Kabanata Kabanata 16 · Chapter XVI

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Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The

astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so

for every visible arc in the wanderer’s orbit; and the narrator of

human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would

have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead

up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense

suffering which take the quality of action—like the cry of

Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems a greater energy than the sea

and sky he invokes and the deity he defies.

Deronda’s circumstances, indeed, had been exceptional. One moment had

been burned into his life as its chief epoch—a moment full of July

sunshine and large pink roses shedding their last petals on a grassy

court enclosed on three sides by a gothic cloister. Imagine him in such

a scene: a boy of thirteen, stretched prone on the grass where it was

in shadow, his curly head propped on his arms over a book, while his

tutor, also reading, sat on a camp-stool under shelter. Deronda’s book

was Sismondi’s _History of the Italian Republics_; the lad had a

passion for history, eager to know how time had been filled up since

the flood, and how things were carried on in the dull periods. Suddenly

he let down his left arm and looked at his tutor, saying in purest

boyish tones,

“Mr. Fraser, how was it that the popes and cardinals always had so many

nephews?”

The tutor, an able young Scotchman, who acted as Sir Hugo Mallinger’s

secretary, roused rather unwillingly from his political economy,

answered with the clear-cut emphatic chant which makes a truth doubly

telling in Scotch utterance,

“Their own children were called nephews.”

“Why?” said Deronda.

“It was just for the propriety of the thing; because, as you know very

well, priests don’t marry, and the children were illegitimate.”

Mr. Fraser, thrusting out his lower lip and making his chant of the

last word the more emphatic for a little impatience at being

interrupted, had already turned his eyes on his book again, while

Deronda, as if something had stung him, started up in a sitting

attitude with his back to the tutor.

He had always called Sir Hugo Mallinger his uncle, and when it once

occurred to him to ask about his father and mother, the baronet had

answered, “You lost your father and mother when you were quite a little

one; that is why I take care of you.” Daniel then straining to discern

something in that early twilight, had a dim sense of having been kissed

very much, and surrounded by thin, cloudy, scented drapery, till his

fingers caught in something hard, which hurt him, and he began to cry.

Every other memory he had was of the little world in which he still

lived. And at that time he did not mind about learning more, for he was

too fond of Sir Hugo to be sorry for the loss of unknown parents. Life

was very delightful to the lad, with an uncle who was always indulgent

and cheerful—a fine man in the bright noon of life, whom Daniel

thought absolutely perfect, and whose place was one of the finest in

England, at once historical, romantic, and home-like: a picturesque

architectural outgrowth from an abbey, which had still remnants of the

old monastic trunk. Diplow lay in another county, and was a

comparatively landless place which had come into the family from a rich

lawyer on the female side who wore the perruque of the restoration;

whereas the Mallingers had the grant of Monk’s Topping under Henry the

Eighth, and ages before had held the neighboring lands of King’s

Topping, tracing indeed their origin to a certain Hugues le Malingre,

who came in with the Conqueror—and also apparently with a sickly

complexion which had been happily corrected in his descendants. Two

rows of these descendants, direct and collateral, females of the male

line, and males of the female, looked down in the gallery over the

cloisters on the nephew Daniel as he walked there: men in armor with

pointed beards and arched eyebrows, pinched ladies in hoops and ruffs

with no face to speak of; grave-looking men in black velvet and stuffed

hips, and fair, frightened women holding little boys by the hand;

smiling politicians in magnificent perruques, and ladies of the

prize-animal kind, with rosebud mouths and full eyelids, according to

Lely; then a generation whose faces were revised and embellished in the

taste of Kneller; and so on through refined editions of the family

types in the time of Reynolds and Romney, till the line ended with Sir

Hugo and his younger brother Henleigh. This last had married Miss

Grandcourt, and taken her name along with her estates, thus making a

junction between two equally old families, impaling the three Saracens’

heads proper and three bezants of the one with the tower and falcons

_argent_ of the other, and, as it happened, uniting their highest

advantages in the prospects of that Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt who

is at present more of an acquaintance to us than either Sir Hugo or his

nephew Daniel Deronda.

In Sir Hugo’s youthful portrait with rolled collar and high cravat, Sir

Thomas Lawrence had done justice to the agreeable alacrity of

expression and sanguine temperament still to be seen in the original,

but had done something more than justice in slightly lengthening the

nose, which was in reality shorter than might have been expected in a

Mallinger. Happily the appropriate nose of the family reappeared in his

younger brother, and was to be seen in all its refined regularity in

his nephew Mallinger Grandcourt. But in the nephew Daniel Deronda the

family faces of various types, seen on the walls of the gallery, found

no reflex. Still he was handsomer than any of them, and when he was

thirteen might have served as model for any painter who wanted to image

the most memorable of boys: you could hardly have seen his face

thoroughly meeting yours without believing that human creatures had

done nobly in times past, and might do more nobly in time to come. The

finest childlike faces have this consecrating power, and make us

shudder anew at all the grossness and basely-wrought griefs of the

world, lest they should enter here and defile.

