The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Source of book: Borrowed from the library. I haven’t found a good used hardback yet…

This book is the October selection for the Reading to Know Book Club, hosted by my friend Carrie at readingtoknow.com. This will be my final book club review for this year. Next month is Little Women, which I have read, but didn’t find all that interesting, so I’m skipping reading it again. December is A Tale of Two Cities, which I read just a few years back. I liked it, but decided to skip reading it again both because I did recently read it and because December is my most insane music month, so I seriously doubt I would have time to tackle a Dickens novel. I will note in advance that A Tale of Two Cities is only novel for which I can quote the beginning and the ending. No other novel has such memorable lines at both ends. So, if you haven’t already read it, this might be a good chance.

This book also fits into the category of “Books I Should Have Read in High School.”

Photograph by Napoleon Sarony, 1882

I should point out at the outset that I love Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest is, hands down, one of the wittiest and most quotable plays of all time. Any time one needs a pithy - or poisonous - quote, Wilde is always a good bet. So I rather expected to find some good lines in this book, and I was not disappointed.

The central idea of The Picture of Dorian Gray is so well known that it isn’t much of a spoiler to disclose it. Dorian Gray remains young and unspotted by his vice while a portrait of him suffers the consequences of his debauchery.

The plot is also a variation on the age-old story of Faust. The German legend is best known through the plays by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In the earliest versions, Faust sells his soul to the devil for early knowledge (contrasted with heavenly wisdom). In Marlowe’s version, Faust seeks power as much - perhaps more than - knowledge. Goethe makes Faust’s bargain to be the result of his quest for something that transcends the limits of human knowledge and experience - almost the flip side of the original. (I am currently reading part two of Goethe’s Faust, so I will have more thoughts on this soon.)

Wilde makes Dorian Gray rather more shallow than Faust. Where Faust seeks knowledge, power, or transcendence, Dorian wishes to look pretty. He is horrified initially at the thought that he will age and become ugly. At one point, he cannot decided which is worse: to show the signs of cruelty and debauchery, or to simply look old.

He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age.

This vanity, combined with the new-found temptation of the experiences of hedonism, leads him to wish that the portrait would age, rather than himself.

The part of Mephistopheles is played by Sir Henry, who resembles Algernon Moncrief (in The Importance of Being Earnest), except more jaded and worldly-wise. He tempts Dorian (and everyone who will listen) with a delightfully witty never-ending stream of paradoxes and repartees that contain a mixture of truth and poison. He is a living representation of the hedonistic philosophy. Pleasure is everything. Aesthetics is everything.

And he does have some pleasing lines.

I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool.

Or this one, which has more than a grain of truth in it:

Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken of the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.

It’s hard to believe this wasn’t written yesterday. (Do a web search for McDonalds and how to live on minimum wage.) And there are many, many more. In most cases, there is a grain of truth, mixed with an utterly selfish and self absorbed view of life. At its core, however, it is an empty philosophy, as Wilde makes utterly clear by the end of the book. Henry, and eventually his acolyte Dorian, are incapable of love. Infatuation, yes. (Dorian’s passion for and eventual destruction of, Sybil parallels Faust’s relationship with Margaret.) True love in the sense of believing others exist beyond their capacity for giving one gratification, no. Sir Henry has disdain for his wife (who eventually leaves him for another man) and indeed women in general. One of many examples:

My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

This inability to love results in one of the most disconcerting scenes in the book. Dorian tells Henry that he is reforming, and that he did a good deed. Henry (and the portrait) reveal that Dorian has merely done good out of vanity and a quest for sensation. Exactly the same reason he engaged in his life of pleasure and debauchery. Although he feels that true repentance would give him freedom, Dorian resists to the end, and eventually destroys himself as a result.

The Picture of Dorian Gray caused a huge scandal when it was published. Before it even made it there, it was revised in part to get past the censors. The revisions seem rather minor to us in retrospect. They were primarily the modification of certain homoerotic elements which might lead to the idea that the painter Basil and Dorian were sexually involved. Nothing even remotely explicit. Perhaps the strongest line was Basil’s remark, “It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend.” Actually, this isn’t any stronger than the words King David and his friend Jonathan say to each other in the Bible, but the interpretation of the words was undoubtedly colored by Wilde’s own homosexuality. Wilde was pretty widely suspected of homosexual relationships when he wrote Dorian Gray, but the real scandal came later. As a result of a public accusation (in a manner that would have led to a duel a few decades earlier), Wilde sued a man who accused him of sodomy. In the course of the trial, some of Wilde’s letters came to light, and he was eventually convicted and sent to prison for a couple of years. So yes, the censors seem to have overreacted a bit to some fairly mild elements.

