Daniel Deronda
乔治.艾略特 George Eliot
CHAPTER XLI.
"This, too is probable, according to that saying of Agathon: 'It is apart of probability that many improbable things will happen.'"--ARISTOTLE: _Poetics_.
Imagine the conflict in a mind like Deronda's given not only to feelstrongly but to question actively, on the evening after the interview withMordecai. To a young man of much duller susceptibilities the adventuremight have seemed enough out of the common way to divide his thoughts; butit had stirred Deronda so deeply, that with the usual reaction of hisintellect he began to examine the grounds of his emotion, and consider howfar he must resist its guidance. The consciousness that he was halfdominated by Mordecai's energetic certitude, and still more by his ferventtrust, roused his alarm. It was his characteristic bias to shrink from themoral stupidity of valuing lightly what had come close to him, and ofmissing blindly in his own life of to-day the crisis which he recognizedas momentous and sacred in the historic life of men. If he had read ofthis incident as having happened centuries ago in Rome, Greece, AsiaMinor, Palestine, Cairo, to some man young as himself, dissatisfied withhis neutral life, and wanting some closer fellowship, some more specialduty to give him ardor for the possible consequences of his work, it wouldhave appeared to him quite natural that the incident should have created adeep impression on that far-off man, whose clothing and action would havebeen seen in his imagination as part of an age chiefly known to us throughits more serious effects. Why should he be ashamed of his own agitatedfeeling merely because he dressed for dinner, wore a white tie, and livedamong people who might laugh at his owning any conscience in the matter,as the solemn folly of taking himself to seriously?--that bugbear ofcircles in which the lack of grave emotion passes for wit. From suchcowardice before modish ignorance and obtuseness, Deronda shrank. But healso shrank from having his course determined by mere contagion, withoutconsent of reason; or from allowing a reverential pity for spiritualstruggle to hurry him along a dimly-seen path.
What, after all, had really happened? He knew quite accurately the answerSir Hugo would have given: "A consumptive Jew, possessed by a fanaticismwhich obstacles and hastening death intensified, had fixed on Deronda asthe antitype of some visionary image, the offspring of wedded hope anddespair: despair of his own life, irrepressible hope in the propagation ofhis fanatical beliefs. The instance was perhaps odd, exceptional in itsform, but substantially it was not rare. Fanaticism was not so common asbankruptcy, but taken in all its aspects it was abundant enough. WhileMordecai was waiting on the bridge for the fulfillment of his visions,another man was convinced that he had the mathematical key of the universewhich would supersede Newton, and regarded all known physicists asconspiring to stifle his discovery and keep the universe locked; another,that he had the metaphysical key, with just that hair's-breadth ofdifference from the old wards which would make it fit exactly. Scatteredhere and there in every direction you might find a terrible person, withmore or less power of speech, and with an eye either glittering orpreternaturally dull, on the look-out for the man who must hear him; andin most cases he had volumes which it was difficult to get printed, or ifprinted to get read. This Mordecai happened to have a more patheticaspect, a more passionate, penetrative speech than was usual with suchmonomaniacs; he was more poetical than a social reformer with coloredviews of the new moral world in parallelograms, or than an enthusiast insewage; still he came under the same class. It would be only right andkind to indulge him a little, to comfort him with such help as waspracticable; but what likelihood was there that his notions had the sortof value he ascribed to them? In such cases a man of the world knows whatto think beforehand. And as to Mordecai's conviction that he had found anew executive self, it might be preparing for him the worst ofdisappointments--that which presents itself as final."
Deronda's ear caught all these negative whisperings; nay, he repeated themdistinctly to himself. It was not the first but it was the most pressingoccasion on which he had had to face this question of the family likenessamong 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 hisown unmanifested inspiration, down to the last inventor of an idealmachine that will achieve perpetual motion. The kinship of human passion,the sameness of mortal scenery, inevitably fill fact with burlesque andparody. Error and folly have had their hecatombs of martyrs. Reduce thegrandest type of man hitherto known to an abstract statement of hisqualities and efforts, and he appears in dangerous company: say that, likeCopernicus and Galileo, he was immovably convinced in the face of hissingincredulity; but so is the contriver of perpetual motion. We cannot fairlytry the spirits by this sort of test. If we want to avoid giving the doseof hemlock or the sentence of banishment in the wrong case, nothing willdo but a capacity to understand the subject-matter on which the immovableman is convinced, and fellowship with human travail, both near and afar,to hinder us from scanning and deep experience lightly. Shall we say, "Letthe ages try the spirits, and see what they are worth?" Why, we are thebeginning of the ages, which can only be just by virtue of just judgmentsin separate human breasts--separate yet combined. Even steam-engines couldnot have got made without that condition, but must have stayed in the mindof James Watt.
