Chương Chương 42 · Chapter XLII
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“Wenn es eine Stufenleiter von Leiden giebt, so hat Israel die höchste
Staffel erstiegen; wen die Dauer der Schmerzen und die Geduld, mit
welcher sie ertragen werden, adeln, so nehmen es die Juden mit den
Hochgeborenen aller Länder auf; wenn eine Literatur reich genannt
wird, die wenige klassische Trauerspiele besitzt, welcher Platz
gebührt dann einer Tragodie die anderthalb Jahrtausende wahrt,
gedichtet und dargestellt von den Helden selber?”—ZUNZ: _Die
Synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters._
“If there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the
nations—if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they
are borne ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land—if
a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic
tragedies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen
hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?”
Deronda had lately been reading that passage of Zunz, and it occurred
to him by way of contrast when he was going to the Cohens, who
certainly bore no obvious stamp of distinction in sorrow or in any
other form of aristocracy. Ezra Cohen was not clad in the sublime
pathos of the martyr, and his taste for money-getting seemed to be
favored with that success which has been the most exasperating
difference in the greed of Jews during all the ages of their
dispersion. This Jeshurun of a pawnbroker was not a symbol of the great
Jewish tragedy; and yet was there not something typical in the fact
that a life like Mordecai’s—a frail incorporation of the national
consciousness, breathing with difficult breath—was nested in the
self-gratulating ignorant prosperity of the Cohens?
Glistening was the gladness in their faces when Deronda reappeared
among them. Cohen himself took occasion to intimate that although the
diamond ring, let alone a little longer, would have bred more money, he
did not mind _that_—not a sixpence—when compared with the pleasure of
the women and children in seeing a young gentleman whose first visit
had been so agreeable that they had “done nothing but talk of it ever
since.” Young Mrs. Cohen was very sorry that baby was asleep, and then
very glad that Adelaide was not yet gone to bed, entreating Deronda not
to stay in the shop, but to go forthwith into the parlor to see “mother
and the children.” He willingly accepted the invitation, having
provided himself with portable presents; a set of paper figures for
Adelaide, and an ivory cup and ball for Jacob.
The grandmother had a pack of cards before her and was making “plates”
with the children. A plate had just been thrown down and kept itself
whole.
“Stop!” said Jacob, running to Deronda as he entered. “Don’t tread on
my plate. Stop and see me throw it up again.”
Deronda complied, exchanging a smile of understanding with the
grandmother, and the plate bore several tossings before it came to
pieces; then the visitor was allowed to come forward and seat himself.
He observed that the door from which Mordecai had issued on the former
visit was now closed, but he wished to show his interest in the Cohens
before disclosing a yet stronger interest in their singular inmate.
It was not until he had Adelaide on his knee, and was setting up the
paper figures in their dance on the table, while Jacob was already
practicing with the cup and ball, that Deronda said,
“Is Mordecai in just now?”
“Where is he, Addy?” said Cohen, who had seized an interval of business
to come and look on.
“In the workroom there,” said his wife, nodding toward the closed door.
“The fact is, sir,” said Cohen, “we don’t know what’s come to him this
last day or two. He’s always what I may call a little touched, you
know”—here Cohen pointed to his own forehead—“not quite so rational
in all things, like you and me; but he’s mostly wonderful regular and
industrious so far as a poor creature can be, and takes as much delight
in the boy as anybody could. But this last day or two he’s been moving
about like a sleep-walker, or else sitting as still as a wax figure.”
“It’s the disease, poor dear creature,” said the grandmother, tenderly.
“I doubt whether he can stand long against it.”
“No; I think its only something he’s got in his head,” said Mrs. Cohen
the younger. “He’s been turning over writing continually, and when I
speak to him it takes him ever so long to hear and answer.”
“You may think us a little weak ourselves,” said Cohen, apologetically.
“But my wife and mother wouldn’t part with him if he was a still worse
incumbrance. It isn’t that we don’t know the long and short of matters,
but it’s our principle. There’s fools do business at a loss and don’t
know it. I’m not one of ’em.”