While the reaction to the homoerotic undercurrent was understandable, the work was also condemned by many who felt it condoned hedonism.

One wonders if these critics actually read the book.

If anything, Dorian Gray is a compelling argument against hedonism. It is hard to think of a better vision of just how empty selfish pleasure really is. Sir Henry sounds great. One can see how the naive and vain Dorian would become attracted to his ideas. But the point isn’t that Dorian is punished by a cruel society that doesn’t understand him. Because society loves him, for the most part. He gets his way, and does what he wants. He even seems to escape conscience itself until he crosses over his own line and commits a murder.

And yet he becomes increasingly empty and unhappy. He escapes the physical consequences of his sin, but continues to pay the price in his soul - and indeed in his very essence. That which he believed would lead to happiness destroys him inside long before it leads to his final destruction. “"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, borrowing from Samuel Johnson’s Latin aphorism.) It is difficult to imagine a more unhappy man than Dorian. And this encourages debauchery?

Perhaps one like Miss Prism (also in Earnest) might interpret it that way. (Such people as my wife knew from her teen years - see the note at the bottom of this review - definitely fell in this category.) If one cannot abide the idea that anyone would ever do anything wrong, even in literature, then this book would be dangerous indeed. (And heaven forbid anyone of this opinion would actually read the Bible. Good lord, there is a lot of sex and violence in there!) But, if one looks beyond the presence of genuine evil in this book, one might note that Wilde’s point is the vanity of, well, vanity and hedonism. As Wilde himself puts it, "The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

At his best, Wilde is perceptive in his criticisms of the hypocrisy of society, not because he comes out and says “society is bad and hypocritical” but because he strips away the pretty veneer. Sir Henry isn’t really saying things that we don’t all think. He just says them outright rather than coating them in a shell of respectability. Dorian isn’t doing anything we don’t do. He just does them to the extreme. We are all Dorian Gray - and Faust, which is why the legend endures. All of us have our moments of compromise when we think we will not be caught. If we are honest with ourselves, we would undoubtedly discover that Dorian’s bargain would be hard to resist. If our selfishness were truly hidden, and we would never pay the consequences, what would we do? The answer lies in the everyday actions we take to reduce others to means of our fulfilment. (This one thing alone keeps divorce lawyers in business.) And then we justify our selfish actions in ways that seem to leave our own souls unspotted. But what if someone could look at that magical portrait of our souls. What would they see? Would we really want anyone to know what we really look like? Do we really want all our motives laid bare? If one can answer “yes” to that question, one must be a thorough hypocrite indeed.

Note on the ennui of debauchery:

Another quote that I couldn’t figure out how to fit into the main body of my review:

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them; strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.

Wilde is on to something here. Dante, for example, distinguished between the sins of passion and the sins of deliberate planning. Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo are in the outer circles because their adultery was a sensual affair, while the worst punishment (being stuck in Satan’s mouth) was reserved for infamous traitors such as Judas Iscariot. Somehow, the line between sins of a lack of self control and sins purely to gratify the ego are different in our minds. (Perhaps they are different in an absolute sense too.) This is a powerful description. The acts no longer bring pleasure to the senses, but they feed the pride. An interesting idea to ponder.

Note on the most famous quote from this book:

I had heard this numerous times before, but did not realise it came from Dorian Gray - and was one of Sir Henry’s fun lines:

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

Now, confirmation bias is a legitimate problem here. Still, my own practice indicates that Wilde (and Sir Henry) were speaking at least a partial truth. In my experience, one facet in particular does appear to be nearly universally true: A man who has had a long and happy marriage either dies soon after she does, or remarries quickly - and often unwisely.

