Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 13
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Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 13
Literature -- Collections
and convincingly represented in this novel. The reader enters
sympathetically into the little soul of that beautiful girl at the
very beginning of the story, and in her he passes through all the
phases, until without any forced hiatus he sees before him at the end
the purified and enlarged Gwendolen, who has learnt her ennobling
lesson in the great school of suffering. It is perhaps the greatest
achievement in her art.
The more definite question is: How can such a girl realize the great
world of ideas? The answer is: It must come through the heart, through
the emotions and not the intellect,--the intellect will be widened and
matured after her personality has been thrilled. She must fall in love
with a man who is the impersonation of an idea, whose whole existence
centres round a great desire far removed from the petty world of self
in which she has lived,--nay, opposed to it, in direct contrast to it.
This impersonation is presented in Daniel Deronda; and the fault in
the book is that George Eliot's theoretical bias has been too strong
for her, and in her eagerness to make him the bearer of an idea to the
central figure of the story she has sacrificed the realistic drawing
of Daniel, who is an impersonation at the cost of flesh and blood.
Given the fact that Daniel must in his personality represent some
unselfish idea, the question was: What actual idea, great in extent
and enough to fill a man's mind and soul, should be chosen? The
difficulty here arose, that if George Eliot had chosen some purely
imaginary topic it would have lacked reality, and would have moved
neither Gwendolen nor the reader into sympathy. If on the other hand
she had taken some stirring question of the day, the question as such
would have engrossed the interest and attention of the reader, and
would no longer have been subordinated to the chief artistic purpose
it has in the story. As it is, to many, the Jewish question as treated
and suggested in the novel has itself engrossed the attention of
readers, and has diverted their minds from the main artistic gist of
the story. But to the ordinary English reader the subject of Jewish
social life and aspirations was sufficiently remote. Nay, so narrow
are the sympathies and the intellectual horizon of many cultivated
Englishmen, that though they can be interested in the lives of gipsies
and farm laborers, they cannot "screw up an interest in those Jews."
To Daniel however it was a real, stirring, and great idea to which he
wished to devote his life. Now, in order that Gwendolen should
_realize_ in herself such a great impersonal idea, she had to fall in
love with the man whose life they filled, and through her heart and
her love for him it would reach her mind and raise her thoughts.
Daniel, again, the man she loves, is contrasted with the narrow and
selfish man, the hardened and crystallized type of another social
world, consuming itself in its own self-love.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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