“Oh, Mordecai carries a blessing inside him,” said the grandmother.
“He’s got something the matter inside him,” said Jacob, coming up to
correct this erratum of his grandmother’s. “He said he couldn’t talk to
me, and he wouldn’t have a bit o’ bun.”
“So far from wondering at your feeling for him,” said Deronda, “I
already feel something of the same sort myself. I have lately talked to
him at Ram’s book-shop—in fact, I promised to call for him here, that
we might go out together.”
“That’s it, then!” said Cohen, slapping his knee. “He’s been expecting
you, and it’s taken hold of him. I suppose he talks about his learning
to you. It’s uncommonly kind of _you_, sir; for I don’t suppose there’s
much to be got out of it, else it wouldn’t have left him where he is.
But there’s the shop.” Cohen hurried out, and Jacob, who had been
listening inconveniently near to Deronda’s elbow, said to him with
obliging familiarity, “I’ll call Mordecai for you, if you like.”
“No, Jacob,” said his mother; “open the door for the gentleman, and let
him go in himself Hush! Don’t make a noise.”
Skillful Jacob seemed to enter into the play, and turned the handle of
the door as noiselessly as possible, while Deronda went behind him and
stood on the threshold. The small room was lit only by a dying fire and
one candle with a shade over it. On the board fixed under the window,
various objects of jewelry were scattered: some books were heaped in
the corner beyond them. Mordecai was seated on a high chair at the
board with his back to the door, his hands resting on each other and on
the board, a watch propped on a stand before him. He was in a state of
expectation as sickening as that of a prisoner listening for the
delayed deliverance—when he heard Deronda’s voice saying, “I am come
for you. Are you ready?”
Immediately he turned without speaking, seized his furred cap which lay
near, and moved to join Deronda. It was but a moment before they were
both in the sitting-room, and Jacob, noticing the change in his
friend’s air and expression, seized him by the arm and said, “See my
cup and ball!” sending the ball up close to Mordecai’s face, as
something likely to cheer a convalescent. It was a sign of the relieved
tension in Mordecai’s mind that he could smile and say, “Fine, fine!”
“You have forgotten your greatcoat and comforter,” said young Mrs.
Cohen, and he went back into the workroom and got them.
“He’s come to life again, do you see?” said Cohen, who had
re-entered—speaking in an undertone. “I told you so: I’m mostly
right.” Then in his usual voice, “Well, sir, we mustn’t detain you now,
I suppose; but I hope this isn’t the last time we shall see you.”
“Shall you come again?” said Jacob, advancing. “See, I can catch the
ball; I’ll bet I catch it without stopping, if you come again.”
“He has clever hands,” said Deronda, looking at the grandmother. “Which
side of the family does he get them from?”
But the grandmother only nodded towards her son, who said promptly, “My
side. My wife’s family are not in that line. But bless your soul! ours
is a sort of cleverness as good as gutta percha; you can twist it which
way you like. There’s nothing some old gentlemen won’t do if you set
’em to it.” Here Cohen winked down at Jacob’s back, but it was doubtful
whether this judicious allusiveness answered its purpose, for its
subject gave a nasal whinnying laugh and stamped about singing, “Old
gentlemen, old gentlemen,” in chiming cadence.
Deronda thought, “I shall never know anything decisive about these
people until I ask Cohen pointblank whether he lost a sister named
Mirah when she was six years old.” The decisive moment did not yet seem
easy for him to face. Still his first sense of repulsion at the
commonness of these people was beginning to be tempered with kindlier
feeling. However unrefined their airs and speech might be, he was
forced to admit some moral refinement in their treatment of the
consumptive workman, whose mental distinction impressed them chiefly as
a harmless, silent raving.
“The Cohens seem to have an affection for you,” said Deronda, as soon
as he and Mordecai were off the doorstep.
“And I for them,” was the immediate answer. “They have the heart of the
Israelite within them, though they are as the horse and the mule,
without understanding beyond the narrow path they tread.”
