George Eliot

The Critical Heritage

David Carroll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415134620
• eBook ISBN: 9781136174162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels.
The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation.
Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects.
The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.

Daniel Deronda

February 1876-September 1876

52. Unsigned Notice, Academy

5 February 1876, ix, 120

The appearance of the first number of Daniel Deronda (William Black-wood and Sons) has been looked for the more anxiously because, in spite of the popular impatience of the serial method of publication, the numbers of Middlemarch obtained their success seriatim. ‘The Spoiled Child’ is the heroine of the coming romance; its eponymous hero only appears in the first chapter, where he is introduced in the assumption of a silent superiority to the heroine which is not, apparently, intended to have the same peaceable issue as in Felix Holt. The story is one of modern life and society. Gwendolen Harleth is a young lady of twenty, beautiful with the beauté du diable, but with no more pronounced diabolical propensities than a love of life and luxury and an undefined ambition after some form of superiority or personal ascendancy which should be reconcilable with all the minor good things good society has to offer to brilliant and beautiful girls. In undertaking to represent such a character, and secure attention for the representation, George Eliot is consistent with one of her earliest principles—indifference to the critic saying from his bird’s-eye station: ‘Not a remarkable specimen; the anatomy and habits of the species have been determined long ago.’ George Eliot insists on having the specimen remarked, not because it is rare but because it is real; all the more, indeed, if it is so far from rare that its reality becomes a powerful influence in human life. The representation of this influence of course remains to be developed, and in the meanwhile Gwendolen’s individuality is established, like that of Lydgate, by some personal traits that art not commonly supposed to be associated with the general type of character, though a minutely analytical psychology might perhaps show the connexion to have a root in the nature of things. Thus Gwendolen is superstitious, subject to an inexplicable dread of solitude, darkness, and any other physical suggestion of the existence of natural forces inaccessible to the influence of human wills. Again, though possessing all the vanity and coldness of a coquette, ‘a certain fierceness of maidenhood’ made her object to being directly made love to, and ‘the life of passion had begun negatively in her’ when a pleasant boy-cousin ventures to offend this instinct; but she has also still enough childish naivete to carry this grievance to her mother, for whom she has a childishly selfish but genuine affection. One or two paragraphs seem to suggest that we are to have in Daniel Deronda a treatment (perhaps more full and central than before) of the question presented in some of the writer’s other works, namely, by what property of the natural order it comes to pass that the strength of innocent self-regarding desires is a moral snare unless balanced by some sense of external obligation, or in other words, why egotism is a term of reproach, however fascinating its human habitation. Rex (Gwendolen’s cousin) has a vague impression, when he wants to go and bury his dejection in the backwoods, ‘that he ought to feel—if he had been a better fellow he should have felt—more about his old ties.’ In the Spanish Gypsy the ‘old ties’ of hereditary race-feeling are idealised into a symbol of the strongest bond of human fellowship. In Middlemarch, on the other hand, it is noticed as a popular error that ‘we are most of us brought up to think that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who suffer the wrong;’ and the reason that the severe morality of the Mill on the Floss failed to content some critics seems to have been that there also the ultimate sanction by which right doing was enforced appeared to be only the reluctance to give pain to other persons whose desires were not in any way necessarily more moral or exalted than those of the agent. Without wishing the objective vigour of the author’s imaginative creations to be clouded by a transparent didactic purpose, her readers may not unnaturally look for an imaged solution of the logical dilemma—If the desires of A are not a trustworthy guide for A’s conduct, how can they be a safe moral rule for B; and, conversely, how is A to be more secure in following B’s desires than his own? Or, if the strength of moral ties lies rather in their association with the permanent as opposed to the ephemeral experiences of life, than in their association with altruistic as opposed to egoistic impulses, it will still have to be shown—though not of course proved—how and wherein the permanent conditions of life are more respectable than its accidents. Gwendolen is already cast for the role of demon, but we do not know whether virtue is to be martyred or triumphant—in Rex or in Deronda—or whether George Eliot has yet inclined her ear to the prayer of the novel reader for a ‘real hero’, one unveraciously ideal, who may be admired without any sense of moral discipline and who will steer his way through the pitfalls of his imaginary career with a confidence the more inspiriting because would-be imitators of his prowess might always find excuse in the obstinate circumstances of actual life for any failure to follow in his footsteps. There is something hopefully unpractical in his returning Gwendolen’s necklace, which she has pawned in a gambling freak at Baden, and the first number leaves the reader’s mind in an admirable state of suspense as to the ‘Meeting of the Streams’ of incident indicated in its introductory and concluding chapters.

