Perhaps the greatest joy of my seventies has been the discovery of George Eliot's late novels, although The Mill on the Floss did whet my appetite, at the tender age of 67, for her storytelling verve, laced with astute philosophical observations and aphorisms, some perhaps even more resonant in the 21st century than the 19th. My highlight color is deliberate.
It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day’s dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days’ work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy “Let there not be”—and the many-coloured creation is shrivelled up in blackness. Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon.
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One couldn’t carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.
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Anxiety is good for nothing if we can’t turn it into a defence. But there’s no defence against all the things that might be.
Essentially a novel about the discovery and warm embrace of Jewish identity, Daniel Deronda's length and occasional density forced me to put it aside when Cloud Library, the Palm Beach County e-book lending service, did not permit a renewal but did offer an irresistible first crack at The Disappearers. The interruption proved fortuitous, increasing my appreciation for both authors: despite vast differences in time, place and class, they each passionately address how extensively prevailing social norms play out in good ways and bad on the development of their characters.
Daniel Deronda begins with a wonderful metaphor: Gwnedolyn Harleth, a vivacious young woman, has just won and lost big at the roulette table where she locks eyes with Daniel, a intellectual man of unknown parentage but distinguished position who, despite being at loose ends, has her number from the beginning, although he at first confuses it with potential romance. Eliot spends many chapters in full Victorian mode: will Gwendolyn rise above her circumstances through marriage? Eventually, she does but at great moral cost. Daniel becomes her spiritual counselor, advising her on how to become a better, less selfish person.
In the meantime, he also rescues Mirah, a young Jewish woman from suicide and finds her safe harbor in the home of his closest friend's mother and progressive young sisters. Mirah thrives while Gwendolyn endures the considerable downsides of marrying into British aristocracy for money and status. Daniel is increasingly drawn into Mirah's working class world which includes a reunion he ambivalently facilitates with Mordecai, her long lost, devoutly religious brother who himself has been taken in by a pawnbroker named Ezra Cohen. Mordecai immediately recognizes a kindred soul in Daniel, whose goodness is his most defining characteristic. Their coming together is the heart of Eliot's deeply researched book about Judaism which also defiantly rejects the British value system that has spawned Gwendolen.
Many chapters begin with a quote from classical literature; one starts with this observation from Leopold Zunz, a Jewish scholar:
“IF there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the nations—if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they are borne ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land— if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?”
Deronda had lately been reading that passage of Zunz, and it occurred to him by way of contrast when he was going to the Cohens, who certainly bore no obvious stamp of distinction in sorrow or in any other form of aristocracy. Ezra Cohen was not clad in the sublime pathos of the martyr, and his taste for money-getting seemed to be favoured with that success which has been the most exasperating difference in the greed of Jews during all the ages of their dispersion. This Jeshurun of a pawnbroker was not a symbol of the great Jewish tragedy; and yet was there not something typical in the fact that a life like Mordecai’s—a frail incorporation of the national consciousness, breathing with difficult breath—was nested in the self-gratulating ignorant prosperity of the Cohens?
In the same chapter, Mordecai takes Daniel to the local philosopher's club, which includes both Jews and non-Jews, who debate Jewish assimilation vs. Zionism in its most idealistic stage, decades before the Holocaust or the Nakba. The discussion--which cites American independence as an inspiration for establishing a Jewish homeland--illustrates Eliot's incredible empathy for characters who articulately delineate arguments on both sides; she is equally adept at examining the degrees of British anti-Semitism that existed at the time of the book's publication in 1876.
But here's the kicker: a century later, F.R. Leavis, an esteemed British critic, proposed abridging the book by eliminating the "insufferably boring" Daniel Deronda entirely and retitling the book Gwendolen Harleth, turning it into, at best, a third-rate Middlemarch! I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I accuse him of him of attempting a literary holocaust; it's a particularly egregious example of enduring anti-Semitism erupting in the most unexpected time and place, and good reason for Jews, like homosexuals, to remain extremely wary about their places in the world.
Without Daniel Deronda who, by the book's end, finds his true north (or east, to be more precise) there is no redemption for Gwendolen Harleth, surely one of the most insufferable heroines in Victorian literature. I finished Eliot's masterpiece, appropriately enough, on Yom Kippur.
