tragedy were a Prometheus bound, not after, but before, he had well got the celestial fire into the vapon, whereby it might be conveyed to mortals. Thrust by the Kratos and Bia of instituted methods into a solitude of despised ideas, fastened in throbbing helplessness by the fatal pressure of poverty and disease-a solitude where many pass by, but none regard."

In other words, George Eliot considers the circumstances of Mordecai's fate to surpass in tragic pathos the most colossal monument of Greek dramatic art. Notice, too, the care with which she leads up to the incident. In chapter xxxvii. we have Deronda coming to the Meyricks at Chelsea to announce to Mirah the forthcoming visit of Klesmer, and the chapter finishes as he is leaving Chelsea. The next chapter (xxxviii.) is filled with a description of Mordecai's yearning for a spiritual successor, and gives us en passant a fine picture of the scene of the meeting (iii. 137). We get here in short all we need to understand and sympathise with the final episode of the "book;" but lest we should come upon the fulfilment of the prophecy with too vivid a memory of the author's sublimation of the idea of prophecy, we have interposed, like a comic scene in an Elizabethan tragedy, the magnificent account of Klesmer's visit to the Meyricks in chap. xxxix., which clearly occurred after the events described in chapter xl., which takes up the stream of narrative from chapter xxxvii.

It seems to us clear that all this seemingly inartistic transposition of

events is intended to make the incident of chapter xl. stand out more sharply into relief. We have the miracle explained away, it is truethe modern analytic spirit requires it —but the author wishes us to forget

the explanation, or at least to relegate the intellectual element of chapter xxxviii. to the unconscious background, where it may be ready to assist, though not present to obstruct, emotion. All this care appears to show

the importance attached by the author to the last chapter of book v.

And in itself, apart from what the author may think of it, what a soulmoving incident is there contained! A representative of an ancient worldimportant people, whose royalty of wrongs makes the aristocracies of Europe appear petty, finds himself clutched by the griping hands of want and death before he can move the world to that vision of the Phoenixrise of Israel which the prophetic instincts of his race have brought up clear before him. Careless of his own comfort, careless of coming death, he desires only to live anew-as the quasi-Positivist doctrine of the Cabala bids him live-in "minds made nobler by his presence." His prophetic vision pictures to him the very lineaments of his spiritual alter ego, whom he pathetically thinks of as differing from himself in all externals, and, as death draws nigh, the very scene of their meeting. And in this nineteenth century, in prosaic London, this inward vision of the poor consumptive Jew is fulfilled to the letter.

Would it be too bold a suggestion if we suspected the author of having typified in the meeting of Deronda and Mordecai that

"One far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves,"

the meeting of Israel and its Redeemer? In personal characteristics, in majestic gravity (we cannot imagine Deronda laughing), in width of sympathy and depth of tenderness, even in outward appearance, Daniel resembles the great Galilean Pharisee1 whom all Christendom has accepted as in very truth the Messiah that will restore Judæa to the Holy People. To say the least, the author suggests the audacity in her comparison of the two to the figures of Jesus and the Pharisee in Titian's "Tribute Money."

1 A friend informs me that Pharisee is derived from 5, to extend (the law), not from to separate and define it.

We do not remember a single criticism1 which has referred to this magnificent scene, where to our mind George Eliot's power of representing soul speaking to soul has reached its greatest height. We do not remember a single critic who seemed to think that Mordecai's fate was in any way more pitiful than that of any other consumptive workman with mystic and impossible ideas. What reasons can be given for this defect of sympathy? In addition to the before-mentioned assumption that Mordecai does not possess artistic reality, there has been the emotional obstruction to sympathy with a Jew, and the intellectual element of want of knowledge about modern Judaism. If Mordecai had been an English workman laying down his life for the foundation of some English International with Deronda for its Messiah Lassalle, he would have received more attention from the critics. But a Jew with views involving issues changing the future history of Humanity "impossible, vague, mystic." Let us not be misunderstood: the past generation of Englishmen has been so generous to Jews that we should be ungrateful if we accused cultured Englishmen of the present day of being consciously repelled by the idea of a poor Jew being worthy of admiration. But fifteen centuries of hatred are not to be wiped out by any legislative enactment. No one can say that the fact of a man's being a Jew makes no more difference in other men's minds than if he were (say) a Wesleyan. There yet remains a deep unconscious undercurrent of prejudice against the Jew which conscientious Englishmen have often to fight against as part of that lower nature, a survival of the less perfect development of our ancestors, which impedes the Ascent of Man.

