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the urge to power. The novel seems to me one of the great imaginative
criticisms of modern society, its works and its ways.
It
should now be clear why George Eliot had to place so intoler–
able a burden on the shoulders of poor Deronda. A writer for whom the
idea of purpose, the claims of moral idealism, the "larger life" form the
premise of her work, indeed, of her very being, now finds herself at the
climax of her career with a vision of society astonishingly caustic, still
more astonishingly deficient in positive figures or voices. As a recent
Eliot critic, Alan Mintz, has remarked: "To remain in society of
necessity involves becoming a Gwendolen; and to become a Daniel
Deronda, society-at least English society-has to be left behind."
Eliot's unused aspirations, the values now so difficult to locate in
any English class or group, she thrusts upon Deronda. The precepts he
declaims so sententiously betray depths of uneasiness on the part of his
creator. They are unexceptionable: a call for "sympathy" as the balm
for our afflictions, a hope of moving past the shallow appetites of ego
toward a concern for the suffering of the world, everything, in short, we
have come to know as Eliot's "religion of humanity." But the possibil–
ity of embodying very much of this in the world depicted in
Daniel
Deronda
is decidedly meager. Through a good part of the novel,
Deronda is a young man of affirmed high-mindedness who hasn't the
vaguest idea of what to do with it. He is given the further assignment of
enabling Gwendolen to grasp the significance of her plight and
thereby
to
see beyond it; this would be hard enough in the _best
circumstances, the role of mentor seldom allowing for much novelistic
spontaneity, but it here becomes impossibly stiff in light of the fact that
Deronda does so little except stand about, morally impeccable, and
talk.
There are moments when Eliot recognizes, apparently, that in the
friendship between Gwendolen and Deronda, mostly snatched bits of
conversation, she has set in motion a relationship that leads to or into a
liaison. The girl's vibrations are quick enough, but Deronda, perhaps
because he must be preserved for the Jewish cause, backs away from the
beauty, the pathos of Gwendolen.
It
is no small feat for a young man
to
do that, and at times we're reminded uncomfortably of Joseph Andrews
retreating from Lady Booby.... The truth is, George Eliot simply
cannot manage here what she has begun, perhaps because this is an
instance in which Victorian conventions do exact a price, perhaps
because the conflicting roles assigned to Deronda cannot easily be
reconciled-the young man who responds sympathetically
to
Gwen-