This track of thinking was familiar enough to Deronda to have saved himfrom any contemptuous prejudgment of Mordecai, even if their communicationhad been free from that peculiar claim on himself strangely ushered in bysome long-growing preparation in the Jew's agitated mind. This claim,indeed, considered in what is called a rational way, might seemjustifiably dismissed as illusory and even preposterous; but it wasprecisely what turned Mordecai's hold on him from an appeal to his readysympathy into a clutch on his struggling conscience. Our consciences arenot all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws they arethe voice of sensibilities as various as our memories (which also havetheir kinship and likeness). And Deronda's conscience includedsensibilities beyond the common, enlarged by his early habit of thinkinghimself imaginatively into the experience of others.
What was the claim this eager soul made upon him?--"You must believe mybeliefs--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 ofan obligation in any direct sense would have been preposterous--to haveseemed to admit it would have been dishonesty; and Deronda, looking on theagitation of those moments, felt thankful that in the midst of hiscompassion 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, wasof Jewish blood. Was there ever a more hypothetic appeal?
But since the age of thirteen Deronda had associated the deepestexperience of his affections with what was a pure supposition, namely,that Sir Hugo was his father: that was a hypothesis which had been thesource of passionate struggle within him; by its light he had beenaccustomed to subdue feelings and to cherish them. He had been well usedto find a motive in a conception which might be disproved; and he had beenalso used to think of some revelation that might influence his view of theparticular duties belonging to him. To be in a state of suspense, whichwas also one of emotive activity and scruple, was a familiar attitude ofhis conscience.
And now, suppose that wish-begotten belief in his Jewish birth, and thatextravagant demand of discipleship, to be the foreshadowing of an actualdiscovery and a genuine spiritual result: suppose that Mordecai's ideasmade a real conquest over Deronda's conviction? Nay, it was conceivablethat as Mordecai needed and believed that, he had found an activereplenishment of himself, so Deronda might receive from Mordecai's mindthe complete ideal shape of that personal duty and citizenship which layin his own thought like sculptured fragments certifying some beautyyearned after but not traceable by divination.
As that possibility presented itself in his meditations, he was aware thatit would be called dreamy, and began to defend it. If the influence heimagined himself submitting to had been that of some honored professor,some authority in a seat of learning, some philosopher who had beenaccepted as a voice of the age, would a thorough receptiveness towarddirection have been ridiculed? Only by those who hold it a sign ofweakness to be obliged for an idea, and prefer to hint that they haveimplicitly held in a more correct form whatever others have stated with asadly short-coming explicitness. After all, what was there but vulgarityin taking the fact that Mordecai was a poor Jewish workman, and that hewas to be met perhaps on a sanded floor in the parlor of the _Hand andBanner_ as a reason for determining beforehand that there was not somespiritual force within him that might have a determining effect on awhite-handed gentleman? There is a legend told of the Emperor Domitian,that having heard of a Jewish family, of the house of David, whence theruler of the world was to spring, he sent for its members in alarm, butquickly released them on observing that they had the hands of work-people--being of just the opposite opinion with that Rabbi who stood waiting atthe gate of Rome in confidence that the Messiah would be found among thedestitute who entered there. Both Emperor and Rabbi were wrong in theirtrust of outward signs: poverty and poor clothes are no sign ofinspiration, said Deronda to his inward objector, but they have gone withit in some remarkable cases. And to regard discipleship as out of thequestion because of them, would be mere dullness of imagination.
