Books Around Machen No. 17
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
by Dale Nelson
I begin drafting the present column on All Fools’ Day 2026, but readers should not fear being pranked. It’s true that Machen’s Recluse, in Hieroglyphics, regarded “the works of George Eliot [as] the works of a superior insect” – that is, as lacking completely the gift of “ecstasy” that is the criterion of fine literature. Yet here I am with a BAM on one of her novels.
As I read Eliot’s long last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), I was reminded of Machen a few times. If readers of this column decide that says more about me than about the novel, after reviewing the passages I will adduce, I have no quarrel with them.
Daniel Deronda is set in the lifetime of Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880) and is largely a story of the upper crust, of people who have money and perhaps relatively high-status origins as well. That’s where we find beautiful young Gwendolen Harleth at first, gambling in a German resort town, and Daniel Deronda. When unwise investments destroy the fortunes of Gwendolen’s family, she marries a cold-hearted man she does not love, although she knows he has a mistress living who is mother of his children. While Gwendolen’s misery deepens, Daniel rescues a lovely Jewish girl from suicide and installs her with the sympathetic family of a college friend of Daniel’s.
The mode of the novel is social realism with a strong element of post-puritanical earnestness – hardly a combination to appeal to Machen. And yet there are a few places where he might have thought that he was on the same wavelength with this unpromising author, though only briefly.
I suppose I first thought of Machen when reading Chapter 19. At the beginning of this chapter, we are told of Daniel: “under his calm and self-repressed exterior there was a fervour which made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of everyday life.” This bit of Machenian analysis follows the incident of Daniel’s rescue of the girl Mirah from a suicide attempt. He has been rowing on the Thames near Kew Bridge – that is, in London, which readers of this column will not need to be told was an inspiration for Machen the walker. Suddenly something from a world of chivalric romance bursts upon him.
The rescue of Mirah is of vital importance for the novel’s plot, but Eliot does not want the reader to forget what she wrote about Daniel’s character before that happened; for she recalls it to us in Chapter 32: “I have said that under his calm exterior he had a fervour which made him easily feel the presence of poetry in everyday events.” She alludes to this trait again in the next chapter – “his sense of poetry in common things.” Daniel walks along a side street in the Holborn neighborhood of London (where Charles Williams’s visionary novel All Hallows’ Eve begins), and “just happens” to find a Jewish business which will turn out to be important for the matter of Mirah’s identity. One remembers how Machen was intrigued by the Hebrew letters he saw unexpectedly on a London street.
Mirah’s story before her rescue by Daniel reminded me of the beginning of Miss Lally’s narrative in “The Novel of the Black Seal.” She was wandering in a desperate condition, famished and alone. Mirah has escaped to London from the Continent, and looks for an address that might lead to her mother, but finds that the building on Colman Street has been pulled down. “‘I looked like a street-beggar,’” she remembers. “‘I thought I was forsaken’” (Chapter 20). I thought of Miss Lally’s predicament.
And then there is the dying Jewish part-time dealer in second-hand books, Mordecai. Eliot mentions Kabbalism when she introduces him. But consider further the following. “He was keenly alive to some poetic aspects of London; and a favourite resort of his, when strength and leisure allowed, was to come one of the bridges , especially about sunrise or sunset. Even when he was bending over watch-wheels and trinkets, or seated in a small upper room looking out on dingy bricks and dingy cracked windows, his imagination spontaneously planted him on some spot where he had a far-stretching scene; his thoughts went on in wide spaces; and whenever he could, he tried to have in reality the influences of a large sky. Leaning on the parapet of Blackfriars bridge, and gazing meditatively, the breadth and calm of the river, with its long vista half hazy but luminous, the grand dim masses or tall forms of buildings which were signs of world-commerce, the oncoming of boats and barges from the still distance into sound and colour, entered into his mood, and blent themselves indistinguishably with his thinking, as a fine symphony to which we can hardly be said to listen makes a medium that bears up our spiritual wings” (Chapter 38).
I don’t think I have missed any further Machenian things, so don’t hasten to get hold of Daniel Deronda on Machen’s account. It retains literary interest and also some historical interest as an early introduction of political Zionism into a British novel. This reader was struck also by – in a Lutheran sense – a very strong element of the Law combined with a pronounced absence of the Gospel. I guess that’s what George Eliot was left with when she rejected Christianity.
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