River Imagery in "Daniel Deronda"

Abstract

R EADERS OF George Eliot are familiar with her theory of moral degeneration and have often called it the drift theory. So natural is the metaphor that we can say that Tito Melema or Arthur Donnithorne drifts without adverting to the fact that this is a metaphor. By drift we mean that George Eliot sees certain characters as degenerating not so much through positive and malicious action as through nonresistance to the current taking them down the course of least resistance. We shall see how this metaphor and others related to it are found in Daniel Deronda. Now this metaphor is related to the larger metaphor of life-as-ariver, a recurrent image in George Eliot. The river can suggest all states of life: it can wind slowly down a meandering course, it can rush impetuously, it can be dammed, it can be filled with debris, it can dry up. But there is another possibility. For those who accept an activist morality-a morality that prefers the dynamic strenuous virtues to the more passive ones, that prefers the active to the contemplative life-drifting becomes a symbol of a perilous spiritual state of reprehensible passivity, a succumbing to the currents of the world. For the moral man cannot spend his life lazily cruising down the river, he must manfully take up his moral oars and row toward his port against the tide of selfish worldly cares and trials. Whether or not we call George Eliot a puritan, it is clear that she accepted and taught the doctrine of duty and work and that she had a large area of agreement with Auguste Comte. She