“I have caused you some uneasiness, I fear,” said Deronda, “by my
slowness in fulfilling my promise. I wished to come yesterday, but I
found it impossible.”
“Yes—yes, I trusted you. But it is true I have been uneasy, for the
spirit of my youth has been stirred within me, and this body is not
strong enough to bear the beating of its wings. I am as a man bound and
imprisoned through long years: behold him brought to speech of his
fellow and his limbs set free: he weeps, he totters, the joy within him
threatens to break and overthrow the tabernacle of flesh.”
“You must not speak too much in this evening air,” said Deronda,
feeling Mordecai’s words of reliance like so many cords binding him
painfully. “Cover your mouth with the woolen scarf. We are going to the
_Hand and Banner_, I suppose, and shall be in private there?”
“No, that is my trouble that you did not come yesterday. For this is
the evening of the club I spoke of, and we might not have any minutes
alone until late, when all the rest are gone. Perhaps we had better
seek another place. But I am used to that only. In new places the outer
world presses on me and narrows the inward vision. And the people there
are familiar with my face.”
“I don’t mind the club if I am allowed to go in,” said Deronda. “It is
enough that you like this place best. If we have not enough time I will
come again. What sort of club is it?”
“It is called ‘The Philosophers.’ They are few—like the cedars of
Lebanon—poor men given to thought. But none so poor as I am: and
sometimes visitors of higher worldly rank have been brought. We are
allowed to introduce a friend, who is interested in our topics. Each
orders beer or some other kind of drink, in payment for the room. Most
of them smoke. I have gone when I could, for there are other men of my
race who come, and sometimes I have broken silence. I have pleased
myself with a faint likeness between these poor philosophers and the
Masters who handed down the thought of our race—the great
Transmitters, who labored with their hands for scant bread, but
preserved and enlarged for us the heritage of memory, and saved the
soul of Israel alive as a seed among the tombs. The heart pleases
itself with faint resemblances.”
“I shall be very glad to go and sit among them, if that will suit you.
It is a sort of meeting I should like to join in,” said Deronda, not
without relief in the prospect of an interval before he went through
the strain of his next private conversation with Mordecai.
In three minutes they had opened the glazed door with the red curtain,
and were in the little parlor, hardly much more than fifteen feet
square, where the gaslight shone through a slight haze of smoke on what
to Deronda was a new and striking scene. Half-a-dozen men of various
ages, from between twenty and thirty to fifty, all shabbily dressed,
most of them with clay pipes in their mouths, were listening with a
look of concentrated intelligence to a man in a pepper-and-salt dress,
with blonde hair, short nose, broad forehead and general breadth, who,
holding his pipe slightly uplifted in the left hand, and beating his
knee with the right, was just finishing a quotation from Shelley (the
comparison of the avalanche in his “Prometheus Unbound”)
“As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round.”
The entrance of the new-comers broke the fixity of attention, and
called for re-arrangement of seats in the too narrow semicircle round
the fire-place and the table holding the glasses, spare pipes and
tobacco. This was the soberest of clubs; but sobriety is no reason why
smoking and “taking something” should be less imperiously needed as a
means of getting a decent status in company and debate. Mordecai was
received with welcoming voices which had a slight cadence of compassion
in them, but naturally all glances passed immediately to his companion.
“I have brought a friend who is interested in our subjects,” said
Mordecai. “He has traveled and studied much.”
“Is the gentlemen anonymous? Is he a Great Unknown?” said the
broad-chested quoter of Shelley, with a humorous air.
“My name is Daniel Deronda. I am unknown, but not in any sense great.”
The smile breaking over the stranger’s grave face as he said this was
so agreeable that there was a general indistinct murmur, equivalent to
a “Hear, hear,” and the broad man said,
“You recommend the name, sir, and are welcome. Here, Mordecai, come to
this corner against me,” he added, evidently wishing to give the
coziest place to the one who most needed it.
