Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/86

 have not been laid on with one-sided preference or blind partiality; and the meaning and truth of the authoress's types become all the clearer when we notice the justice with which shadows both deep and light are brought out in this picture of the Jewish people. The little incidental strokes, for instance, by means of which she gives us an insight into the narrowness of the circumstances of Ezra Cohen and his family, and their calculating, business-like mode of expressing kind feeling, are of inimitable grace. George Eliot's satire has none of the bitterness of hatred, but springs, like all true humour, from love; and for this reason the pictures which she has drawn of the Jews are of far greater force than the caricaturing misrepresentations which an active hatred hawks about the world. He has been at all times the true poet who could find the rift of blue mirrored in the ditch, and