But at this moment on the grass among the rose-petals, Daniel Deronda

was making a first acquaintance with those griefs. A new idea had

entered his mind, and was beginning to change the aspect of his

habitual feelings as happy careless voyagers are changed with the sky

suddenly threatened and the thought of danger arises. He sat perfectly

still with his back to the tutor, while his face expressed rapid inward

transition. The deep blush, which had come when he first started up,

gradually subsided; but his features kept that indescribable look of

subdued activity which often accompanies a new mental survey of

familiar facts. He had not lived with other boys, and his mind showed

the same blending of child’s ignorance with surprising knowledge which

is oftener seen in bright girls. Having read Shakespeare as well as a

great deal of history, he could have talked with the wisdom of a

bookish child about men who were born out of wedlock and were held

unfortunate in consequence, being under disadvantages which required

them to be a sort of heroes if they were to work themselves up to an

equal standing with their legally born brothers. But he had never

brought such knowledge into any association with his own lot, which had

been too easy for him ever to think about it—until this moment when

there had darted into his mind with the magic of quick comparison, the

possibility that here was the secret of his own birth, and that the man

whom he called uncle was really his father. Some children, even younger

than Daniel, have known the first arrival of care, like an ominous

irremovable guest in their tender lives, on the discovery that their

parents, whom they had imagined able to buy everything, were poor and

in hard money troubles. Daniel felt the presence of a new guest who

seemed to come with an enigmatic veiled face, and to carry

dimly-conjectured, dreaded revelations. The ardor which he had given to

the imaginary world in his books suddenly rushed toward his own history

and spent its pictorial energy there, explaining what he knew,

representing the unknown. The uncle whom he loved very dearly took the

aspect of a father who held secrets about him—who had done him a

wrong—yes, a wrong: and what had become of his mother, for whom he

must have been taken away?—Secrets about which he, Daniel, could never

inquire; for to speak or to be spoken to about these new thoughts

seemed like falling flakes of fire to his imagination. Those who have

known an impassioned childhood will understand this dread of utterance

about any shame connected with their parents. The impetuous advent of

new images took possession of him with the force of fact for the first

time told, and left him no immediate power for the reflection that he

might be trembling at a fiction of his own. The terrible sense of

collision between a strong rush of feeling and the dread of its

betrayal, found relief at length in big slow tears, which fell without

restraint until the voice of Mr. Fraser was heard saying:

“Daniel, do you see that you are sitting on the bent pages of your

book?”

Daniel immediately moved the book without turning round, and after

holding it before him for an instant, rose with it and walked away into

the open grounds, where he could dry his tears unobserved. The first

shock of suggestion past, he could remember that he had no certainty

how things really had been, and that he had been making conjectures

about his own history, as he had often made stories about Pericles or

Columbus, just to fill up the blanks before they became famous. Only

there came back certain facts which had an obstinate reality, almost

like the fragments of a bridge, telling you unmistakably how the arches

lay. And again there came a mood in which his conjectures seemed like a

doubt of religion, to be banished as an offense, and a mean prying

after what he was not meant to know; for there was hardly a delicacy of

feeling this lad was not capable of. But the summing-up of all his

fluctuating experience at this epoch was, that a secret impression had

come to him which had given him something like a new sense in relation

to all the elements of his life. And the idea that others probably knew

things concerning which they did not choose to mention, set up in him a

premature reserve which helped to intensify his inward experience. His

ears open now to words which before that July day would have passed by

him unnoted; and round every trivial incident which imagination could

connect with his suspicions, a newly-roused set of feelings were ready

to cluster themselves.

One such incident a month later wrought itself deeply into his life.

Daniel had not only one of those thrilling boy voices which seem to

bring an idyllic heaven and earth before our eyes, but a fine musical

instinct, and had early made out accompaniments for himself on the

piano, while he sang from memory. Since then he had had some teaching,

and Sir Hugo, who delighted in the boy, used to ask for his music in

the presence of guests. One morning after he had been singing “Sweet

Echo” before a small party of gentlemen whom the rain had kept in the

house, the baronet, passing from a smiling remark to his next neighbor

said:

“Come here, Dan!”

The boy came forward with unusual reluctance. He wore an embroidered

holland blouse which set off the rich coloring of his head and throat,

and the resistant gravity about his mouth and eyes as he was being

smiled upon, made their beauty the more impressive. Every one was

admiring him.

“What do you say to being a great singer? Should you like to be adored

by the world and take the house by storm, like Mario and Tamberlik?”

Daniel reddened instantaneously, but there was a just perceptible

interval before he answered with angry decision,

“No; I should hate it!”

“Well, well, well!” said Sir Hugo, with surprised kindliness intended

to be soothing. But Daniel turned away quickly, left the room, and

going to his own chamber threw himself on the broad window-sill, which

was a favorite retreat of his when he had nothing particular to do.

