Daniel Deronda
乔治.艾略特 George Eliot
CHAPTER XXXII. Page 1
In all ages it hath been a favorite text that a potent love hath thenature of an isolated fatality, whereto the mind's opinions and wontedresolves are altogether alien; as, for example, Daphnis his frenzy,wherein it had little availed him to have been convinced of Heraclitushis doctrine; or the philtre-bred passion of Tristan, who, though hehad been as deep as Duns Scotus, would have had his reasoning marredby that cup too much; or Romeo in his sudden taking for Juliet,wherein any objections he might have held against Ptolemy had madelittle difference to his discourse under the balcony. Yet all love isnot such, even though potent; nay, this passion hath as large scope asany for allying itself with every operation of the soul: so that itshall acknowledge an effect from the imagined light of unprovenfirmaments, and have its scale set to the grander orbits of what hathbeen and shall be.
Deronda, on his return to town, could assure Sir Hugo of his having lodgedin Grandcourt's mind a distinct understanding that he could get fiftythousand pounds by giving up a prospect which was probably distant, andnot absolutely certain; but he had no further sign of Grandcourt'sdisposition in the matter than that he was evidently inclined to keep upfriendly communications.
"And what did you think of the future bride on a nearer survey?" said SirHugo.
"I thought better of her than I did in Leubronn. Roulette was not a goodsetting for her; it brought out something of the demon. At Dinlow sheseemed much more womanly and attractive--less hard and self-possessed. Ithought her mouth and eyes had quite a different expression."
"Don't flirt with her too much, Dan," said Sir Hugo, meaning to beagreeably playful. "If you make Grandcourt savage when they come to theAbbey at Christmas, it will interfere with my affairs."
might be worth a little inconvenience." another dingy man of the same pattern issued fromthe background glooms.
"I can stay in town, sir."
"No, no. Lady Mallinger and the children can't do without you atChristmas. Only don't make mischief--unless you can get up a duel, andmanage to shoot Grandcourt, which might be worth a little inconvenience."
"I don't think you ever saw me flirt," said Deronda, not amused.
"Oh, haven't I, though?" said Sir Hugo, provokingly. "You are alwayslooking tenderly at the women, and talking to them in a Jesuitical way.You are a dangerous young fellow--a kind of Lovelace who will make theClarissas run after you instead of you running after them."
What was the use of being exasperated at a tasteless joke?--only theexasperation comes before the reflection on utility. Few friendly remarksare more annoying than the information that we are always seeming to dowhat we never mean to do. Sir Hugo's notion of flirting, it was to behoped, was rather peculiar; for his own part, Deronda was sure that he hadnever flirted. But he was glad that the baronet had no knowledge about therepurchase of Gwendolen's necklace to feed his taste for this kind ofrallying.
He would be on his guard in future; for example, in his behavior at Mrs.Meyrick's, where he was about to pay his first visit since his arrivalfrom Leubronn. For Mirah was certainly a creature in whom it was difficultnot to show a tender kind of interest both by looks and speech.
her tohave such a daughter brought back again! But a mother's feelings are notworth reckoning, I .
Mrs. Meyrick had not failed to send Deronda a report of Mirah's well-beingin her family. "We are getting fonder of her every day," she had written."At breakfast-time we all look toward the door with expectation to see hercome in; and we watch her and listen to her as if she were a native from anew country. I have not heard a word from her lips that gives me a doubtabout her. She is quite contented and full of gratitude. My daughters arelearning from her, and they hope to get her other pupils; for she isanxious not to eat the bread of idleness, but to work, like my girls. Mabsays our life has become like a fairy tale, and all she is afraid of isthat Mirah will turn into a nightingale again and fly away from us. Hervoice is just perfect: not loud and strong, but searching and melting,like the thoughts of what has been. That is the way old people like mefeel a beautiful voice."
But Mrs. Meyrick did not enter into particulars which would have requiredher to say that Amy and Mab, who had accompanied Mirah to the synagogue,found the Jewish faith less reconcilable with their wishes in her casethan in that of Scott's Rebecca. They kept silence out of delicacy toMirah, with whom her religion was too tender a subject to be touchedlightly; but after a while Amy, who was much of a practical reformer,could not restrain a question.
