Daniel Deronda

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"Say they're levanting, Buchan," said Miller, who liked his joke, and
would not have objected to be called Voltairian. "Never mind. Let us have
a Jewish night; we've not had one for a long while. Let us take the
discussion on Jewish ground. I suppose we've no prejudice here; we're all
philosophers; and we like our friends Mordecai, Pash, and Gideon, as well
as if they were no more kin to Abraham than the rest of us. We're all
related through Adam, until further showing to the contrary, and if you
look into history we've all got some discreditable forefathers. So I mean
no offence when I say I don't think any great things of the part the
Jewish people have played in the world. What then? I think they were
iniquitously dealt by in past times. And I suppose we don't want any men
to be maltreated, white, black, brown, or yellow--I know I've just given
my half-crown to the contrary. And that reminds me, I've a curious old
German book--I can't read it myself, but a friend of mine was reading out
of it to me the other day--about the prejudicies against the Jews, and the
stories used to be told against 'em, and what do you think one was? Why,
that they're punished with a bad odor in their bodies; and _that_, says
the author, date 1715 (I've just been pricing and marking the book this
very morning)--that is true, for the ancients spoke of it. But then, he
says, the other things are fables, such as that the odor goes away all at
once when they're baptized, and that every one of the ten tribes, mind
you, all the ten being concerned in the crucifixion, has got a particular
punishment over and above the smell:--Asher, I remember, has the right arm
a handbreadth shorter than the left, and Naphthali has pig's ears and a
smell of live pork. What do you think of that? There's been a good deal of
fun made of rabbinical fables, but in point of fables my opinion is, that
all over the world it's six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. However,
as I said before, I hold with the philosophers of the last century that
the Jews have played no great part as a people, though Pash will have it
they're clever enough to beat all the rest of the world. But if so, I ask,
why haven't they done it?"

"For the same reason that the cleverest men in the country don't get
themselves or their ideas into Parliament," said the ready Pash; "because
the blockheads are too many for 'em."

"That is a vain question," said Mordecai, "whether our people would beat
the rest of the world. Each nation has its own work, and is a member of
the world, enriched by the work of each. But it is true, as Jehuda-ha-Levi
first said, that Israel is the heart of mankind, if we mean by heart the
core of affection which binds a race and its families in dutiful love, and
the reverence for the human body which lifts the needs of our animal life
into religion, and the tenderness which is merciful to the poor and weak
and to the dumb creature that wears the yoke for us."

"They're not behind any nation in arrogance," said Lily; "and if they have
got in the rear, it has not been because they were over-modest."

"Oh, every nation brags in its turn," said Miller.

"Yes," said Pash, "and some of them in the Hebrew text."

"Well, whatever the Jews contributed at one time, they are a stand-still
people," said Lily. "They are the type of obstinate adherence to the
superannuated. They may show good abilities when they take up liberal
ideas, but as a race they have no development in them."

