This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
George Eliot and Judaism.
89

a cunningly-wrought musical instrument, never played on, but quivering throughout in uneasy, mysterious meanings 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 know, I have always longed for some ideal task, in which I might feel myself the heart and brain of a multitude—some social captainship, which would come to me as a duty, and not be striven for as a personal prize. You have raised the image of such a task for me—to bind our race together in spite of heresy."

But in whatever way these questions may be decided, the book remains untouched as a work of art. In judging an imaginative work, it is not the critic's business to determine whether or not its ideas be true, but solely to examine whether these ideas have permeated the