Kabanata Kabanata 41 · Chapter XLI
.
“This, too is probable, according to that saying of Agathon: ‘It is a
part of probability that many improbable things will happen.’”
—ARISTOTLE: _Poetics_.
Imagine the conflict in a mind like Deronda’s given not only to feel
strongly but to question actively, on the evening after the interview
with Mordecai. To a young man of much duller susceptibilities the
adventure might have seemed enough out of the common way to divide his
thoughts; but it had stirred Deronda so deeply, that with the usual
reaction of his intellect he began to examine the grounds of his
emotion, and consider how far he must resist its guidance. The
consciousness that he was half dominated by Mordecai’s energetic
certitude, and still more by his fervent trust, roused his alarm. It
was his characteristic bias to shrink from the moral stupidity of
valuing lightly what had come close to him, and of missing blindly in
his own life of to-day the crisis which he recognized as momentous and
sacred in the historic life of men. If he had read of this incident as
having happened centuries ago in Rome, Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine,
Cairo, to some man young as himself, dissatisfied with his neutral
life, and wanting some closer fellowship, some more special duty to
give him ardor for the possible consequences of his work, it would have
appeared to him quite natural that the incident should have created a
deep impression on that far-off man, whose clothing and action would
have been seen in his imagination as part of an age chiefly known to us
through its more serious effects. 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 owning any
conscience in the matter, as the solemn folly of taking himself too
seriously?—that bugbear of circles in which the lack of grave emotion
passes for wit. From such cowardice before modish ignorance and
obtuseness, Deronda shrank. But he also shrank from having his course
determined by mere contagion, without consent of reason; or from
allowing a reverential pity for spiritual struggle to hurry him along a
dimly-seen path.
What, after all, had really happened? He knew quite accurately the
answer Sir Hugo would have given: “A consumptive Jew, possessed by a
fanaticism which obstacles and hastening death intensified, had fixed
on Deronda as the antitype of some visionary image, the offspring of
wedded hope and despair: despair of his own life, irrepressible hope in
the propagation of his fanatical beliefs. The instance was perhaps odd,
exceptional in its form, but substantially it was not rare. Fanaticism
was not so common as bankruptcy, but taken in all its aspects it was
abundant enough. While Mordecai was waiting on the bridge for the
fulfillment of his visions, another man was convinced that he had the
mathematical key of the universe which would supersede Newton, and
regarded all known physicists as conspiring to stifle his discovery and
keep the universe locked; another, that he had the metaphysical key,
with just that hair’s-breadth of difference from the old wards which
would make it fit exactly. Scattered here and there in every direction
you might find a terrible person, with more or less power of speech,
and with an eye either glittering or preternaturally dull, on the
look-out for the man who must hear him; and in most cases he had
volumes which it was difficult to get printed, or if printed to get
read. This Mordecai happened to have a more pathetic aspect, a more
passionate, penetrative speech than was usual with such monomaniacs; he
was more poetical than a social reformer with colored views of the new
moral world in parallelograms, or than an enthusiast in sewage; 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 what likelihood was there that his notions had the sort of value he
ascribed to them? In such cases a man of the world knows what to think
beforehand. And as to Mordecai’s conviction that he had found a new
executive self, it might be preparing for him the worst of
disappointments—that which presents itself as final.”
Deronda’s ear caught all these negative whisperings; nay, he repeated
them distinctly to himself. It was not the first but it was the most
pressing occasion on which he had had to face this question of the
family likeness among 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 his
own unmanifested inspiration, down to the last inventor of an ideal
machine that will achieve perpetual motion. The kinship of human
passion, the sameness of mortal scenery, inevitably fill fact with
burlesque and parody. Error and folly have had their hecatombs of
martyrs. Reduce the grandest type of man hitherto known to an abstract
statement of his qualities and efforts, and he appears in dangerous
company: say that, like Copernicus and Galileo, he was immovably
convinced in the face of hissing incredulity; but so is the contriver
of perpetual motion. We cannot fairly try the spirits by this sort of
test. If we want to avoid giving the dose of hemlock or the sentence of
banishment in the wrong case, nothing will do but a capacity to
understand the subject-matter on which the immovable man is convinced,
and fellowship with human travail, both near and afar, to hinder us
from scanning any deep experience lightly. Shall we say, “Let the ages
try the spirits, and see what they are worth?” Why, we are the
beginning of the ages, which can only be just by virtue of just
judgments in separate human breasts—separate yet combined. Even
steam-engines could not have got made without that condition, but must
have stayed in the mind of James Watt.