Here he could see the rain gradually subsiding with gleams through the

parting clouds which lit up a great reach of the park, where the old

oaks stood apart from each other, and the bordering wood was pierced

with a green glade which met the eastern sky. This was a scene which

had always been part of his home—part of the dignified ease which had

been a matter of course in his life. And his ardent clinging nature had

appropriated it all with affection. He knew a great deal of what it was

to be a gentleman by inheritance, and without thinking much about

himself—for he was a boy of active perceptions and easily forgot his

own existence in that of Robert Bruce—he had never supposed that he

could be shut out from such a lot, or have a very different part in the

world from that of the uncle who petted him. It is possible (though not

greatly believed in at present) to be fond of poverty and take it for a

bride, to prefer scoured deal, red quarries and whitewash for one’s

private surroundings, to delight in no splendor but what has open doors

for the whole nation, and to glory in having no privileges except such

as nature insists on; and noblemen have been known to run away from

elaborate ease and the option of idleness, that they might bind

themselves for small pay to hard-handed labor. But Daniel’s tastes were

altogether in keeping with his nurture: his disposition was one in

which everyday scenes and habits beget not _ennui_ or rebellion, but

delight, affection, aptitudes; and now the lad had been stung to the

quick by the idea that his uncle—perhaps his father—thought of a

career for him which was totally unlike his own, and which he knew very

well was not thought of among possible destinations for the sons of

English gentlemen. He had often stayed in London with Sir Hugo, who to

indulge the boy’s ear had carried him to the opera to hear the great

tenors, so that the image of a singer taking the house by storm was

very vivid to him; but now, spite of his musical gift, he set himself

bitterly against the notion of being dressed up to sing before all

those fine people, who would not care about him except as a wonderful

toy. That Sir Hugo should have thought of him in that position for a

moment, seemed to Daniel an unmistakable proof that there was something

about his birth which threw him out from the class of gentlemen to

which the baronet belonged. Would it ever be mentioned to him? Would

the time come when his uncle would tell him everything? He shrank from

the prospect: in his imagination he preferred ignorance. If his father

had been wicked—Daniel inwardly used strong words, for he was feeling

the injury done him as a maimed boy feels the crushed limb which for

others is merely reckoned in an average of accidents—if his father had

done any wrong, he wished it might never be spoken of to him: it was

already a cutting thought that such knowledge might be in other minds.

Was it in Mr. Fraser’s? probably not, else he would not have spoken in

that way about the pope’s nephews. Daniel fancied, as older people do,

that every one else’s consciousness was as active as his own on a

matter which was vital to him. Did Turvey the valet know?—and old Mrs.

French the housekeeper?—and Banks the bailiff, with whom he had ridden

about the farms on his pony?—And now there came back the recollection

of a day some years before when he was drinking Mrs. Banks’s whey, and

Banks said to his wife with a wink and a cunning laugh, “He features

the mother, eh?” At that time little Daniel had merely thought that

Banks made a silly face, as the common farming men often did, laughing

at what was not laughable; and he rather resented being winked at and

talked of as if he did not understand everything. But now that small

incident became information: it was to be reasoned on. How could he be

like his mother and not like his father? His mother must have been a

Mallinger, if Sir Hugo were his uncle. But no! His father might have

been Sir Hugo’s brother and have changed his name, as Mr. Henleigh

Mallinger did when he married Miss Grandcourt. But then, why had he

never heard Sir Hugo speak of his brother Deronda, as he spoke of his

brother Grandcourt? Daniel had never before cared about the family

tree—only about that ancestor who had killed three Saracens in one

encounter. But now his mind turned to a cabinet of estate-maps in the

library, where he had once seen an illuminated parchment hanging out,

that Sir Hugo said was the family tree. The phrase was new and odd to

him—he was a little fellow then—hardly more than half his present

age—and he gave it no precise meaning. He knew more now and wished

that he could examine that parchment. He imagined that the cabinet was

always locked, and longed to try it. But here he checked himself. He

might be seen: and he would never bring himself near even a silent

admission of the sore that had opened in him.

It is in such experiences of a boy or girlhood, while elders are

debating whether most education lies in science or literature, that the

main lines of character are often laid down. If Daniel had been of a

less ardently affectionate nature, the reserve about himself and the

supposition that others had something to his disadvantage in their

minds, might have turned into a hard, proud antagonism. But inborn

lovingness was strong enough to keep itself level with resentment.