The other parts of this are less universal. I do see a general tendency after the breakup of a bad marriage. Women tend to think that they just picked badly and will do better next time. And then, they seem to pick, as we lawyers say, “The same person, with a different face.” And men, while they may enter a new relationship after a bad breakup, are more resistant to marrying and having children with a new woman. Once bitten, twice shy. Finally, I do think that one finds more women who remain widows after the end of a good marriage. Although, this may also be due to the fact that men generally tend to die earlier - so there may not be much to choose from after a certain age.

Note on Wilde’s view of his own book:

I am hesitant to take anything Wilde said entirely at face value, because his tongue was pretty much grafted into his cheek. That said, this is Wilde’s statement about Dorian Gray, in a letter to an admirer of the book:

I am so glad that you like that strange coloured book of mine: it contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks of me: Dorian what I would like to be - in other ages, perhaps.

Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

Source of book: I own this. My wife found a hardback Everyman’s Library edition at a library sale for me.

This book was the August selection for the Reading To Know book club, but it took a bit longer than that to read. Here are the other reviews:

Carrie

Sky

Barbara

Heather

I would imagine most of us read Silas Marner as part of our assigned reading in high school. That was my introduction to George Eliot. I later read The Mill on the Floss, which has some autobiographical elements.

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. She also went by Marian and Mary Anne at various times, but decided to write under a man’s name so that her novels would be taken seriously and not pigeonholed into the light romantic fluff associated with female writers. (A version of this prejudice continues today, of course.)

Eliot was considered to be rather unattractive, even at a young age, but was highly intelligent and a voracious reader. Her parents thus decided that an advantageous marriage was unlikely, and invested in her education. Like Christina Rossetti and Anne Bradstreet, she was able to gain an education unusual for women of the time.

George Eliot circa 1860, by Samuel Laurence. This is the most flattering picture of her I could find.

True to the expectation, she stayed home and kept house for her father from the death of her mother when she was sixteen until his death when she was thirty. After a year abroad, she returned to England and edited a political journal for several years.

In 1854, at age thirty-five, she began a relationship with George Henry Lewes, which was to last for the next twenty years until his death.

The problem was, Lewes was already married. He had an open marriage, and his wife had several children by another man. Since he knew of that affair, he lacked grounds to divorce her. She likewise, could not divorce him, because adultery wasn’t grounds for a woman to get a divorce, so they just went their separate ways. (For more peculiar rules regarding divorce in the Victorian and earlier eras, see my post on domestic violence.) So, Lewes and Eliot couldn’t marry. Had they lived a century later, they would have been able to marry, and thus avoid the stigma.

Now, having a longstanding affair like this was actually fairly commonplace in the Victorian Era. It wasn’t even all that scandalous if a man had a mistress. It was rather expected. But, a man had to be discreet. He should pretend the other woman didn’t exist. Lewes and Eliot made the social mistake of being open about their relationship. (Keep this thought in mind, because it becomes a key plot point.)

Daniel Deronda was Eliot’s last book. While Middlemarch is generally considered to be her masterpiece, there are many who make the argument in favor of Daniel Deronda. Since I have not read Middlemarch yet, I cannot weigh in. I can, however, highly recommend Daniel Deronda.

My edition of this book is 900 pages long. I am reasonably used to long books. I have read several over 500 pages this year. However, August was a busy month for me, and I got behind. It took a while to get through it.

Even by Victorian standards, this isn’t a short book. I believe one of the main reasons for this is that Eliot combined two books into one.

On the one hand, this is a tragedy. The tragedy of Gwendolyn Harleth, who marries for money against her conscience and better judgment, and pays (most) of the consequences, before being rescued by a deux ex machina at the end.

The other half of the tale is one of self-discovery by the title character and his eventual romance with the beautiful Jewess, Mirah Lapidoth.

Both plots tie together pretty well, but either could have stood alone - particularly the first one.

Gwendolyn is, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating female protagonists in Victorian literature. One of the clues as to Eliot’s gender is that she is far harsher to Gwendolyn than any male Victorian author could be. Her faults are not excused, but are dwelt on, and not lovingly. Still, Eliot makes her just sympathetic enough that she isn’t a villain. She is irritatingly entitled and egoistic, but one still doesn’t wish terrible things on her. And she certainly finds herself in an awkward position without a clear good choice.

