the word a theocracy, where the Infinite Holiness is supreme, and in its supremacy is included a reign of justice, purity, and love; — the establishment of such a polity locally between the materialistic proclivities of the West and the psychological subtleties of the East, mediative between them, communicating from each to each of those essentials to human life in which the other is deficient, is a conception worthy of her genius.

Another minor and very trivial objection to the presence of this Jewish element need be no more than adverted to.  It is the presence of such different types as the mean-souled scoundrel Lapidoth; the shrewd self-approving trader Cohen, with the inimitable picture of a home-life so pleasant and kindly; the vague intense enthusiasm, the ardent aspirations and fervent hopes of Mordecai; the absorbing Judaism of the Physician; the fierce revulsion of his daughter against her race and name; the meek, delicate, ethereal purity of Mirah; the innate Jewish yearnings and aspirations of Deronda, expanded by all the breadth that could be given by the highest Anglo-Saxon culture and training.  To those who take exception to this, it is answer more than sufficient that, as an artist, it was necessary to present every typical phase of Jewish character and life; and we confess there are other passages in the work we could better spare than 9these delicious pictures of a London-Jewish pawnbroker at home.

Of all the characters portrayed in fiction, there is perhaps not one so difficult to analyse and define as that which stands out so prominently in this wonderful work, Gwendolen Harleth.  At once attractive and repellent — fascinating in no ordinary degree, and yet, in the estimation of all around her, hard, cold, and worldly-minded — bewitching, alike from her beauty, grace, and accomplishments, yet a superficial and seemingly heartless coquette, — she presents a combination of at once some of the finest and some of the meanest qualities of woman.  Her hardness towards her fond, doting mother, and her contempt for her sisters, are conspicuous almost from her first appearance.  Her arrogant defiance of Deronda in the gambling-house, and the fierce revulsion of pride with which she received the return of her necklace, are entirely in keeping with these characteristics.  And the news of the reduction of her family to utter poverty awakens no emotion save on her own behalf alone.  Yet, ever and anon, faint gleams of tenderness towards her gentle mother break forth, though soon obscured by the bitter insistance with which her own claims to station, wealth, and luxury assert themselves.  Her first acceptance of Grandcourt represents this phase of her twofold nature; her rejection of him and flight from him, after her interview with Mrs Glasher, are equally characteristic of the second.  That rejection 0is actuated much more by resentment against Mrs Glasher, that she should have dared to anticipate her in anything resembling affection he had to give, and against him, that he should have presumed to offer to her a heart already sealed to anything resembling love, than by the faintest approach to it in her own.  The leap, as it were, by which she ultimately accepts him, is merely a quick, half-conscious instinct to secure her own deliverance from poverty, and the attainment of those higher external enjoyments of life for which she conceived herself formed; and if, in addition, a thought of relieving the wants of her mother and sisters obtrudes, it holds only a very secondary place in her mind.  Deeming herself born for dominion over every male heart, in her utter childish ignorance of human character, she deems that Grandcourt also shall be her slave.

But through all her relations with that magnificent incarnation of self-isolation and self-love, she is compelled to cower before him.  Again and again she attempts to turn, only to be crushed under his heel as ruthlessly as a worm.  During the yachting voyage it is the same; intense inward revulsion on the one side — cold, inexorable despotism on the other.

The drowning scene first begins to stir the better nature within her.  The intensity of terror with which she regards the involuntary murderous thought, and which prompted her leap into the water, the fervour of remorse which followed, all begin to indicate a 1nature which may yet be attuned to the highest qualities.  On the other hand, the sweet clinging trust with which she hangs on Deronda, looks up to him, feels that for her every possibility of good lies in association with him, are those of a guileless, artless child.  She has been called a hard-hearted, callous woman of the world: her worldliness is on the surface alone.  Her first cry to Deronda is the piteous wail of a forsaken child; the letter with which their relations close is the fond yearning of a child towards one whom she looks up to as protector and saviour.