Along with this unconscious Judæo

1 Professor Dowden's article in the Contemporary Review for February, which appeared after the above was written, forms an exception with respect to this as to all the other deficiencies of the critics against which we here protest.

phobia there has gone the intellectual element of a tacit assumption that modern Judaism is a lifeless code of ritual instead of a living body of religious truth. Of course the pathos and tragedy of Mordecai's fate depend in large measure on the value of the ideas for which he laid down his life. If he were a crazy believer that the English nation is descended from the lost Ten Tribes, his fate would only deserve a smile of contemptuous pity. Hence the artistic necessity of the philosophic discussion in chapter xlii., where his ideas are explained and defended. Here again we have to complain of the want of sympathy shown by the critics, but perhaps still more of their want of knowledge. Our author devotes the forty-first chapter to a piece of special pleading (really addressed to the reader, though supposed to be a philosophic musing of Deronda's), the outcome of which is that if we want to tell whether an enthusiast is justified in his faith, our only test is knowledge of the subjectmatter. And the moral naturally is: study the history of the Jews. Hegel says somewhere-"The heritage a great man leaves the world is to force it to explain him," and we may say the same of a great work of art. But the critics of Daniel Deronda have refused to pay the heavy probate duty of wading through the ten volumes or so of Grätz's Geschichte der Juden to see whether Mordecai's ideas have anything in them or no: the easier plan was to denounce them as 66 vague and mystical." If it be contended that the subject is too unfamiliar for ordinary readers, and therefore unsuited for a novel, we may answer that similar reasoning would exalt an Offenbach over a Beethoven. George Eliot has endeavoured to raise the novel to heights where it may treat of subjects hitherto reserved for the Drama or the Epic, but instead of encouragement from English critics she meets with their neglect.

Apart, however, from the intrinsic value of Mordecai's ideas, the discussion

would deserve our admiration as a literary tour de force. It was the high praise of the Greek philosopher that if the gods spoke Greek they would talk as Plato wrote: may we not say that if Isaiah had spoken English he would have prophesied as George Eliot makes Mordecai speak? We trace in this the influence which the Authorised Version, -with all its inaccuracies, the most living reproduction of the Hebrew Scriptures has had on our principal writers, notably in the case of so unbiblical a writer as Mr. Swinburne.

And what of the ideas which Mordecai clothes with words as of one whose lips have been touched with coals of burning fire? What vagueness or mystery is there in the grand and simple lines of Jewish policy laid down by Mordecai? Two ideas dominate Mordecai's arguments throughout the discussion. The resumption of the soil of Palestine by the Jews (which has often been proposed by Gentile writers as a solution of the much vexed Eastern Question), and as a consequence the third and final promulgation of the Jewish religion to the world, are sufficiently definite ideas, however large and grand they may be. Even if one disagree with Mordecai's views one may at any rate pay him the respect due to an energetic leader of opposition, and recognise in him the leader of those who refuse to believe that Israel's part in history is played out, and that her future policy should be to amalgamate with the nations as soon as possible, letting her glorious past sink into an antiquarian study instead of living as a perennial spring of political action. Mordecai is not of those who hold that the millennium will come when men shall have arrived at that nicely balanced mediocrity, that the "pale abstract" man shall know his brother from other cosmopolitan beings only by some official badge necessary for distinction. He rather holds that in the world-organism of the nations each nationality will have its special function, Israel, as the Jewish poet-philosopher said, being