There was hardly any creature in his habitual world that he was not

fond of; teasing them occasionally, of course—all except his uncle, or

“Nunc,” as Sir Hugo had taught him to say; for the baronet was the

reverse of a strait-laced man, and left his dignity to take care of

itself. Him Daniel loved in that deep-rooted filial way which makes

children always the happier for being in the same room with father or

mother, though their occupations may be quite apart. Sir Hugo’s

watch-chain and seals, his handwriting, his mode of smoking and of

talking to his dogs and horses, had all a rightness and charm about

them to the boy which went along with the happiness of morning and

breakfast time. That Sir Hugo had always been a Whig, made Tories and

Radicals equally opponents of the truest and best; and the books he had

written were all seen under the same consecration of loving belief

which differenced what was his from what was not his, in spite of

general resemblance. Those writings were various, from volumes of

travel in the brilliant style, to articles on things in general, and

pamphlets on political crises; but to Daniel they were alike in having

an unquestionable rightness by which other people’s information could

be tested.

Who cannot imagine the bitterness of a first suspicion that something

in this object of complete love was _not_ quite right? Children demand

that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so:

perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is hardly a less

revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall

of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in

maturer life.

But some time after this renewal of Daniel’s agitation it appeared that

Sir Hugo must have been making a merely playful experiment in his

question about the singing. He sent for Daniel into the library, and

looking up from his writing as the boy entered threw himself sideways

in his arm-chair. “Ah, Dan!” he said kindly, drawing one of the old

embroidered stools close to him. “Come and sit down here.”

Daniel obeyed, and Sir Hugo put a gentle hand on his shoulder, looking

at him affectionately.

“What is it, my boy? Have you heard anything that has put you out of

spirits lately?”

Daniel was determined not to let the tears come, but he could not speak.

“All changes are painful when people have been happy, you know,” said

Sir Hugo, lifting his hand from the boy’s shoulder to his dark curls

and rubbing them gently. “You can’t be educated exactly as I wish you

to be without our parting. And I think you will find a great deal to

like at school.”

This was not what Daniel expected, and was so far a relief, which gave

him spirit to answer,

“Am I to go to school?”

“Yes, I mean you to go to Eton. I wish you to have the education of an

English gentleman; and for that it is necessary that you should go to a

public school in preparation for the university: Cambridge I mean you

to go to; it was my own university.”

Daniel’s color came and went.

“What do you say, Sirrah?” said Sir Hugo, smiling.

“I should like to be a gentleman,” said Daniel, with firm distinctness,

“and go to school, if that is what a gentleman’s son must do.”

Sir Hugo watched him silently for a few moments, thinking he understood

now why the lad had seemed angry at the notion of becoming a singer.

Then he said tenderly,

“And so you won’t mind about leaving your old Nunc?”

“Yes, I shall,” said Daniel, clasping Sir Hugo’s caressing arm with

both his hands. “But sha’n’t I come home and be with you in the

holidays?”

“Oh yes, generally,” said Sir Hugo. “But now I mean you to go at once

to a new tutor, to break the change for you before you go to Eton.”

After this interview Daniel’s spirit rose again. He was meant to be a

gentleman, and in some unaccountable way it might be that his

conjectures were all wrong. The very keenness of the lad taught him to

find comfort in his ignorance. While he was busying his mind in the

construction of possibilities, it became plain to him that there must

be possibilities of which he knew nothing. He left off brooding, young

joy and the spirit of adventure not being easily quenched within him,

and in the interval before his going away he sang about the house,

danced among the old servants, making them parting gifts, and insisted

many times to the groom on the care that was to be taken of the black

pony.

“Do you think I shall know much less than the other boys, Mr. Fraser?”

said Daniel. It was his bent to think that every stranger would be

surprised at his ignorance.

“There are dunces to be found everywhere,” said the judicious Fraser.

“You’ll not be the biggest; but you’ve not the makings of a Porson in

you, or a Leibnitz either.”

“I don’t want to be a Porson or a Leibnitz,” said Daniel. “I would

rather be a greater leader, like Pericles or Washington.”

“Ay, ay; you’ve a notion they did with little parsing, and less

algebra,” said Fraser. But in reality he thought his pupil a remarkable

lad, to whom one thing was as easy as another, if he had only a mind to

it.

Things went on very well with Daniel in his new world, except that a

boy with whom he was at once inclined to strike up a close friendship

talked to him a great deal about his home and parents, and seemed to

expect a like expansiveness in return. Daniel immediately shrank into

reserve, and this experience remained a check on his naturally strong

bent toward the formation of intimate friendship. Every one, his tutor

included, set him down as a reserved boy, though he was so good-humored

and unassuming, as well as quick, both at study and sport, that nobody

called his reserve disagreeable. Certainly his face had a great deal to

do with that favorable interpretation; but in this instance the beauty

of the closed lips told no falsehood.

A surprise that came to him before his first vacation strengthened the

silent consciousness of a grief within, which might be compared in some

ways with Byron’s susceptibility about his deformed foot. Sir Hugo

wrote word that he was married to Miss Raymond, a sweet lady, whom

Daniel must remember having seen. The event would make no difference

about his spending the vacation at the Abbey; he would find Lady

Mallinger a new friend whom he would be sure to love—and much more to

the usual effect when a man, having done something agreeable to

himself, is disposed to congratulate others on his own good fortune,

and the deducible satisfactoriness of events in general.

