With Daniel Deronda in mind, it's extraordinary to what extent Trilby, written nearly 20 years later, is an anti-Deronda. Eliot's sympathetic tapestry of musical and Jewish culture becomes in Trilby a hideous anti-Semitic fantasy, Svengali perhaps the most egregious example of the demonic Jew in English literature. The book has no clear programme and, at one level, it pays a heady tribute to the art of music. Little Billee, hearing Svengali play, "was conscious, while it lasted, that he saw deeper into the beauty, the sadness of things, the very heart of them, and their pathetic evanescence, as with a new, inner eye - even into eternity itself, beyond the veil - a vague cosmic vision that faded when the music was over, but left an unfading reminiscence of its having been, and a passionate desire to express the like some day through the plastic medium of his own beautiful art". Yet it is the magic of music that is repeatedly stressed, both in the account of Trilby's exquisite bel canto - "every separate note was a highly finished gem of sound, linked to the next by a magic bond" - and in the insistence on the power of music: "It is irresistible; it forces itself on you." And magic is ultimately the province of the sinister oriental, Svengali, "a magician", the hypnotist, the entrancer.
What remains interesting for a musician today, and for a singer in particular, is Trilby's relationship to Victorian efforts to understand what Herbert Spencer called "The Origin and Function of Music" (an article he wrote in 1857). For Spencer (and we see his account reflected in du Maurier's evocations of Trilby's art), singing originated in reflex actions of the larynx, varied vocal responses to emotion which, received by a listener, elicited sympathy. "These various modifications of voice became not only a language through which we understand the emotions of others, but also the means of exciting our sympathy with such emotions." It is the intricate brocade of music woven from the primitive, instinctive response of our distant ancestors.
