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"counter-myth": he is now benevolent, wise, pure-spirited. But if
neither myth nor counter-myth allows a fully-shaded humanity to
characterization of Jews, still, the counter-myth is a step toward that
desired end. Without the one there cannot be the other. Grappling with
the "counter-myth," and thereby coming to see the Jews-some of
them-as a possible counter-force to the English society depicted in the
novel, George Eliot undertook a task that can only be called heroic.
Anyone with a grain of historical imagination ought to feel admira–
tion, even for those 'parts of
Daniel Deronda
that obviously fail, the
failures of great writers often being more valuable than the successes of
lesser ones.
This much said, we can turn to to the novel itself.
On its strong side
Daniel Deronda
is the most penetrating scrutiny
in nineteenth-century English fiction, perhaps in all English fiction, of
human beings caught up in a web of inhuman relations. Only
Little
Dorrit
offers perhaps as mordant and relentless a criticism of English
(but of course, more than English) society: its devaluation of love and·
friendship through the exercise of power, its subordination of human
affections
to
the cash nexus, its bone-chilling social elitism.
One doesn't usually think of George Eliot as a social critic, and her
liberalism seems more a quality of tone and temper-the ' tone of
generosity, the temper of humaneness-than of any militant desire for
social change. But what she shows here of the relationship between
Gwendolen and Henleigh Grandcourt, the 'suavely perverse aristocrat
who becomes her husband, is not just the anatomy of a bad marriage,
nor even the terror felt by a young woman trapped by an overmastering
husband. It is
a system of dehumanized personal relations,
and th'ereby
more than personal relations; it is the barbarism that civilization
lightly coats and readily becomes. Except perhaps for Henry James's
study of Isabel Archer's subjugation in
Portrait of a Lady
there is
nothing else in our language quite like this.
In its strength, then,
Daniel Deronda
is a novel about the crushing
weight of power, the power of those who rule over other human beings
and take it to be proper that they should rule. Social rulers, personal
rulers: there is of course an important difference, but also a still more
important affinity. A long-entrenched aristocracy can exert its power
with so complete a sense of assurance that its members are likely to feel
its domination to be "natural," somehow ordained by the order of the
universe, Grandcourt is hardly a typical aristocrat, but he drives to an
ugly extreme a good many aristocratic values. What makes him so