"That is false!" said Mordecai, leaning forward again with his former
eagerness. "Let their history be known and examined; let the seed be
sifted, let its beginning be traced to the weed of the wilderness--the
more glorious will be the energy that transformed it. Where else is there
a nation of whom it may be as truly said that their religion and law and
moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart and made one
growth--where else a people who kept and enlarged their spiritual store at
the very time when they are hated with a hatred as fierce as the forest
fires that chase the wild beast from his covert? There is a fable of the
Roman, that swimming to save his life he held the roll of his writings
between his teeth and saved them from the waters. But how much more than
that is true of our race? They struggled to keep their place among the
nations like heroes--yea, when the hand was hacked off, they clung with
their teeth; but when the plow and the harrow had passed over the last
visible signs of their national covenant, and the fruitfulness of their
land was stifled with the blood of the sowers and planters, they said,
'The spirit is alive, let us make it a lasting habitation--lasting because
movable--so that it may be carried from generation to generation, and our
sons unborn may be rich in the things that have been, and possess a hope
built on an unchangeable foundation.' They said it and they wrought it,
though often breathing with scant life, as in a coffin, or as lying
wounded amid a heap of slain. Hooted and scared like the unknown dog, the
Hebrew made himself envied for his wealth and wisdom, and was bled of them
to fill the bath of Gentile luxury; he absorbed knowledge, he diffused it;
his dispersed race was a new Phoenicia working the mines of Greece and
carrying their products to the world. The native spirit of our tradition
was not to stand still, but to use records as a seed and draw out the
compressed virtues of law and prophecy; and while the Gentile, who had
said, 'What is yours is ours, and no longer yours,' was reading the letter
of our law as a dark inscription, or was turning its parchments into shoe-
soles for an army rabid with lust and cruelty, our Masters were still
enlarging and illuminating with fresh-fed interpretation. But the
dispersion was wide, the yoke of oppression was a spiked torture as well
as a load; the exile was forced afar among brutish people, where the
consciousness of his race was no clearer to him than the light of the sun
to our fathers in the Roman persecution, who had their hiding-place in a
cave, and knew not that it was day save by the dimmer burning of their
candles. What wonder that multitudes of our people are ignorant, narrow,
superstitious? What wonder?"

Here Mordecai, whose seat was next the fireplace, rose and leaned his arm
on the little shelf; his excitement had risen, though his voice, which had
begun with unusual strength, was getting hoarser.

"What wonder? The night is unto them, that they have no vision; in their
darkness they are unable to divine; the sun is gone down over the
prophets, and the day is dark above them; their observances are as
nameless relics. But which among the chief of the Gentile nations has not
an ignorant multitude? They scorn our people's ignorant observance; but
the most accursed ignorance is that which has no observance--sunk to the
cunning greed of the fox, to which all law is no more than a trap or the
cry of the worrying hound. There is a degradation deep down below the
memory that has withered into superstition. In the multitudes of the
ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession
of the divine Unity, the soul of Judaism is not dead. Revive the organic
centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its
religion be an outward reality. Looking toward a land and a polity, our
dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a
national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the
West--which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be,
as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. Let that come to
pass, and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel,
and superstition will vanish, not in the lawlessness of the renegade, but
in the illumination of great facts which widen feeling, and make all
knowledge alive as the young offspring of beloved memories."

Mordecai's voice had sunk, but with the hectic brilliancy of his gaze it
was not the less impressive. His extraordinary excitement was certainly
due to Deronda's presence: it was to Deronda that he was speaking, and the
moment had a testamentary solemnity for him which rallied all his powers.
Yet the presence of those other familiar men promoted expression, for they
embodied the indifference which gave a resistant energy to his speech. Not
that he looked at Deronda: he seemed to see nothing immediately around
him, and if any one had grasped him he would probably not have known it.
Again the former words came back to Deronda's mind,--"You must hope my
hopes--see the vision I point to--behold a glory where I behold it." They
came now with gathered pathos. Before him stood, as a living, suffering
reality, what hitherto he had only seen as an effort of imagination,
which, in its comparative faintness, yet carried a suspicion, of being
exaggerated: a man steeped in poverty and obscurity, weakened by disease,
consciously within the shadow of advancing death, but living an intense
life in an invisible past and future, careless of his personal lot, except
for its possible making some obstruction to a conceived good which he
would never share except as a brief inward vision--a day afar off, whose
sun would never warm him, but into which he threw his soul's desire, with
a passion often wanting to the personal motives of healthy youth. It was
something more than a grandiose transfiguration of the parental love that
toils, renounces, endures, resists the suicidal promptings of despair--all
because of the little ones, whose future becomes present to the yearning
gaze of anxiety.

