Daniel Deronda

G >> George Eliot >> Daniel Deronda

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69

Deronda was a little startled by this clear-sightedness; but before he
could reply Mordecai added--"it is all one. Had you been in need of the
money, the great end would have been that we should meet again. But you
are rich?" he ended, in a tone of interrogation.

"Not rich, except in the sense that every one is rich who has more than he
needs for himself."

"I desired that your life should be free," said Mordecai, dreamily--"mine
has been a bondage."

It was clear that he had no interest in the fact of Deronda's appearance
at the Cohens' beyond its relation to his own ideal purpose. Despairing of
leading easily up to the question he wished to ask, Deronda determined to
put it abruptly, and said--

"Can you tell me why Mrs. Cohen, the mother, must not be spoken to about
her daughter?"

There was no immediate answer, and he thought that he should have to
repeat the question. The fact was that Mordecai had heard the words, but
had to drag his mind to a new subject away from his passionate
preoccupation. After a few moments, he replied with a careful effort such
as he would have used if he had been asked the road to Holborn---

"I know the reason. But I will not speak even of trivial family affairs
which I have heard in the privacy of the family. I dwell in their tent as
in a sanctuary. Their history, so far as they injure none other, is their
own possession."

Deronda felt the blood mounting to his cheeks as a sort of rebuke he was
little used to, and he also found himself painfully baffled where he had
reckoned with some confidence on getting decisive knowledge. He became the
more conscious of emotional strain from the excitements of the day; and
although he had the money in his pocket to redeem his ring, he recoiled
from the further task of a visit to the Cohens', which must be made not
only under the former uncertainty, but under a new disappointment as to
the possibility of its removal.

"I will part from you now," he said, just before they could reach Cohen's
door; and Mordecai paused, looking up at him with an anxious fatigued face
under the gaslight.

"When will you come back?" he said, with slow emphasis.

"May I leave that unfixed? May I ask for you at the Cohens' any evening
after your hour at the book-shop? There is no objection, I suppose, to
their knowing that you and I meet in private?"

"None," said Mordecai. "But the days I wait now are longer than the years
of my strength. Life shrinks: what was but a tithe is now the half. My
hope abides in you."

"I will be faithful," said Deronda--he could not have left those words
unuttered. "I will come the first evening I can after seven: on Saturday
or Monday, if possible. Trust me."

He put out his ungloved hand. Mordecai, clasping it eagerly, seemed to
feel a new instreaming of confidence, and he said with some recovered
energy--"This is come to pass, and the rest will come."

That was their good-bye.

BOOK VI---REVELATIONS

CHAPTER XLI.

"This, too is probable, according to that saying of Agathon: 'It is a
part of probability that many improbable things will happen.'"
--ARISTOTLE: _Poetics_.

Imagine the conflict in a mind like Deronda's given not only to feel
strongly but to question actively, on the evening after the interview with
Mordecai. To a young man of much duller susceptibilities the adventure
might have seemed enough out of the common way to divide his thoughts; but
it had stirred Deronda so deeply, that with the usual reaction of his
intellect he began to examine the grounds of his emotion, and consider how
far he must resist its guidance. The consciousness that he was half
dominated by Mordecai's energetic certitude, and still more by his fervent
trust, roused his alarm. It was his characteristic bias to shrink from the
moral stupidity of valuing lightly what had come close to him, and of
missing blindly in his own life of to-day the crisis which he recognized
as momentous and sacred in the historic life of men. If he had read of
this incident as having happened centuries ago in Rome, Greece, Asia
Minor, Palestine, Cairo, to some man young as himself, dissatisfied with
his neutral life, and wanting some closer fellowship, some more special
duty to give him ardor for the possible consequences of his work, it would
have appeared to him quite natural that the incident should have created a
deep impression on that far-off man, whose clothing and action would have
been seen in his imagination as part of an age chiefly known to us through
its more serious effects. Why should he be ashamed of his own agitated
feeling merely because he dressed for dinner, wore a white tie, and lived
among people who might laugh at his owning any conscience in the matter,
as the solemn folly of taking himself to seriously?--that bugbear of
circles in which the lack of grave emotion passes for wit. From such
cowardice before modish ignorance and obtuseness, Deronda shrank. But he
also shrank from having his course determined by mere contagion, without
consent of reason; or from allowing a reverential pity for spiritual
struggle to hurry him along a dimly-seen path.