This track of thinking was familiar enough to Deronda to have saved him
from any contemptuous prejudgment of Mordecai, even if their
communication had been free from that peculiar claim on himself
strangely ushered in by some long-growing preparation in the Jew’s
agitated mind. This claim, indeed, considered in what is called a
rational way, might seem justifiably dismissed as illusory and even
preposterous; but it was precisely what turned Mordecai’s hold on him
from an appeal to his ready sympathy into a clutch on his struggling
conscience. Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner
deliverance of fixed laws: they are the voice of sensibilities as
various as our memories (which also have their kinship and likeness).
And Deronda’s conscience included sensibilities beyond the common,
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—see the vision I point
to—behold a glory where I behold it!” To take such a demand in the
light of an obligation in any direct sense would have been
preposterous—to have seemed to admit it would have been dishonesty;
and Deronda, looking on the agitation of those moments, felt thankful
that in the midst of his compassion 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, was of Jewish blood. Was there ever a
more hypothetic appeal?
But since the age of thirteen Deronda had associated the deepest
experience of his affections with what was a pure supposition, namely,
that Sir Hugo was his father: that was a hypothesis which 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 conception which might be disproved; and he
had been also used to think of some revelation that might influence his
view of the particular duties belonging to him. To be in a state of
suspense, which was also one of emotive activity and scruple, was a
familiar attitude of his conscience.
And now, suppose that wish-begotten belief in his Jewish birth, and
that extravagant demand of discipleship, to be the foreshadowing of an
actual discovery and a genuine spiritual result: suppose that
Mordecai’s ideas made a real conquest over Deronda’s conviction? Nay,
it was conceivable that as Mordecai needed and believed that, he had
found an active replenishment of himself, so Deronda might receive from
Mordecai’s mind the complete ideal shape of that personal duty and
citizenship which lay in his own thought like sculptured fragments
certifying some beauty yearned after but not traceable by divination.
As that possibility presented itself in his meditations, he was aware
that it would be called dreamy, and began to defend it. If the
influence he imagined himself submitting to had been that of some
honored professor, some authority in a seat of learning, some
philosopher who had been accepted as a voice of the age, would a
thorough receptiveness toward direction have been ridiculed? Only by
those who hold it a sign of weakness to be obliged for an idea, and
prefer to hint that they have implicitly held in a more correct form
whatever others have stated with a sadly short-coming explicitness.
After all, what was there but vulgarity in taking the fact that
Mordecai was a poor Jewish workman, and that he was to be met perhaps
on a sanded floor in the parlor of the _Hand and Banner_ as a reason
for determining beforehand that there was not some spiritual force
within him that might have a determining effect on a white-handed
gentleman? There is a legend told of the Emperor Domitian, that having
heard of a Jewish family, of the house of David, whence the ruler of
the world was to spring, he sent for its members in alarm, but quickly
released them on observing that they had the hands of
work-people—being of just the opposite opinion with that Rabbi who
stood waiting at the gate of Rome in confidence that the Messiah would
be found among the destitute who entered there. Both Emperor and Rabbi
were wrong in their trust of outward signs: poverty and poor clothes
are no sign of inspiration, said Deronda to his inward objector, but
they have gone with it in some remarkable cases. And to regard
discipleship as out of the question because of them, would be mere
dullness of imagination.