Let Sir Hugo be partly excused until the grounds of his action can be

more fully known. The mistakes in his behavior to Deronda were due to

that dullness toward what may be going on in other minds, especially

the minds of children, which is among the commonest deficiencies, even

in good-natured men like him, when life has been generally easy to

themselves, and their energies have been quietly spent in feeling

gratified. No one was better aware than he that Daniel was generally

suspected to be his own son. But he was pleased with that suspicion;

and his imagination had never once been troubled with the way in which

the boy himself might be affected, either then or in the future, by the

enigmatic aspect of his circumstances. He was as fond of him as could

be, and meant the best by him. And, considering the lightness with

which the preparation of young lives seem to lie on respectable

consciences, Sir Hugo Mallinger can hardly be held open to exceptional

reproach. He had been a bachelor till he was five-and-forty, had always

been regarded as a fascinating man of elegant tastes; what could be

more natural, even according to the index of language, than that he

should have a beautiful boy like the little Deronda to take care of?

The mother might even, perhaps, be in the great world—met with in Sir

Hugo’s residence abroad. The only person to feel any objection was the

boy himself, who could not have been consulted. And the boy’s

objections had never been dreamed of by anybody but himself.

By the time Deronda was ready to go to Cambridge, Lady Mallinger had

already three daughters—charming babies, all three, but whose sex was

announced as a melancholy alternative, the offspring desired being a

son; if Sir Hugo had no son the succession must go to his nephew,

Mallinger Grandcourt. Daniel no longer held a wavering opinion about

his own birth. His fuller knowledge had tended to convince him that Sir

Hugo was his father, and he conceived that the baronet, since he never

approached a communication on the subject, wished him to have a tacit

understanding of the fact, and to accept in silence what would be

generally considered more than the due love and nurture. Sir Hugo’s

marriage might certainly have been felt as a new ground of resentment

by some youths in Deronda’s position, and the timid Lady Mallinger with

her fast-coming little ones might have been images to scowl at, as

likely to divert much that was disposable in the feelings and

possessions of the baronet from one who felt his own claim to be prior.

But hatred of innocent human obstacles was a form of moral stupidity

not in Deronda’s grain; even the indignation which had long mingled

itself with his affection for Sir Hugo took the quality of pain rather

than of temper; and as his mind ripened to the idea of tolerance toward

error, he habitually liked the idea with his own silent grievances.

The sense of an entailed disadvantage—the deformed foot doubtfully

hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and

easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But

in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one

among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and

makes the imagination tender. Deronda’s early-weakened susceptibility,

charged at first with ready indignation and resistant pride, had raised

in him a premature reflection on certain questions of life; it had

given a bias to his conscience, a sympathy with certain ills, and a

tension of resolve in certain directions, who marked him off from other

youths much more than any talents he possessed.

One day near the end of the long vacation, when he had been making a

tour in the Rhineland with his Eton tutor, and was come for a farewell

stay at the Abbey before going to Cambridge, he said to Sir Hugo,

“What do you intend me to be, sir?” They were in the library, and it

was the fresh morning. Sir Hugo had called him in to read a letter from

a Cambridge Don who was to be interested in him; and since the baronet

wore an air at once business-like and leisurely, the moment seemed

propitious for entering on a grave subject which had never yet been

thoroughly discussed.

“Whatever your inclination leads you to, my boy. I thought it right to

give you the option of the army, but you shut the door on that, and I

was glad. I don’t expect you to choose just yet—by-and-by, when you

have looked about you a little more and tried your mettle among older

men. The university has a good wide opening into the forum. There are

prizes to be won, and a bit of good fortune often gives the turn to a

man’s taste. From what I see and hear, I should think you can take up

anything you like. You are in the deeper water with your classics than

I ever got into, and if you are rather sick of that swimming, Cambridge

is the place where you can go into mathematics with a will, and disport

yourself on the dry sand as much as you like. I floundered along like a

carp.”

“I suppose money will make some difference, sir,” said Daniel blushing.

“I shall have to keep myself by-and-by.”

“Not exactly. I recommend you not to be extravagant—yes, yes, I

know—you are not inclined to that—but you need not take up anything

against the grain. You will have a bachelor’s income—enough for you to

look about with. Perhaps I had better tell you that you may consider

yourself secure of seven hundred a year. You might make yourself a

barrister—be a writer—take up politics. I confess that is what would

please me best. I should like to have you at my elbow and pulling with

me.”

Deronda looked embarrassed. He felt that he ought to make some sign of

gratitude, but other feelings clogged his tongue. A moment was passing

by in which a question about his birth was throbbing within him, and

yet it seemed more impossible than ever that the question should find

vent—more impossible than ever that he could hear certain things from

Sir Hugo’s lips. The liberal way in which he was dealt with was the

more striking because the baronet had of late cared particularly for

money, and for making the utmost of his life-interest in the estate by

way of providing for his daughters; and as all this flashed through

Daniel’s mind it was momentarily within his imagination that the

provision for him might come in some way from his mother. But such

vaporous conjecture passed away as quickly as it came.