What, after all, had really happened? He knew quite accurately the answer
Sir Hugo would have given: "A consumptive Jew, possessed by a fanaticism
which obstacles and hastening death intensified, had fixed on Deronda as
the antitype of some visionary image, the offspring of wedded hope and
despair: despair of his own life, irrepressible hope in the propagation of
his fanatical beliefs. The instance was perhaps odd, exceptional in its
form, but substantially it was not rare. Fanaticism was not so common as
bankruptcy, but taken in all its aspects it was abundant enough. While
Mordecai was waiting on the bridge for the fulfillment of his visions,
another man was convinced that he had the mathematical key of the universe
which would supersede Newton, and regarded all known physicists as
conspiring to stifle his discovery and keep the universe locked; another,
that he had the metaphysical key, with just that hair's-breadth of
difference from the old wards which would make it fit exactly. Scattered
here and there in every direction you might find a terrible person, with
more or less power of speech, and with an eye either glittering or
preternaturally dull, on the look-out for the man who must hear him; and
in most cases he had volumes which it was difficult to get printed, or if
printed to get read. This Mordecai happened to have a more pathetic
aspect, a more passionate, penetrative speech than was usual with such
monomaniacs; he was more poetical than a social reformer with colored
views of the new moral world in parallelograms, or than an enthusiast in
sewage; still he came under the same class. It would be only right and
kind to indulge him a little, to comfort him with such help as was
practicable; but what likelihood was there that his notions had the sort
of value he ascribed to them? In such cases a man of the world knows what
to think beforehand. And as to Mordecai's conviction that he had found a
new executive self, it might be preparing for him the worst of
disappointments--that which presents itself as final."

Deronda's ear caught all these negative whisperings; nay, he repeated them
distinctly to himself. It was not the first but it was the most pressing
occasion on which he had had to face this question of the family likeness
among the heirs of enthusiasm, whether prophets or dreamers of dreams,
whether the

"Great benefactors of mankind, deliverers,"

or the devotees of phantasmal discovery--from the first believer in his
own unmanifested inspiration, down to the last inventor of an ideal
machine that will achieve perpetual motion. The kinship of human passion,
the sameness of mortal scenery, inevitably fill fact with burlesque and
parody. Error and folly have had their hecatombs of martyrs. Reduce the
grandest type of man hitherto known to an abstract statement of his
qualities and efforts, and he appears in dangerous company: say that, like
Copernicus and Galileo, he was immovably convinced in the face of hissing
incredulity; but so is the contriver of perpetual motion. We cannot fairly
try the spirits by this sort of test. If we want to avoid giving the dose
of hemlock or the sentence of banishment in the wrong case, nothing will
do but a capacity to understand the subject-matter on which the immovable
man is convinced, and fellowship with human travail, both near and afar,
to hinder us from scanning and deep experience lightly. Shall we say, "Let
the ages try the spirits, and see what they are worth?" Why, we are the
beginning of the ages, which can only be just by virtue of just judgments
in separate human breasts--separate yet combined. Even steam-engines could
not have got made without that condition, but must have stayed in the mind
of James Watt.

This track of thinking was familiar enough to Deronda to have saved him
from any contemptuous prejudgment of Mordecai, even if their communication
had been free from that peculiar claim on himself strangely ushered in by
some long-growing preparation in the Jew's agitated mind. This claim,
indeed, considered in what is called a rational way, might seem
justifiably dismissed as illusory and even preposterous; but it was
precisely what turned Mordecai's hold on him from an appeal to his ready
sympathy into a clutch on his struggling conscience. Our consciences are
not all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws they are
the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories (which also have
their kinship and likeness). And Deronda's conscience included
sensibilities beyond the common, enlarged by his early habit of thinking
himself imaginatively into the experience of others.

