Seven years on the rack is no small test of the heroic temperament; to lie sick and solitary, stretched on a ‘mattress grave,’ the back bent and twisted, the legs paralysed, the hands powerless, and with the senses of sight and taste fast failing. At any time within that seven years Heine might well have gained the gold medal in capability of suffering for which, in his whimsical way, he talked of competing, should such a prize be offered at the Paris Exhibition.[15] And the long days, with ‘no pleasure in them,’ were so drearily many; the silver cord was so slowly loosed, the golden bowl seemed broken on the wheel. His very friends grew tired. ‘One must love one’s friends with all their failings, but it is a great failing to be ill,’ says Madame Sevigné, and, as the years went by, more and more deserted grew the sick-chamber. He never complained; his sweet, ungrudging nature found excuses for desertion and content in loneliness, in the reflection that he was in truth ‘unconscionably long a-dying.’ ‘Never have I seen,’ says Lady Duff-Gordon, in her Recollections of Heine, and she herself was no mean exemplar of bravely-borne pain, ‘never have I seen a man bear such horrible pain and misery in so perfectly unaffected a manner. He neither paraded his anguish, nor tried to conceal it, or to put on any stoical airs. He was pleased to see tears in my eyes, and then at once set to work to make me laugh heartily, which pleased him just as much.’
‘Don’t tell my wife,’ he exclaims one day, when a paroxysm that should have been fatal was not, and the doctor expressed what he meant for a reassuring belief, that it would not hasten the end. ‘Don’t tell my wife’—we seem to hear that sad little jest, so infinitely sadder than a moan, and our own eyes moisten. Perfectly upright geniuses, when suffering from dyspepsia, have not always shown as much consideration for their perfectly proper wives as does this ‘blackguard’ Heine, under torture, for his. It is conceivable that under exceptional circumstances a man may contrive to be a hero to his valet, but, unless he be truly heroic, he will not be able to keep up the character to his wife. Heine managed both. Madame Heine is still living,[16] and one may not say much of a love that was truly strong as death, and that the many waters of affliction could not quench. But the valet test, we may hint, was fulfilled; for the old servant who helped to tend him in that terrible illness lives still with Madame Heine, and cries ‘for company’ when the widow’s talk falls, as it falls often, on the days of her youth and her ‘pauvre Henri.’ There are traditional records in plenty of his cheerful courage, his patient unselfishness, his unfailing endurance of well-nigh unendurable pain. ‘Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son métier,’ the dying lips part to say, still with that sweet, inseparable smile playing about them. Shall man be more just than God? Shall we leave to Him for ever the monopoly of His métier?
DANIEL DERONDA AND HIS
JEWISH CRITICS
George Eliot and Judaism. An attempt to appreciate Daniel Deronda. By Professor David Kaufmann, of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Buda-Pesth. Translated from the German by J. W. Ferrier, 1877. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons.
The latest echo from the critical chorus which has greeted Daniel Deronda comes to us from Germany, in the form of a small book by Dr. Kaufmann, professor in the recently instituted Jewish Theological Seminary at Buda-Pesth. A certain prominence, which its very excellent translation into English confers upon this work, seems to be due less to any special or novel feature in its criticism than to the larger purpose shadowed forth in the title, ‘George Eliot and Judaism.’ It is advowedly ‘an attempt to appreciate Daniel Deronda,’ and is valuable and interesting to English society not as a critique on the plot or the characters of the book—on which points it strikes us, in more than one instance, as somewhat weak and one-sided—but as indicating from a Jewish standpoint in how far and how truly modern Judaism is therein represented. Unappreciative as the great mass of the reading public have shown themselves to the latest of George Eliot’s novels, the work has excited a considerable amount of curiosity and admiration on the ground of the intimate knowledge its author has evinced of the inner lives and of the little-read literature of the ‘Great Unknown of humanity.’ We think Dr. Kaufmann goes too far when he says, ‘The majority of readers view the world to which they are introduced in Daniel Deronda as one foreign, strange, and repulsive.... It is not only the Jew of flesh and blood whom men encounter every day upon the streets that they hate, but the Jew under whatever shape he may appear, and even the airy productions of the poet’s fancy are denounced when they venture to take that people as their subject’ (p. 92). We think this view concedes very much too much to prejudice; but it is undoubtedly a fact that the first serious attempt by a great writer to make Jews and Judaism the central interest of a great work, has produced a certain sense of discord on the public ear, and that criticism has for the most part run in the minor key. Mr. Swinburne, perhaps, strikes the most distinctly jarring chord, when, in his lately published ‘Note on Charlotte Brontë,’ he owns to possessing ‘no ear for the melodies of a Jew’s harp,’ and, disclaiming ‘a taste for the dissection of dolls,’ ‘leaves Daniel Deronda to his natural place over the rag-shop door’ (pp. 21, 22). Even an ear so politely and elegantly owned defective might be able, it could be imagined, to catch an echo from the ‘choir invisible’; and poetic insight, one might almost venture to think, should be able to discern in poetic aspirations, however unfamiliar and even alien to itself, something different from bran. This arrow is too heavily tipped to fly straight to the goal. There are numbers, however, of the like school who, with more excuse than Mr. Algernon Swinburne, fail to ‘see anything’ in Daniel Deronda, and a criticism we once overheard in the Louvre occurs to us as pertinent to this point. The picture was Correggio’s ‘Marriage of St. Katharine,’ and to an Englishman standing near us it evidently did not fulfil preconceived conceptions of a marriage ceremony. He looked at it long, and at last turned disappointed away, audibly muttering, ‘Well, I can’t see anything in it.’ That was evident, but the failure was not in the picture. Preconceived conceptions count for much, whether the artist be a Correggio or a George Eliot, and ignorance and prejudice are ill-fitting spectacles wherewith to assist vision.
