GEORGE ELIOT. Daniel Deronda. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by PENGUIN BOOKS TERENCE CAVE

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2 DANIEL DERONDA MARY ANN (MARIAN) EVANS was born in 1819 in Warwickshire. She attended schools in Nuneaton and Coventry, coming under the influence of evangelical teachers and clergymen. In 1836 her mother died and Marian became her father s housekeeper, educating herself in her spare time. In 1841 she moved to Coventry, and met Charles and Caroline Bray, local progressive intellectuals. Through them she was commissioned to translate Strauss s Life of Jesus and met the radical publisher John Chapman, who, when he purchased the Westminster Review in 1851, made her his managing editor. Having lost her Christian faith and thereby alienated her family, she moved to London and met Herbert Spencer (whom she nearly married, only he found her too morbidly intellectual ) and the versatile man-of-letters George Henry Lewes. Lewes was separated from his wife, but with no possibility of divorce. In 1854 he and Marian decided to live together, and did so until Lewes s death in It was he who encouraged her to turn from philosophy and journalism to fiction, and during those years, under the name of George Eliot, she wrote Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, as well as numerous essays, articles and reviews. George Eliot died in 1880, only a few months after marrying J.W. Cross, an old friend and admirer, who became her first biographer. She was buried beside Lewes at Highgate. George Eliot combined a formidable intelligence with imaginative sympathy and acute powers of observation, and became one of the greatest and most influential of English novelists. Her choice of material widened the horizons of the novel and her psychological insights radically influenced the novelist s approach to characterization. TERENCE CAVE is Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Research Fellow of St John s College. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy. His main area of specialization is the French Renaissance, but his interests extend to European literature as a whole. His publications include The Cornucopian Text Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics, a translation of Mme de Lafayette s La Princesse de Clèves, and an edition of George Eliot s Silas Marner. 2

3 GEORGE ELIOT Daniel Deronda Edited with an Introduction and Notes by TERENCE CAVE PENGUIN BOOKS 3

4 PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi , India Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England First published 1876 This edition first published in Penguin Books 1995 Reprinted with new Further Reading and Chronology Introduction and notes copyright Terence Cave, 1995 All rights reserved The moral right of the editor has been asserted Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser 4

5 CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction Further Reading Chronology A Note on the Text DANIEL DERONDA BOOK I BOOK II BOOK III BOOK IV BOOK V BOOK VI BOOK VII BOOK VIII The Spoiled Child Meeting Streams Maidens Choosing Gwendolen Gets Her Choice Mordecai Revelations The Mother and the Son Fruit and Seed Notes Emendations Selected Variants 5

6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I should first like to acknowledge here my debt to previous editors of Daniel Deronda. Graham Handley s Clarendon edition provided an indispensable point of reference for the establishing of the text, while the notes to his edition of the novel in the Oxford University Press World s Classics series saved me much labour in glossing literary references, especially those falling within the mainstream of English literature. I have also made use of Barbara Hardy s helpful notes to her 1967 Penguin edition. Substantive borrowings from these editors have been acknowledged individually. I offer my warmest thanks to Julia Briggs, who invited me to undertake this edition, and to Kate Flint, Ritchie Robertson, and other colleagues and friends who helped me on points of detail. Catherine Godman s acute readings of my Introduction and Notes not to mention the novel itself were invaluable, and I am grateful to her for her support and encouragement throughout. Finally, I should like to dedicate this edition as a whole to my father s mother, whom I never met. 6

7 INTRODUCTION* We only see what interests us, and we have only insight in proportion to our sympathy. Genesis G. H. LEWIS Suffering from toothache and from mental and physical exhaustion after the marathon of composition, George Eliot completed her last novel on 8 June On 6 June her publisher and friend John Blackwood wrote to his nephew William of a visit he had paid to the Leweses : She was not visible, being in the agonies of the wind up and suffering from face-ache. We had, however, a most pleasant lunch with Lewes and Miss Helps Lewes said his wife was writing with tears in her eyes, and I do not wonder at it. That portion of the proof which I received today certainly made me weep. There is a simplicity and a power about it that has not been reached in my time. And in his diary for 7 and 8 June, Lewes made the following entries: Polly read me last chapter but one of Deronda, and with hot eyes and a sense of having been beaten all over I walked out with her in Park. Deronda finished at last. Polly read the closing chapter after lunch and we then went to Mr Mummery [a dentist] for final revision of teeth. Framed thus in the gaze of two appreciative men, Mrs Lewes silently and painfully completed one of the most controversial prose fictions of the nineteenth century. The story of the novel s genesis is in fact difficult to reconstruct except at second and third hand. No working drafts or plans, other than the finished manuscript, have been preserved, and George Eliot was extremely protective about her novels while they were in progress. She discussed them privately with Lewes and consulted experts on technical matters, but the detailed workings of her plot, or her method of composition, never surface in her correspondence or diary. Such indications as she gives are very general, and those we can gather from what others wrote are necessarily oblique. Like most novels of the period, Daniel Deronda was first published in instalments. Book I appeared in February 1876, the other books following monthly until September. It is important to bear in mind that George Eliot still had several months writing ahead of her when the first four monthly parts were sent to the publishers in October In other words, the whole of the later part of the novel was written in the knowledge that no retrospective adjustments to the earlier part were possible. Impeded by attacks of the kidney stone (the first of which had occurred in February 1874), by depressive states and other lesser ailments, George Eliot had been writing 7