What was the claim this eager soul made upon him?--"You must believe my
beliefs--be moved by my reasons--hope my hopes--see the vision I point to
--behold a glory where I behold it!" To take such a demand in the light of
an obligation in any direct sense would have been preposterous--to have
seemed to admit it would have been dishonesty; and Deronda, looking on the
agitation of those moments, felt thankful that in the midst of his
compassion he had preserved himself from the bondage of false concessions.
The claim hung, too, on a supposition which might be--nay, probably was--
in discordance with the full fact: the supposition that he, Deronda, was
of Jewish blood. Was there ever a more hypothetic appeal?

But since the age of thirteen Deronda had associated the deepest
experience of his affections with what was a pure supposition, namely,
that Sir Hugo was his father: that was a hypothesis which had been the
source of passionate struggle within him; by its light he had been
accustomed to subdue feelings and to cherish them. He had been well used
to find a motive in a conception which might be disproved; and he had been
also used to think of some revelation that might influence his view of the
particular duties belonging to him. To be in a state of suspense, which
was also one of emotive activity and scruple, was a familiar attitude of
his conscience.

And now, suppose that wish-begotten belief in his Jewish birth, and that
extravagant demand of discipleship, to be the foreshadowing of an actual
discovery and a genuine spiritual result: suppose that Mordecai's ideas
made a real conquest over Deronda's conviction? Nay, it was conceivable
that as Mordecai needed and believed that, he had found an active
replenishment of himself, so Deronda might receive from Mordecai's mind
the complete ideal shape of that personal duty and citizenship which lay
in his own thought like sculptured fragments certifying some beauty
yearned after but not traceable by divination.

As that possibility presented itself in his meditations, he was aware that
it would be called dreamy, and began to defend it. If the influence he
imagined himself submitting to had been that of some honored professor,
some authority in a seat of learning, some philosopher who had been
accepted as a voice of the age, would a thorough receptiveness toward
direction have been ridiculed? Only by those who hold it a sign of
weakness to be obliged for an idea, and prefer to hint that they have
implicitly held in a more correct form whatever others have stated with a
sadly short-coming explicitness. After all, what was there but vulgarity
in taking the fact that Mordecai was a poor Jewish workman, and that he
was to be met perhaps on a sanded floor in the parlor of the _Hand and
Banner_ as a reason for determining beforehand that there was not some
spiritual force within him that might have a determining effect on a
white-handed gentleman? There is a legend told of the Emperor Domitian,
that having heard of a Jewish family, of the house of David, whence the
ruler of the world was to spring, he sent for its members in alarm, but
quickly released them on observing that they had the hands of work-people
--being of just the opposite opinion with that Rabbi who stood waiting at
the gate of Rome in confidence that the Messiah would be found among the
destitute who entered there. Both Emperor and Rabbi were wrong in their
trust of outward signs: poverty and poor clothes are no sign of
inspiration, said Deronda to his inward objector, but they have gone with
it in some remarkable cases. And to regard discipleship as out of the
question because of them, would be mere dullness of imagination.

A more plausible reason for putting discipleship out of the question was
the strain of visionary excitement in Mordecai, which turned his wishes
into overmastering impressions, and made him read outward facts as
fulfillment. Was such a temper of mind likely to accompany that wise
estimate of consequences which is the only safeguard from fatal error,
even to ennobling motive? But it remained to be seen whether that rare
conjunction existed or not in Mordecai: perhaps his might be one of the
natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of
that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.
The inspirations of the world have come in that way too: even strictly-
measuring science could hardly have got on without that forecasting ardor
which feels the agitations of discovery beforehand, and has a faith in its
preconception that surmounts many failures of experiment. And in relation
to human motives and actions, passionate belief has a fuller efficacy.
Here enthusiasm may have the validity of proof, and happening in one soul,
give the type of what will one day be general.

