Eminent Victorian

By Joseph Epstein
The Weekly Standard, June 8, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot
By Gertrude Himmelfarb
Encounter, 250 pages

The cavalcade of Victorian genius is greater than that of any other period in any other nation in the history of the world. And of all the great Victorians, perhaps none was more complex, unpredictable, and finally astonishing than Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot. That George Eliot is among the small company of the world's great novelists is without doubt. Her place at the very top rank in Anglophone literature is secure.

The intellectual background, composition, and critical reception of Daniel Deronda (1876), her last and most complex novel, is the subject of Gertrude Himmelfarb's new book. Her deeper subject is how George Eliot, the daughter of a churchgoing country estate manager in Warwickshire, came to her understanding of the Jews, their condition in the 19th century, their aspirations, their fate in a world historically hostile to them.

"Eliot was the rare novelist," Himmelfarb writes, "who was also a genuine intellectual, whose most serious ideas found dramatic expression in her novels." Henry James averred that "the fault of most of her work is the absence of spontaneity, the excess of reflection; and by her action in 1854 (which seemed superficially to be of the sort that is usually termed reckless), she committed herself to being nothing if not reflective, to cultivation of a kind of compensatory earnestness."

The "action in 1854" was Mary Ann Evans's union with George Henry Lewes, an intellectual journalist. Lewes and Mary Ann Evans went off together to Germany, where she mastered German. Theirs was the closest of relationships, dear and deep, a mating of souls and intellects. Once united, they thought of each other as husband and wife.

Lewes encouraged George Eliot (as she later became) to write fiction. Hitherto she had restricted herself to criticism and doing translations of Feuerbach, Spinoza, and other erudite works. She began writing fiction at the age of 37, and published her first full novel, Adam Bede (1859), at 40. From there she went from strength to strength: writing, to mention some of her best-known novels,
The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Lewes supported her in every way until his death in 1878. George Eliot died two years later.

Eliot acquired a great deal from what experience was available to her. But she also, as Himmelfarb notes, gained a vast amount from her reading, which was extensive, serious, and as far as possible from desultory. Himmelfarb remarks on George Eliot's restrained use of all she had learned before creating the intensely Jewish characters in Daniel Deronda. Like the true artist she was, she obtained all she needed to know, and deployed her knowledge with precision and artistic tact.

Himmelfarb thinks Daniel Deronda is a great novel, among the very greatest. The wide variety of its characters, its high level of penetrating observations, the intricacy of its plot, its delicate but devastating satire, the powerful emotions it evokes, all are of the stuff of a masterpiece.

Two plots run concurrently in Daniel Deronda. One is the story of Gwendolen Harleth, a great natural beauty, self-absorbed to the highest power, born to a widowed mother without means, who uses the beguilements of her radiant charm to contract a disastrous marriage to a domineering, cold-blooded aristocrat. The other is the story of Daniel Deronda, whose true parentage and Jewish origins are revealed to him late in the novel, a revelation that comes as a gift to a man who has, as another character says of him, "a passion for people who have been pelted." The two plots are elaborately interlaced, with Deronda, raised by the baronet Sir Hugh Mallinger, who is the uncle to Grandcourt, bridging the novel's two worlds, Jewish déclassé and English gentry.

Deronda's sense of mission as a Jew gives his life a purpose, and the novel itself a meaning, well beyond the story of a mere abortive romance between Gwendolen and Daniel. "The idea that I am possessed with," Deronda tells Gwendolen at their final meeting, "is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre such as the English have, though they are scattered over the face of the globe." From this sense of mission Deronda derives his stature.

Eliot tends to idealize her three principal Jewish characters. Daniel Deronda, often sounds sententious, if not priggish. Still, the cast of the novel's Jewish characters, from the family of the pawnshop-owning Ezra Cohen to the musician Klesmer to Deronda's long-lost mother, to Mirah's thieving father Lapidoth with his gambling addiction, far from being idealized, are so rich in their variety and various in their richness as to qualify Eliot as a connoisseur of Jewish types.

Eliot's penchant for abstraction takes the form of generalization, commenting, as if from the sidelines, on the action going on in the novel. One of the modern fiction workshop laws is that a writer should always show and never tell. Eliot did both, and with sufficient success to wipe the law off the books.

The larger question looming over Daniel Deronda is how did George Eliot come to have her profound imaginative sympathy for the Jews. Himmelfarb traces out Eliot's views about Jews, from her early, vaguely contemptuous view to her profound understanding of the significance behind Jewish history and religion. Writing about the Jews as she did, Himmelfarb claims, required "audacity" on Eliot's part. "Her Jewish question," Himmelfarb writes, "was not the relation of the Jews to the Gentile world, but the relation of the Jews to themselves, to their own people and their own world, the beliefs and traditions that were their history and their legacy."

Eliot's prescience is little short of astonishing. She understood the prejudice against the Jews of her day. She understood the mission of every Jew, who "should be conscious that he is one of a multitude possessing common objects of piety in the immortal achievements and immortal sorrows of ancestors who have transmitted to them a physical and mental type strong enough, eminent enough in faculties, pregnant enough with peculiar promise, to constitute a new beneficent individuality among nations, and, by confuting the traditions of scorn, nobly avenge the wrongs done to their Fathers."

She also understood the necessity of a Jewish nation as a rallying point and political means for the carrying of this mission to completion. Himmelfarb writes that Daniel Deronda "reminds us that Israel is not merely a refuge for desperate people, that the history of Judaism is more than the bitter annals of persecution and catastrophe, and that Jews are not only, certainly not essentially, victims, survivors, martyrs, or even an abused or disaffected people."

Eliot's great prescient point is that, as Himmelfarb notes, it was not anti-Semitism but "Judaism, the religion and the people, that created the Jew. And it was Judaism that created the Jewish state, the culmination of a proud and enduring faith that defined the Jewish 'nation,' uniting Jews even as they were, and as they remain, physically dispersed."

That George Eliot, who was herself neither Jewish nor ever thought of becoming Jewish, understood so well and sympathized so completely with Jewish aspirations, that she grasped the Jews' true historical destiny, that in many ways she came to know the Jews better than they knew themselves, is a tribute to a great writer.
 

AR  Martin Amis almost persuaded me — rather indirectly — to read Daniel Deronda many years ago but I never did find the time for it. Perhaps I should now.