Deronda was well satisfied to get a seat on the opposite side, where
his general survey of the party easily included Mordecai, who remained
an eminently striking object in this group of sharply-characterized
figures, more than one of whom, even to Daniel’s little exercised
discrimination, seemed probably of Jewish descent.
In fact pure English blood (if leech or lancet can furnish us with the
precise product) did not declare itself predominantly in the party at
present assembled. Miller, the broad man, an exceptional second-hand
bookseller who knew the insides of books, had at least grand-parents
who called themselves German, and possibly far-away ancestors who
denied themselves to be Jews; Buchan, the saddler, was Scotch; Pash,
the watchmaker, was a small, dark, vivacious, triple-baked Jew; Gideon,
the optical instrument maker, was a Jew of the red-haired,
generous-featured type easily passing for Englishmen of unusually
cordial manners: and Croop, the dark-eyed shoemaker, was probably more
Celtic than he knew. Only three would have been discernable everywhere
as Englishmen: the wood-inlayer Goodwin, well-built, open-faced,
pleasant-voiced; the florid laboratory assistant Marrables; and Lily,
the pale, neat-faced copying-clerk, whose light-brown hair was set up
in a small parallelogram above his well-filled forehead, and whose
shirt, taken with an otherwise seedy costume, had a freshness that
might be called insular, and perhaps even something narrower.
Certainly a company select of the select among poor men, being drawn
together by a taste not prevalent even among the privileged heirs of
learning and its institutions; and not likely to amuse any gentleman in
search of crime or low comedy as the ground of interest in people whose
weekly income is only divisible into shillings. Deronda, even if he had
not been more than usually inclined to gravity under the influence of
what was pending between him and Mordecai, would not have set himself
to find food for laughter in the various shades of departure from the
tone of polished society sure to be observable in the air and talk of
these men who had probably snatched knowledge as most of us snatch
indulgences, making the utmost of scant opportunity. He looked around
him with the quiet air of respect habitual to him among equals, ordered
whisky and water, and offered the contents of his cigar-case, which,
characteristically enough, he always carried and hardly ever used for
his own behoof, having reasons for not smoking himself, but liking to
indulge others. Perhaps it was his weakness to be afraid of seeming
straight-laced, and turning himself into a sort of diagram instead of a
growth which can exercise the guiding attraction of fellowship. That he
made a decidedly winning impression on the company was proved by their
showing themselves no less at ease than before, and desirous of quickly
resuming their interrupted talk.
“This is what I call one of our touch-and-go nights, sir,” said Miller,
who was implicitly accepted as a sort of moderator—on addressing
Deronda by way of explanation, and nodding toward each person whose
name he mentioned. “Sometimes we stick pretty close to the point. But
to-night our friend Pash, there, brought up the law of progress; and we
got on statistics; then Lily, there, saying we knew well enough before
counting that in the same state of society the same sort of things
would happen, and it was no more wonder that quantities should remain
the same, than that qualities should remain the same, for in relation
to society numbers are qualities—the number of drunkards is a quality
in society—the numbers are an index to the qualities, and give us no
instruction, only setting us to consider the causes of difference
between different social states—Lily saying this, we went off on the
causes of social change, and when you came in I was going upon the
power of ideas, which I hold to be the main transforming cause.”
“I don’t hold with you there, Miller,” said Goodwin, the inlayer, more
concerned to carry on the subject than to wait for a word from the new
guest. “For either you mean so many sorts of things by ideas that I get
no knowledge by what you say, any more than if you said light was a
cause; or else you mean a particular sort of ideas, and then I go
against your meaning as too narrow. For, look at it in one way, all
actions men put a bit of thought into are ideas—say, sowing seed, or
making a canoe, or baking clay; and such ideas as these work themselves
into life and go on growing with it, but they can’t go apart from the
material that set them to work and makes a medium for them. It’s the
nature of wood and stone yielding to the knife that raises the idea of
shaping them, and with plenty of wood and stone the shaping will go on.