8 for rather more than a year before the first batch of manuscript went to the printer. On 23 June 1874 Lewes informed John Blackwood Mrs Lewes is fairly now at her new novel, and that means going on ; on 27 August he noted in his diary Polly read all the evening the chapters she had written of Daniel De Ronda ; and on 11 November George Eliot wrote to Blackwood of a thick slice of manuscript which had passed into the irrevocable before we left Earlswood (25 September). An entry in George Eliot s own journal for 13 January 1875 shows that she had completed the first fifteen chapters; and a letter from William Blackwood to his uncle John Blackwood, dated 21 April 1875, reports a visit to the Leweses in the course of which he asked her whether she had good news to tell him of the novel: She at once hung her head low and said Oh no, it is detestable I think Of course [Lewes s] opinion was quite the reverse and he said it was perfectly charming and all about English Ladies and Gentlemen and scene laid in Wiltshire. I got the title of it from him in great confidence and as a secret to be told to no one but you I then learned that whole of Volume I was in a complete state and part one of the next volume. The planning phase seems to have occupied most of the preceding year. On 5 November 1873 George Eliot had felt able to tell John Blackwood that she was simmering towards another big book, although Lewes wrote to Blackwood on 17 January 1874 saying that she was unable to work because of continual headaches: she simmers and simmers, despairs and despairs, believes she can never do anything again worth doing Once let her begin and she will go of her own impulse. The earliest signs that the conception of a new book was beginning to take shape date from June to July 1873, when Lewes s diary speaks first of the possibility of a novel or a play, then of Polly s novel (30 July). They were at that time travelling in Europe, and a few days later (8 August) Lewes notes that they visited the synagogue in Frankfurt for Mutter s purposes. In her own subsequent letters to friends about this trip, George Eliot makes virtually no mention of the German excursion, except in one letter where she is dismissive of Frankfurt and says nothing about the synagogue, and the central role of Jewish culture in Daniel Deronda will remain a closely guarded secret until John Blackwood reads Book IV in proof and writes to Eliot: Where did you get your knowledge of the Jews? (30 November 1875). The genesis of Daniel Deronda is often traced back to an episode that occurred in the autumn of 1872, when Lewes and Eliot were again travelling in Europe. At the casino in Homburg, she witnessed the play of Miss Leigh, Byron s grand niece, who is only 26 years old, and is completely in the grasp of this mean, money-raking demon. It made me cry to see her young fresh face among the hags and brutally stupid men around her (letter of 4 October 1872; see also letter of 25 September). An entry on gambling and the calculation of probabilities in one of George Eliot s notebooks shows that she read an article called Gambling Superstitions, which had appeared in the June 1872 number of the Cornhill magazine, 1 but since the dating of the notebooks is for the most part conjectural, we cannot be sure that she rushed home from Germany and began to read up on gambling. She may simply have filed the episode away in her prodigious memory for possible future use, as she did for many other details and episodes that ended up in the novel (and many that didn t). What does seem probable, however, is that the rich cluster of materials concentrated in notebooks 707, 710 and (especially) 711 belongs to the period of gestation and early 8

