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recent style there be any portion of truth, it will be found in the circumstance that an occasional sentence becomes laboured, and perhaps overloaded in her effort to charge it fully and accurately with its freight of meaning. The manner of few great artists—if any—becomes simpler as they advance in their career, that is, as their ideas multiply, as their emotions receive more numerous affluents from the other parts of their being, and as the vital play of their faculties with one another becomes swifter and more intricate. The later sonatas of Beethoven still perplex facile and superficial musicians. The later landscapes of Turner bewilder and amaze the profane. The difference between the languid and limpid fluency of the style of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" and the style of Shakspere's later plays, so compressed, so complex, so live with breeding imagery, is great. Something is lost but more has been gained. When the sustained largo of the sentences of "Daniel Deronda" is felt after the crude epigrammatic smartnesses of much of the writing in "Scenes of Clerical Life" we perceive as great a difference and as decided a preponderance of gain over loss.

But what renders singular the warning addressed to George Eliot that her work is undergoing a "scientific depravation" is that the whole of her last book is a homage to the emotions rather than to the intellect of man. Her feeling finds expression not only in occasional gnomic utterances in which sentiments are declared to be the best part of the world's wealth, and love is spoken. of as deeper than reason, and the intellect is pronounced incapable of ascertaining the validity of claims which

rest upon loving instincts of the heart, or else are baseless. The entire work possesses an impassioned aspect, an air of spiritual prescience, far more than the exactitude of science. The main forces which operate in it are sympathies, aspirations, ardours; and ideas chiefly as associated with these. From his meditative numbness Deronda is roused, his diffused mass of feeling is rendered definite, and is impelled in a given direction, his days become an ordered sequence bound together by love and duty, his life is made one with the life of humanity. How is this change brought about? And how is that other change effected by which Gwendolen is checked in her career of victorious self-pleasing, is delivered from her habits of a spoiled child, and is made-she also-a portion of the better life of man? Does Deronda take counsel with a Lydgate, and learn by the microscope the secrets of moral energy and resolved submission to spiritual motive?

Or does some theory of ethics make the moral world new for him? Neither of these. It is the discovery of his parentage and his people which creates claims to which his heart consents with joy, and Deronda's life takes its new direction not from the inductions of a savant of the West, but from the inspiration of a Hebrew prophet, with whom the inferences of what Coleridge would have named the prudential understanding are wholly overshadowed by the faith of what he would have named the imaginative reason.

Is then the objection warranted that the part assigned to Mordecai and his influence upon Deronda are a fantastic unreality which offends against our saner judgment? Is such a person as Mordecai incredible?

And again, is the idea which the consumptive Jew breathes into Deronda only the hectic fever-dream of a visionary, or has it substance and validity for the imagination of the reader? And why all this concern about Jews—the stiff-necked race? Quid ergo amplius Judæo est? aut quæ utilitas circumcisionis?

It might be said, in answer to some of these questions, that as a fact Mordecai is an ideal study from a veritable Jew, Cohn or Kohn, one of the club of students who met some forty years since at Red Lion Square, Holborn,* and that recently a scheme for the redemption of Palestine for Israel was actually in contemplation among members of the Jewish race. But to criticize "Daniel Deronda" from the literal, prosaic point of view, would be as much a critical stupidity as to undertake the defence of Shakspere's "King Lear" from the charge of historical improbability. It is enough if the idealization is worked out upon lines which have a starting-point and a direction that can be justified to the intellect, and if the imagination consents to yield credence to ideal truth. The century which has contained an actual Mazzini, an actual Lamennais, can surely credit the existence of an imagined Mordecai. Or is the lament of Mr Mill, uttered in 1838, still true of a younger generation: 'Nowadays nature and probability are thought to be violated if there be shown to the reader, in the personages with whom he is called upon to sympathize,

* See Mr M'Alister's letter to the Academy, July 29, 1876, with its interesting quotations from Mr G. H. Lewes's article in the Fortnightly Review, April 1, 1866.

See also "George Eliot and Judaism," by Prof. Kaufmann, of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Buda-Pesth, pp. 13-20, and pp. 66-70.

characters on a larger scale than himself, or than the persons he is accustomed to meet at a dinner or a quadrille party?" We owe to the author of "Daniel Deronda" the gratitude due to one who enriches human life for her discovery in Ram's bookshop, and among the kindly-hearted mercenary Cohens, of a prophet of the Exile. To feel that intense spiritual forces lie concealed under the heaped débris of follies, and fashions, and worldliness which accumulates around us, makes our existence one of more awed responsibility, and of quicker hopes and fears. There are powers in our midst of which we are not aware; the electric charge of the spirit may play upon us at any moment, we know not from what point; material interests and machinery are not yet, and never will be, supreme; still from the spirit of man to the spirit of man flow forth the issues of life and death. "This consumptive Jewish workman in threadbare clothing, lodged by charity, delivering himself to hearers who took his thoughts without attaching more consequences to them than the Flemings to the ethereal chimes ringing above their market-places, had the chief elements of human greatness: a mind consciously, energetically moving with the larger march of human destinies, but not the less full of conscience and tender heart for the footsteps that tread near and need a leaning-place; capable of conceiving and choosing a life's task with far-off issues, yet capable of the unapplauded heroism which turns off the road of achievement at the call of the nearer duty whose effect lies within the beatings of the hearts that are close to us, as the hunger of the unfledged bird to the breast of its parent."

To understand aright the Jewish idea of Mordecai we should approach it through the wider human idea of George Eliot. It might indeed be contended that at a period when on the continent of Europe the idea of nationality-unity of Italy, pan-Teutonism, pan-Slavism -has played and is playing so important a part, there were a historical justification and a historical propriety in its employment as a poetical motive in a work of art. If the political imagination of the English nation is seldom assailed by great principles or ideas, their force upon the history of the world has not therefore been small; lives have been spent for them, and blood has been gladly offered up. Probably none but English readers in our day would refuse to accept as deserving of imaginative credence such an idea as that which inspires Mordecai. That an ancient people, who under every battering shock of doom have preserved their faith and their traditions, should resume their place in the community of nations, could be hardly more wonderful than that they exist at all. A French philosopher conceived a polity of Western nations, with France as the presiding power; there is a grandeur (and grandeur is a quality of thought by no means necessarily implying something unreal or theatrical) in the conception of a future which shall include an organization of the East as well as of the West, and which places at the head of Eastern civilization the greatest and most spiritual of Shemitic races.

But the central conception of "Daniel Deronda" is religious, and not political: religious, not in the sense which implies faith in a personal providence superintending the lives of men, or faith in the intervention of the

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