George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: Abridged by Emma Laybourn
Chapter Forty-one
Imagine the conflict in a responsive and questioning mind like Deronda’s, after the interview with Mordecai. The adventure might have moved a much duller young man; but it had stirred Deronda so deeply, that with his usual reaction of his intellect he began to examine his emotion, and consider how far he must resist its guidance.
The consciousness that he was dominated by Mordecai’s certainty and trust alarmed him. He shrank from undervaluing an experience simply because it had come close to him, when in an historical context he would recognise it as a momentous event. If he had read of this incident as having happened centuries ago in Rome, Greece, or Asia Minor, to some young man dissatisfied with life, and wanting a special fellowship or duty to inspire him with passion for his work, it would have seemed quite natural that the meeting should have created a deep impression on him. 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 seriousness in the matter? But Deronda also shrank from having his course determined without the consent of reason; or from allowing his pity to hurry him along a dimly-seen path.
What, after all, had really happened? He knew what Sir Hugo would have said: “A consumptive, fanatical Jew has fixed on Deronda as the embodiment of some visionary image born of his fanatical beliefs and his despair of his own life. Fanaticism is not rare. The world is full of fanatics convinced they hold the key to unique knowledge. Scattered in every direction you might find a terrible person with a glittering eye, on the look-out for the man who must hear him; and in most cases he had volumes which he could not get printed or read. This Mordecai happened to have a more pathetic aspect, a more passionate speech than most; but 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 how likely was it that his ideas had any value? In such cases a man of the world knows what to think beforehand. As to Mordecai’s conviction that he had found a new executive self, it might lead to the worst of disappointments.”
Deronda’s ear caught all these negative whisperings. He knew that human passion invites burlesque and parody. Many martyrs have been sacrificed to error and folly. The grandest man can appear ridiculous if reduced to an abstract statement of his qualities and efforts: to do him justice, we need to understand the subject-matter on which he is convinced, and to feel fellowship with his effort.
Deronda was familiar enough with this track of thinking to be saved from any contemptuous prejudgment of Mordecai, even without the peculiar claim made on him by the Jew. This claim, indeed, considered rationally, might seem preposterous; but it was precisely what turned Mordecai’s hold on him from an appeal to his sympathy into a clutch on his struggling conscience. Our consciences are not all of the same pattern: they are as various as our memories. And Deronda’s conscience was 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 – behold a glory where I behold it!” To see this as an obligation would have been preposterous – to have agreed to it would have been dishonesty; and Deronda felt thankful that in his compassion he had preserved himself from the bondage of false agreements. The claim hung, too, on a supposition which was probably not true: the supposition that he, Deronda, was of Jewish blood.
But since the age of thirteen Deronda had associated his deepest affections with the assumption that Sir Hugo was his father. That theory 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 belief which might be disproved; and he had been also used to imagine some revelation that might change his view of his duties. A state of scrupulous suspense was familiar to him.
And now, suppose that belief in his Jewish birth, and that extravagant demand of discipleship, to be the foreshadowing of an actual discovery: suppose that Mordecai’s ideas made a real conquest over Deronda’s conviction? It was possible that just as Mordecai believed he had found a renewal of himself, so Deronda might receive from Mordecai’s mind the complete ideal shape of that personal duty which lay in his own thought, like sculptured fragments indicating some beauty yearned after but without a foreseeable form.
As he meditated on that possibility, he was aware that it would be called dreamy, and began to defend it. If Mordecai were some honoured professor or distinguished philosopher, would Deronda’s receptiveness toward him be ridiculed? Because he was a poor Jewish workman, to be met in the Hand and Banner, was that a reason for deciding that there was no spiritual force within him?
There is a legend that the Emperor Domitian, having heard that a ruler of the world was to spring from a Jewish family, sent for its members in alarm, but quickly released them on observing that they had the hands of work-people; in contrast to the Rabbi who stood waiting at the gate of Rome, sure that the Messiah would be found among the destitute who entered there. Both Emperor and Rabbi were wrong to trust outward signs: poverty and poor clothes are no mark of inspiration, said Deronda to himself, but they have gone with it in some remarkable cases.
A more plausible reason for rejecting discipleship was Mordecai’s visionary excitement, which made him see events as fulfilment of his overwhelming wishes. Was he capable of judging consequences wisely in such a frame of mind? But perhaps Mordecai might able to combine wise judgment with that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in. Even strictly-measuring science could hardly have got on without that ardour which feels the excitement of discovery beforehand, and has a faith in its result that overcomes many failures of experiment.
At least, Deronda argued, Mordecai’s visionary excitability was hardly a reason for assuming that he was not worth listening to. Are stricter reasoners free from false conclusions? The driest argument has its hallucinations; no formulas for thinking will save us imperfect mortals from mistake in our thought. We must be patient with the inevitable makeshift nature of our human thinking. Columbus was superstitious; but he had also some sound ideas, and the passionate patience of genius to make them tell on mankind. The world is rather contemptuous about those who were deaf to Columbus.
“I must not adopt their mistake on a small scale,” said Deronda, “and assume that there cannot be any momentous relation between this Jew and me, simply because of his visionary ideas. What I can be to him, or he to me, may not depend on his belief about the way we came together. To me the way seems made up of plainly discernible links. If I had not found Mirah, I should not have begun to be interested in the Jews, and certainly I should not have gone on that search after an Ezra Cohen which made me pause at Ram’s book-shop. Mordecai, on his side, had his visions of a disciple, and I corresponded with the image his longing had created. He took me for one of his race. The elderly Jew at Frankfort seemed to have the same impression. Suppose that this should somehow be proved true, and that I should come to share 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 result should be quite different? – well, there will be pain and crushing disappointment for the poor fellow. I had better prepare myself for 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 with which he would formerly have thought of himself as a Jew. And he was romantic. His young energy and spirit of adventure gave him a certain quivering interest in the track he might enter – especially when the track was one of thought as well as action.
But his Jewishness was no more than a bare possibility. The belief that his father was an Englishman only grew firmer under the weak assaults of unwarranted doubt
Whatever the truth about his birth might be, he decided that he would not hasten its discovery. Rather, he cherished his present uncertainty. It might even be justifiable to use it in keeping up a suspense which would induce Mordecai to accept the friendly help that Deronda longed to urge on him.
These were the thoughts that busied Deronda in the four days before he could call on Mordecai again: Sir Hugo’s demands on him continued so late as to put a trip to Holborn out of the question.