CLIFFORD
J.
MARKS
451
If
Jews occupy the margin and Christians the mainstream, in Daniel
we observe a seeming Christian with initial questions and concerns
regarding Judaism. But Daniel, whether his origins are Jewish or Christ–
ian, remains concerned primarily with transforming
this world's spiritu–
ality.
Daniel cannot remain content with Christianity providing answers
in the afterlife; he must find spiritual understanding in the here and now.
Judaism appeals to Daniel because the religion provides worldly strate–
gies to achieve transcendent comprehension. As the narrator says,
We fall on the leaning side; and Deronda suspected himself of lov–
ing too well the losing causes of the world....But how and whence
was the needed event to come?-the influence that would justify
partiality, and making him what he longed to be yet was unable to
make himself-an organic part of social life, instead of roaming in
it like a yearning disembodied spirit, stirred with a vague social
passion, but without fixed local habitation to render fellowship
real? To make a little difference for the better was what he was not
contented to live without; but how make it?
It
is one thing to see
your road, another to cut it.
Much earlier than the revelation of Daniel's Jewish origins, Eliot por–
trays Daniel as having a noble desire to improve the world. While
Daniel understands the potential futilities that accompany such a feel–
ing, he also knows that despite these frustrations, he must follow his
chosen way, when he discovers it. But the narrator refers to him as "a
disembodied spirit" because he cannot define his spiritual frame of ref–
erence. The final metaphor of the passage, about Daniel's seeing and
cutting his road, suggests to achieve his goals, Daniel must be illumi–
nated by a certain everyday being-in-the-world ("fixed local habita–
tion") that centers him. Paradoxically, his "centeredness" comes by the
means of being marginalized in a minority culture. This centering must
be both physical and spiritual.
According to the narrator, Daniel's nature hints at a special combi–
nation of qualities that permit him to move from the immediate to the
universal:
I have said that under his calm exterior he had a fervour which
made him easily feel the presence of poetry in everyday events; and
the forms of the
.Iudengasse,
rousing the sense of union with what
is remote, set him musing on two elements on our historic life
which that sense raises into the same region of poetry;-the faint
beginnings of faiths and institutions, and their obscure lingering