53. Henry James, Unsigned Notice, Nation

24 February 1876, xxii, 131

In view of the deluge of criticism which is certain to be poured out upon George Eliot’s new novel when the publication is completed, it might seem the part of discretion not to open fire upon the first instalment. But this writer’s admirers can reconcile themselves to no argument which forbids them to offer the work a welcome, and—putting criticism aside—we must express our pleasure in the prospect of the intellectual luxury of taking up, month after month, the little clear-paged volumes of Daniel Deronda. We know of none other at the present time that is at all comparable to it. The quality of George Eliot’s work makes acceptable, in this particular case, a manner of publication to which in general we strongly object. It is but just that so fine and rare a pleasure should have a retarding element in it. George Eliot’s writing is so full, so charged with reflection and intellectual experience, that there is surely no arrogance in her giving us a month to think over and digest any given portion of it. For almost a year to come the lives of appreciative readers will have a sort of lateral extension into another multitudinous world—a world ideal only in the soft, clear light under which it lies, and most real in its close appeal to our curiosity. It is too early to take the measure of the elements which the author has in hand, but the imagination has a confident sense of large and complex unfolding. The opening chapters are of course but the narrow end of the wedge. The wedge—as embodied in the person of Gwendolen Harleth—seems perhaps unexpectedly narrow, but we make no doubt that before many weeks have gone by we shall be hanging upon this young lady’s entangled destiny with the utmost tension of our highest faculties. Already we are conscious of much acuteness of conjecture as to the balance of her potentialities—as to whether she is to exemplify the harsh or the tender side of tragic interest, whether, as we may say in speaking of a companion work to Middletnarch, the Dorothea element or the Rosamond element is to prevail. A striking figure in these opening chapters is that of Herr Klesmer, a German music-master, who has occasion to denounce an aria of Bellini as expressing ‘a puerile state of culture—no sense of the universal.’ There could not be a better phrase than this latter one to express the secret of that deep interest with which the reader settles down to George Eliot’s widening narrative. The ‘sense of the universal’ is constant, omnipresent. It strikes us sometimes perhaps as rather conscious and over-cultivated; but it gives us the feeling that the threads of the narrative, as we gather them into our hands, are not of the usual commercial measurement, but long electric wires capable of transmitting messages from mysterious regions.

54. Extracts from George Eliot’s Journal

1875–6

All page references are to The George Eliot Letters (see Introduction, p. 33).

25 December 1875.

For the last three weeks, however I have been suffering from a cold and its effects so as to be unable to make any progress. Meanwhile, the 2 first volumes of Daniel Deronda are in print and the first Book is to be published on February 1.—I have thought very poorly of it myself throughout, but George and the Blackwoods are full of satisfaction in it. Each part as I see it before me im Werden¹ seems less likely to be anything else than a failure, but I see on looking back this morning— Christmas Day—that I really was in worse health and suffered equal depression about Romola—and so far as I have recorded, the same thing seems to be true of Middlemarch.

I have finished the Vth Book, but am not so far on in the Vlth as I hoped to have been, the oppression under which I have been labouring having positively suspended my power of writing anything that I could feel satisfaction in (vi, 200–1).

12 April 1876.

On February 1 began the publication of Deronda, and the interest of the public, strong from the first, appears to have increased with Book III. The day before yesterday I sent off Book VII. The success of the work at present is greater than that of Middlemarch up to the corresponding point of publication. What will be the feeling of the public as the story advances I am entirely doubtful. The Jewish element seems to me likely to satisfy nobody.—I am in rather better health, having perhaps profited by some eight days’ change at Weybridge (vi, 238).

3 June 1876.

Book V published a week ago. Growing interest in the public and growing sale, which has from the beginning exceeded that of Middlemarch. The Jewish part apparently creating strong interest (vi, 259).

1 December 1876.

Since we came home at the beginning of September I have been made aware of much repugnance or else indifference towards the Jewish part of Deronda, and of some hostile as well as adverse reviewing. On the other hand there have been the strongest expressions of interest —some persons adhering to the opinion, started during the early numbers, that the book is my best—delighted letters have here and there been sent to me, and the sale both in America and in England has been an unmistakable guarantee that the public has been touched. Words of gratitude have come from Jews and Jewesses, and there are certain signs that I may have contributed my mite to a good result (vi, 314).

¹In process of becoming.

55. R. H. Hutton, Unsigned Review, Spectator

9 September 1876, xliv, 1131–3

Hutton reviewed four of the eight parts of Daniel Deronda in the Spectator (29 January, 8 April, 10 June, 29 July) as they appeared during 1876. He concluded with this review of the novel when it was published in four volumes (see Introduction, pp. 33–4).