Stunningly beautiful, and reasonably witty, she is expected by all to make an advantageous marriage. Sure, she is a bit full of herself, and her tongue has an acid edge, but she is young, and will presumably improve with a little age.

Two problems, though, interfere. First, she fears the dependency that marriage will bring. She has no intention of being ruled by a man. (Her mother’s unhappy second marriage gives her pretty good reason for anxiety.)

Second, her family loses its fortune. It wasn’t a big fortune to start with, but now she becomes responsible for the financial fortunes of her family. Her uncle the clergyman generously helps with their support, but he doesn’t have that much to share. Her mother intends to do some sewing for the little it will bring in, but it is Gwendolyn who is expected to become a governess until her great beauty snares an appropriately wealthy man.

Gwendolyn is not eager to submit to the role of governess, though. She has never been raised with employment in mind, and her proud spirit recoils at having to take orders.

“As to the sweetness of labour and fulfilled claims; the interest of inward and outward activity; the impersonal delights of perpetual discovery; the dues of courage, fortitude, industry...these, even if they had been eloquently preached to her, could have been no more than faintly apprehended doctrines…”

This is an interesting mirror image of Eliot’s own experience. She was “ugly” and therefore was raised with the idea that she would have to find employment, income, and satisfaction in working with her hands or brains.

Perhaps this might have lent the bitter edge to her portrayal of Gwendolyn.

Enter Henleigh Grandcourt.

(Side note: I love the way this name rolls off the tongue. I am reminded of a similarly stuffy British name in the character of Heneage Dundas - a minor character in Patrick O’Brian’s books.)

Grandcourt is blessed with, not one, but two likely inheritances. He got his father’s property, of course. He is also in line to receive the property of his uncle, Sir Hugo Mallinger (another delightful character), who had the misfortune to have only daughters. This is a source of distress to the good-natured, if a bit clueless Sir Hugo, as his own family will be relatively impoverished while his nephew receives nearly everything.

Grandcourt takes a liking to Gwendolyn, and seems on the verge of proposing, when Gwendolyn makes an unpleasant discovery.

Grandcourt has another family already. In his younger years, he took up with the wife of an Irish military officer. She left her husband because he was abusive; so, by comparison, Grandcourt seemed like a welcome change, even if they couldn’t marry. (Again, enter those Victorian marriage laws: abuse was not grounds for a woman to obtain a divorce. Her husband could have divorced her due to her adultery, but chose not to out of spite.) So, Grandcourt never does marry Lydia, his mistress, but they have children together.

Gwendolyn meets Lydia and learns all, and essentially promises not to marry Grandcourt. Her prospective poverty, however, overcomes her scruples, and she marries Grandcourt. First and foremost, because she realizes this is the way she is expected to rescue her family (and, let it be said, herself) from poverty.

This is where the sexual politics get interesting. Grandcourt is in a position of power. He has a vast current and prospective fortune, which he has and will receive solely because he is male. Gwendolyn is impoverished. So, she already owes him big time.

Grandcourt isn’t a benevolent dictator either. He gets off on controlling others, and Gwendolyn is simply his latest pet. She is beautiful arm-candy, and he knows that he can get her to do whatever he wants. In fact, her resistance to his control makes his success all the sweeter.

I was reminded a bit of another written a decade later by George Meredith. I am determined that all of my children read The Egoist before they marry. Actually, anyone enamored of Victorian era marriage should read it. In that book, which is humorous where Daniel Deronda is dark, the wealthy and highly eligible Sir Willoughby sees woman as a mirror for himself to gaze in and see his own views and opinions reflected back. It is all about him, and women are just commodities in which he can revel: they confirm his high opinion of himself.

Where Willoughby is laughably clueless, but completely non-malicious, Grandcourt is truly malevolent. He “prefers command to love,” as Eliot puts it.

His behavior is never violent - or even outwardly angry. To an outsider, Gwendolyn even has a “good” marriage. But Grandcourt is undeniably abusive to her. He has the power, and enjoys bullying her. And, under the laws she lives under, she has no options. To leave would mean an even worse poverty, as her disgrace would prevent employment - except as a prostitute. And then, her family would suffer as well.

Even worse for Gwendolyn is her guilt concerning Lydia. She knows she has wronged her, but cannot at this point make things right. As Eliot puts it, the Furies have entered her marriage and pursued her. In her despair, she turns to Deronda for advice as to how to become a better person.

