THE HERO OF "DANIEL DERONDA."
WE quite agree as yet with Sir Hugo Mellinger, when, looking " at men and society from a liberal-menagerie point of view," he piques himself on the difficulty of classifying his adopted (or possibly his own) son, Daniel Deronda, and describes the young man, to himself at least, in words like these :—" You see this fine young fellow,—not such as you see every day, is he ?—he belongs to me in a sort of way ; I brought him up from a child, but you would not ticket him off easily ; he has notions of his own, and he's as far as the poles asunder from what I was at his age." It would be very difficult to ticket off Daniel Deronda ; and it would do a certain amount of credit to the classifying power of the men of science attached to the "Liberal menagerie" if they could give any clear account of him. And yet it is not for want of study on the part of the great writer who has chosen him for her hero. He is much the most-described young gentleman with whom we have ever had to deal in her stories. We suspect he is still a bit of a problem to the author herself. She can't study him enough, and almost always leaves us with the feeling that there was something behind which she wanted to say of him, and had not been able quite to find the right word for. No doubt the chief feature of his character is intended to be a warm sympathy and receptiveness, much enhanced by reflecting on his own ambigu- ous position in the world, and by a sense of wrong diverted by an intense natural generosity into an eager desire to enter into the sufferings of others, instead of to resent or revenge his own. Al- ready this high chivalry of nature has found four objects on which to lavish sympathy,—the poor artist fellow-student whose studies Deronda helped at the cost of his own chance of a scholarship ; the despairing Jewess, whom he saved from drowning herself in the Thames ; the spoiled girl whom he first saw gambling at Leubronn, and afterwards finds betrothed, and later, married to the cold and cruel Grandcourt ; and finally, the consumptive Jewish poet, or thinker, or both, who, in his tete-excites dreams, fastens on Deronda as the man who may inherit his ideas, and thus rescue his thoughts from the grave, in which they might otherwise be buried with him. To struggling art, to hopeless misery, to sin touched with any gleam of remorse or regret, and to the enthusiasm of pure intellectual passion, Deronda is painted as extending with equal readiness his ardent and tender sympathy, and yet as feel- ing a certain irritation when people look upon him as so purely disinterested that they cannot even impute to him selfish hopes of his own, in connection with any of his chivalric enterprises. Thus Hans Meyrick's mode of regarding Deronda as if he were quite out of the field when speaking of his own love for the pretty Jewess, Mirah Cohen, rouses a deep feeling of annoyance in the chivalric young hero, whose character had hitherto been painted as having almost too conscientious a tolerance for all courses of action which might seem likely to interfere with his own views. But barring this little touch, and, of course, the high morale which makes him turn in disgust from forms of evil in which there is no sign of relenting or remorse, the difficulty of catching the character is the difficulty of getting any distinct impression of wax, or any other substance which takes any mould impressed upon it. It is not easy as yet to see exactly, what he is, on any of the sides on which he is so lavish of his heartfelt sympathy. His views on art are tentative and very un- defined; his attitude towards the beautiful little Jewess he has saved from drowning is uncertain, and even in carrying out her own wish to discover her mother and brother, he is reluctant and hesitating ; his moral help to Gwendolen, in her errors and sins, cordially as it is given, is of the very vaguest character ; and whether or not he has any convictions of his own which will prevent him from taking the impress of Mordecai's musings, and attempting to expound and publish them to the world, is as yet as great a question for the reader as it ever could have been for the man himself. George Eliot has rarely spent more pains on any character, but except its disinterestedness, its large receptiveness, and its moral elevation, we find, as yet, little or no individuality in it. We have not been told what Mordecai' s
ideas are, and of course, therefore, we could not, even in any case,—even if Deronda had been ever so clearly defined,—know whether or not they would have any fascination for him. But we have so little notion of Deronda's own intellectual nature that, as far as we know, he might be accessible to any Neo-Jewish or other theosophic ideas, which had on them a clear impress of moral grandeur, no matter what they were.
And it is the same with his ethical notions. When G-wendolen, smarting under the sense that she had done a great wrong to Grandeourt's mistress, Mrs. Glasher, in marrying Grandcourt with the full knowledge of the poor woman's claims and the claims of her • children upon him, appeals to Deronda for help in atoning for the-wrong in any way she may, his counsel is of the vaguest. In a farmer conversation, he had told her that "affection is the broadest basis of good in life," and that the objects of all deep affections are generally not exactly real persons, but "a mixture, half-persons and half -ideas,"—by which, we suppose, he meant that idealised persons,—persons regarded in the light of the
highest characteristics they are capable of suggesting,—are the
true objects of the highest affection. When afterwards the question is put more directly what one who has never been "fond of people,"—as poor Gwendolen confesses that she never has been, except of her mother,—can do to atone in any way for a great wrong, Deronda's only advice is to enlarge her knowledge, and with her knowledge, her sympathy with the world. "It is the curse of your life,—forgive me,—of so many lives; that all passion is spent in a narrow round, for want of ideas and sym- pathies to make a larger home for it." Gwendolen objects that she is "frightened at everything," "at herself," and Deronda replies, "Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed on the idea of increasing that remorse, which is so bitter to you.