At least, Deronda argued, Mordecai's visionary excitability was hardly a
reason for concluding beforehand that he was not worth listening to except
for pity sake. Suppose he had introduced himself as one of the strictest
reasoners. Do they form a body of men hitherto free from false conclusions
and illusory speculations? The driest argument has its hallucinations, too
hastily concluding that its net will now at last be large enough to hold
the universe. Men may dream in demonstrations, and cut out an illusory
world in the shape of axioms, definitions, and propositions, with a final
exclusion of fact signed Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking will save us
mortals from mistake in our imperfect apprehension of the matter to be
thought about. And since the unemotional intellect may carry us into a
mathematical dreamland where nothing is but what is not, perhaps an
emotional intellect may have absorbed into its passionate vision of
possibilities some truth of what will be--the more comprehensive massive
life feeding theory with new material, as the sensibility of the artist
seizes combinations which science explains and justifies. At any rate,
presumptions to the contrary are not to be trusted. We must be patient
with the inevitable makeshift of our human thinking, whether in its sum
total or in the separate minds that have made the sum. Columbus had some
impressions about himself which we call superstitions, and used some
arguments which we disapprove; but he had also some sound physical
conceptions, and he had the passionate patience of genius to make them
tell on mankind. The world has made up its mind rather contemptuously
about those who were deaf to Columbus.

"My contempt for them binds me to see that I don't adopt their mistake on
a small scale," said Deronda, "and make myself deaf with the assumption
that there cannot be any momentous relation between this Jew and me,
simply because he has clad it in illusory notions. What I can be to him,
or he to me, may not at all depend on his persuasion about the way we came
together. To me the way seems made up of plainly discernible links. If I
had not found Mirah, it is probable that I should not have begun to be
specially interested in the Jews, and certainly I should not have gone on
that loitering search after an Ezra Cohen which made me pause at Ram's
book-shop and ask the price of _Maimon_. Mordecai, on his side, had his
visions of a disciple, and he saw me by their light; I corresponded well
enough with the image his longing had created. He took me for one of his
race. Suppose that his impression--the elderly Jew at Frankfort seemed to
have something like it--suppose in spite of all presumptions to the
contrary, that his impression should somehow be proved true, and that I
should come actually to share any of the ideas he is devoted to? This is
the only question which really concerns the effect of our meeting on my
life.

"But if the issue should be quite different?--well, there will be
something painful to go through. I shall almost inevitably have to be an
active cause of that poor fellow's crushing disappointment. Perhaps this
issue is the one I had need prepare myself for. I fear that no tenderness
of mine can make his suffering lighter. Would the alternative--that I
should not disappoint him--be less painful to me?"

Here Deronda wavered. Feelings had lately been at work within him which
had very much modified the reluctance he would formerly have had to think
of himself as probably a Jew. And, if you like, he was romantic. That
young energy and spirit of adventure which have helped to create the
world-wide legions of youthful heroes going to seek the hidden tokens of
their birth and its inheritance of tasks, gave him a certain quivering
interest in the bare possibility that he was entering on a track like--all
the more because the track was one of thought as well as action.

"The bare possibility." He could not admit it to be more. The belief that
his father was an Englishman only grew firmer under the weak assaults of
unwarranted doubt. And that a moment should ever come in which that belief
was declared a delusion, was something of which Deronda would not say, "I
should be glad." His life-long affection for Sir Hugo, stronger than all
his resentment, made him shrink from admitting that wish.

Which way soever the truth might lie, he repeated to himself what he had
said to Mordecai--that he could not without farther reasons undertake to
hasten its discovery. Nay, he was tempted now to regard his uncertainty as
a condition to be cherished for the present. If further intercourse
revealed nothing but illusions as what he was expected to share in, the
want of any valid evidence that he was a Jew might save Mordecai the worst
shock in the refusal of fraternity. It might even be justifiable to use
the uncertainty on this point in keeping up a suspense which would induce
Mordecai to accept those offices of friendship that Deronda longed to urge
on him.

These were the meditations that busied Deronda in the interval of four
days before he could fulfill his promise to call for Mordecai at Ezra
Cohen's, Sir Hugo's demands on him often lasting to an hour so late as to
put the evening expedition to Holborn out of the question.

CHAPTER XLII.