All eyes were fixed on Mordecai as he sat down again, and none with
unkindness; but it happened that the one who felt the most kindly was the
most prompted to speak in opposition. This was the genial and rational
Gideon, who also was not without a sense that he was addressing the guest
of the evening. He said--

"You have your own way of looking at things, Mordecai, and as you say,
your own way seems to you rational. I know you don't hold with the
restoration of Judea by miracle, and so on; but you are as well aware as I
am that the subject has been mixed with a heap of nonsense both by Jews
and Christians. And as to the connection of our race with Palestine, it
has been perverted by superstition till it's as demoralizing as the old
poor-law. The raff and scum go there to be maintained like able-bodied
paupers, and to be taken special care of by the angel Gabriel when they
die. It's no use fighting against facts. We must look where they point;
that's what I call rationality. The most learned and liberal men among us
who are attached to our religion are for clearing our liturgy of all such
notions as a literal fulfillment of the prophecies about restoration, and
so on. Prune it of a few useless rites and literal interpretations of that
sort, and our religion is the simplest of all religions, and makes no
barrier, but a union, between us and the rest of the world."

"As plain as a pike-staff," said Pash, with an ironical laugh. "You pluck
it up by the roots, strip off the leaves and bark, shave off the knots,
and smooth it at top and bottom; put it where you will, it will do no
harm, it will never sprout. You may make a handle of it, or you may throw
it on the bonfire of scoured rubbish. I don't see why our rubbish is to be
held sacred any more than the rubbish of Brahmanism or Buddhism."

"No," said Mordecai, "no, Pash, because you have lost the heart of the
Jew. Community was felt before it was called good. I praise no
superstition, I praise the living fountains of enlarging belief. What is
growth, completion, development? You began with that question, I apply it
to the history of our people. I say that the effect of our separateness
will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless our race
takes on again the character of a nationality. That is the fulfillment of
the religious trust that moulded them into a people, whose life has made
half the inspiration of the world. What is it to me that the ten tribes
are lost untraceably, or that multitudes of the children of Judah have
mixed themselves with the Gentile populations as a river with rivers?
Behold our people still! Their skirts spread afar; they are torn and
soiled and trodden on; but there is a jeweled breastplate. Let the wealthy
men, the monarchs of commerce, the learned in all knowledge, the skilful
in all arts, the speakers, the political counselors, who carry in their
veins the Hebrew blood which has maintained its vigor in all climates, and
the pliancy of the Hebrew genius for which difficulty means new device--
let them say, 'we will lift up a standard, we will unite in a labor hard
but glorious like that of Moses and Ezra, a labor which shall be a worthy
fruit of the long anguish whereby our fathers maintained their
separateness, refusing the ease of falsehood.' They have wealth enough to
redeem the soil from debauched and paupered conquerors; they have the
skill of the statesman to devise, the tongue of the orator to persuade.
And is there no prophet or poet among us to make the ears of Christian
Europe tingle with shame at the hideous obloquy of Christian strife which
the Turk gazes at as at the fighting of beasts to which he has lent an
arena? There is store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity,
grand, simple, just, like the old--a republic where there is equality of
protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our
ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western freedom
amid the despotisms of the East. Then our race shall have an organic
centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the outraged Jew
shall have a defense in the court of nations, as the outraged Englishman
of America. And the world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a
community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the
sympathies of every great nation in its bosom: there will be a land set
for a halting-place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium
is for the West. Difficulties? I know there are difficulties. But let the
spirit of sublime achievement move in the great among our people, and the
work will begin."

"Ay, we may safely admit that, Mordecai," said Pash. "When there are great
men on 'Change, and high-flying professors converted to your doctrine,
difficulties will vanish like smoke."

Deronda, inclined by nature to take the side of those on whom the arrows
of scorn were falling, could not help replying to Pash's outfling, and
said--

"If we look back to the history of efforts which have made great changes,
it is astonishing how many of them seemed hopeless to those who looked on
in the beginning.

"Take what we have all heard and seen something of--the effort after the
unity of Italy, which we are sure soon to see accomplished to the very
last boundary. Look into Mazzini's account of his first yearning, when he
was a boy, after a restored greatness and a new freedom to Italy, and of
his first efforts as a young man to rouse the same feelings in other young
men, and get them to work toward a united nationality. Almost everything
seemed against him; his countrymen were ignorant or indifferent,
governments hostile, Europe incredulous. Of course the scorners often
seemed wise. Yet you see the prophecy lay with him. As long as there is a
remnant of national consciousness, I suppose nobody will deny that there
may be a new stirring of memories and hopes which may inspire arduous
action."

