360
PARTISAN REVIEW
idealism of hers, perhaps forgivable in youth but unseemly in a woman
of mature years?
In the standard accounts of English literature
Daniel Deronda
was
for many years regarded as, at best, a worthy embarrassment, and only
with F.R. Leavis's
The Great Tradition
(1947) did there occur a
decisive shift in critical opinion. Leavis, while dismissing "the Jewish
part" as a flat failure, insisted that in "the Gwendolen Harleth part"
Eliot had done her most brilliant work. He toyed with the notion that
the two segments of the book might be ripped apart, so that a new
novel to be called
Gwendolen Harleth
would emerge, though on a later
occasion he admitted that this was an utterly impractical idea since the
two strands are, for better or worse, inseparable. With Leavis's overall
judgment one isn't disposed to quarrel, only to offer a few complicat–
ing amendments. (There are, after all, significant gradations of literary
realization in "the Jewish part" of the book; it is not simply to be
dismissed.) But even Leavis, probably the best Eliot critic of our time,
didn't trouble to ask what it was that Eliot 'was trying
to
do in this
book, how it might relate
to
her lifelong moral and intellectual
concerns, and to what extent it signified a change in her attitudes
toward English society. Answer these questions, and you are in a
position to measure the extraordinary
interest
of this novel, an under–
taking more complex and valuable than simply laying out its strengths
and weaknesses.
The last part of
Middlemarch
appeared in December 1873; the first
part of
Daniel Deronda
in February 1876. Between these two dates, and
no doubt somewhat before the earlier one, there was an intense activity
in George Eliot's creative life.
So great a book as
Middlemarch
can hardly be reduced to one or
two concerns, but for my present purpose let me stress these: It is a
novel that portrays the difficulties encountered by serious people, those
who would live beyond mere appetite or ego, as they try to survive in
the society of nineteenth-century England (perhaps any society).
If
they
are
to
make their way in the world without surrendering their values,
such people need a sizable moral and intellectual armament-they
cannot permit themselves relaxation or slackness. Not that the society
of
Middlemarch
is merely despicable; not at all. It contains elements of
benign feeling and remnants of religious faith, but essentially it is a
philistine society, sluggish in its provincialism, hostile to the uses of
mind, and streaked with that complacent egoism Eliot regards as the
most damaging of human failings-an egoism, it may be suggested
