Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/60

 amalgamation by the author of things irrelevant. Two lines which cut one another at a common point of Intersection make a mathematical figure, it is true; but they cannot form the subject of a work of art, the unity of which must be preserved in accordance with fundamental axioms. For a writer of fiction to couple narratives which have no essential connection does not lower his work—it sentences it to death outright; and it is solely because contemporary criticism has shut its eyes to the relation of the two stories which run through 'Daniel Deronda' that its value as a work of art and its real significance as a book have not yet received full and true expression.

As the entire scope of the Germania of Tacitus only becomes intelligible to us after we succeed in picturing to ourselves the pure Teutonic sunlight which shines beyond the corrupt Roman society of that