Part 6

_Theodora._ It is a most beautiful nature. I don’t know anywhere a more complete, a more deeply analysed portrait of a great nature. We praise novelists for wandering and creeping so into the small corners of the mind. That is what we praise Balzac for when he gets down upon all fours to crawl through _Le Père Goriot_ or _Les Parents Pauvres_. But I must say I think it a finer thing to unlock with as firm a hand as George Eliot some of the greater chambers of human character. Deronda is in a manner an ideal character, if you will, but he seems to me triumphantly married to reality. There are some admirable things said about him; nothing can be finer than those pages of description of his moral temperament in the fourth book--his elevated way of looking at things, his impartiality, his universal sympathy, and at the same time his fear of their turning into mere irresponsible indifference. I remember some of it verbally: “He was ceasing to care for knowledge--he had no ambition for practice--unless they could be gathered up into one current with his emotions.”

_Pulcheria._ Oh, there is plenty about his emotions. Everything about him is “emotive.” That bad word occurs on every fifth page.

_Theodora._ I don’t see that it is a bad word.

_Pulcheria._ It may be good German, but it is poor English.

_Theodora._ It is not German at all; it is Latin. So, my dear!

_Pulcheria._ As I say, then, it is not English.

_Theodora._ This is the first time I ever heard that George Eliot’s style was bad!

_Constantius._ It is admirable; it has the most delightful and the most intellectually comfortable suggestions. But it is occasionally a little too long-sleeved, as I may say. It is sometimes too loose a fit for the thought, a little baggy.

_Theodora._ And the advice he gives Gwendolen, the things he says to her, they are the very essence of wisdom, of warm human wisdom, knowing life and feeling it. “Keep your fear as a safeguard, it may make consequences passionately present to you.” What can be better than that?

_Pulcheria._ Nothing, perhaps. But what can be drearier than a novel in which the function of the hero--young, handsome and brilliant--is to give didactic advice, in a proverbial form, to the young, beautiful and brilliant heroine?

_Constantius._ That is not putting it quite fairly. The function of Deronda is to make Gwendolen fall in love with him, to say nothing of falling in love himself with Mirah.

_Pulcheria._ Yes, the less said about that the better. All we know about Mirah is that she has delicate rings of hair, sits with her feet crossed, and talks like an article in a new magazine.

_Constantius._ Deronda’s function of adviser to Gwendolen does not strike me as so ridiculous. He is not nearly so ridiculous as if he were lovesick. It is a very interesting situation--that of a man with whom a beautiful woman in trouble falls in love and yet whose affections are so preoccupied that the most he can do for her in return is to enter kindly and sympathetically into her position, pity her and talk to her. George Eliot always gives us something that is strikingly and ironically characteristic of human life; and what savours more of the essential crookedness of our fate than the sad cross-purposes of these two young people? Poor Gwendolen’s falling in love with Deronda is part of her own luckless history, not of his.

_Theodora._ I do think he takes it to himself rather too little. No man had ever so little vanity.

_Pulcheria._ It is very inconsistent, therefore, as well as being extremely impertinent and ill-mannered, his buying back and sending to her her necklace at Leubronn.

_Constantius._ Oh, you must concede that; without it there would have been no story. A man writing of him, however, would certainly have made him more peccable. As George Eliot lets herself go, in that quarter, she becomes delightfully, almost touchingly, feminine. It is like her making Romola go to housekeeping with Tessa, after Tito Melema’s death; like her making Dorothea marry Will Ladislaw. If Dorothea had married any one after her misadventure with Casaubon, she would have married a trooper.

_Theodora._ Perhaps some day Gwendolen will marry Rex.

_Pulcheria._ Pray, who is Rex?

_Theodora._ Why, Pulcheria, how can you forget?

_Pulcheria._ Nay, how can I remember? But I recall such a name in the dim antiquity of the first or second book. Yes, and then he is pushed to the front again at the last, just in time not to miss the falling of the curtain. Gwendolen will certainly not have the audacity to marry any one we know so little about.

_Constantius._ I have been wanting to say that there seems to me to be two very distinct elements in George Eliot--a spontaneous one and an artificial one. There is what she is by inspiration and what she is because it is expected of her. These two heads have been very perceptible in her recent writings; they are much less noticeable in her early ones.