I look at it, that such ideas as are mixed straight away with all the
other elements of life are powerful along with ’em. The slower the
mixing, the less power they have. And as to the causes of social
change, I look at it in this way—ideas are a sort of parliament, but
there’s a commonwealth outside and a good deal of the commonwealth is
working at change without knowing what the parliament is doing.”
“But if you take ready mixing as your test of power,” said Pash, “some
of the least practical ideas beat everything. They spread without being
understood, and enter into the language without being thought of.”
“They may act by changing the distribution of gases,” said Marrables;
“instruments are getting so fine now, men may come to register the
spread of a theory by observed changes in the atmosphere and
corresponding changes in the nerves.”
“Yes,” said Pash, his dark face lighting up rather impishly, “there is
the idea of nationalities; I dare say the wild asses are snuffing it,
and getting more gregarious.”
“You don’t share that idea?” said Deronda, finding a piquant
incongruity between Pash’s sarcasm and the strong stamp of race on his
features.
“Say, rather, he does not share that spirit,” said Mordecai, who had
turned a melancholy glance on Pash. “Unless nationality is a feeling,
what force can it have as an idea?”
“Granted, Mordecai,” said Pash, quite good-humoredly. “And as the
feeling of nationality is dying, I take the idea to be no better than a
ghost, already walking to announce the death.”
“A sentiment may seem to be dying and yet revive into strong life,”
said Deronda. “Nations have revived. We may live to see a great
outburst of force in the Arabs, who are being inspired with a new zeal.”
“Amen, amen,” said Mordecai, looking at Deronda with a delight which
was the beginning of recovered energy: his attitude was more upright,
his face was less worn.
“That may hold with backward nations,” said Pash, “but with us in
Europe the sentiment of nationality is destined to die out. It will
last a little longer in the quarters where oppression lasts, but
nowhere else. The whole current of progress is setting against it.”
“Ay,” said Buchan, in a rapid thin Scotch tone which was like the
letting in of a little cool air on the conversation, “ye’ve done well
to bring us round to the point. Ye’re all agreed that societies
change—not always and everywhere—but on the whole and in the long
run. Now, with all deference, I would beg t’ observe that we have got
to examine the nature of changes before we have a warrant to call them
progress, which word is supposed to include a bettering, though I
apprehend it to be ill-chosen for that purpose, since mere motion
onward may carry us to a bog or a precipice. And the questions I would
put are three: Is all change in the direction of progress? if not, how
shall we discern which change is progress and which not? and thirdly,
how far and in what way can we act upon the course of change so as to
promote it where it is beneficial, and divert it where it is injurious?”
But Buchan’s attempt to impose his method on the talk was a failure.
Lily immediately said,
“Change and progress are merged in the idea of development. The laws of
development are being discovered, and changes taking place according to
them are necessarily progressive; that is to say, it we have any notion
of progress or improvement opposed to them, the notion is a mistake.”
“I really can’t see how you arrive at that sort of certitude about
changes by calling them development,” said Deronda. “There will still
remain the degrees of inevitableness in relation to our own will and
acts, and the degrees of wisdom in hastening or retarding; there will
still remain the danger of mistaking a tendency which should be
resisted for an inevitable law that we must adjust ourselves to,—which
seems to me as bad a superstition or false god as any that has been set
up without the ceremonies of philosophizing.”
“That is a truth,” said Mordecai. “Woe to the men who see no place for
resistance in this generation! I believe in a growth, a passage, and a
new unfolding of life whereof the seed is more perfect, more charged
with the elements that are pregnant with diviner form. The life of a
people grows, it is knit together and yet expanded, in joy and sorrow,
in thought and action; it absorbs the thought of other nations into its
own forms, and gives back the thought as new wealth to the world; it is
a power and an organ in the great body of the nations. But there may
come a check, an arrest; memories may be stifled, and love may be faint
for the lack of them; or memories may shrink into withered relics—the
soul of a people, whereby they know themselves to be one, may seem to
be dying for want of common action. But who shall say, ‘The fountain of
their life is dried up, they shall forever cease to be a nation?’ Who
shall say it? Not he who feels the life of his people stirring within
his own. Shall he say, ‘That way events are wending, I will not
resist?’ His very soul is resistance, and is as a seed of fire that may
enkindle the souls of multitudes, and make a new pathway for events.”