If it be an axiom that a man should be judged by his peers, we should think that George Eliot would herself prefer that her work should be weighed in the balance by those qualified to hold the scales, and should by them, if at all, be pronounced ‘wanting.’ A book of which Judaism is the acknowledged theme should appeal to Jews for judgment, and thus the question becomes an interesting one to the outer world,—What do the Jews themselves think of Daniel Deronda? Are the aspirations of Mordecai regarded by them as the expression of a poet’s dream, or a nation’s hope? What, in short, is the aspect of modern Judaism to the book?
‘Modern’ Judaism is itself, perhaps, a convenient rather than a correct figure of speech. There are modern manners to which modern Jews necessarily conform, and which have a tendency to tone down the outward and special characteristics of Judaism, as of everything else, to a general socially-undistinguishable level. But men are not necessarily dumb because they do not speak much or loudly of such very personal matters as their religious hopes and beliefs, more especially if in these days they are so little in the fashion as to hold strong convictions on such subjects. Our author distinctly formulates the opinion that ‘men may give all due allegiance to a foreign State without ceasing to belong to their own people’ (p. 21); and in the same sense as we may conceive a man honestly fulfilling all dues as good husband and good father to his living and lawful wife and children, and yet holding tenderly in the unguessed-at depths of memory some long-ago-lost love, so is it conceivable of many an unromantic-looking nineteenth century Jew, who soberly performs all good citizen duties, that the unspoken name of Jerusalem is still enshrined in like unguessed-at depths, as the ‘perfection of beauty,’ ‘the joy of the whole earth.’ Conventionalities conduce to silence on such topics, and therefore it is to published rather than to spoken Jewish criticisms we must turn in our inquiry, and the little book under review certainly helps us to a definite answer.
And we may notice, as a significant fact, that while on the part of general critics there has been some differing even in their adverse judgments, and a more than partial failure to grasp the idea of the book, there seems both here and abroad a grateful consensus of Jewish opinion that not only has George Eliot truly depicted the externals of Jewish life, which was a comparatively easy task, but has also correctly represented Jewish thought and the ideas underlying Judaism. Our author emphatically says, ‘Daniel Deronda is a Jewish book, not only in the sense that it treats of Jews, but also in the sense that it is pre-eminently fitted for being understood and appreciated by Jews’ (p. 90); and again, ‘it will always be gratefully declared,’ he concludes, ‘that George Eliot has deserved right well of Judaism’ (p. 95). Does this, then, mean that the ‘national’ idea is a rooted, practical hope? Do English Jews, undistinguishable in the mass from other Englishmen, really and truly hold the desire, like Mordecai, of ‘founding a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old’? (Daniel Deronda, Book IV.) Do they indeed design to devote their ‘wealth to redeem the soil from debauched and paupered conquerors,’ to cleanse their fair land from ‘the hideous obloquy of Christian strife, which the Turk gazes at as at the fighting of wild beasts to which he has lent an arena’ (ibidem)? Was Daniel’s honeymoon-mission to the East to have this practical result? The general Jewish verdict, as we read it, scarcely concedes so much; it sees rather in the closing scene of Daniel Deronda the only weak spot in the book. Vague and visionary as are all honeymoon anticipations, those of Daniel, their beauty and unselfishness notwithstanding, strike Jewish readers as even more unsubstantial, even less likely of realisation, than such imaginings in general. Possibly, as in the old days of the Babylonian exile, ‘there be some that dream’ of an actual restoration, of a Palestine which should be the Switzerland of Asia Minor, which, crowned with ancient laurels, might sit enthroned in peace and plenty,—
‘Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-Be.’
But save with such few and faithful dreamers, memory scarcely blossoms into hope, and hope most certainly has not yet ripened into strong desire. It may come; but at present we apprehend the majority of Jews see the ‘future of Judaism’ not in the form of a centralised and localised nationality, but rather in the destiny foreshadowed by our author, in which ‘Israel will be greatest when she labours under every zone,’ when ‘her children shall have spread themselves abroad, bearing the ineradicable seeds of eternal truth’ (pp. 86, 87). This conception of ‘nationality’ would point rather to a spiritual than to a temporal sovereignty, to a supremacy of mind rather than of matter, and appears to be in accord with the tone pervading both ancient and modern Jewish literature, which exhibits Judaism as a perpetual living force, maintained from within rather than from without, and destined continually to influence religious thought, and to survive all dispensations.