_Theodora._ You mean that she is too scientific? So long as she remains the great literary genius that she is, how can she be too scientific? She is simply permeated with the highest culture of the age.

_Pulcheria._ She talks too much about the “dynamic quality” of people’s eyes. When she uses such a phrase as that in the first sentence in her book she is not a great literary genius, because she shows a want of tact. There can’t be a worse limitation.

_Constantius._ The “dynamic quality” of Gwendolen’s glance has made the tour of the world.

_Theodora._ It shows a very low level of culture on the world’s part to be agitated by a term perfectly familiar to all decently-educated people.

_Pulcheria._ I don’t pretend to be decently educated; pray tell me what it means.

_Constantius_ (promptly). I think Pulcheria has hit it in speaking of a want of tact. In the manner of the book, throughout, there is something that one may call a want of tact. The epigraphs in verse are a want of tact; they are sometimes, I think, a trifle more pretentious than really pregnant; the importunity of the moral reflections is a want of tact; the very diffuseness is a want of tact. But it comes back to what I said just now about one’s sense of the author writing under a sort of external pressure. I began to notice it in _Felix Holt_; I don’t think I had before. She strikes me as a person who certainly has naturally a taste for general considerations, but who has fallen upon an age and a circle which have compelled her to give them an exaggerated attention. She does not strike me as naturally a critic, less still as naturally a sceptic; her spontaneous part is to observe life and to feel it, to feel it with admirable depth. Contemplation, sympathy and faith--something like that, I should say, would have been her natural scale. If she had fallen upon an age of enthusiastic assent to old articles of faith, it seems to me possible that she would have had a more perfect, a more consistent and graceful development, than she has actually had. If she had cast herself into such a current--her genius being equal--it might have carried her to splendid distances. But she has chosen to go into criticism, and to the critics she addresses her work; I mean the critics of the universe. Instead of feeling life itself, it is “views” upon life that she tries to feel.

_Pulcheria._ She is the victim of a first-class education. I am so glad!

_Constantius._ Thanks to her admirable intellect she philosophises very sufficiently; but meanwhile she has given a chill to her genius. She has come near spoiling an artist.

_Pulcheria._ She has quite spoiled one. Or rather I shouldn’t say that, because there was no artist to spoil. I maintain that she is not an artist. An artist could never have put a story together so monstrously ill. She has no sense of form.

_Theodora._ Pray, what could be more artistic than the way that Deronda’s paternity is concealed till almost the end, and the way we are made to suppose Sir Hugo is his father?

_Pulcheria._ And Mirah his sister. How does that fit together? I was as little made to suppose he was not a Jew as I cared when I found out he was. And his mother popping up through a trap-door and popping down again, at the last, in that scrambling fashion! His mother is very bad.

_Constantius._ I think Deronda’s mother is one of the unvivified characters; she belongs to the cold half of the book. All the Jewish part is at bottom cold; that is my only objection. I have enjoyed it because my fancy often warms cold things; but beside Gwendolen’s history it is like the empty half of the lunar disk beside the full one. It is admirably studied, it is imagined, it is understood, but it is not embodied. One feels this strongly in just those scenes between Deronda and his mother; one feels that one has been appealed to on rather an artificial ground of interest. To make Deronda’s reversion to his native faith more dramatic and profound, the author has given him a mother who on very arbitrary grounds, apparently, has separated herself from this same faith and who has been kept waiting in the wing, as it were, for many acts, to come on and make her speech and say so. This moral situation of hers we are invited retrospectively to appreciate. But we hardly care to do so.

_Pulcheria._ I don’t _see_ the princess, in spite of her flame-coloured robe. Why should an actress and prima-donna care so much about religious matters?

_Theodora._ It was not only that; it was the Jewish race she hated, Jewish manners and looks. You, my dear, ought to understand that.

_Pulcheria._ I do, but I am not a Jewish actress of genius; I am not what Rachel was. If I were I should have other things to think about.

_Constantius._ Think now a little about poor Gwendolen.

_Pulcheria._ I don’t care to think about her. She was a second-rate English girl who got into a flutter about a lord.

_Theodora._ I don’t see that she is worse than if she were a first-rate American girl who should get into exactly the same flutter.

_Pulcheria._ It wouldn’t be the same flutter at all; it wouldn’t be any flutter. She wouldn’t be afraid of the lord, though she might be amused at him.