"Excuse me, Mirah, but _does_ it seem quite right to you that the womenshould sit behind rails in a gallery apart?"
"Yes, I never thought of anything else," said Mirah, with mild surprise.
"And you like better to see the men with their hats on?" said Mab,cautiously proposing the smallest item of difference.
"Oh, yes. I like what I have always seen there, because it brings back tome the same feelings--the feelings I would not part with for anything elsein the world."
After this, any criticism, whether of doctrine or practice, would haveseemed to these generous little people an inhospitable cruelty. Mirah'sreligion was of one fibre with her affections, and had never presenteditself to her as a set of propositions.
"She says herself she is a very bad Jewess, and does not half know herpeople's religion," said Amy, when Mirah was gone to bed. "Perhaps itwould gradually melt away from her, and she would pass into Christianitylike the rest of the world, if she got to love us very much, and neverfound her mother. It is so strange to be of the Jews' religion now."
"Oh, oh, oh!" cried Mab. "I wish I were not such a hideous Christian. Howcan an ugly Christian, who is always dropping her work, convert abeautiful Jewess, who has not a fault?"
"It may be wicked of me," said shrewd Kate, "but I cannot help wishingthat her mother may not be found. There might be something unpleasant."
"I don't think it, my dear," said Mrs. Meyrick. "I believe Mirah is cutout after the pattern of her mother. And what a joy it would be to her tohave such a daughter brought back again! But a mother's feelings are notworth reckoning, I suppose" (she shot a mischievous glance at her owndaughters), "and a dead mother is worth more that a living one?"
"Well, and so she may be, little mother," said Kate; "but we would ratherhold you cheaper, and have you alive."
Not only the Meyricks, whose various knowledge had been acquired by theirregular foraging to which clever girls have usually been reduced, butDeronda himself, with all his masculine instruction, had been roused bythis apparition of Mirah to the consciousness of knowing hardly anythingabout modern Judaism or the inner Jewish history. The Chosen People havebeen commonly treated as a people chosen for the sake of somebody else;and their thinking as something (no matter exactly what) that ought tohave been entirely otherwise; and Deronda, like his neighbors, hadregarded Judaism as a sort of eccentric fossilized form which anaccomplished man might dispense with studying, and leave to specialists.But Mirah, with her terrified flight from one parent, and her yearningafter the other, had flashed on him the hitherto neglected reality thatJudaism was something still throbbing in human lives, still making forthem the only conceivable vesture of the world; and in the idlingexcursion on which he immediately afterward set out with Sir Hugo he beganto look for the outsides of synagogues, and the title of books about theJews. This awakening of a new interest--this passing from the suppositionthat we hold the right opinions on a subject we are careless about, to asudden care for it, and a sense that our opinions were ignorance--is aneffectual remedy for _ennui_, which, unhappily, cannot be secured on aphysician's prescription; but Deronda had carried it with him, and enduredhis weeks of lounging all the better. It was on this journey that he firstentered a Jewish synagogue--at Frankfort--where his party rested on aFriday. In exploring the Juden-gasse, which he had seen long before, heremembered well enough its picturesque old houses; what his eyes chieflydwelt on now were the human types there; and his thought, busilyconnecting them with the past phases of their race, stirred that fibre ofhistoric sympathy which had helped to determine in him certain traitsworth mentioning for those who are interested in his future. True, when ayoung man has a fine person, no eccentricity of manners, the education ofa gentleman, and a present income, it is not customary to feel a pryingcuriosity about his way of thinking, or his peculiar tastes. He may verywell be settled in life as an agreeable clever young fellow withoutpassing a special examination on those heads. Later, when he is gettingrather slovenly and portly, his peculiarities are more distinctlydiscerned, and it is taken as a mercy if they are not highlyobjectionable. But any one wishing to understand the effect of after-events on Deronda should know a little more of what he was at five-and-twenty than was evident in ordinary intercourse.
set about one function in particular with zeal andsteadiness. Not an admirable experience, to be proposed as an ideal; but aform of struggle before break of day which some young men since thepatriarch?