"Amen," said Mordecai, to whom Deronda's words were a cordial. "What is
needed is the leaven--what is needed is the seed of fire. The heritage of
Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in their veins as a
power without understanding, like the morning exultation of herds; it is
the inborn half of memory, moving as in a dream among writings on the
walls, which it sees dimly but cannot divide into speech. Let the torch of
visible community be lit! Let the reason of Israel disclose itself in a
great outward deed, and let there be another great migration, another
choosing of Israel to be a nationality whose members may still stretch to
the ends of the earth, even as the sons of England and Germany, whom
enterprise carries afar, but who still have a national hearth and a
tribunal of national opinion. Will any say 'It cannot be'? Baruch Spinoza
had not a faithful Jewish heart, though he had sucked the life of his
intellect at the breasts of Jewish tradition. He laid bare his father's
nakedness and said, 'They who scorn him have the higher wisdom.' Yet
Baruch Spinoza confessed, he saw not why Israel should not again be a
chosen nation. Who says that the history and literature of our race are
dead? Are they not as living as the history and literature of Greece and
Rome, which have inspired revolutions, enkindled the thought of Europe,
and made the unrighteous powers tremble? These were an inheritance dug
from the tomb. Ours is an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver in
millions of human frames."

Mordecai had stretched his arms upward, and his long thin hands quivered
in the air for a moment after he had ceased to speak. Gideon was certainly
a little moved, for though there was no long pause before he made a remark
in objection, his tone was more mild and deprecatory than before; Pash,
meanwhile, pressing his lips together, rubbing his black head with both
his hands and wrinkling his brow horizontally, with the expression of one
who differs from every speaker, but does not think it worth while to say
so. There is a sort of human paste that when it comes near the fire of
enthusiasm is only baked into harder shape.

"It may seem well enough on one side to make so much of our memories and
inheritance as you do, Mordecai," said Gideon; "but there's another side.
It isn't all gratitude and harmless glory. Our people have inherited a
good deal of hatred. There's a pretty lot of curses still flying about,
and stiff settled rancor inherited from the times of persecution. How will
you justify keeping one sort of memory and throwing away the other? There
are ugly debts standing on both sides."

"I justify the choice as all other choice is justified," said Mordecai. "I
cherish nothing for the Jewish nation, I seek nothing for them, but the
good which promises good to all the nations. The spirit of our religious
life, which is one with our national life, is not hatred of aught but
wrong. The Master has said, an offence against man is worse than an
offence against God. But what wonder if there is hatred in the breasts of
Jews, who are children of the ignorant and oppressed--what wonder, since
there is hatred in the breasts of Christians? Our national life was a
growing light. Let the central fire be kindled again, and the light will
reach afar. The degraded and scorned of our race will learn to think of
their sacred land, not as a place for saintly beggary to await death in
loathsome idleness, but as a republic where the Jewish spirit manifests
itself in a new order founded on the old, purified and enriched by the
experience our greatest sons have gathered from the life of the ages. How
long is it?--only two centuries since a vessel carried over the ocean the
beginning of the great North American nation. The people grew like meeting
waters--they were various in habit and sect--there came a time, a century
ago, when they needed a polity, and there were heroes of peace among them.
What had they to form a polity with but memories of Europe, corrected by
the vision of a better? Let our wise and wealthy show themselves heroes.
They have the memories of the East and West, and they have the full vision
of a better. A new Persia with a purified religion magnified itself in art
and wisdom. So will a new Judaea, poised between East and West--a covenant
of reconciliation. Will any say, the prophetic vision of your race has
been hopelessly mixed with folly and bigotry: the angel of progress has no
message for Judaism--it is a half-buried city for the paid workers to lay
open--the waters are rushing by it as a forsaken field? I say that the
strongest principle of growth lies in human choice. The sons of Judah have
to choose that God may again choose them. The Messianic time is the time
when Israel shall will the planting of the national ensign. The Nile
overflowed and rushed onward: the Egyptian could not choose the overflow,
but he chose to work and make channels for the fructifying waters, and
Egypt became the land of corn. Shall man, whose soul is set in the royalty
of discernment and resolve, deny his rank and say, I am an onlooker, ask
no choice or purpose of me? That is the blasphemy of this time. The divine
principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. Let us
contradict the blasphemy, and help to will our own better future and the
better future of the world--not renounce our higher gift and say, 'Let us
be as if we were not among the populations;' but choose our full heritage,
claim the brotherhood of our nation, and carry into it a new brotherhood
with the nations of the Gentiles. The vision is there; it will be
fulfilled."

