Grandcourt is portrayed before us in more massive and simple proportions as a type of concentrated selfishness. We dare not despise him, we cannot loathe him—we stand bowed and awe-stricken before him. He never for a moment falls from that calm dignity of pride and self-isolation—never for a moment softens into respect for anything without himself. Without a moment’s exception he is ever consistent, imperturbable in his self-containedness, ruthlessly crushing all things from dog to wife, under his calm, cold, slighting contempt. He stands up before us, not so much indomitable as simply unassailable. We cannot conceive the boldest approaching or encroaching on him—all equally shiver and quail before that embodiment of the devil as represented by human self-love.
Fain would we linger over the Jewish girl, Mirah. She has been spoken of as characterless; to us it seems as if few characters of more exquisite loveliness
have ever been portrayed. From her first appearance robed in her meek despair, through all her subsequent relations with Deronda, her brother, and Gwendolen, there is the same delicate purity, the same tender meekness, the same full acceptance of the life of a Jewess as—in harmony with the life of her race—one of “sufferance.” Even as her spirits gladden in that sunny Meyrick home, with its delicious interiors, and brighten under the noble-hearted musician Klesmer’s encouragement, the brightness refers to something entirely without herself. In one sense far more acquainted with the evil that is in the world than Gwendolen with all her alleged worldliness, it is her shrinking from the least approach to this that prompts her strange, apparently hopeless flight in search of the mother she had loved so dearly. Her sad, humble complaints that she has not been a good Jewess, because she has been inevitably cut off from the use of Jewish books, and restrained by her scoundrel father from attendance at Jewish worship, find their answer in her deep unfailing sense of her share in the national doom of suffering. We feel with Mrs Meyrick “that she is a pearl, and the mud has only washed her.” In her startling interview with Gwendolen, the sudden indignant protest which the inquiry of the latter calls out is a protest against even a hint of evil being directed towards that which has been best and highest to her. Her love for Deronda steals into the maiden purity of her soul with an unconscious
delicacy which cannot be surpassed; and as she parts from us by his side, we feel that she is no Judith or Esther, but the meek Mary of the annunciation, going forth on her unknown mission of love with the words, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”
Beside the exquisitely meek child-figure, with the small delicate head faintly drooping under the sorrow which is the heritage of her race, stands up Deronda in his calm dignity. As he lies on the grass, and the first faint glimmering of the possible origin of his life breaks upon him, even the first inevitable risings of resentment against Sir Hugo are softened and toned down by the old yearning affection; and the longings for the unknown mother, intense as they are, yet shrink from full discovery of what she may have been or may still be. He and he alone, in unconscious dignity, stands up uncowering before Grandcourt. His whole relations to Mordecai are characterised by a deep suppressed enthusiasm, that fully responds to the enthusiast’s soul. Towards Gwendolen every word he speaks, every act he does, is marked by the fervour of his whole nature; but it is beside the fair head drooping under its burden of hereditary sorrow that Deronda passes from our sight, the fitting type of him who shall yet, sooner or later, re-establish that great Jewish theocracy so long dreamt of, and reaffirm that Judaism yet holds a great place in human life and civilisation.
We have throughout had no intention of dealing
with George Eliot merely as the artist; but if we have succeeded in showing this unity of moral purpose and aim as pervading all her works, as giving rise to their variety by reason of the varieties and modifications it necessitates in order to its full illustration, and as ministered to, directly or indirectly, by all the accessory characters and incidents of these creations,—the question naturally arises, whether this does not constitute her an artist of the highest possible order.
But the true worth of George Eliot’s works rests, we think, on higher grounds than any mere perfection of artistic finish; on this ground, specially, that among all our fictionists she stands out as the deepest, broadest, and most catholic illustrator of the true ethics of Christianity; the most earnest and persistent expositor of the true doctrine of the Cross, that we are born and should live to something higher than the love of happiness; the most subtle and profound commentator on the solemn words, “He that loveth his soul shall lose it: he that hateth his soul shall keep it unto life eternal.”
Footnotes:
[{15}] The translators of our English Bible, possibly perplexed by the seeming paradox involved in these remarkable words, have taken an unwarrantable freedom with the original, in rendering the Greek ψυχη, invariably the synonym of the soul, the spiritual and undying element in man, by “life”—the ζωη of all Greek literature so-called, sacred and profane alike; the synonym of that life which is his in common with the beast of the field and the tree of the forest.