9 composition (1874 5), 2 and it provides a glimpse of the extraordinary range of Eliot s intellectual and imaginative interests and of the luminous precision of her mind. As John William Cross was to put it, Her standard was always abnormally high it was the standard of an expert; and she believed in the aphorism that to know any subject well, we must know the details of it (Cross III.373). 3 She also had a fluent reading knowledge of Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and Spanish, and had begun to learn Hebrew some time previously. 4 Whether she was exploring the history of religions, the Cabala, Jewish history and culture, Hebrew poetry, contemporary politics or science, legal questions, or Celtic and Norse legends and names, the same sharpness of focus is evident. Daniel Deronda was as meticulously researched as any of Flaubert s novels. One particular cluster of materials will give an idea of the way in which associations between apparently different subjects seem to have developed in her mind always with the proviso that the exact chronology and sequence of the entries cannot be taken for granted. The entry on gambling (fols ) is immediately preceded by quotations from Disraeli s novel Tancred, which, as we know from other sources, Eliot didn t much care for because its portrayal of Jews and Jewish life was overidealized and not culturally specific. 5 But Disraeli s Tancred also makes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and the gambling note is immediately followed by notes on the Middle East, on the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, on the meaning of the name Moses in Egyptian, and on the scope for new settlements in and around Jerusalem, this last based on an article from the Academy, dated 25 April Two days earlier Eliot had received a letter from Lady Emily Strangford giving concrete details of the possibility and problems of a Palestinian settlement (the letter is cited in the notebook and is also available from Eliot s extant correspondence). This configuration of references shows the genesis of the novel in a light quite different from that of the linear writing process to which Eliot had irrevocably committed herself by the end of The gambling episode which will form the dramatic prelude to the book s action and which carries many of its motifs (calculation, probability, hazard, even superstition) is juxtaposed with the idea which will ground the denouement of the novel: the dream of a Jewish return to Palestine. The whole narrative structure will rest on these two points, and it is no doubt significant that Disraeli s Jewish fiction provided a kind of subtext against which Eliot s conception developed: as a Jew who had, par excellence, become fully assimilated into English culture, having been elected Prime Minister in February 1874, Disraeli was the emblem of a politics of the Jewish presence in Victorian society. Reception The first readers of the early instalments of Daniel Deronda were unanimously enthusiastic. Reviewing Book I on 24 February 1876, Henry James whose own laurels rested chiefly on Roderick Hudson at that stage quotes Klesmer s phrase the sense of the universal (see Chapter 5) and goes on: 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 it gives us the feeling that the threads of the 9

10 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. 6 The metaphor is derived from the rapidly developing technology of communication (referred to more than once in the novel itself) and powerfully conveys the combination of spiritual fervour and scientific optimism in Eliot s outlook. The sales figures show that she soon had the general public hooked too. The new novel looked set to outstrip Middlemarch as readers all over the country not to mention abroad waited anxiously for the next instalment and heatedly discussed the possible outcomes of the plot. As she wrote the later part of the novel, Eliot held this immense power in her hands, the power to satisfy or disappoint. She took it, and used it in what was to be a last fling, hazarding her unparalleled reputation in order to stretch her readers minds in a direction they could not have foreseen. The story of the novel s reception from that point on is notorious. As the references to Jewish characters and culture emerge, the responses become more ambivalent. John Blackwood s first impression was that That Jew boy [Jacob] is a little marvel, but he found Mordecai harder to swallow. On 27 February 1876 Lewes wrote to him, All along this has been her vision of the effect which the presentation of the Jewish ideal would have; and I have vainly combated it. But whether it is liked or disliked do it she must and will ; in the privacy of his journal for 12 April 1876, Lewes remarked: The Jewish element seems to me likely to satisfy nobody. Blackwood diplomatically revised his opinion, but the prejudice in his tone remains palpable. The public went on reading; sales remained excellent; George Eliot was making a good deal of money. On 7 September 1876 Blackwood wrote to her: It is almost impossible to make a strong Jewish element popular in this country and it was perfectly marvellous to see how in your transitions you kept your public together. Anti-Jews grumbled but went on. The reference to the novel s transitions is significant: by means of suspense, and the brilliant intertwining of the English and the Jewish strands of the narrative, Eliot forces even the most prejudiced reader to persevere. Yet the friction is evident. By 25 November Blackwood was writing to Lewes: The Jews should be the most interesting people in the world, but even her magic pen cannot at once make them a popular element in a Novel. The discussion however goes on and the power she has expended on the despised element will tell and force its way. And in February 1877, in a letter to Edward Dowden, who subsequently published a sympathetic review comparing Middlemarch with Daniel Deronda, Lewes quotes a particularly crude anti-semitic response to the novel, and adds the remark that I have used for the epigraph to this Introduction. Henry James s satirical Conversation of December 1876 shows that his view of the novel was now more ambivalent: three upper-class voices are heard, one unequivocally anti-semitic, one favourable to the novel, and the third (the only male voice, usually equated with James himself) adopting a guarded position somewhere in between. But the English reception of the novel is perhaps most lucidly anticipated in the last chapters of Daniel Deronda itself, those where Daniel s identity, his 10