Sir Hugo appeared not to notice anything peculiar in Daniel’s manner,

and presently went on with his usual chatty liveliness.

“I am glad you have done some good reading outside your classics, and

have got a grip of French and German. The truth is, unless a man can

get the prestige and income of a Don and write donnish books, it’s

hardly worth while for him to make a Greek and Latin machine of himself

and be able to spin you out pages of the Greek dramatists at any verse

you’ll give him as a cue. That’s all very fine, but in practical life

nobody does give you the cue for pages of Greek. In fact, it’s a nicety

of conversation which I would have you attend to—much quotation of any

sort, even in English is bad. It tends to choke ordinary remark. One

couldn’t carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the

fact that everything had been said better than we can put it ourselves.

But talking of Dons, I have seen Dons make a capital figure in society;

and occasionally he can shoot you down a cart-load of learning in the

right place, which will tell in politics. Such men are wanted; and if

you have any turn for being a Don, I say nothing against it.”

“I think there’s not much chance of that. Quicksett and Puller are both

stronger than I am. I hope you will not be much disappointed if I don’t

come out with high honors.”

“No, no. I should like you to do yourself credit, but for God’s sake

don’t come out as a superior expensive kind of idiot, like young

Brecon, who got a Double First, and has been learning to knit braces

ever since. What I wish you to get is a passport in life. I don’t go

against our university system: we want a little disinterested culture

to make head against cotton and capital, especially in the House. My

Greek has all evaporated; if I had to construe a verse on a sudden, I

should get an apoplectic fit. But it formed my taste. I dare say my

English is the better for it.”

On this point Daniel kept a respectful silence. The enthusiastic belief

in Sir Hugo’s writings as a standard, and in the Whigs as the chosen

race among politicians, had gradually vanished along with the seraphic

boy’s face. He had not been the hardest of workers at Eton. Though some

kinds of study and reading came as easily as boating to him, he was not

of the material that usually makes the first-rate Eton scholar. There

had sprung up in him a meditative yearning after wide knowledge which

is likely always to abate ardor in the fight for prize acquirement in

narrow tracks. Happily he was modest, and took any second-rateness in

himself simply as a fact, not as a marvel necessarily to be accounted

for by a superiority. Still, Mr. Fraser’s high opinion of the lad had

not been altogether belied by the youth: Daniel had the stamp of rarity

in a subdued fervor of sympathy, an activity of imagination on behalf

of others which did not show itself effusively, but was continually

seen in acts of considerateness that struck his companions as moral

eccentricity. “Deronda would have been first-rate if he had had more

ambition,” was a frequent remark about him. But how could a fellow push

his way properly when he objected to swop for his own advantage,

knocked under by choice when he was within an inch of victory, and,

unlike the great Clive, would rather be the calf than the butcher? It

was a mistake, however, to suppose that Deronda had not his share of

ambition. We know he had suffered keenly from the belief that there was

a tinge of dishonor in his lot; but there are some cases, and his was

one of them, in which the sense of injury breeds—not the will to

inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but, a hatred of all

injury. He had his flashes of fierceness and could hit out upon

occasion, but the occasions were not always what might have been

expected. For in what related to himself his resentful impulses had

been early checked by a mastering affectionateness. Love has a habit of

saying “Never mind” to angry self, who, sitting down for the nonce in

the lower place, by-and-by gets used to it. So it was that as Deronda

approached manhood his feeling for Sir Hugo, while it was getting more

and more mixed with criticism, was gaining in that sort of allowance

which reconciles criticism with tenderness. The dear old beautiful home

and everything within it, Lady Mallinger and her little ones included,

were consecrated for the youth as they had been for the boy—only with

a certain difference of light on the objects. The altarpiece was no

longer miraculously perfect, painted under infallible guidance, but the

human hand discerned in the work was appealing to a reverent tenderness

safer from the gusts of discovery. Certainly Deronda’s ambition, even

in his spring-time, lay exceptionally aloof from conspicuous, vulgar

triumph, and from other ugly forms of boyish energy; perhaps because he

was early impassioned by ideas, and burned his fire on those heights.

One may spend a good deal of energy in disliking and resisting what

others pursue, and a boy who is fond of somebody else’s pencil-case may

not be more energetic than another who is fond of giving his own

pencil-case away. Still it was not Deronda’s disposition to escape from

ugly scenes; he was more inclined to sit through them and take care of

the fellow least able to take care of himself. It had helped to make

him popular that he was sometimes a little compromised by this apparent

comradeship. For a meditative interest in learning how human miseries

are wrought—as precocious in him as another sort of genius in the poet

who writes a Queen Mab at nineteen—was so infused with kindliness that

it easily passed for comradeship. Enough. In many of our neighbors’

lives there is much not only of error and lapse, but of a certain

exquisite goodness which can never be written or even spoken—only

divined by each of us, according to the inward instruction of our own

privacy.

