A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

235.
in many ancestors--thoughts that seem to have been intensely -
present in my grandfather. Suppose the stolen offspring of some
mountain tribe brought up in a city of the plain, or one with an
inherited genius for painting, and bornblind--the anoestral life
would lie within them as a dim longing for unknown objects and
sensations, and the spell-bound habit of their inherited frames
would be like a ounningly-wrought musioal instrument, never played
on, but quivering throughout in uneASY mysterious moanings of its
intricate structure that, under the right touch, gives musio.
Something like that, I think, has been my experience. 74
Deronda t s enthusiastio oommi tment· t otheJ ewishoause is thematioally
contrasted with Grandcourt' s moral laxity. The epigraph to ohapter 25
shows the result of excessive aimlessness.
How trace the why and wherefore in a mind reduced to the barrenness
of fastidious egOism, in which all direot desires are dulled,
and have dwindled from motives into a vaoillating expectation of
motives: a mind made up of moods, where a fitful impulse springs
here and there conspicuously rank amid the general weediness? 'Tis
a condition apt to befall a life too much at large, unmoulded by
the pressure of obligation. 75
It is not surprising that we feel as we are expected to feel that Deronda
is the more worthy for emerging from his state of drifting dilettanteism
and for making a whole-hearted commitment to some impersonal cause when
we are shown, very graphioally, in the character of Grandcourt, some of
the moral flaws attendant on the lack of a dutiful commitment.
The preceding section has s et out the identifica.tion in IW-eorge Eliot t s
mind between the principles of evolutionary psyohology and duty. It has
shown tha.t Deronda., after several years of indecisiveness suddenly
"chooses," supposedly freely, to acoept Jewish partisanship and to work
lito bind @is I race together in spite of heresy. II 76 We need now to
examine whether in faot George Eliot has allowed him a free choice or
whether the opposition between freedom and duty does not indicate an
inflexible control of her character and a possible flaw in the novel.
I have already adumbrated my conclusion that, in actuality, the
facts of evolutionary psychology, even Deronda's Jewish ancestry, do
not in the~selves
constitute too drastically limiting a factor. Oert-