THE STRONG SIDE OF "DANIEL DERONDA."
THERE can be no doubt that in some, perhaps in many, respects, "Daniel Deronda" is a much less powerful book than " Middlemarch," but in one respect certainly it is more so. To our minds, the deficiency in power is chiefly to be seen in the inci- dental remarks, the observations on life and character, which are always sprinkled thick through George Eliot's stories, and which were wont to have so much wisdom, or at least knowledge of life, in them, that the more you read them, the more they struck you. In the new story, which is now but one number short of com- pletion, there has seemed to us a vast deal more of effort and a vast deal less of fruitful wisdom in the incidental remarks, which have been at once less easy to apprehend, and when appre- hended, less worth the labour of apprehending. Nor do we think that it is now hasty to say that, fine as in many respects, the conception of Mordecai, the prophetic Jew, is, it is a conception which could not well have been, and certainly has not been, so worked out within the limits of this story as to justify the introduction of such a character into a work of fiction. The most inadequate part of the book has been the part in which Mordecai has canvassed his politico-religious enterprise, and tried to demonstrate that the Jewish nation might still have a national work to do in the world in interpreting to the East the wisdom of the West, as modified by the higher conceptions of the Jewish faith. But the greatest fault of the book has been very elose, at least, to its greatest secret of power,—a kind of power in which no previous book of George Eliot's has been nearly so rich as this. If the conception of Mordecai's religious and political mission has transgressed the bounds of what even George Eliot can accomplish in fiction, there is yet a religious element in the story far surpassing in power and in the skill with which it is developed, anything corresponding to it in any other of her books. We refer to the very great power with which the over-ruling in- fluence of a spirit which moulds human wilfulness to its higher purposes is brought out, in the story both of Gwendolen and of Daniel Deronda and his ancestors, not only without any inter- ference with the naturalness of the story, but even with very great advantage to the connection of its incidents and the unity of its effect. Indeed, whatever may be the faults of this last work of George Eliot's, we do not think that any of her books, not even "Adam Bede," has been so powerfully constructed in point of plot. And it is precisely because the shadow of a higher con- ception has been thrown over the plot, because the various lives, and the various parts of lives in this book, have been conceived and determined in relation to the demands of a purpose which, so far from being defeated by the resistance of human wilfulness, finds in these caprices the opportunity of effecting something even larger and higher than, apart from that resistance, might have been possible, that we read the whole with so intense an interest, and find both a naturalness and grandeur in the threading-together of the successive generations and the individual lives brought before us, which very few stories of any author's have seemed to contain, and which certainly none of George Eliot's have ever before aimed at in any high degree.
There is in this tale more of moral presentiment, more of moral providence, and more of moral subordination to purposes higher and wider than that of any one generation's life, than in any previous story of this author's, and the effect certainly has been to weld the whole together, in a way that is very unusual with her brilliant but somewhat loosely-knitted sketches of character. Nothing can be finer, now we have seen the issue of Gwendoleu's wicked self-will in the number just published, than the connection between her girlish dread of the supernatural—the horror with which the white dead face from which a figure is fleeing in horror in the old panel-picture, struck her—and the destiny which she works out for herself, by her selfish persistence in a course which she knew to be both opposed to all pure womanly instincts, and treacherous to one to whom she had pledged her faith. And perhaps the finest part of this fine picture is the careful, subtle moderation with which it is worked out. Gwen- dolen, after all, realises the fate of which she had had so dim and dreadful a presentiment, only in a very modified form. While, in one sense, she has been offending more and more consciously against her sense of right, it has been partly because the sense of right itself has been growing in her even faster perhaps than the evil will which has outraged it ; so that when at last she finds herself fleeing from the silent accusation of a dead face, the accusation it brings against her is not so fearful as it might have been, and is more likely to bear fruit in humility and penitence than in the mad horror of inexpiable remorse. Whatever we may think, too, of the character of Daniel Deronda,—and to us it remains at the end what it was from the beginning, far too much of an elaborate study and too little of a vivid picture,—no one can deny that the power of the personal influence which passes from his into Gwendolen's life is very finely portrayed, and that the mode in which his evident nobility of nature becomes to her, as it were, a sort of moral inspiration, and a living stand.ard of inward obligation, is very finely conceived and executed. But after all, it is the working-out of the retribution which her sin brings upon her, and the growing of the hatred of the sin, even while the very life of it seems to be growing, too, in her, which is the finest thing in her story. Her interviews with Deronda, after she has faced the fulfilment of her dread, her terror lest he should think her guilt too deep to be expiated, and his fear lest, in trying to give her nature the support it needed, he should be accepting for him- self a burden greater than he could support, are all painted in a mood higher than even with this author we were prepared for. And it is curious to notice that, in this last and finest part of her tale, the vein of cynical, and sometimes almost flippant observation, in which she had so often indulged before, almost wholly dis- appears. She rises to the dignity of tragedy when she passes into the tragic scenes.
And to our minds, the conception of Deronda's mother, of her hatred of her lot as a Jewess, of her inability to resist the iron will of her father, and yet her determination somehow to escape its galling and oppressive yoke ; of her apparent con- quest over destiny, her career as a great singer, her desire for bringing up her son without the taint of the Jew upon him, and the collapse of her whole resolve as age and disease come on, beneath the inward spell exerted over her conscience by her dead father's imperious fidelity to duty, is still more finely painted. You see the physique of the great singer and actress in all she says and does. You see that she is what she calls herself, an unloving woman, to whom high dogmatic conscientiousness seems a gadfly which pursues us in our madness, rather than one of the noblest of human attributes ; and yet you see, too, that she recognises, most reluctantly and grudgingly, but still re- cognises, the nobility of the ideas which dominated her father's life, and that she acquiesces (though unwillingly) in the duty of giving them a chance with her son. And the author's evident intention to hint that Deronda, instead of losing by his mother's faithfulness to her father's will, had gained greatly by it in capacity to become precisely what that father had fondly hoped him to be, a new leader for his people, a leader with wider conceptions of what lay outside his race's nature and deeper conceptions of what lay inside it, is a nobler indication of her faith in a power which con- sciously overrules human errors for its own higher purposes, than any we can recall in any of her other works.
If we may judge by the story of "Daniel Deronda," George Eliot has real faith in a power which anticipates the end from the beginning, and moulds our nature so as to fit it for a life above nature,—a faith which is the condition not merely of finding any true significance in art, but of seeing any perennial interest in the vicissitudes of history and that "web of human things" which make up human life. What has been mostly wanting in George Eliot's books is this faith in the larger purpose which moulds men into something higher than anything into which they could mould themselves. And now that it is powerfully presented in one of her stories, though a story in which some of the elements of her genius are less visible than before, it certainly lends to her writing a force and a unity and a grandeur of effect which make up for many faults of execution, and even for occa- sional evidences of that weariness, which, more than anything in a great writer's works, excites the solicitude and the regret of the reader.
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