awe than her uncle’s surplices seen out of use at the rectory.  With human ears and eyes about her, she had always hitherto recovered her confidence, and felt the possibility of winning empire.

Her difficulties all came out of this egoistic spirit, this want of spiritual anchorage and religious faith.  Gradually her bitter experiences awakened in her a desire for a purer life, and the influence of Deronda worked powerfully in the same direction.  She is to be regarded, however, as simply a representative of that social, moral and spiritual life bred in our century by the disintegrating forces everywhere at work.  No moral ideal, no awe of the divine Nemesis, no spiritual sympathy with the larger life of the race, is to be found in her thought.  The radicalism of the time, which neglects religious training, which scorns the life of the past, which lives for self and culture, is destroying all that is best in modern society.  Gwendolen is one of the results of these processes, an example of that impoverished life which is so common, arising from religious rebellion and egotism.

Another motive and spirit is represented in the character of Deronda.  As a boy, his mind was full of ideal aspirations, he was chivalrous and eager to help and comfort others.  He would take no mean advantages in his own behalf, he loved the comradeship of those whom he could help, he was always ready with his sympathy.

    He was early impassioned by ideas, and burned his fire on those
    heights.

He would not regard his studies as instruments of success, but as the means whereby to feed motive and opinion.  He had a strong craving for comprehensiveness of opinion, and was not content to store up knowledge that demanded a mere act of memory in its acquisition.  He had a craving after a larger life, an ideal aim of the most winning attractiveness.  Though Deronda was educated amidst surroundings almost identical with those which helped to form Gwendolen’s character, yet a very different result was produced in him because of his inherited tendencies of mind.  After he had seen his mother, learned that he was a Jew, he said to Mordecai,—­

“It is you who have given shape to what I believe was an inherited yearning—­the effect of brooding, passionate thoughts in my ancestors—­ thoughts that seem to have been intensely present in my grandfather.  Suppose the stolen offspring of some mountain tribe brought up in a city of the plain, or one with an inherited genius for painting, and born blind—­the ancestral life would be within them as a dim longing for unknown objects and sensations, and the spell-bound habit of their inherited frames would be like a cunningly wrought musical instrument never played on, but quivering throughout in uneasy, mysterious moanings of its intricate structure that, under the right touch, gives music.  Something like that, I think, has been my experience.  Since I began to read and