A more plausible reason for putting discipleship out of the question wasthe strain of visionary excitement in Mordecai, which turned his wishesinto overmastering impressions, and made him read outward facts asfulfillment. Was such a temper of mind likely to accompany that wiseestimate of consequences which is the only safeguard from fatal error,even to ennobling motive? But it remained to be seen whether that rareconjunction existed or not in Mordecai: perhaps his might be one of thenatures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires ofthat 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 ardorwhich feels the agitations of discovery beforehand, and has a faith in itspreconception that surmounts many failures of experiment. And in relationto 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 areason for concluding beforehand that he was not worth listening to exceptfor pity sake. Suppose he had introduced himself as one of the strictestreasoners. Do they form a body of men hitherto free from false conclusionsand illusory speculations? The driest argument has its hallucinations, toohastily concluding that its net will now at last be large enough to holdthe universe. Men may dream in demonstrations, and cut out an illusoryworld in the shape of axioms, definitions, and propositions, with a finalexclusion of fact signed Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking will save usmortals from mistake in our imperfect apprehension of the matter to bethought about. And since the unemotional intellect may carry us into amathematical dreamland where nothing is but what is not, perhaps anemotional intellect may have absorbed into its passionate vision ofpossibilities some truth of what will be--the more comprehensive massivelife feeding theory with new material, as the sensibility of the artistseizes combinations which science explains and justifies. At any rate,presumptions to the contrary are not to be trusted. We must be patientwith the inevitable makeshift of our human thinking, whether in its sumtotal or in the separate minds that have made the sum. Columbus had someimpressions about himself which we call superstitions, and used somearguments which we disapprove; but he had also some sound physicalconceptions, and he had the passionate patience of genius to make themtell on mankind. The world has made up its mind rather contemptuouslyabout those who were deaf to Columbus.
"My contempt for them binds me to see that I don't adopt their mistake ona small scale," said Deronda, "and make myself deaf with the assumptionthat 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 cametogether. To me the way seems made up of plainly discernible links. If Ihad not found Mirah, it is probable that I should not have begun to bespecially interested in the Jews, and certainly I should not have gone onthat loitering search after an Ezra Cohen which made me pause at Ram'sbook-shop and ask the price of _Maimon_. Mordecai, on his side, had hisvisions of a disciple, and he saw me by their light; I corresponded wellenough with the image his longing had created. He took me for one of hisrace. Suppose that his impression--the elderly Jew at Frankfort seemed tohave something like it--suppose in spite of all presumptions to thecontrary, that his impression should somehow be proved true, and that Ishould come actually to share any of the ideas he is devoted to? This isthe only question which really concerns the effect of our meeting on mylife.
"But if the issue should be quite different?--well, there will besomething painful to go through. I shall almost inevitably have to be anactive cause of that poor fellow's crushing disappointment. Perhaps thisissue is the one I had need prepare myself for. I fear that no tendernessof mine can make his suffering lighter. Would the alternative--that Ishould not disappoint him--be less painful to me?"
Here Deronda wavered. Feelings had lately been at work within him whichhad very much modified the reluctance he would formerly have had to thinkof himself as probably a Jew. And, if you like, he was romantic. Thatyoung energy and spirit of adventure which have helped to create theworld-wide legions of youthful heroes going to seek the hidden tokens oftheir birth and its inheritance of tasks, gave him a certain quiveringinterest in the bare possibility that he was entering on a track like--allthe 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 thathis father was an Englishman only grew firmer under the weak assaults ofunwarranted doubt. And that a moment should ever come in which that beliefwas declared a delusion, was something of which Deronda would not say, "Ishould be glad." His life-long affection for Sir Hugo, stronger than allhis resentment, made him shrink from admitting that wish.
Which way soever the truth might lie, he repeated to himself what he hadsaid to Mordecai--that he could not without farther reasons undertake tohasten its discovery. Nay, he was tempted now to regard his uncertainty asa condition to be cherished for the present. If further intercourserevealed nothing but illusions as what he was expected to share in, thewant of any valid evidence that he was a Jew might save Mordecai the worstshock in the refusal of fraternity. It might even be justifiable to usethe uncertainty on this point in keeping up a suspense which would induceMordecai to accept those offices of friendship that Deronda longed to urgeon him.
These were the meditations that busied Deronda in the interval of fourdays before he could fulfill his promise to call for Mordecai at EzraCohen's, Sir Hugo's demands on him often lasting to an hour so late as toput the evening expedition to Holborn out of the question.