Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/91

finds its account in the care which the authoress takes to blend a degree of shade with the light which streams forth like a halo from Deronda and Mordecai. It is always painful to hear fair lips pronouncing ugly words, and we are wounded and annoyed by the hard and rugged language of Deronda's mother, the daughter of the Genoese physician, Daniel Charisi. Masculine in her ideas, this woman has always regarded Judaism with all its rules and formalities as an oppressive burden; but her stern father was resolutely opposed to all her loose artistic inclinations, and forced her to marry the man of his choice. When her father and husband are both dead, she determines to break all family ties, and gives her infant son to her admirer. Sir Hugo Mallinger, in order that the boy may be spared all those troubles and sorrows which embittered her own young days, and were the ruin, indeed, of