"Wenn es eine Stutenleiter von Leiden giebt, so hat Israel die hoechste
Staffel erstiegen; wen die Dauer der Schmerzen und die Geduld, mit
welcher sie ertragen werden, adeln, so nehmen es die Juden mit den
Hochgeborenen aller Laender auf; wenn eine Literatur reich genannt
wird, die wenige klassische Trauerspiele besitzt, welcher Platz
gebuehrt dann einer Tragodie die anderthalb Jahrtausende wahrt,
gedichtet und dargestellt von den Helden selber?"--ZUNZ: _Die
Synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters._

"If there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the
nations--if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they are
borne ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land--if a
literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies,
what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years,
in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?"

Deronda had lately been reading that passage of Zunz, and it occurred to
him by way of contrast when he was going to the Cohens, who certainly bore
no obvious stamp of distinction in sorrow or in any other form of
aristocracy. Ezra Cohen was not clad in the sublime pathos of the martyr,
and his taste for money-getting seemed to be favored with that success
which has been the most exasperating difference in the greed of Jews
during all the ages of their dispersion. This Jeshurun of a pawnbroker was
not a symbol of the great Jewish tragedy; and yet was there not something
typical in the fact that a life like Mordecai's--a frail incorporation of
the national consciousness, breathing with difficult breath--was nested in
the self-gratulating ignorant prosperity of the Cohens?

Glistening was the gladness in their faces when Deronda reappeared among
them. Cohen himself took occasion to intimate that although the diamond
ring, let alone a little longer, would have bred more money, he did not
mind _that_--not a sixpence--when compared with the pleasure of the women
and children in seeing a young gentleman whose first visit had been so
agreeable that they had "done nothing but talk of it ever since." Young
Mrs. Cohen was very sorry that baby was asleep, and then very glad that
Adelaide was not yet gone to bed, entreating Deronda not to stay in the
shop, but to go forthwith into the parlor to see "mother and the
children." He willingly accepted the invitation, having provided himself
with portable presents; a set of paper figures for Adelaide, and an ivory
cup and ball for Jacob.

The grandmother had a pack of cards before her and was making "plates"
with the children. A plate had just been thrown down and kept itself
whole.

"Stop!" said Jacob, running to Deronda as he entered. "Don't tread on my
plate. Stop and see me throw it up again."

Deronda complied, exchanging a smile of understanding with the
grandmother, and the plate bore several tossings before it came to pieces;
then the visitor was allowed to come forward and seat himself. He observed
that the door from which Mordecai had issued on the former visit was now
closed, but he wished to show his interest in the Cohens before disclosing
a yet stronger interest in their singular inmate.

It was not until he had Adelaide on his knee, and was setting up the paper
figures in their dance on the table, while Jacob was already practicing
with the cup and ball, that Deronda said--

"Is Mordecai in just now?"

"Where is he, Addy?" said Cohen, who had seized an interval of business to
come and look on.

"In the workroom there," said his wife, nodding toward the closed door.

"The fact is, sir," said Cohen, "we don't know what's come to him this
last day or two. He's always what I may call a little touched, you know"--
here Cohen pointed to his own forehead--"not quite so rational in all
things, like you and me; but he's mostly wonderful regular and industrious
so far as a poor creature can be, and takes as much delight in the boy as
anybody could. But this last day or two he's been moving about like a
sleep-walker, or else sitting as still as a wax figure."

"It's the disease, poor dear creature," said the grandmother, tenderly. "I
doubt whether he can stand long against it."

"No; I think its only something he's got in his head." said Mrs. Cohen the
younger. "He's been turning over writing continually, and when I speak to
him it takes him ever so long to hear and answer."

"You may think us a little weak ourselves," said Cohen, apologetically.
"But my wife and mother wouldn't part with him if he was a still worse
encumbrance. It isn't that we don't know the long and short of matters,
but it's our principle. There's fools do business at a loss and don't know
it. I'm not one of 'em."

"Oh, Mordecai carries a blessing inside him," said the grandmother.

"He's got something the matter inside him," said Jacob, coming up to
correct this erratum of his grandmother's. "He said he couldn't talk to
me, and he wouldn't have a bit o' bun."

"So far from wondering at your feeling for him," said Deronda, "I already
feel something of the same sort myself. I have lately talked to him at
Ram's book-shop--in fact, I promised to call for him here, that we might
go out together."