the nations' heart.1 The now-prevailing doctrine of Heredity and the political enthusiasm for Panslavism, Panteutonism, Pan-whatnotism, will have nought to urge against these Panjudaic views. And to our minds Mordecai's is the profounder philosophy of history when he further thinks that the great quarry of religious truth, whence two worldreligions have been hewn and shaped, but only into torsos, has yet wherewithal to completely fashion the religion of the future. The one theologic dogma of Judaism, the unity of the Godhead (involving, as Mordecai remarks, the unity of mankind), can meet with no harsh reception from the philosophies of the day, imbued as they all are with the

monism of the "God-intoxicated Jew." The rationalism of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which has undermined mediæval Christianity, now tottering from the attack, merely represents the outcome of a long line of Jewish thought on prophecy, miracles, and the like, and is, in large measure, derived from our summa theologiæ, the Morê Nebouchîm of Maimonides. Again, reverence for law, as marked a trait of the Jewish spirit as of Roman pride (the Talmud is but a Corpus Juris), is another characteristic which Judaism shares with the Zukunfts Religion. The divorce between man and the world, which is the disintegrating factor in Christianity, nowhere finds a place in Judaism. Further, the teleologic tendency of the evolution doctrine must find a reason for the miraculous tenacity with which Judaism has clung to life. If, as biologists tell us, life consists in the adaptation of internal forces to the relations of the environment, Judaism, of all religions, has most truly lived, and George Eliot has with due knowledge connected the utterances of Mordecai on Judaism with the problem of the hour, "What

1 Cusari, ii. 36. Mordecai attributes the saying to Jehuda Halevi; Sephardo in the Spanish Gypsy, p. 210, to the Book of Light, the Cabalistic book Sohar. It occurs in both. Vide Cassel's note in loco.

19

is progress ? In this connection it were interesting to contrast the history of the two religions of civilisation in the ages previous to the Reformation. While Father after Father was crystallising the freethought of Jesus into stony dogma; while Doctor after Doctor was riveting still closer the fetters of reason; Rabbi after Rabbi was adapting tradition to the reason of the time, each, when his task was done, dying with the shemah ' on his lips. Our author has put into the mouth of a Jew one of her noblest passages, describing this progress in Judaism. Sephardo, in the Spanish Gypsy (p. 215), speaks thus of the principles of order and progress in the Jewish religion

"I abide

By that wise spirit of listening reverence
Which marks the boldest doctors of our race.
For truth to us is like a living child,
Born of two parents: if the parents part
And will divide the child, how shall it live?
Or I will rather say: Two angels guide
The paths of man, both aged and yet young,
As angels are, ripening through endless years.
On one he leans: some call her Memory,
Some Tradition; and her voice is sweet
With deep mysterious accords: the other,
Floating above, holds down a lamp which
streams

A light divine and searching on the earth,
Compelling eyes and footsteps: memory yields
Yet clings with loving check, and shines anew,
Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp

of our separateness," he says, "will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality." And here again history confirms his views. For the life of Judaism has been connected with the history of Jews in a way such as has been the fate of no other religion. The very name of the religion displays this intimate connection; of all religions Judaism alone has been named after the race of its believers. And it is to this that we may perhaps attribute the peculiar interest that George Eliot has felt for Jews, which we can trace at least as far back as 1864, when the first draft of the Spanish Gypsy was written. The two chief interests of the translator of Strauss and the friend of Mr. Herbert Spencer have been the religious consciousness, which she was the first to use for the artistic purposes of the novel, and the influence of hereditary forces, which she first raised into an ethical creed. And Jews are interesting in both connections, exhibiting in the greatest known degree what is to her the highest virtue, fidelity to claims of race. At the same time this relation of believers and creed has been the source of much misconception. No distinction is made in the popular mind between the theo

But for tradition: we walk evermore,

To higher paths by brightening Reason's lamp."

The pages of that history of rationalism that shall treat of the progress of Jewish theosophy, culminating in the epoch-making thought of Spinoza, will fully bear out the historic truth of the above description. And surely that represents the spirit with which we may expect the religion of the future to be informed.

