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PARTISAN REVIEW
dolen's condition, the poised moral figure waiting for his "election and
calling."
Eliot needs to find a locus for those moral standards and aspira–
tions that had always illuminated her novels, sometimes unsettled
them. She must now, in her last work, move past her familiar world,
toward some wished-for "beyond." The need for a crux of meaning by
which to justify and sustain the human struggle-this need she tries to
satisfy through turning to the Jewish tradition and the new hunger for
a Jewish renaissance. Some residue of her youthful self, we may
surmise, must have responded warmly to the thought that in the
Jewish tradition might be found the moral grounding of all religious
life; some part of her adult mind must have responded as warmly to the
secular universalism of the incipient Jewish movement. Deronda is to
be the carrier of this new light-but not in England, only toward
distant Palestine. Abundantly virtuous but only intermittently alive, he
must bear the weight of the ideals which George Eliot finds increas–
ingly difficult to authenticate in her own world. No wonder he comes
to seem a mere figment of will or idea, a speechmaker without blood, a
mere accessory to the prophetic Mordecai, the dying spokesman of
Jewish rebirth. At some level George Eliot seems to have understood
that as a novelist she had made for herself enormous difficulties of
specification, concreteness, dramatization. She tried to ease them a
little by insuring that at least a few of the Jewish characters, like the
shopkeeper Cohen and his family, be stereotypically commonplace.
She wanted, clearly, to avoid the vaporousness of excessive
idealization-she wanted this as a novelist, but the pressures of the
moral sage, the spokesman for "the religion of humanity," overcame
her. To
be
sure, there are bits and pieces in the Jewish part of the book
that have their anecdotal or representative interest, where the novelist
triumphs over recalcitrant materials. And there have in recent years
been some shrewd efforts at justifying, or at least placing, the Jewish
part of the book, by denying that it should be seen as novelistic at all. It
must, so this argument runs, be regarded as an instance of another
genre, say, the visionary romance, which makes demands upon narra–
tive, character, and plausibility of action quite different from those of
the novel. Perhaps so; but to say this is only to transfer the difficulty to
another plane, for the juxtaposition of two genres of prose fiction,
novel and visionary romance, is here as disconcerting as the usual
judgment about the varying merits of the two sides of the book
conceived simply as a novel.
The difficulties George Eliot encountered in her last novel arose
