Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/312

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300
ESSAYS ON MODERN HISTORY

hero, whose supposed resemblance to our Lord gives intensity to the contrast between a Jew who sacrificed his people for religion, and a Christian who goes back to Judaism, renouncing his religion in obedience to the hereditary claim of race. When she was writing Adam Bede at Munich, a Moldavian Jew came with introductions to her friends, intent on the same vague errand of national redemption upon which Deronda disappears from sight. Liszt, whom they had known at Weimar, became Klesmer ; and a young lady over whom George Eliot wept in the gambling rooms at Homburg, and who remembers the meeting, served as the model of Gwendolen.

After many years characterised by mental independence and resistance to control, George Eliot inclined to that system which is popular among men who " yield homage only to external laws." The influence of Comte began early and grew with the successive study of his works, until the revolutionary fervour of 1848 was transformed into the self-suppression of the Spanish Gypsy, and the scorn for Liberality and Utilitarianism which appears in Felix Holt. It was the second Comte, the dogmatising and emotional author of the Politique Positive, that she revered, and she has not a word for the arch-rebel Littré. Positivists deem that she never thoroughly conformed. But she renounced much of her unattached impartial freedom for an attitude of doctrinal observance, and submitted her mind to discipline, if not to authority. She continued to analyse and to illustrate with an increasing fertility and accuracy ; but she was in the clasp of the dead hand, and the leading ideas recur with constant sameness. That the yoke was ever shaken does not appear. We learn from the Life that she never became a party politician, and refused to admit that political differences are, what religious differences are not, founded on an ultimate diversity of moral principles.

Comte, who was averse to popular Protestantism, who excluded the reformers from his Calendar, and acknowledged the provisional services rendered to the mediaeval phase of the progress of society by the Church, encouraged the