It happened that the very vividness of his impressions had often made himthe more enigmatic to his friends, and had contributed to an apparentindefiniteness in his sentiments. His early-wakened sensibility andreflectiveness had developed into a many-sided sympathy, which threatenedto hinder any persistent course of action: as soon as he took up anyantagonism, though only in thought, he seemed to himself like the Sabinewarriors in the memorable story--with nothing to meet his spear but fleshof his flesh, and objects that he loved. His imagination had so wroughtitself to the habit of seeing things as they probably appeared to others,that a strong partisanship, unless it were against an immediateoppression, had become an insincerity for him. His plenteous, flexiblesympathy had ended by falling into one current with that reflectiveanalysis which tends to neutralize sympathy. Few men were able to keepthemselves clearer of vices than he; yet he hated vices mildly, being usedto think of them less in the abstract than as a part of mixed humannatures having an individual history, which it was the bent of his mind totrace with understanding and pity. With the same innate balance he wasfervidly democratic in his feeling for the multitude, and yet, through hisaffections and imagination, intensely conservative; voracious ofspeculations on government and religion, yet both to part with long-sanctioned forms which, for him, were quick with memories and sentimentsthat no argument could lay dead. We fall on the leaning side; and Derondasuspected himself of loving too well the losing causes of the world.Martyrdom changes sides, and he was in danger of changing with it, havinga strong repugnance to taking up that clue of success which the order ofthe world often forces upon us and makes it treason against the commonweal to reject. And yet his fear of falling into an unreasoning narrowhatred made a check for him: he apologized for the heirs of privilege; heshrank with dislike from the loser's bitterness and the denunciatory toneof the unaccepted innovator. A too reflective and diffusive sympathy wasin danger of paralyzing in him that indignation against wrong and thatselectness of fellowship which are the conditions of moral force; and inthe last few years of confirmed manhood he had become so keenly aware ofthis that what he most longed for was either some external event, or someinward light, that would urge him into a definite line of action, andcompress his wandering energy. He was ceasing to care for knowledge--hehad no ambition for practice--unless they could both be gathered up intoone current with his emotions; and he dreaded, as if it were a dwelling-place of lost souls, that dead anatomy of culture which turns the universeinto a mere ceaseless answer to queries, and knows, not everything, buteverything else about everything--as if one should be ignorant of nothingconcerning the scent of violets except the scent itself for which one hadno nostril. But how and whence was the needed event to come?--theinfluence that would justify partiality, and make him what he longed tobe, yet was unable to make himself--an organic part of social life,instead of roaming in it like a yearning disembodied spirit, stirred witha vague social passion, but without fixed local habitation to renderfellowship real? To make a little difference for the better was what hewas not contented to live without; but how to make it? It is one thing tosee your road, another to cut it. He found some of the fault in his birthand the way he had been brought up, which had laid no special demands onhim and had given him no fixed relationship except one of a doubtful kind;but he did not attempt to hide from himself that he had fallen into ameditative numbness, and was gliding farther and farther from that life ofpractically energetic sentiment which he would have proclaimed (if he hadbeen inclined to proclaim anything) to be the best of all life, and forhimself the only way worth living. He wanted some way of keeping emotionand its progeny of sentiments--which make the savors of life--substantialand strong in the face of a reflectiveness that threatened to nullify alldifferences. To pound the objects of sentiment into small dust, yet keepsentiment alive and active, was something like the famous recipe formaking cannon--to first take a round hole and then enclose it with iron;whatever you do keeping fast hold of your round hole. Yet how distinguishwhat our will may wisely save in its completeness, from the heaping ofcat-mummies and the expensive cult of enshrined putrefactions?
Something like this was the common under-current in Deronda's mind whilehe was reading law or imperfectly attending to polite conversation.Meanwhile he had not set about one function in particular with zeal andsteadiness. Not an admirable experience, to be proposed as an ideal; but aform of struggle before break of day which some young men since thepatriarch have had to pass through, with more or less of bruising if notlaming.
I have said that under his calm exterior he had a fervor which made himeasily feel the presence of poetry in everyday events; and the forms ofthe Juden-gasse, rousing the sense of union with what is remote, set himmusing on two elements of our historic life which that sense raises intothe same region of poetry;--the faint beginnings of faiths andinstitutions, and their obscure lingering decay; the dust and witheredremnants with which they are apt to be covered, only enhancing for theawakened perception the impressiveness either of a sublimely penetratinglife, as in the twin green leaves that will become the sheltering tree, orof a pathetic inheritance in which all the grandeur and the glory havebecome a sorrowing memory.