A more plausible reason for putting discipleship out of the question
was the strain of visionary excitement in Mordecai, which turned his
wishes into overmastering impressions, and made him read outward facts
as fulfillment. Was such a temper of mind likely to accompany that wise
estimate of consequences which is the only safeguard from fatal error,
even to ennobling motive? But it remained to be seen whether that rare
conjunction existed or not in Mordecai: perhaps his might be one of the
natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of
that 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 ardor which feels the agitations of discovery beforehand,
and has a faith in its preconception that surmounts many failures of
experiment. And in relation to 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
a reason for concluding beforehand that he was not worth listening to
except for pity’s sake. Suppose he had introduced himself as one of the
strictest reasoners. Do they form a body of men hitherto free from
false conclusions and illusory speculations? The driest argument has
its hallucinations, too hastily concluding that its net will now at
last be large enough to hold the universe. Men may dream in
demonstrations, and cut out an illusory world in the shape of axioms,
definitions, and propositions, with a final exclusion of fact signed
Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking will save us mortals from mistake in
our imperfect apprehension of the matter to be thought about. And since
the unemotional intellect may carry us into a mathematical dreamland
where nothing is but what is not, perhaps an emotional intellect may
have absorbed into its passionate vision of possibilities some truth of
what will be—the more comprehensive massive life feeding theory with
new material, as the sensibility of the artist seizes combinations
which science explains and justifies. At any rate, presumptions to the
contrary are not to be trusted. We must be patient with the inevitable
makeshift of our human thinking, whether in its sum total or in the
separate minds that have made the sum. Columbus had some impressions
about himself which we call superstitions, and used some arguments
which we disapprove; but he had also some sound physical conceptions,
and he had the passionate patience of genius to make them tell on
mankind. The world has made up its mind rather contemptuously about
those who were deaf to Columbus.
“My contempt for them binds me to see that I don’t adopt their mistake
on a small scale,” said Deronda, “and make myself deaf with the
assumption that 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 came together. To me the way seems made up of plainly
discernible links. If I had not found Mirah, it is probable that I
should not have begun to be specially interested in the Jews, and
certainly I should not have gone on that loitering search after an Ezra
Cohen which made me pause at Ram’s book-shop and ask the price of
_Maimon_. Mordecai, on his side, had his visions of a disciple, and he
saw me by their light; I corresponded well enough with the image his
longing had created. He took me for one of his race. Suppose that his
impression—the elderly Jew at Frankfort seemed to have something like
it—suppose in spite of all presumptions to the contrary, that his
impression should somehow be proved true, and that I should come
actually to share any of 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 issue should be quite different?—well, there will be
something painful to go through. I shall almost inevitably have to be
an active cause of that poor fellow’s crushing disappointment. Perhaps
this issue is the one I had need prepare myself for. I fear 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 he would formerly have had to
think of himself as probably a Jew. And, if you like, he was romantic.
That young energy and spirit of adventure which have helped to create
the world-wide legions of youthful heroes going to seek the hidden
tokens of their birth and its inheritance of tasks, gave him a certain
quivering interest in the bare possibility that he was entering on a
like track —all the 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
that his father was an Englishman only grew firmer under the weak
assaults of unwarranted doubt. And that a moment should ever come in
which that belief was declared a delusion, was something of which
Deronda would not say, “I should be glad.” His life-long affection for
Sir Hugo, stronger than all his resentment, made him shrink from
admitting that wish.
Which way soever the truth might lie, he repeated to himself what he
had said to Mordecai—that he could not without farther reasons
undertake to hasten its discovery. Nay, he was tempted now to regard
his uncertainty as a condition to be cherished for the present. If
further intercourse revealed nothing but illusions as what he was
expected to share in, the want of any valid evidence that he was a Jew
might save Mordecai the worst shock in the refusal of fraternity. It
might even be justifiable to use the uncertainty on this point in
keeping up a suspense which would induce Mordecai to accept those
offices of friendship that Deronda longed to urge on him.
These were the meditations that busied Deronda in the interval of four
days before he could fulfill his promise to call for Mordecai at Ezra
Cohen’s, Sir Hugo’s demands on him often lasting to an hour so late as
to put the evening expedition to Holborn out of the question.