Irving Howe
GEORGE ELIOT AND THE JEWS
Toward the end of their careers, great writers are sometimes
roused to a new energy by thoughts of risk. Some final stab at an area of
human experience they had neglected or at a theme only recently
become urgent: this exci.tes their imaginations. They leave behind
assured achievement, all they have done well and could still do better,
and start clambering up the slopes of uncertainty and experiment.
Watching them as they slide, slip, and start up again can be very
moving-it can also make one very nervous.
Jane Austen, triumphant in
Emma,
edges toward a shy romanti–
cism in
Persuasion.
Dickens, triumphant in
Little Dorrit,
grapples
with the psychology of
ressentiment
in the Bradley Headstone segment
of
Our Mutual Friend:
quite as if he were "becoming" Dostoevsky.
George Eliot, seldom regarded as an innovator in the art of fiction,
brushes past the serene equilibrium and symmetrical ironies of
Mid–
dlemarch
in order
to
test new perceptions in her final novel,
Daniel
Deronda.
What moves these writers is some inner restlessness to go
beyond the known and the finished, to undertake work that will
probably turn out to be only partly fulfilled. With George Eliot, it is a
movement into ways of writing about the world that partly anticipate
the modernism of twentieth-century fiction.
Now this is by no means the usual account of her concluding years
and work. By the time she published
Middlemarch
in 1873, she was
commonly regarded as the leading English novelist of her day, indeed,
as a cultural sage of gravity and truthfulness. When she came to
publish
Daniel Deronda
in 1876 there was a noticeable cooling of
public response. By now anything from her pen was certain to be
treated respectfully, but this was not a book that most English readers
could feel easy with. Beneath the critical acclaim could be heard sighs
of perplexity: Why was she taxing them with so ponderous, so
unEnglish
a theme as the proto-Zionism to which the hero of the novel
commits himself? Why does it contain so many passages of "heavy"
reflection? And why could she not restrain that ardent, nervous