11 engagement to Mirah, and his commitment to the cause of a Jewish national home finally become known to the other characters: the conversation between Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger in Chapter 69, and above all, later in the same chapter, the utterly frustrated look with which Gwendolen meets his ultimate confession. Surely that can t be the long-awaited outcome of Eliot s charming novel about English ladies and gentlemen? The acceptance of Daniel s romance by the Meyrick girls in the final chapter provides a mild but still satirical antidote. Virtually all of the novel s English reviewers followed suit, at best damning with faint praise the Jewish part of the story and calling into question the portrayal of Daniel (boring, priggish, too feminine, and so on). Many of them construct aesthetic arguments based on the violent contrast between the different parts of the plot: F.R. Leavis s famous judgement that the obviously bad Jewish episodes should simply be cut out, leaving a novel to be renamed Gwendolen Harleth, is only the most celebrated example of a critical reflex which is still apparent however carefully disguised in many readings of our own day. It is particularly shocking that Leavis, who claimed the moral high ground, should have sponsored such a reading in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Rather than giving more space to inveterately English readings, it is instructive to retrace the Jewish response. As early as 21 July 1876 the Jewish Chronicle printed an enthusiastic review of the novel. On 2 September Eliot received a letter from the Deputy Chief Rabbi Dr Hermann Adler, expressing his warm appreciation of the fidelity with which some of the best traits of the Jewish character have been depicted and enclosing a clipping from the Jewish Chronicle. A similar letter followed later in the month from Chaim Guedalla, another leader of the Jewish community in London, this time enclosing a pamphlet summarizing recent discussions of the possibility of raising Turkish finance for a Jewish colony in Palestine. Eliot was delighted to find that these discussions had been taking place at about the time she had been composing the Hand and Banner scene (Chapter 42). On 1 October Guedalla wrote again, mentioning that his translation into Hebrew of this scene had appeared in a Jewish newspaper in Lemberg. The Gentlemen s Magazine of that same month printed another English review, by R.E. Francillon, which was highly favourable but still presented Mordecai as merely instrumental to the true Romance of Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda. In the November issue of the same magazine James Picciotto focuses on the Jewish element: there is far greater purpose in Daniel Deronda than the tale of a woman s life and the development of her soul. It is the vindication of a long maligned race against ignorant misrepresentation or wilful aspersion. 7 Picciotto is, incidentally, the first critic to allude to a problem which has much exercised recent commentators: It is singular, he says, that [Deronda] should never have suspected his origin, which ought to have left visible traces. Given that Daniel was born into a family of orthodox Jews, he would presumably have been circumcised: how then could he not have guessed that he was a Jew? 8 Other testimonies from English Jews followed towards the end of Adler delivered a lecture on Daniel Deronda, and an exchange of letters between George Eliot and Benisch, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, shows that Eliot was beginning to feel that her work might have an effect in encouraging Jewish aspirations to a 11

12 national home. There were further Jewish reviews in English magazines: Joseph Jacobs, for example, claims that George Eliot has hazarded and at least temporarily lost success for her most elaborated production by endeavouring to battle with the commonplace and conventional ideas about Judaism ; he compares Deronda to the great Galilean Pharisee, and argues that the successful treatment of a great world-problem would seem to be an advance on [Eliot s] previous studies of village life (Macmillan s Magazine, June 1877). 9 But weightier approval was given by David Kaufmann, of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Budapest, who sent Eliot a copy of his extended commentary on Daniel Deronda in German. In her reply she thanks him, among other things, for his clear perception of the relation between the presentation of the Jewish element and those of English Social Life (letter of 30 May 1877). She wrote to him again on 12 October, saying that his essay had been translated into English and was to be published by Blackwood; it appeared in 1878 under the title George Eliot and Judaism and was reprinted the following year. Kaufmann s analysis is detailed and perceptive according to any criterion; it also makes the point, awkwardly stated by Jacobs, that Eliot s good faith in representing Jews and Jewish culture is proved by the attacks of her critics. But it is a landmark above all because together with Guedalla s fragment of translation it inaugurates the reception of Daniel Deronda among Jews outside England. Shmuel Werses has usefully outlined this aspect of the novel s history in an article of 1976 (see Further Reading) which is no doubt symptomatically never referred to. Initial responses were mixed, partly because Chaim Guedalla s interest in a Palestinian settlement was opposed by many orthodox Jews. But Daniel Deronda nevertheless continued to reach non-english Jewish readers, first in a rather turgid German translation, then in a Hebrew version of the Jewish episodes only; it is no doubt significant also that a French translation, published in Paris in 1882, was the work of a Jewish writer. The first extended Hebrew translation, by David Frischmann, was begun in 1887 and completed in 1893; even that version made substantial cuts in the Gentile part of the novel. It was reprinted in 1914 and 1924, and abridged versions for children were published. Frischmann s translation was used as the basis for Mordecai Ben Hillel Hacohen s essay Israel and Its Land in Fiction, published in instalments in the monthly Ha- Shilo ab in 1899 and Hacohen s reading provides an ironic perspective on the English critics desire for a Deronda without the Jewish bits (I quote from Werses s account): Half of the story of Daniel Deronda does not derive from the visions and life of the Jews. Nearly all the first part and many chapters in the other parts have nothing to do with the great idea, the cornerstone of the story, or with Mordecai. They deal with the life of Englishmen, whose connections with Mirah and Deronda are weak and seem artificial. If someone were to excise from this story all the chapters which tell of these Gentiles who have almost nothing to do with its main theme and basic idea, and to leave only those chapters [concerning the life of Jews], the story would lack almost nothing. This is an extraordinary and revealing reversal, fifty years in advance, of Leavis s position. Large numbers of Jews in Germany and eastern Europe were thus reading a version 12