_Theodora._ I am sure I don’t perceive whom Gwendolen was afraid of. She was afraid of her misdeed--her broken promise--after she had committed it, and through that fear she was afraid of her husband. Well she might be! I can imagine nothing more vivid than the sense we get of his absolutely clammy selfishness.

_Pulcheria._ She was not afraid of Deronda when, immediately after her marriage and without any but the most casual acquaintance with him, she begins to hover about him at the Mallingers’ and to drop little confidences about her conjugal woes. That seems to me very indelicate; ask any woman.

_Constantius._ The very purpose of the author is to give us an idea of the sort of confidence that _Deronda_ inspired--its irresistible potency.

_Pulcheria._ A lay father-confessor--horrid!

_Constantius._ And to give us an idea also of the acuteness of Gwendolen’s depression, of her haunting sense of impending trouble.

_Theodora._ It must be remembered that Gwendolen was in love with Deronda from the first, long before she knew it. She didn’t know it, poor girl, but that was it.

_Pulcheria._ That makes the matter worse. It is very disagreeable to see her hovering and rustling about a man who is indifferent to her.

_Theodora._ He was not indifferent to her, since he sent her back her necklace.

_Pulcheria._ Of all the delicate attention to a charming girl that I ever heard of, that little pecuniary transaction is the most felicitous.

_Constantius._ You must remember that he had been _en rapport_ with her at the gaming-table. She had been playing in defiance of his observation, and he, continuing to observe her, had been in a measure responsible for her loss. There was a tacit consciousness of this between them. You may contest the possibility of tacit consciousness going so far, but that is not a serious objection. You may point out two or three weak spots in detail; the fact remains that Gwendolen’s whole history is vividly told. And see how the girl is known, inside out, how thoroughly she is felt and understood. It is the most _intelligent_ thing in all George Eliot’s writing, and that is saying much. It is so deep, so true, so complete, it holds such a wealth of psychological detail, it is more than masterly.

_Theodora._ I don’t know where the perception of character has sailed closer to the wind.

_Pulcheria._ The portrait may be admirable, but it has one little fault. You don’t care a straw for the original. Gwendolen is not an interesting girl, and when the author tries to invest her with a deep tragic interest she does so at the expense of consistency. She has made her at the outset too light, too flimsy; tragedy has no hold on such a girl.

_Theodora._ You are hard to satisfy. You said this morning that Dorothea was too heavy, and now you find Gwendolen too light. George Eliot wished to give us the perfect counterpart of Dorothea. Having made one portrait she was worthy to make the other.

_Pulcheria._ She has committed the fatal error of making Gwendolen vulgarly, pettily, drily selfish. She was _personally_ selfish.

_Theodora._ I know nothing more personal than selfishness.

_Pulcheria._ I am selfish, but I don’t go about with my chin out like that; at least I hope I don’t. She was an odious young woman, and one can’t care what becomes of her. When her marriage turned out ill she would have become still more hard and positive; to make her soft and appealing is very bad logic. The second Gwendolen doesn’t belong to the first.

_Constantius._ She is perhaps at the first a little childish for the weight of interest she has to carry, a little too much after the pattern of the unconscientious young ladies of Miss Yonge and Miss Sewell.

_Theodora._ Since when it is forbidden to make one’s heroine young? Gwendolen is a perfect picture of youthfulness--its eagerness, its presumption, its preoccupation with itself, its vanity and silliness, its sense of its own absoluteness. But she is extremely intelligent and clever, and therefore tragedy _can_ have a hold upon her. Her conscience doesn’t make the tragedy; that is an old story and, I think, a secondary form of suffering. It is the tragedy that makes her conscience, which then reacts upon it; and I can think of nothing more powerful than the way in which the growth of her conscience is traced, nothing more touching than the picture of its helpless maturity.