Grandcourt is portrayed before us in more massive and simple proportions as a type of concentrated selfishness.  We dare not despise him, we cannot loathe him — we stand bowed and awe-stricken before him.  He never for a moment falls from that calm dignity of pride and self-isolation — never for a moment softens into respect for anything without himself.  Without a moment’s exception he is ever consistent, imperturbable in his self-containedness, ruthlessly crushing all things from dog to wife, under his calm, cold, slighting contempt.  He stands up before us, not so much indomitable as simply unassailable.  We cannot conceive the boldest approaching or encroaching on him — all equally shiver and quail before that embodiment of the devil as represented by human self-love.

Fain would we linger over the Jewish girl, Mirah.  She has been spoken of as characterless; to us it seems as if few characters of more exquisite loveliness 2have ever been portrayed.  From her first appearance robed in her meek despair, through all her subsequent relations with Deronda, her brother, and Gwendolen, there is the same delicate purity, the same tender meekness, the same full acceptance of the life of a Jewess as — in harmony with the life of her race — one of “sufferance.”  Even as her spirits gladden in that sunny Meyrick home, with its delicious interiors, and brighten under the noble-hearted musician Klesmer’s encouragement, the brightness refers to something entirely without herself.  In one sense far more acquainted with the evil that is in the world than Gwendolen with all her alleged worldliness, it is her shrinking from the least approach to this that prompts her strange, apparently hopeless flight in search of the mother she had loved so dearly.  Her sad, humble complaints that she has not been a good Jewess, because she has been inevitably cut off from the use of Jewish books, and restrained by her scoundrel father from attendance at Jewish worship, find their answer in her deep unfailing sense of her share in the national doom of suffering.  We feel with Mrs Meyrick “that she is a pearl, and the mud has only washed her.”  In her startling interview with Gwendolen, the sudden indignant protest which the inquiry of the latter calls out is a protest against even a hint of evil being directed towards that which has been best and highest to her.  Her love for Deronda steals into the maiden purity of her soul with an unconscious 3delicacy which cannot be surpassed; and as she parts from us by his side, we feel that she is no Judith or Esther, but the meek Mary of the annunciation, going forth on her unknown mission of love with the words, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”

Beside the exquisitely meek child-figure, with the small delicate head faintly drooping under the sorrow which is the heritage of her race, stands up Deronda in his calm dignity.  As he lies on the grass, and the first faint glimmering of the possible origin of his life breaks upon him, even the first inevitable risings of resentment against Sir Hugo are softened and toned down by the old yearning affection; and the longings for the unknown mother, intense as they are, yet shrink from full discovery of what she may have been or may still be.  He and he alone, in unconscious dignity, stands up uncowering before Grandcourt.  His whole relations to Mordecai are characterised by a deep suppressed enthusiasm, that fully responds to the enthusiast’s soul.  Towards Gwendolen every word he speaks, every act he does, is marked by the fervour of his whole nature; but it is beside the fair head drooping under its burden of hereditary sorrow that Deronda passes from our sight, the fitting type of him who shall yet, sooner or later, re-establish that great Jewish theocracy so long dreamt of, and reaffirm that Judaism yet holds a great place in human life and civilisation.

We have throughout had no intention of dealing 4with George Eliot merely as the artist; but if we have succeeded in showing this unity of moral purpose and aim as pervading all her works, as giving rise to their variety by reason of the varieties and modifications it necessitates in order to its full illustration, and as ministered to, directly or indirectly, by all the accessory characters and incidents of these creations, — the question naturally arises, whether this does not constitute her an artist of the highest possible order.

But the true worth of George Eliot’s works rests, we think, on higher grounds than any mere perfection of artistic finish; on this ground, specially, that among all our fictionists she stands out as the deepest, broadest, and most catholic illustrator of the true ethics of Christianity; the most earnest and persistent expositor of the true doctrine of the Cross, that we are born and should live to something higher than the love of happiness; the most subtle and profound commentator on the solemn words, “He that loveth his soul shall lose it: he that hateth his soul shall keep it unto life eternal.”

Highgate Cemetery, North London — Eliot’s final resting place