Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/96

 life. Deronda was intended to ennoble Judaism in the estimation of Christians and of Jews, and it would almost seem from a letter to Professor Kaufmann, couched in extravagant terms, that the only object in introducing Grandcourt and Gwendolen was to contrast Christian society with Jewish family life, to the disadvantage of the former. In all these later works the novel in George Eliot's hand had become the Tendenz-roman, not alone the philosophic novel, as Mr. Shorthouse, for example, conceives it, but philosophy in the form of the novel.

It is not our intention to discuss here the artistic value of the Tendenz-roman. The function of criticism is to classify and analyse much more than to judge. Its artistic limitations are obvious: with the whole field of life before it, the Tendenz-roman has to confine itself to its Tendenz. Its artistic value is dependent in large measure on its philosophic truth. The temptation to philosophise formally has its dangers, as George Eliot recognised when she wrote to Mr. Blackwood that she is in danger of refining where novel-readers only think of skipping. But the point that comes out with most fulness in this Life is the high function which such writing must claim for itself, 'the high responsibilities of literature that undertakes to represent life.' The following catena of passages from the book