With the last sentence, which was no more than a loud whisper, Mordecai
let his chin sink on his breast and his eyelids fall. No one spoke. It was
not the first time that he had insisted on the same ideas, but he was seen
to-night in a new phase. The quiet tenacity of his ordinary self differed
as much from his present exaltation of mood as a man in private talk,
giving reasons for a revolution of which no sign is discernable, differs
from one who feels himself an agent in a revolution begun. The dawn of
fulfillment brought to his hope by Deronda's presence had wrought
Mordecai's conception into a state of impassioned conviction, and he had
found strength in his excitement to pour forth the unlocked floods of
emotive argument, with a sense of haste as at a crisis which must be
seized. But now there had come with the quiescence of fatigue a sort of
thankful wonder that he had spoken--a contemplation of his life as a
journey which had come at last to this bourne. After a great excitement,
the ebbing strength of impulse is apt to leave us in this aloofness from
our active self. And in the moments after Mordecai had sunk his head, his
mind was wandering along the paths of his youth, and all the hopes which
had ended in bringing him hither.

Every one felt that the talk was ended, and the tone of phlegmatic
discussion made unseasonable by Mordecai's high-pitched solemnity. It was
as if they had come together to hear the blowing of the _shophar_, and had
nothing to do now but to disperse. The movement was unusually general, and
in less than ten minutes the room was empty of all except Mordecai and
Deronda. "Good-nights" had been given to Mordecai, but it was evident he
had not heard them, for he remained rapt and motionless. Deronda would not
disturb this needful rest, but waited for a spontaneous movement.

CHAPTER XLIII.

"My spirit is too weak; mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky."
--KEATS.

After a few minutes the unwonted stillness had penetrated Mordecai's
consciousness, and he looked up at Deronda, not in the least with
bewilderment and surprise, but with a gaze full of reposing satisfaction.
Deronda rose and placed his chair nearer, where there could be no imagined
need for raising the voice. Mordecai felt the action as a patient feels
the gentleness that eases his pillow. He began to speak in a low tone, as
if he were only thinking articulately, not trying to reach an audience.

"In the doctrine of the Cabbala, souls are born again and again in new
bodies till they are perfected and purified, and a soul liberated from a
worn-out body may join the fellow-soul that needs it, that they may be
perfected together, and their earthly work accomplished. Then they will
depart from the mortal region, and leave place for new souls to be born
out of the store in the eternal bosom. It is the lingering imperfection of
the souls already born into the mortal region that hinders the birth of
new souls and the preparation of the Messianic time:--thus the mind has
given shape to what is hidden, as the shadow of what is known, and has
spoken truth, though it were only in parable. When my long-wandering soul
is liberated from this weary body, it will join yours, and its work will
be perfected."

Mordecai's pause seemed an appeal which Deronda's feeling would not let
him leave unanswered. He tried to make it truthful; but for Mordecai's ear
it was inevitably filled with unspoken meaning. He only said--

"Everything I can in conscience do to make your life effective I will do."

"I know it," said Mordecai, in a tone of quiet certainty which dispenses
with further assurance. "I heard it. You see it all--you are by my side on
the mount of vision, and behold the paths of fulfillment which others
deny."