The impression he made at Cambridge corresponded to his position at

Eton. Every one interested in him agreed that he might have taken a

high place if his motives had been of a more pushing sort, and if he

had not, instead of regarding studies as instruments of success,

hampered himself with the notion that they were to feed motive and

opinion—a notion which set him criticising methods and arguing against

his freight and harness when he should have been using all his might to

pull. In the beginning his work at the university had a new zest for

him: indifferent to the continuation of Eton classical drill, he

applied himself vigorously to mathematics, for which he had shown an

early aptitude under Mr. Fraser, and he had the delight of feeling his

strength in a comparatively fresh exercise of thought. That delight,

and the favorable opinion of his tutor, determined him to try for a

mathematical scholarship in the Easter of his second year: he wished to

gratify Sir Hugo by some achievement, and the study of the higher

mathematics, having the growing fascination inherent in all thinking

which demands intensity, was making him a more exclusive worker than he

had been before.

But here came the old check which had been growing with his growth. He

found the inward bent toward comprehension and thoroughness diverging

more and more from the track marked out by the standards of

examination: he felt a heightening discontent with the wearing futility

and enfeebling strain of a demand for excessive retention and dexterity

without any insight into the principles which form the vital

connections of knowledge. (Deronda’s undergraduateship occurred fifteen

years ago, when the perfection of our university methods was not yet

indisputable.) In hours when his dissatisfaction was strong upon him he

reproached himself for having been attracted by the conventional

advantage of belonging to an English university, and was tempted toward

the project of asking Sir Hugo to let him quit Cambridge and pursue a

more independent line of study abroad. The germs of this inclination

had been already stirring in his boyish love of universal history,

which made him want to be at home in foreign countries, and follow in

imagination the traveling students of the middle ages. He longed now to

have the sort of apprenticeship to life which would not shape him too

definitely, and rob him of the choice that might come from a free

growth. One sees that Deronda’s demerits were likely to be on the side

of reflective hesitation, and this tendency was encouraged by his

position; there was no need for him to get an immediate income, or to

fit himself in haste for a profession; and his sensibility to the

half-known facts of his parentage made him an excuse for lingering

longer than others in a state of social neutrality. Other men, he

inwardly said, had a more definite place and duties. But the project

which flattered his inclination might not have gone beyond the stage of

ineffective brooding, if certain circumstances had not quickened it

into action.

The circumstances arose out of an enthusiastic friendship which

extended into his after-life. Of the same year with himself, and

occupying small rooms close to his, was a youth who had come as an

exhibitioner from Christ’s Hospital, and had eccentricities enough for

a Charles Lamb. Only to look at his pinched features and blonde hair

hanging over his collar reminded one of pale quaint heads by early

German painters; and when this faint coloring was lit up by a joke,

there came sudden creases about the mouth and eyes which might have

been moulded by the soul of an aged humorist. His father, an engraver

of some distinction, had been dead eleven years, and his mother had

three girls to educate and maintain on a meagre annuity. Hans

Meyrick—he had been daringly christened after Holbein—felt himself

the pillar, or rather the knotted and twisted trunk, round which these

feeble climbing plants must cling. There was no want of ability or of

honest well-meaning affection to make the prop trustworthy: the ease

and quickness with which he studied might serve him to win prizes at

Cambridge, as he had done among the Blue Coats, in spite of

irregularities. The only danger was, that the incalculable tendencies

in him might be fatally timed, and that his good intentions might be

frustrated by some act which was not due to habit but to capricious,

scattered impulses. He could not be said to have any one bad habit; yet

at longer or shorter intervals he had fits of impish recklessness, and

did things that would have made the worst habits.

Hans in his right mind, however, was a lovable creature, and in Deronda

he had happened to find a friend who was likely to stand by him with

the more constancy, from compassion for these brief aberrations that

might bring a long repentance. Hans, indeed, shared Deronda’s rooms

nearly as much as he used his own: to Deronda he poured himself out on

his studies, his affairs, his hopes; the poverty of his home, and his

love for the creatures there; the itching of his fingers to draw, and

his determination to fight it away for the sake of getting some sort of

a plum that he might divide with his mother and the girls. He wanted no

confidence in return, but seemed to take Deronda as an Olympian who

needed nothing—an egotism in friendship which is common enough with

mercurial, expansive natures. Deronda was content, and gave Meyrick all

the interest he claimed, getting at last a brotherly anxiety about him,

looking after him in his erratic moments, and contriving by adroitly

delicate devices not only to make up for his friend’s lack of pence,

but to save him from threatening chances. Such friendship easily

becomes tender: the one spreads strong sheltering wings that delight in

spreading, the other gets the warm protection which is also a delight.