“I don’t deny patriotism,” said Gideon, “but we all know you have a
particular meaning, Mordecai. You know Mordecai’s way of thinking, I
suppose.” Here Gideon had turned to Deronda, who sat next to him, but
without waiting for an answer he went on. “I’m a rational Jew myself. I
stand by my people as a sort of family relations, and I am for keeping
up our worship in a rational way. I don’t approve of our people getting
baptised, because I don’t believe in a Jew’s conversion to the Gentile
part of Christianity. And now we have political equality, there’s no
excuse for a pretense of that sort. But I am for getting rid of all of
our superstitions and exclusiveness. There’s no reason now why we
shouldn’t melt gradually into the populations we live among. That’s the
order of the day in point of progress. I would as soon my children
married Christians as Jews. And I’m for the old maxim, ‘A man’s country
is where he’s well off.’”
“That country’s not so easy to find, Gideon,” said the rapid Pash, with
a shrug and grimace. “You get ten shillings a-week more than I do, and
have only half the number of children. If somebody will introduce a
brisk trade in watches among the ‘Jerusalem wares,’ I’ll go—eh,
Mordecai, what do you say?”
Deronda, all ear for these hints of Mordecai’s opinion, was inwardly
wondering at his persistence in coming to this club. For an
enthusiastic spirit to meet continually the fixed indifference of men
familiar with the object of his enthusiasm is the acceptance of a slow
martyrdom, beside which the fate of a missionary tomahawked without any
considerate rejection of his doctrines seems hardly worthy of
compassion. But Mordecai gave no sign of shrinking: this was a moment
of spiritual fullness, and he cared more for the utterance of his faith
than for its immediate reception. With a fervor which had no temper in
it, but seemed rather the rush of feeling in the opportunity of speech,
he answered Pash:,
“What I say is, let every man keep far away from the brotherhood and
inheritance he despises. Thousands on thousands of our race have mixed
with the Gentiles as Celt with Saxon, and they may inherit the blessing
that belongs to the Gentile. You cannot follow them. You are one of the
multitudes over this globe who must walk among the nations and be known
as Jews, and with words on their lips which mean, ‘I wish I had not
been born a Jew, I disown any bond with the long travail of my race, I
will outdo the Gentile in mocking at our separateness,’ they all the
while feel breathing on them the breath of contempt because they are
Jews, and they will breathe it back poisonously. Can a fresh-made
garment of citizenship weave itself straightway into the flesh and
change the slow deposit of eighteen centuries? What is the citizenship
of him who walks among a people he has no hardy kindred and fellowship
with, and has lost the sense of brotherhood with his own race? It is a
charter of selfish ambition and rivalry in low greed. He is an alien of
spirit, whatever he may be in form; he sucks the blood of mankind, he
is not a man, sharing in no loves, sharing in no subjection of the
soul, he mocks it all. Is it not truth I speak, Pash?”
“Not exactly, Mordecai,” said Pash, “if you mean that I think the worse
of myself for being a Jew. What I thank our fathers for is that there
are fewer blockheads among us than among other races. But perhaps you
are right in thinking the Christians don’t like me so well for it.”
“Catholics and Protestants have not liked each other much better,” said
the genial Gideon. “We must wait patiently for prejudices to die out.
Many of our people are on a footing with the best, and there’s been a
good filtering of our blood into high families. I am for making our
expectations rational.”
“And so am I!” said Mordecai, quickly, leaning forward with the
eagerness of one who pleads in some decisive crisis, his long, thin
hands clasped together on his lap. “I, too, claim to be a rational Jew.