This imaginative stirring, as he turned out of the Juden-gasse, andcontinued to saunter in the warm evening air, meaning to find his way tothe synagogue, neutralized the repellent effect of certain ugly littleincidents on his way. Turning into an old book-shop to ask the exact timeof service at the synagogue, he was affectionately directed by aprecocious Jewish youth, who entered cordially into his wanting, not thefine new building of the Reformed but the old Rabbinical school of theorthodox; and then cheated him like a pure Teuton, only with more amenity,in his charge for a book quite out of request as one "nicht so leicht zubekommen." Meanwhile at the opposite counter a deaf and grisly tradesmanwas casting a flinty look at certain cards, apparently combiningadvantages of business with religion, and shoutingly proposed to him inJew-dialect by a dingy man in a tall coat hanging from neck to heel, a bagin hand, and a broad low hat surmounting his chosen nose--who had nosooner disappeared than another dingy man of the same pattern issued fromthe background glooms of the shop and also shouted in the same dialect. Infact, Deronda saw various queer-looking Israelites not altogether withoutguile, and just distinguishable from queer-looking Christians of the samemixed _morale_. In his anxiety about Mirah's relatives, he had lately beenthinking of vulgar Jews with a sort of personal alarm. But a littlecomparison will often diminish our surprise and disgust at the aberrationsof Jews and other dissidents whose lives do not offer a consistent orlovely pattern of their creed; and this evening Deronda, becoming moreconscious that he was falling into unfairness and ridiculous exaggeration,began to use that corrective comparison: he paid his thaler too much,without prejudice to his interests in the Hebrew destiny, or his wish tofind the _Rabbinische Schule_, which he arrived at by sunset, and enteredwith a good congregation of men.
He happened to take his seat in a line with an elderly man from whom hewas distant enough to glance at him more than once as rather a noticeablefigure--his ample white beard and felt hat framing a profile of that finecontour which may as easily be Italian as Hebrew. He returned Deronda'snotice till at last their eyes met; an undesirable chance with unknownpersons, and a reason to Deronda for not looking again; but he immediatelyfound an open prayer-book pushed toward him and had to bow his thanks.However, the congregation had mustered, the reader had mounted to the_almemor_ or platform, and the service began. Deronda, having lookedenough at the German translation of the Hebrew in the book before him toknow that he was chiefly hearing Psalms and Old Testament passages orphrases, gave himself up to that strongest effect of chanted liturgieswhich is independent of detailed verbal meaning--like the effect of anAllegri's _Miserere_ or a Palestrina's _Magnificat_. The most powerfulmovement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothingspecial, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our ownweakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us; or elsea self-oblivious lifting up of Gladness, a _Gloria in excelsis_ that suchGood exists; both the yearning and the exaltation gathering their utmostforce from the sense of communion in a form which has expressed them both,for long generations of struggling fellow-men. The Hebrew liturgy, likeothers, has its transitions of litany, lyric, proclamation, dry statementand blessing; but this evening, all were one for Deronda: the chant of the_Chazaris_ or Reader's grand wide-ranging voice with its passage frommonotony to sudden cries, the outburst of sweet boys' voices from thelittle choir, the devotional swaying of men's bodies backward and forward,the very commonness of the building and shabbiness of the scene where anational faith, which had penetrated the thinking of half the world, andmoulded the splendid forms of that world's religion, was finding a remote,obscure echo--all were blent for him as one expression of a bindinghistory, tragic and yet glorious. He wondered at the strength of his ownfeeling; it seemed beyond the occasion--what one might imagine to be adivine influx in the darkness, before there was any vision to interpret.The whole scene was a coherent strain, its burden a passionate regret,which, if he had known the liturgy for the Day of Reconciliation, he mighthave clad in its authentic burden; "Happy the eye which saw all thesethings; but verily to hear only of them afflicts our soul. Happy the eyethat saw our temple and the joy of our congregation; but verily to hearonly of them afflicts our soul. Happy the eye that saw the fingers whentuning every kind of song; but verily to hear only of them afflicts oursoul."