13 of the novel for seventy years after its first publication. They associated it with the dream of a national home, which began to take more concrete form in the 1890s with the establishment of the European Zionist movement. But it seems clear that the success of the novel among these readers was not exclusively political; nor was it merely due to the fact that a leading Gentile writer had for once said some nice things about Jews. Most of them can have had only a vague conception of the novel s author and her cultural milieu. Instead, they translated what they recognized and found it absorbing as literature. The popularity of the novel with Jewish readers, especially non-english ones, makes it difficult to argue that the parts dealing with Jewish life and culture are aesthetically weak, an argument usually resorted to by those who would like to salvage from Daniel Deronda a worthy successor to Jane Austen s novels without appearing to be ethnically prejudiced. The evidence might, it is true, seem to confirm the view that the novel falls into two separate parts, each appealing to different tastes and different cultural norms; but that would be to accept the least demanding reading (on both sides), whereas patently the point of the novel is to make unusual demands on the reader. Daniel Deronda represents cultural difference in the most palpable way, but it also represents a movement across the frontier of that difference. It is only by attempting to follow that movement, in its fullest and most problematic implications, that one can hope to do justice to the work, whether as a landmark of Victorian culture or as a complex narrative still capable of delivering meanings to readers in our own day. Context Even the most summary review of the intellectual and political context from which the novel emerged reveals a cultural divide that runs not between the English and the Jewish perspectives but between late twentieth-century ways of thinking and the mental world of George Eliot. One need only read, say, the chapter entitled Hebraism and Hellenism in Matthew Arnold s Culture and Anarchy, published in the heyday of George Eliot s career (1868), to appreciate the strangeness of that landscape. Arnold s quasi-allegorical personification of two opposed strands in English culture (manful battling with sin versus the sweetness and light of rational thought), his belief in the possibility of human moral development (the word is a key one in this period), and his assertion that Darwinian science has proved the well-foundedness of racial typology may strike us as slightly odd or archaic, but they are all relevant to what George Eliot was trying to do in Daniel Deronda. Another useful co-ordinate is Eliot s own poem O may I join the choir invisible, or better still (though much more labour-intensive) her dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy, written between 1864 and 1868, which features a young woman brought up by Spanish nobles who discovers that she is the daughter of a gypsy chief. The subsequent action turns on the conflict between ethnic inheritance and amorous passion: the girl sticks with her father, while her lover, who tries to join the gypsies for her sake, eventually finds that he has his own ethnic priorities. Daniel Deronda s trajectory will be very precisely the reverse of this character s. 13

14 George Eliot s interest in the history of religions stretches back to a much earlier stage in her life. On her first visit to London at the age of twenty, she is said to have treated herself to a copy of Josephus s History of the Jews. Her translations of Strauss s Life of Jesus (published 1846) and Feuerbach s Essence of Christianity (1854) made her thoroughly familiar, before she wrote any fiction at all, with one of the most crucial aspects of nineteenth-century European thought, namely the attempt to reinterpret the Christian religion and its Jewish ancestry as a purely secular phenomenon as history of culture or anthropology rather than as theology. In the intellectual circles to which George Eliot belonged from her Westminster Review days onwards, and which included leading thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, these interests converged with the ideas of the French positivist Augusts Comte. Comte rejected theology and metaphysics as phenomena belonging to earlier stages in human development and elaborated a system of thought based entirely on scientifically observable phenomena. In common with many other mid-nineteenth-century thinkers, he took a highly optimistic view of the development of human thought and society, and in the later part of his career (after 1842) he attempted to present his philosophy as a secular religion based on the worship of Humanity. For Eliot, as for Arnold, such a belief found its corroboration in Darwin s theories, which were vigorously debated in her lifetime (she and Lewes were also on visiting terms with the Darwins in the 1870s): the gradual evolution of species in the natural world gave reason to believe that the human species too was evolving towards higher forms, and that the differentiation of human races was instrumental in this development. 10 The nineteenth century was also a time of intensive interest in the common forms of human experience lying beneath the proliferation of cultural and linguistic variants. Philologists sought to reconstruct the archaic Indo-European language from which the modern languages sprang; German scholars compiled folk-stories and myths and compared them in ways that anticipate Frazer s The Golden Bough and Jung s theory of a collective unconscious. George Eliot s notebooks show her pursuing etymologies, comparing Celtic and Norse myths, and moving freely aided by her formidable linguistic skills as well as her powers of intellectual synthesis between forms of religious belief which she perceived as analogous. It is important to bear this in mind in order to appreciate the relative position that her study of Judaism occupies in her intellectual landscape; many of the cultural allusions in Daniel Deronda which appear to be secondary or merely adventitious have a function within this wider constellation of reflections on human culture and its development. The Jewish Christian genealogy is none the less crucial to her way of imagining culture, not least of course because it touched on highly controversial social and political issues of the period. The notebooks again show Eliot calculating the total Jewish population of the world and its distribution; the number of Jews in England increased rapidly in the later nineteenth century, partly as a result of a population explosion in the poorer sections of society, partly also because of an influx of Jews from eastern Europe, although this did not reach its peak during Eliot s lifetime. Successive reform measures had given Jews the right to vote and other freedoms; in legislation was introduced opening lay university posts to men of all faiths. 11 Yet prejudice and (at best) patronizing tolerance were standard reflexes in English 14