Fixed meditation may do a great deal towards defining our longing or dread. We are not always in a state of strong emotion, and when we are calm, we can use our memories, and gradually change
the bias of our fear, as we do our tastes. Take your fear as a safe- guard. It is like quickness of hearing. It may make consequences passionately present to you. Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision." Both bits of advice,
—both that as to extending the range of knowledge, and so of her sympathies, and that as to making her fear of herself and her own rash acts a new power to appreciate the possible consequences of action,—are certainly good, so far as they go, but they do strike one as of the nature of the present of a stone to one who asks for bread. It was not want of knowledge which led Gwendolen wrong ; and even if a fuller sensibility to the consequences would have kept her right, her want of sensibility was not due to any deficiency of selfish fears ; indeed, the only tangible good that advice so vague and abstract could do her was, we suspect, the confidence its earnestness gave her in Deronda's sym- pathy, and the tendency it might have, therefore, to put before her mind an image of a nature,—half-personal, half-ideal, as Deronda himself had put it,—of a nobler kind than any to which she had accustomed herself. So far as specific moral direction was wanted by her, we fear there was none.
No doubt the noble vagueness and wax-like tentativeness of Deronda's character,—the vagueness and tentativeness which make him shrink from even choosing as yet any profession for himself,—is meant to be specially contrasted with Grandcourt's sterile, inert, and stony selfishness of imagination, and to sug- gest to the reader that there is something absolutely good in the plastic moral temperament, and absolutely evil in the impenetrability which shuts out with a sort of rigid snap all purposes but its own. In the fourth book, George Eliot has given us one of her subtlest sketches of Grandcourt, in his inert musings :-
"He spent the evening in the solitude of the smaller drawing-room, where, with various new publications on the table, of the kind a gentle- man may like to have at hand without touching, he employed himself (as a philosopher might have done) in sitting meditatively on a sofa and abstaining from literature—political, comic cynical, or romantic. In this way hours may pass surprisingly soon, without the arduous, in- visible chase of philosophy ; not from love of thought, but from hatred of effort—from a state of the inward world, something like premature ago, whore the need for action lapses into a mere image of what has been is and may or might be ; where impulse is born and dies in a phantasmal world, pausing in rejection even of a shadowy fulfilment. That is a condition which often comes with whitening hair; and some- times, too, an intense obstinacy and tenacity of rule, like the main trunk of an exorbitant egoism, conspicuous in proportion as the varied sus- ceptibilities of younger years are stripped away."
All that Grandcourt does, whether in relation to Lush, or to Mrs. Glasher, or to Gwendolen, is illastrative of this tenacious purpose and of this sterility of imagination which accompanies it. His slow. and low sentences give all who have to deal with him the sense of "as absolute a resistance as if their fingers had been pushing at a fast-shut iron door,"—and it is this dull fixity of purpose, as much almost as his utter selfishness, which is brought into contrast with Deronda's wide, and plastic, and ready sympathies. Grandoourt cannot even sympathise with poor Sir Hugo Mallinger's efforts to make the best of his not very fine stud of horses, and remarks that he does not call it riding, "to sit astride a set of brutes with every deformity under the sun ;"—which, in- deed, we suspect Mr. Grandcourt was too much of the conven- tional gentleman to say, under the circumstances, in Sir Hugo's presence, though he might have said it in his absence. Still, no doubt, the author attributes this insolent remark to him to make clearer his absolute incapacity to sympathise with any human being in the world ; and she illustrates the same incapacity in the masterly sketch of the scene with Mrs. Glasher, as well as in the fine scene where he forces Gwendolen to -wear the diamonds. Deronda, who is receptive towards every genuine feeling, and especi- ally to everyform of keen suffering, is painted as the very antithesis to Grandcourt, who is receptive only towards impressions which anyhow affect himself, and in regard to these is quick enough in his perceptions. Of course, the latter is ignoble, cruel, iron-hearted, generous in nothing but in money-giving where the conventional feelings of a gentleman are supposed to require it ; while the former is noble, generous, self-sacrificing. But the contrast is meant certainly to be not simply moral, but intellectual, and we cannot help fancying that the drift and suggestion of the story are,--that plasticity and receptiveness of nature are the root of the higher temper, while sterility, rigidity, and impenetrability of nature are the root of the lower temper. However that may be, it is certain that Grandcourt, though his insolence impresses us as exaggerated,—and affects us more as the insolence of a bad woman, than as the insolence of a bad man,— is much the more definite picture of the two ; and that Daniel Deronda runs the risk. of appearing to the end as little more than a wreath of moral mist,—a mere tentative, or rather group of ten- tatives, in character-conceiving, which the author may find it ex- ceedingly difficult to crystallise into a distinct form. Is not this to some extent the result indeed of George Eliot's philosophy, which has parted with all the old lines of principle, except the keen sympathy with every noble sentiment which she always betrays, and imported nothing new and definite in their places, except the vaguest hopes and aspirations ? We do not think that the higher class of characters, though they may well begin like Daniel Deronda's, can ever ripen into any high type, without far more power of rejecting the multiplied solicitings of all sorts of sympathies, and far more also of definite conviction, than anything-we have as yet seen in the picture of her new hero. Possibly, however, Mordecai's teaching is intended to crystallise the young man's mind into clear and vigorous purpose ; and we shall be eager to withdraw anything depreciatory in the present criticism, if that result should be achieved.
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