There are both blemishes and beauties in Daniel Deronda which belong exclusively to this work of its great author. No book of hers before this has ever appeared so laboured, and sometimes even so forced and feeble, in its incidental remarks. No book of hers before this has ever had so many original mottoes prefixed to the chapters which, instead of increasing our admiration for the book, rather overweight and perplex it. No book of hers before this ever contained so little humour. And no doubt the reader feels the difference in all these respects between Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch. On the other hand, no book of hers before this, unless, perhaps, we except Adam Bede, ever contained so fine a plot, so admirably worked out. No book of hers before this was ever conceived on ideal lines so noble, the whole effect of which, when we look back to the beginning from the end, seems to have been so powerfully given. No book of hers before this has contained so many fine characters, and betrayed so subtle an insight into the modes of growth of a better moral life within the shrivelling buds and blossoms of the selfish life which has been put off and condemned. And last of all, no book of hers before this has breathed so distinctly religious a tone, so much faith in the power which overrules men’s destinies for purposes infinitely raised above the motives which actually animate them, and which uses the rebellion, and the self-will, and the petty craft of human unworthiness, only to perfect the execution of His higher ends, and to hasten His day of deliverance. It is true that so far as this book conveys the author’s religious creed, it is a purified Judaism,—in other words, a devout Theism, purged of Jewish narrowness, while retaining the intense patriotism which pervades Judaism; and that the hero,—who is intended for an ideal of goodness as perfect as any to which man can reach at present,—evidently sees nothing in the teaching of Christ which raises Christianity above the purified Judaism of Mordecai’s vision. But however much we may differ from her here, it is not on such a difference that our estimate of the power or art of this fine tale can turn. So far as its art is concerned, there neither is nor can be any issue of a dogmatic nature embodied in it. But it would be as idle to say that there is no conception of Providence or of supernatural guidance involved in the story, as to say the same of the Œdipean trilogy of Sophocles. The art of this story is essentially religious.

The struggle between evil and good for Gwendolen, her fear of the loneliness and vastness of the universe over which she can exert no influence, and the selfish plunge which she makes, against all her instincts of right and purity, into a marriage in which she fancies she can get her own way, only to find that she has riveted on herself the grasp of an evil nature which she cannot influence at all, though every day makes her fear and hate that nature more; the counteracting influence for good which Deronda gains with her by venturing,—as a mere stranger, —to warn her and help her against her gambling caprice, and thus identifying himself in her mind with those agencies of the universe beyond the control of her will which ‘make for righteousness,’ to use Mr. Arnold’s phrase; and lastly, that disposal of events which always brings her within reach of Deronda’s influence when she most needs it, till good has gained the victory in her, and that influence, too, is withdrawn, to make room for a more spiritual guidance,—all this is told with a power and a confidence in the overshadowing of human lives by a higher control which is of the essence of the art of the story, and essentially religious. And still more essentially religious is that part of the tale which affects Deronda himself. His mother’s attempt to separate him in infancy from the Jewish people, whose narrowness, though a Jewess herself, she detested, and to get him the footing of an English gentleman; the effect which this parentless and ambiguous condition of life has in so training Deronda’s natural sensitiveness as to make him study the habits, and wants, and feelings of others even before his own; the controlling power which brings him into special relations with his own people, though he does not know them to be his own people; the victory of conscience over his mother when a fatal disease strikes her, and she fulfils her father’s wishes, in spite of her own repulsion to them, by revealing to her son to what race he belongs, and what dreams of his future his Jewish grandfather had indulged; and most of all, the effect which human rebelliousness and self-will had in aiding rather than foiling those higher purposes against which they tried to make war,—all this is told with a force that at times resembles that of the Hebrew prophet’s belief in the Eternal purposes, and at times that of the Greek tragedian’s mysterious trackings of that inscrutable power which now seems to mock us with its irony, and now again to smile on us in compassion. Whatever the blemishes of the story, no one who can appreciate Art of the higher kind will deny that the history of Gwendolen’s moral collapse and regeneration, and of Deronda’s mother, and her eventual submission to that higher spirit of her father which, by its want of breadth and sympathy with her own individual genius, had utterly alienated her, in the brilliancy of her youth, till she strove with all her might to ignore what was noble and even grand in it, is traced with a sort of power of which George Eliot has never before given us any specimen.

At the same time, it cannot be denied that while there is more which reaches true grandeur in this story than in perhaps any other of the same writer’s, there is much less equality of execution and richness of conception. The hero himself is laboured. And though in some of the closing scenes, especially those with his mother and with Gwendolen, we are compelled to admit that the picture is a noble one, so much pains has been expended on studying rather than on painting him, that throughout (say) three-quarters of the story, we are rather being prepared to make acquaintance with Deronda than actually making acquaintance with him. Again, we are not satisfied with the Jewish heroine, Mirah. After the first scene in which she appears, where in her misery she is contemplating suicide, and, with a minute forethought characteristic of times of excitement, takes care to dip her long woollen cloak in the river, in order that she may sink the more easily when she puts it on,—after this scene, we say, Mirah does not gain upon us, but rather irritates us against her by her intolerable habit of crossing her hands on her breast, in sign, we suppose, of the meekness and patience of her disposition,—a sign, however, which excites arrogance and impatience in the mind of the readers, and sends a nerve-current through their hands which would be likely to show itself in a sort of action very different from that of Mirah’s. The vagueness of the picture of the hero till within a few fine scenes of the end, and this ostentatious humility of the heroine’s, seem to us real blots on the higher art of the book.

Then, again, as we h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• General Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Scenes of Clerical Life (1857)
• Adam Bede (1859)
• The Mill on the Floss (1860)
• Silas Marner (1861)
• Romola (1862–3)
• Felix Holt (1866)
• Middlemarch (1871–2)
• Daniel Deronda (1876)
• Bibliography
• Index