15 society, as one can see from John Blackwood s letters, and even from Lewes s. Much earlier, in her notorious letter to John Sibree, Eliot herself had claimed that The fellowship of race is so evidently an inferior impulse which must ultimately be superseded that I wonder that even [Disraeli], Jew as he is, dares to boast of it, adding that Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade. This reflex, self-consciously outrageous and provoked partly by an allergy to Disraeli s fiction, is underpinned by the crude evolutionist notion that sharply individualized races are destined either to die out or to fuse with others for physical and moral ends. Later perhaps already by November 1854 when she and Lewes attended a performance of Lessing s pro-jewish play Nathan der Weise in Berlin her intellectual interest in the history of religions led her towards very different conclusions. A major catalyst in this change was her friendship with the Jewish scholar and librarian Emanuel Deutsch, whom she and Lewes first met in Deutsch s learning encompassed not only Judaism and Christianity but also Islam and other religions; his controversial article on the Talmud, which he sent to Eliot in proof in August 1867, is in fact a study in comparative religions, and he wrote an article on Islam for the Quarterly Review in October A letter from Eliot to Deutsch, thought to have been written in December of that year, expresses gratitude for his offer to visit her weekly, probably for instruction in Hebrew: the notebooks of the 1870s contain copious notes on Hebrew grammar and vocabulary. Deutsch was also connected with the project for the development of Jewish settlements in Palestine, which was already being discussed long before Daniel Deronda was conceived. On 27 May 1870, during a visit to Oxford, Eliot went to a meeting of the Palestine Exploration Society: Captain Warren, conductor of the Exploration at Jerusalem, read a paper, and then Mr Deutsch gave an account of the interpretation, as hitherto arrived at, of the Moabite Stone (Journal, May 1870). In the spring of 1869 Deutsch had himself travelled to Palestine; in 1872, fatally ill with cancer, he planned a second visit, but died in Alexandria in May Towards the end of that year, Eliot wrote: All the great religions of the world historically considered, are rightly the objects of deep reverence and sympathy they are the record of spiritual struggles which are the types of our own. This is to me pre-eminently true of Hebrewism and Christianity, on which my own youth was nourished (letter of 19 October 1873 to John Walter Cross) Deutsch s painful destiny must have represented for Eliot a highly individualized form of Jewish experience: his profound learning, his modest background, the failure of his employers and the public to recognize his qualities, and the drama of his death while travelling towards the Holy Land should not be associated with any single character in Daniel Deronda (although some inevitably compared him with Mordecai), but undoubtedly provided a powerful imaginative source for the novel s conception. 12 Two often quoted letters to the American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom s Cabin had raised difficult ethnic issues, allow one to calibrate Eliot s professed views in this phase of her career. The first, dated 8 May 1869, makes a grand Comtian gesture, but one in which the note of sympathy is struck: 15

16 I believe that religion too has to be modified developed, according to the dominant phrase and that a religion more perfect than any yet prevalent, must express less care for personal consolation, and a more deeply-awing sense of responsibility to man, springing from sympathy with that which of all things is most certainly known to us, the difficulty of the human lot. The second, written on 29 October 1876 when Daniel Deronda was already in the public domain, castigates the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews : I therefore felt urged to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature and knowledge could attain to. Moreover, not only towards the Jews, but towards all oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has become a national disgrace to us But towards the Hebrews we western people who have been reared in Christianity, have a peculiar debt and, whether we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religious and moral sentiment. 13 The momentum of George Eliot s interest in Judaism was to continue until virtually the end of her life. On 12 October 1876 Lewes reported that she was absorbed in her Hebrew literature, and her crusading essay against anti-jewish prejudice, The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep! in the Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), provides a very precise indication of the scope and the limitations of her anti-racist arguments. 14 Daniel Deronda presupposes the view that the positivist Utopia, in which all humankind would recognize and obey universal principles, was still a long way off, and that development could only come about through the action of individuals, grounded in distinct national and cultural traditions. Eliot was scornful of liberals, of the assumption that systematic egalitarianism would cure all ills. She put her faith in the values of family solidarity and cultural inheritance: her representation of the Cohen family, patronizing and stereotyped as it might seem to a modern eye, encodes these values, and the brash pawnbroker provides a refuge for the prophetic spirit of Mordecai. For the same reason, as the Hand and Banner episode shows, the emphasis of the book is firmly in favour of ethnic identity and against assimilation, or what we would call the melting-pot (the argument attributed to Klesmer in Chapter 22 and to Gideon in Chapter 42). Although she admired the poetry of the converted Jew Heinrich Heine and the philosophy of the rationalist Jew Spinoza, Eliot put her stakes in the end on the proto-zionist movement as the only way in which the values of Judaism could be preserved, not only for the Jews but also for humanity. That she was wholly unaware of the political and ethical problem of the displacement of the Palestinian peoples is a blindness which we may reasonably censure, but which was conditioned by the assumptions of the day: Palestine was perceived as a poor, under-populated country, inured to centuries of rule by a power that was now bankrupt and inefficient. Like other writers of her period, she was struck by the meteoric rise to nationhood of Italy after centuries of fragmentation and subjection, and by the pan-slavic movements which continue to reverberate today. Besides, in both Daniel Deronda and The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep! there are signs that she at least recognized the question of the indigenous people of Palestine. More importantly, perhaps, she scathingly censures the imperialist habit of the English diaspora: we do not call ourselves a dispersed and a punished people: we are a colonizing people, and it is we who have punished others 16