_Constantius._ That is perfectly true. Gwendolen’s history is admirably typical--as most things are with George Eliot: it is the very stuff that human life is made of. What is it made of but the discovery by each of us that we are at the best but a rather ridiculous fifth wheel to the coach, after we have sat cracking our whip and believing that we are at least the coachman in person? We think we are the main hoop to the barrel, and we turn out to be but a very incidental splinter in one of the staves. The universe forcing itself with a slow, inexorable pressure into a narrow, complacent, and yet after all extremely sensitive mind, and making it ache with the pain of the process--that is Gwendolen’s story. And it becomes completely characteristic in that her supreme perception of the fact that the world is whirling past her is in the disappointment not of a base but of an exalted passion. The very chance to embrace what the author is so fond of calling a “larger life” seems refused to her. She is punished for being narrow, and she is not allowed a chance to expand. Her finding Deronda pre-engaged to go to the East and stir up the race-feeling of the Jews strikes me as a wonderfully happy invention. The irony of the situation, for poor Gwendolen, is almost grotesque, and it makes one wonder whether the whole heavy structure of the Jewish question in the story was not built up by the author for the express purpose of giving its proper force to this particular stroke.

_Theodora._ George Eliot’s intentions are extremely complex. The mass is for each detail and each detail is for the mass.

_Pulcheria._ She is very fond of deaths by drowning. Maggie Tulliver and her brother are drowned, Tito Melema is drowned, Mr. Grandcourt is drowned. It is extremely unlikely that Grandcourt should not have known how to swim.

_Constantius._ He did, of course, but he had a cramp. It served him right. I can’t imagine a more consummate representation of the most detestable kind of Englishman--the Englishman who thinks it low to articulate. And in Grandcourt the type and the individual are so happily met: the type with its sense of the proprieties and the individual with his absence of all sense. He is the apotheosis of dryness, a human expression of the simple idea of the perpendicular.

_Theodora._ Mr. Casaubon, in _Middlemarch_, was very dry too; and yet what a genius it is that can give us two disagreeable husbands who are so utterly different!

_Pulcheria._ You must count the two disagreeable wives too--Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen. They are very much alike. I know the author didn’t mean it; it proves how common a type the worldly, _pincée_, selfish young woman seemed to her. They are both disagreeable; you can’t get over that.

_Constantius._ There is something in that, perhaps. I think, at any rate, that the secondary people here are less delightful than in _Middlemarch_; there is nothing so good as Mary Garth and her father, or the little old lady who steals sugar, or the parson who is in love with Mary, or the country relatives of old Mr. Featherstone. Rex Gascoigne is not so good as Fred Vincy.

_Theodora._ Mr. Gascoigne is admirable, and Mrs. Davilow is charming.

_Pulcheria._ And you must not forget that you think Herr Klesmer “Shakespearean.” Wouldn’t “Wagnerian” be high enough praise?

_Constantius._ Yes, one must make an exception with regard to the Klesmers and the Meyricks. They are delightful, and as for Klesmer himself, and Hans Meyrick, Theodora may maintain her epithet. Shakespearean characters are characters that are born of the _overflow_ of observation--characters that make the drama seem multitudinous, like life. Klesmer comes in with a sort of Shakespearean “value,” as a painter would say, and so, in a different tone, does Hans Meyrick. They spring from a much-peopled mind.

_Theodora._ I think Gwendolen’s confrontation with Klesmer one of the finest things in the book.

_Constantius._ It is like everything in George Eliot; it will bear thinking of.

_Pulcheria._ All that is very fine, but you cannot persuade me that _Deronda_ is not a very ponderous and ill-made story. It has nothing that one can call a subject. A silly young girl and a solemn, sapient young man who doesn’t fall in love with her! That is the _donnée_ of eight monthly volumes. I call it very flat. Is that what the exquisite art of Thackeray and Miss Austen and Hawthorne has come to? I would as soon read a German novel outright.

_Theodora._ There is something higher than form--there is spirit.

_Constantius._ I am afraid Pulcheria is sadly æsthetic. She had better confine herself to Mérimée.

_Pulcheria._ I shall certainly to-day read over _La Double Méprise_.

_Theodora._ Oh, my dear, _y pensez-vous_?

_Constantius._ Yes, I think there is little art in _Deronda_, but I think there is a vast amount of life. In life without art you can find your account; but art without life is a poor affair. The book is full of the world.

_Theodora._ It is full of beauty and knowledge, and that is quite art enough for me.

_Pulcheria_ (to the little dog). We are silenced, darling, but we are not convinced, are we? (The pug begins to bark.) No, we are not even silenced. It’s a young woman with two bandboxes.

_Theodora._ Oh, it must be our muslins.

_Constantius_ (rising to go). I see what you mean!

1876.

IV

ANTHONY TROLLOPE