But the new birth of Judaism and its revelation to the world are, in Mordecai's opinion, indissolubly connected with the new birth of the Jewish race as a nation. "The effect

1 The assertion of the Divine Unity, Deut. vi. 4.

and the national customs of Jews. It is true that in the biblical times and afterwards the social and religious sanctions were not differentiated, but their raison d'être nowadays, apart from the sanitary sanction of many of the customs, is merely the same as that which preserves many family customs among the aristocracies of Europe. It is our national boast to have been the first to proclaim the true God, and the "Swiss Guards of Deism," as Heine wittily calls us, have clothed themselves with such customs as with a uniform. These rites and ceremonies are not essential to the Judaism we have the mission to preach to the world for Jews are : a missionary though not a proselytising people; how

ever our voices may have hitherto been stifled, we have lived our mission if we have not been permitted to preach it. Those who become Jews in religion need not adopt the Mosaic rites unless they wish to be naturalised as Jews in race. Still the religious trust that has kept the national life throbbing through the centuries has been the conviction that the Messiah who shall spread Judaism to the four corners of the world will be a Jew by race as well as in creed. And Mordecai's views of the resumption of the soil of the Holy Land by the holy people are the only logical position of a Jew who desires that the long travail of the ages shall not end in the total disappearance of the race. For from the times of the Judges periods of prosperity, such as the one upon which the present generation has entered, have been the most perilous for our national life it is the struggle for national existence that has resulted, we are vain enough to think, in the survival of the fittest missionaries of the true religion. The Sages say, "Israel is like the olive, the more it is pressed, the more copious the oil; " and it is to be feared that the removal of the pressure will result in the cessation of the noble needs that are typified by the oil. Unless some such project as Mordecai has in view be carried out in the next three generations, it is much to be feared that both the national life of Jews and the religious life of Judaism will perish utterly from the face of the earth. “A consummation devoutly to be wished," the scoffers may say; but not surely those in whose veins runs the blood of Israelites, and who have the proud heritage of God's truth to hand down to their children.

Enough has perhaps been said to show that Mordecai's views about the future of Judaism and of Jews have all history and much reason on their side and display those powers of intellectual intuition of the future which the psychological system of Maimonides assigns to the Prophet. And we have perhaps contributed somewhat to an explanation of Deronda's acceptance of his

spiritual inheritance. Like Mordecai, Deronda protests against the "blasphemy of the time," that men should stand by as spectators of life instead of living. But before he meets with Mordecai what noble work in life has this young and cultured Englishman with his thousands a year? This age of unfaith gives no outlet for his deep, spiritual yearnings (nor for those of thousands like him). The old beliefs are gone the world is godless, and Deronda cannot, for all the critics have said, offer to Gwendolen Grandcourt any consolation in a higher order of things instead of the vague platitudes which alone remain to be offered. Yet there comes to this young ardent soul an angel of the Lord (albeit in the shape of a poor Jew watch-mender) with a burning message, giving a mission in life as grand as the most far-reaching ideal he could have formed. Is it strange that his thirsty soul should have swallowed up the soul of Mordecai, in the Cabalistic way which the latter often refers to? Is it strange that Deronda should not have refused the heritage of his race when offered by the hands of Mirah's brother? But is it not strange that the literary leaders of England should have failed to see aught but unsatisfactory vagueness in all the parts of Daniel Deronda which treat of the relations of the hero with Mordecai Cohen? Is it possible that they have failed to see the grandeur and beauty of these incidents because of the lack of that force of imagination necessary to pierce to the pathos of a contemporary tragedy, however powerful their capacity might be to see the romance of a Rebecca of York or the pathos of a Baruch Spinoza ?

One possible source of misconception for English readers may be mentioned. Since the time of Moses Mendelssohn the home of spiritual Judaism has been in Germany, and George Eliot, whose pages are informed with the writings of German Jews like Zunz, Geiger, and Grätz, has, with true historic insight attributed Mordecai's spiritual birth to