17 (Theophrastus, p. 64). Exploitative misrule in the West Indies is referred to more than once in the novel, and is associated in a particularly significant passage with Grandcourt s behaviour: If this white-handed man with the perpendicular profile had been sent to govern a difficult colony, he might have won reputation among his contemporaries. He had certainly ability, would have understood that it was safer to exterminate than to cajole superseded proprietors, and would not have flinched from making things safe in that way. (pp ) As it is, his tyranny is exercised on women, dogs, horses and sailing-boats; but once the connection is made, one can see as so often in Daniel Deronda that the domestic sphere is inseparable from the theatre of history. It does no service to George Eliot to try to prove that her attitudes conform to the ethics of the late twentieth century. A sense of distaste for certain aspects of Jewish life shows through in both Darnel Deronda and Theophrastus, chiefly those which London Jews shared with the proletaries. She was something of a recluse in the later part of her life, and her researches did not include renting a back room in an East End pawnshop. Historically, what is interesting is the exact calibration of these attitudes on the scale of possibilities open to an informed mind of the 1870s. For readers of Daniel Deronda, the question takes a slightly different form. Leavis s move shows that Eliot s last novel could only be admitted to the canon (the Great Tradition ) if it were mutilated. Reversing that move, we can see that she risked exclusion, turned her back on canonization, in order to try to force readers out of their reassuringly English assumptions. The importance of Daniel Deronda is that it challenges and disrupts the canon at every level social, ideological and formal. 15 Romance and Realism On a first reading, Daniel Deronda is the most accessible of novels, needing no commentary or apology. It is also one of the most moving, especially if one can suspend the ingrained twentieth-century habit of irony, the fear of open expressions of emotion. Do we have to behave like the anaemic English characters who titter at Klesmer and patronize the little Jewess Mirah? If the novel could make Blackwood weep, why should the modern reader not weep too? That is the first and most helpful response to the so-called problem of the Jewish episodes, which require a more immediate sensibility than most of us are used to; and it also removes some primary objections to the complex and experimental character of the plot. Yet it is also helpful to see why readers have had problems at this level. Francillon found Daniel Deronda so disconcerting that it was like reading an entirely new kind of novel by an unknown writer, while Edward Dowden s major review of February 1877 compares Eliot s novel with the later sonatas of Beethoven, the later landscapes of Turner, and Shakespeare s later plays, so compressed, so complex, so live with breeding imagery. 16 This last reference contains a valuable clue. Shakespeare s late plays were romances; their plots are multi-layered, they rely on extraordinary coincidences and quasi-miraculous happenings, and they culminate in spectacular recognition scenes. 17

