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everything in the book is related to everything else, or how well related,
is something else again.
Daniel Deronda
tried the tolerance of the English public, even its
most cultivated segment. The fate of the Jews, scattered and in some
cases demoralized, was a subject too distant-perhaps it even seemed a
little "unsavory" -for a literary public largely fixed in the self–
regarding premises of Victorian England. One might favor religious
liberty, even deplore persecution in far-off Eastern places, but that was
hardly a reason to have the Jews thrust upon one, page after page. The
public had adored
Adam Bede
and
The Mill on the Floss,
Eliot's earlier
fictions about English country life: such books were familiar, delight–
ful. The public respected, or was trained to respect, the solidity and
poise of
Middlemarch.
But Jews, especially loquacious ones prophecy–
ing miracles in Palestine, were just too much.
We come now to a crucial question: Why was George Eliot drawn
to the Jews at all? What made her suppose them a usable novelistic
subject-or, if not usable, then necessary? Not, apparently, any special
feelings of personal attachment: it's important to remember that she
had to "work up" this subject. Something more entangled must have
been at stake, and though we cannot know for certain, since we are
speculating about the inner life of a great writer, I want to put down a
few suppositions:
1) She saw in the usual contempt for the Jews a gross instance of
that English xenophobia, that English smugness of feeling which she
had come increasingly to deplore. As she wrote to Harriet Beecher
Stowe:
Precisely because I felt that the usual attitude of Christians
toward Jews is-I hardly know whether to say more impious or more
stupid when viewed in the light of their professed principles. I there–
fore felt urged to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding
as my nature and knowledge could attain to.
Anti-Semitism she proceeded to locate as an example of "a spirit of
arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness ... which has become a
national disgrace." Estimable these sentiments are, but they can hardl y
be supposed fully to explain why she gave the Jews so large a role in
her book, why, that is, she
turned
to them late in her career. For she
must have known or sensed'that sympathy from a distance by no means
insures success in rendering.
2) She found herself going back, through channels of yearning, to
something like her youthful religious enthusiasms. The fervor of the
