noble aspirations which George Eliot ascribed to the Jews were denied to that race by Marian Evans.
Before Marian Evans' vision could penetrate men and things with the clearness of George Eliot, the views which she held regarding the Jewish people were anything but flattering to that much abused people. Their future defender was now, if not their enemy, their contemner. Had George Eliot been confronted with some of the statements made by her as Marian Evans, she would have ample cause to congratulate herself on the expansion of her views, and would, no doubt, feel grateful to her inconsistency. But then, as Bismarck said, a man is a fool who does not change his mind at least once every seven years.
The several anti-Semitic effusions in the early letters and journals of George Eliot (collected under the title of “Life of George Eliot, edited from her letters and journals, by her husband, J. W. Cross,” lose their sting for the present Jewish readers who have the consolation of looking backward at the subsequent works of the author, in view of which sympathy with the Jewish elements of her work, her early attacks upon the Jews become evanescent and unstable, since she herself removed the pedestal whereon her attacks had rested.
As a young woman George Eliot had a special dislike for D'Israeli. His grandiloquent, bombastic phrases jarred on her artist sense. With his forced aggressiveness she could not sympathize, nor could she countenance his overzealous ambition. The dislike which she felt for the man amounted to disgust when his books were in question. "I am provoked with you for being in the least pleased with 'Tancred,'" she writes to her life-long friend, Miss Sara Hennel. "D'Israeli," she goes on to say, "who, writing himself much more detestable stuff than ever came from a French pen, can do nothing better to bamboozle the unfortunates who are seduced into reading 'Tancred,' than speak superciliously of all other men and things."
On another occasion, in 1848, when Mr. John Sibree wrote to her in praise of Lord Beaconsfield, and his admirable courage and dauntlessness, especially of the noble motive of his literary work, which he flung in the face of opposition as a vindication of his race, she reiterates her dislike to the work, thinking "'Tancred' very thin," though she admits with something of her later humanitarian feeling that she "loves and respects the work as an effort on behalf of the people."
As to D'Israeli's qualities as a statesman, she readily admits that he is "unquestionably an able man." Her main objection to him is that, according to her, "his theory of races has not a leg to stand on, and can only be buoyed up by such eloquences: You chubby-faced, squabby-nosed Europeans owe your commerce, your arts, your religions to the Hebrews, nay, the Hebrews lead your armies—in proof of which he can tell us that Massena, a second-rate general of Napoleon, was a Jew whose real name was Manasseh."
And, then, in order to make clear her own particular views regarding the superior claims of D'Israeli, she concludes with a stubbornness which in her, even at that early period, is surprising—says she: "My Gentile nature kicks most resolutely against any assumption of superiority in the Jews, and is almost ready to echo Voltaire's vituperation. I bow to the supremacy of Hebrew poetry, but