Who is Daniel Deronda? That is a question not answered until near the end of the novel. Deronda has been raised by Sir Hugo, who has never revealed his parentage. Everyone, including Deronda himself, suspects that he is Sir Hugo’s illegitimate son, but only Sir Hugo knows.

In the meantime, while he decides what he intends to do with himself for the rest of his life (he has a little income from those mysterious parents), he ends up rescuing Mirah from a suicide attempt. She has fled her abusive father, who attempted to sell her into prostitution, and had been looking for her mother and brother, who she hasn’t seen since she was a very small child.

Deronda locates the brother (the mother is long dead) by a series of coincidences, and becomes friends with him.

While this part of the plot is less convincing that the other, it contains some very interesting ideas. First of all, Eliot introduces the idea of Zionism - the quest to re-establish the nation of Israel - at a time when it was fairly new to non-Jews in Europe. I was a bit surprised to find it here. I was not surprised to find descriptions of anti-Semitism as it existed in Europe.

In the light of subsequent events, it was a bit jarring to see a note of optimism about the acceptance of Jews in Germany, to be sure. Eliot could not have foreseen the Holocaust, but details of her descriptions look prophetic in retrospect. (This would be an interesting future post. The connection of the Holocaust to millennia of anti-Semitism in Europe. Also the unfair portrayal of Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi and the whitewashing of Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic views in certain right-wing circles. I’ll think about it.)

There are also a few mentions of the Kabbalah, the Jewish version of mysticism. If you are interested in further fictional reading in this regard, I highly recommend the short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (not to be confused with Isaac Singer, the sewing machine magnate.)  

The two plots come together at a few crucial points. One is the contrast between Gwendolyn’s self absorption and Deronda’s compassion. She thinks nearly entirely of herself (and a little of her mother). Deronda is easily caught up in the emotion of empathy for those less fortunate - even Gwendolyn.

There is also the contrast between Gwendolyn, who fears work, and fears even more being subservient to anyone, with the Meyricks, who take in Mirah despite their own poverty. Gwendolyn has difficulty imagining life outside her privileged bubble, and it is only through Deronda’s encouragement that she is finally able to look outside herself.

I really wish I had the time and space to quote extensively from this book. There really are great lines throughout - often many on one page. From the opening scene with its description of wealthy gamblers (which could be a modern description of gamblers at Las Vegas, minus a little of the glitz), to the many potent zingers against social hypocrisy.

Particularly pricking are the ones on class and gender relations.

For example, in the description of Gwendolyn’s aunt, “Many of her opinions, such as those on church government and the character of Archbishop Laud, seemed too decided under every alteration to have been arrived at otherwise than by a wifely receptiveness.”

Or, of Grandcourt, “was good-looking, of sound constitution, virtuous or at least reformed…” Yes, a woman must be unstained and pure. A man can settle for “reformed” provided he has a nice little income.

Or the later observation that “Gwendolyn’s view of her position might easily have been no other than that her husband’s marriage with her was his entrance on the path of virtue, while [Lydia] Glasher represented his forsaken sin.”

Perhaps Gwendolyn’s flippant remark to Grandcourt, laced with more truth than she intends to share:

“We women can’t go in search of adventures - to find out the North-West Passage or the source of the Nile, or to hunt tigers in the East. We must stay where we grow, or where the gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the flowers, to look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining. That is my notion about why some of them have got poisonous.”

Eliot plays more on this idea through the character of Deronda’s mother, who was forced by a domineering father into a marriage she did not desire. The pressure to be the good girl eventually overwhelmed her, leaving havoc behind.

Or maybe Eliot’s biting aside after Sir Hugo lightly dismisses the importance of birth in determining success, “as men after dining well often agree that the good of life is distributed with wonderful equality.” Touché.

This, contrasted with Deronda’s observation about wealth. “[I am] not rich, except in the sense that every one is rich who has more than he needs for himself.”

I might also go with Eliot’s perceptive notice that gambling is a refuge from dullness and boredom. (Ever watch a bingo game at a senior center? Just a little scary.)

“I don’t admit the justification,” said Deronda [to Gwendolyn]. “I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could any one find an intense interest in life? And many do.”

