'The Old and New Imperatives of Wit''

“[P]erhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world except for those phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope and even in railway carriages: what banishes them is the vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers.” 

The speaker is the narrator in Vol. 2, Chapter XIX of George Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda, published in 1876. The person in question is the title character, who has rescued from suicide by drowning a young Jewish woman, Mirah Lapidoth, an event that leads to Deronda discovering his own Jewish identity. He is given to helping others, even though his altruism often results in difficulties for himself. Deronda is a romantic by nature. The narrator continues:

 

“How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that has no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?”

 

Timothy Steele has published a sonnet, “Memorial Service,” at The Sonneteer. He dedicates the poem “For Nancy Huddleston Packer, 28 December 2025.” Packer was a writer who taught at Stanford. She died last year at age ninety-nine:

 

“The speakers well evoke the teacher, mother,

Friend, and grandmother. Thus, her life is closed,

As in the fine short stories she composed.

We rise and, with refreshments, greet each other

And talk about sports, politics, and art

Or fumble as our piece of cheddar slips

Off of its cracker inches from our lips.

Then, trading hugs and fist bumps, we depart.

 

“And bear, as she would, in our homeward traveling

The old and new imperatives of wit:

Be kind and truthful. Though it seems unraveling,

Defend the State: stand up to Trump and ICE.

Read all the novels of George Eliot

And Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda twice.”

 

Steele cites the two greatest English novels of the nineteenth century. In The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (Encounter Books, 2009), Gertrude Himmelfarb writes:

 

“Daniel Deronda is an enduring presence in the ​‘Great Tradition’ of the novel--and an enduring contribution as well to the age-old Jewish question. Many novels of ideas die as the ideas themselves wither away, becoming the transient fancies of earlier times and lesser minds. Eliot’s vision of Judaism is as compelling today as it was more than a century ago, very much part of the perennial dialogue about Jewish identity and the Jewish question.”