18 The scene in The Winter s Tale where Hermione s statue comes to life and she is restored to her husband and daughter is directly evoked in Chapter 6 of Daniel Deronda, although its movement is reversed (the daughter Gwendolen freezes when the music sounds and the ghastly painting is revealed). Notebook 711 contains a key quotation from this scene, another quotation from the play is used as the epigraph for Chapter 31, and Daniel s encounter with his mother in Chapters 51 and 53 may also be read as a kind of inversion of Hermione s return to life. 17 The novel is in fact strewn with references to romance and analogous forms of fiction. The Meyrick girls read the story of Mirah and Daniel as a romance, drawing on their knowledge of Scott s Ivanhoe and the Arabian Nights. Tasso s Gerusalemme liberata, a crusading epic heavily influenced by romance, provides one of the many literary leitmotifs for the novel s action. Deronda s uncertainty about his genealogy, which inaugurates his narrative in the flashback of Chapter 16, is a classic feature of romance narrative, and in Chapter 41, which opens the book entitled Revelations, it surfaces again as he approaches the great sequence of recognitions which will establish his identity and provide him with a destiny: That young energy and spirit of adventure which have helped to create the world-wide legends of youthful heroes going to seek the hidden tokens of their birth and its inheritance of tasks, gave him a certain quivering interest in the bare possibility that he was entering on a like track all the more because the track was one of thought as well as action, (p. 515) Eliot s conscious transformation of an ancient narrative structure runs parallel to her interest in the history of religions and myths. Believing that such imaginative forms are expressions of deeply rooted human impulses, she secularizes them so that they assume the guise of everyday modern life while retaining their age-old psychological power. It is also not an accident that the epigraph for Chapter 41 is a quotation from Aristotle s Poetics defending improbability in tragedy and epic. On 22 May 1873, when the conception of a new novel was about to crystallize in Eliot s mind, she wrote in her journal: I am just finishing again Aristotle s Poetics, which I first read in The European tradition of poetics was clearly present to her as a shaping force, helping her to place the forms she was using, not in terms of the neoclassical aesthetic usually associated with the Poetics, but in relation to their historical and intellectual genealogy. Thus, too, the epigraph to Chapter 1 cites one of the best-known topoi of poetics, the in medias res of Horace s Ars poetica, and re-reads it with the help of nineteenth-century scientific ideas. 18 This inaugural epigraph has many ramifications. It becomes connected with the gambling motif and the calculation of probabilities in that sense; together with the questions of the novel s opening paragraph, it evokes the indeterminate relationship between psychology and action, the sense that many outcomes are possible for any given combination of character and situation; and at the formal level it heralds the use of a romance structure. The beginning of a narrative in medias res usually implies a flashback at some later point (the classic instance is Ulysses narrative in Books IX XII of the Odyssey), but in European romance of the early modern period this technique was given a spectacular twist Critics and writers were fascinated by the 18

19 Aethiopica of the late Greek writer Heliodorus, in which the initial scene presents the reader with an enigma: the characters are not named, and their pre-histories, which are essential to the understanding of this narrative moment, are not provided until much later. Likewise, Daniel Deronda opens with the meeting of two enigmatic characters in a dramatic situation; after the first two chapters the narrative retraces the fortunes first of Gwendolen, then of Daniel, and only moves forward again in Chapter 21. Eliot thus creates a powerful interplay of ignorance and knowledge, both within the novel and between the novel and its readers. There is another connection here with the tradition of poetics, since Aristotle defines recognition as a shift from ignorance to knowledge, and the lengthy epigraph to Chapter 21 develops precisely this theme. Once again, however, these are not merely formal questions. Time and history, error and truth, interpretation and misinterpretation, are essential themes of the novel, and the narrative structure problematizes the relationship of history to event, of everyday chronology to the deeper processes of human development. It has been suggested that the abrupt opening, the fracturing of temporal and spatial continuity, and the repeated instances of coincidence and fulfilled visions mark George Eliot s departure from the realist novel (David, p. 184). This was recognized, once again, by Eliot s earliest commentators, especially Francillon and Picciotto. It is worth quoting Francillon at length: George Eliot has not only adopted the spirit of romance but its forms nay, often its common and conventional forms, and that with deliberate preference and intention [ ] The direct, uncompromising adaptation of the spirit and form of the romance to a novel of our own time by the author of Middlemarch is in itself a striking and daring, perhaps hazardous experiment in the art of fiction [ ] one striking feature of Daniel Deronda is that it is not only George Eliot s first romance, but the first novel in which she has either taken our own day for her date, or the class of whom most novel readers have most personal experience excluding prophets and pawnbrokers for her dramatis personae. 19 The realism of the middle- and upper-class English novel is marked from an early stage in its history by a satirical rejection of romance. Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey has to learn not to read life like a romance; Emma Woodhouse s narrative fantasies are exploded when Harriet Smith turns out to be the daughter of a tradesman, not a nobleman. Romance elements are certainly present in Eliot s earlier novels the foundling Eppie in Silas Marner, Esther in Felix Holt and there are quasi-supernatural coincidences, like the portents of Adam Bede s father s death and the seizure which allows the infant Eppie to appear to Marner as a miraculous replacement for the gold he has lost. These elements are, however, firmly contained within the framework of everyday English life, and Eliot s fans would naturally have expected her to continue in the same vein. She reinforces their expectation, not only by the setting of the first three or four books, which give predominance to Gwendolen s story and thus to English society, but also by choosing for the first time in her career to place her fictional chronology comfortably within her reader s memory span. But she reinforces it in order to supersede it, reversing Jane Austen s suggestion that romance is childish, a story to be grown out of. The readers of Daniel Deronda have to learn all over again to read romance, but to read it through, and not against, realism; or, perhaps better, to read it as an evolved or developed form of narrative, fusing elements from previous narrative modes. 19