Meyrick was going in for a classical scholarship, and his success, in

various ways momentous, was the more probable from the steadying

influence of Deronda’s friendship.

But an imprudence of Meyrick’s, committed at the beginning of the

autumn term, threatened to disappoint his hopes. With his usual

alternation between unnecessary expense and self-privation, he had

given too much money for an old engraving which fascinated him, and to

make up for it, had come from London in a third-class carriage with his

eyes exposed to a bitter wind and any irritating particles the wind

might drive before it. The consequence was a severe inflammation of the

eyes, which for some time hung over him the threat of a lasting injury.

This crushing trouble called out all Deronda’s readiness to devote

himself, and he made every other occupation secondary to that of being

companion and eyes to Hans, working with him and for him at his

classics, that if possible his chance of the classical scholarship

might be saved. Hans, to keep the knowledge of his suffering from his

mother and sisters, alleged his work as a reason for passing the

Christmas at Cambridge, and his friend stayed up with him.

Meanwhile Deronda relaxed his hold on his mathematics, and Hans,

reflecting on this, at length said: “Old fellow, while you are hoisting

me you are risking yourself. With your mathematical cram one may be

like Moses or Mohammed or somebody of that sort who had to cram, and

forgot in one day what it had taken him forty to learn.”

Deronda would not admit that he cared about the risk, and he had really

been beguiled into a little indifference by double sympathy: he was

very anxious that Hans should not miss the much-needed scholarship, and

he felt a revival of interest in the old studies. Still, when Hans,

rather late in the day, got able to use his own eyes, Deronda had

tenacity enough to try hard and recover his lost ground. He failed,

however; but he had the satisfaction of seeing Meyrick win.

Success, as a sort of beginning that urged completion, might have

reconciled Deronda to his university course; but the emptiness of all

things, from politics to pastimes, is never so striking to us as when

we fail in them. The loss of the personal triumph had no severity for

him, but the sense of having spent his time ineffectively in a mode of

working which had been against the grain, gave him a distaste for any

renewal of the process, which turned his imagined project of quitting

Cambridge into a serious intention. In speaking of his intention to

Meyrick he made it appear that he was glad of the turn events had

taken—glad to have the balance dip decidedly, and feel freed from his

hesitations; but he observed that he must of course submit to any

strong objection on the part of Sir Hugo.

Meyrick’s joy and gratitude were disturbed by much uneasiness. He

believed in Deronda’s alleged preference, but he felt keenly that in

serving him Daniel had placed himself at a disadvantage in Sir Hugo’s

opinion, and he said mournfully, “If you had got the scholarship, Sir

Hugo would have thought that you asked to leave us with a better grace.

You have spoiled your luck for my sake, and I can do nothing to amend

it.”

“Yes, you can; you are to be a first-rate fellow. I call that a

first-rate investment of my luck.”

“Oh, confound it! You save an ugly mongrel from drowning, and expect

him to cut a fine figure. The poets have made tragedies enough about

signing one’s self over to wickedness for the sake of getting something

plummy; I shall write a tragedy of a fellow who signed himself over to

be good, and was uncomfortable ever after.”

But Hans lost no time in secretly writing the history of the affair to

Sir Hugo, making it plain that but for Deronda’s generous devotion he

could hardly have failed to win the prize he had been working for.

The two friends went up to town together: Meyrick to rejoice with his

mother and the girls in their little home at Chelsea; Deronda to carry

out the less easy task of opening his mind to Sir Hugo. He relied a

little on the baronet’s general tolerance of eccentricities, but he

expected more opposition than he met with. He was received with even

warmer kindness than usual, the failure was passed over lightly, and

when he detailed his reasons for wishing to quit the university and go

to study abroad, Sir Hugo sat for some time in a silence which was

rather meditative than surprised. At last he said, looking at Daniel

with examination, “So you don’t want to be an Englishman to the

backbone after all?”

“I want to be an Englishman, but I want to understand other points of

view. And I want to get rid of a merely English attitude in studies.”

“I see; you don’t want to be turned out in the same mould as every

other youngster. And I have nothing to say against your doffing some of

our national prejudices. I feel the better myself for having spent a

good deal of my time abroad. But, for God’s sake, keep an English cut,

and don’t become indifferent to bad tobacco! And, my dear boy, it is

good to be unselfish and generous; but don’t carry that too far. It

will not do to give yourself to be melted down for the benefit of the

tallow-trade; you must know where to find yourself. However, I shall

put no veto on your going. Wait until I can get off Committee, and I’ll

run over with you.”

So Deronda went according to his will. But not before he had spent some

hours with Hans Meyrick, and been introduced to the mother and sisters

in the Chelsea home. The shy girls watched and registered every look of

their brother’s friend, declared by Hans to have been the salvation of

him, a fellow like nobody else, and, in fine, a brick. They so

thoroughly accepted Deronda as an ideal, that when he was gone the

youngest set to work, under the criticism of the two elder girls, to

paint him as Prince Camaralzaman.