IRVING HOWE
371
48, we find on its very first page a brilliant juxtaposition, but also a
joining, of the social and personal components of Grandcourt's
character. Here, in ironic voice and with obvious public references, is
the first paragraph:
Grandcourt's imporlance as a subject of this realm was of
the grandly passive kind which consists in the inheritance of land.
Political and social movements touched him only through the wire
of his rental, and his most careful biographer need not have read up
on Schleswig-Holstein, the policy of Bismark, trade' unions, house–
hold suffrage, or even the last commercial panic. He glanced over the
best newspaper columns on these topics, and his views on them can
hardly be said to have wanted breadth, since he embraced all
Germans, all commercial men, and all voters liable to use the wrong
kind of soap, under the general epithet of "brutes"; but he took no
action on these much agitated questions beyond looking from under
his eyelids at any man who mentioned them, and retaining a silence
which served to shake the opinions of timid thinkers.
Now the third paragraph, personal in reference:
No movement of Gwendolen in relation to Deronda escaped
him. He would have denied that he was jealous; because jealousy
would have implied some doubt of his power to hinder what he had
determined against. That his wife should have more inclination to
another man's society than to his own would not pain him; what he
required was that she should be as fully aware as she would have
been of a locked hand-cuff, that her inclination was helpless to
decide anything in contradiction to his resolve... He had not
repented of his marriage; it had really brought more of aim into his
life, new objects to exert his will upon; and he had not repented of
his choice. His taste was fastidious, and Gwendolen satisfied it; he
would not have liked a wife who had not received some elevation of
rank from him; nor one who did not command admiration by her
mien and her beauty; nor one whose nails were not of the right
shape; nor one the lobe of whose ear was at all too large and red; nor
one who, even if her nails and ears were right, was at the same time a
ninny, unable to make spirited answers.
And here is the brief second paragraph indicating Eliot's intention
to
link " the subject of the realm" whose importance was "of the
grandly passive kind" with the husband who found in marriage " new
objects to exert his will upon":
But GrandcoUrl within his own sphere of interest showed
some of the qualities which have entered into triumphal diplomacy
of the widest continental sort.