I also loved Deronda’s comment that age or novelty by itself should not be an argument for or against anything. Fashions - and ideas - must be weighed on their own merits, and not rejected or accepted just because of the comfort of habit or the thrill of the new.

Also, the exchange between Mrs. Meyrick and her outspoken daughter Kate.

“I notice mothers are like the people I deal with - the girls’ doings are always priced low.”

“My dear child, the boys are such a trouble - we should never put up with them, if we didn’t make believe they were worth more.”

It was also fun to learn a new word: calignosity. Calignous is “misty, dim; obscure, dark.” In context, Deronda prefers that he not know his origins, preferring “cheerful calignosity.” I love that.

Finally, I must note some great observations regarding music. Deronda attends a Jewish service, and is carried away by the power of the liturgy, even though he cannot understand it.

That “strongest effect of chanted liturgies which is independent of detailed verbal meaning - like the effect of an Allegri’s Miserere or a Palestrina’s Magnificat. The most powerful movement of a feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us; or else a self-oblivious lifting up of gladness, a Gloria in excelsis that such Good exists; both the yearning and the exultation gathering their utmost force from the sense of communion in a form which has expressed them both, for long generations of struggling fellow-men.”

Yes. A thousand times yes! If you have never experienced this, I pity you.

The most I can do is to introduce you to the two masterworks of the Renaissance era cited above. You can (and should be able to) enjoy and understand both without knowing the text. But, for the record, the Miserere is Psalm 51, written by King David after getting called on his sin of adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband. (The text accompanies the music in this clip.)

The Magnificat is the song of the Virgin Mary from the Gospel of Luke, after she is told she will give birth to Christ. 

My soul doth magnify the Lord : and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

For he hath regarded : the lowliness of his handmaiden.

For behold, from henceforth : all generations shall call me blessed.

For he that is mighty hath magnified me : and holy is his Name.

And his mercy is on them that fear him : throughout all generations.

He hath shewed strength with his arm : he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat : and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things : and the rich he hath sent empty away.

He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel : as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed for ever. (translation from The Book of Common Prayer)

I’ll end with Deronda’s view of the place of music in the soul. Gwendolyn has given up singing after a true musician tells her she lacks the skill to be a professional. She rejects Deronda’s proposal she take it up again for pleasure and for the good it will do her.

“I don’t feel able to follow your advice of enjoying my own middlingness.”

“For my part,” said Deronda, “people who do anything finely always inspirit me to try. I don’t mean that they make me believe I can do it as well. But they make the thing, whatever it may be, seem worthy to be done. I can bear to think my own music not good for much, but the world would be more dismal if I thought music itself not good for much. Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.”

“But then if we can’t imitate it? - it only makes our own life seem the tamer,” said Gwendolyn, in a mood to resent encouragement founded on her own insignificance.

“That depends on the point of view, I think,” said Deronda. “We should have a poor life of it if we were reduced for all our pleasure to our own performances. “

This is encouraging to me. I know the limitations of my own ability all too well, and it falls short of the perfection I desire. But excellence is worth pursuing for its own sake.

Anyway, I loved this book, and highly recommend it. Eliot is psychologically astute, and the conversations seem as if they could be from our own time, even though the institutions have changed. The main weaknesses are typical of the Victorian era: a sentimental ending, a too-neat resolution, a death from consumption, and the conformity at the end to the “damsel in distress” view of gender roles. Once one acknowledges the need to adhere to certain elements of the formula to sell books, one can enjoy Eliot’s solid command of narrative, pacing, and especially the language, which is rich and yet easily comprehensible.

Note on the Furies:

The Furies, also known as the Erinyes, were a group of female underworld deities in Greek mythology. (Eventually, it became common to refer to three of them.) They were goddesses of vengeance, pursuing those who did wrong, particularly those who broke oaths. They figure prominently in Aeschylus’ play cycle, the Oresteia, in which they relentlessly pursue the protagonists in vengeance for the ongoing blood feud within the family of Agamemnon.

They are thus fitting in this book, as they pursue Gwendolyn, who has broken her oath to Lydia.

The Remorse of Orestes or Orestes Pursued by the Furies, 1862 by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. I wonder if this painting partially inspired Eliot’s use in this book. It predated the book by just a few years.