But what is it to be rational—what is it to feel the light of the
divine reason growing stronger within and without? It is to see more
and more of the hidden bonds that bind and consecrate change as a
dependent growth—yea, consecrate it with kinship: the past becomes my
parent and the future stretches toward me the appealing arms of
children. Is it rational to drain away the sap of special kindred that
makes the families of men rich in interchanged wealth, and various as
the forests are various with the glory of the cedar and the palm? When
it is rational to say, ‘I know not my father or my mother, let my
children be aliens to me, that no prayer of mine may touch them,’ then
it will be rational for the Jew to say, ‘I will seek to know no
difference between me and the Gentile, I will not cherish the prophetic
consciousness of our nationality—let the Hebrew cease to be, and let
all his memorials be antiquarian trifles, dead as the wall-paintings of
a conjectured race. Yet let his child learn by rote the speech of the
Greek, where he abjures his fellow-citizens by the bravery of those who
fought foremost at Marathon—let him learn to say that was noble in the
Greek, that is the spirit of an immortal nation! But the Jew has no
memories that bind him to action; let him laugh that his nation is
degraded from a nation; let him hold the monuments of his law which
carried within its frame the breath of social justice, of charity, and
of household sanctities—let him hold the energy of the prophets, the
patient care of the Masters, the fortitude of martyred generations, as
mere stuff for a professorship. The business of the Jew in all things
is to be even as the rich Gentile.’”
Mordecai threw himself back in his chair, and there was a moment’s
silence. Not one member of the club shared his point of view or his
emotion; but his whole personality and speech had on them the effect of
a dramatic representation which had some pathos in it, though no
practical consequences; and usually he was at once indulged and
contradicted. Deronda’s mind went back upon what must have been the
tragic pressure of outward conditions hindering this man, whose force
he felt to be telling on himself, from making any world for his thought
in the minds of others—like a poet among people of a strange speech,
who may have a poetry of their own, but have no ear for his cadence, no
answering thrill to his discovery of the latent virtues in his mother
tongue.
The cool Buchan was the first to speak, and hint the loss of time. “I
submit,” said he, “that ye’re traveling away from the questions I put
concerning progress.”
“Say they’re levanting, Buchan,” said Miller, who liked his joke, and
would not have objected to be called Voltairian. “Never mind. Let us
have a Jewish night; we’ve not had one for a long while. Let us take
the discussion on Jewish ground. I suppose we’ve no prejudice here;
we’re all philosophers; and we like our friends Mordecai, Pash, and
Gideon, as well as if they were no more kin to Abraham than the rest of
us. We’re all related through Adam, until further showing to the
contrary, and if you look into history we’ve all got some discreditable
forefathers. So I mean no offence when I say I don’t think any great
things of the part the Jewish people have played in the world. What
then? I think they were iniquitously dealt by in past times. And I
suppose we don’t want any men to be maltreated, white, black, brown, or
yellow—I know I’ve just given my half-crown to the contrary. And that
reminds me, I’ve a curious old German book—I can’t read it myself, but
a friend of mine was reading out of it to me the other day—about the
prejudices against the Jews, and the stories used to be told against
’em, and what do you think one was? Why, that they’re punished with a
bad odor in their bodies; and _that_, says the author, date 1715 (I’ve
just been pricing and marking the book this very morning)—that is
true, for the ancients spoke of it. But then, he says, the other things
are fables, such as that the odor goes away all at once when they’re
baptized, and that every one of the ten tribes, mind you, all the ten
being concerned in the crucifixion, has got a particular punishment
over and above the smell:—Asher, I remember, has the right arm a
handbreadth shorter than the left, and Naphthali has pig’s ears and a
smell of live pork. What do you think of that? There’s been a good deal
of fun made of rabbinical fables, but in point of fables my opinion is,
that all over the world it’s six of one and half-a-dozen of the other.
However, as I said before, I hold with the philosophers of the last
century that the Jews have played no great part as a people, though
Pash will have it they’re clever enough to beat all the rest of the
world. But if so, I ask, why haven’t they done it?”
“For the same reason that the cleverest men in the country don’t get
themselves or their ideas into Parliament,” said the ready Pash;
“because the blockheads are too many for ’em.”
“That is a vain question,” said Mordecai, “whether our people would
beat the rest of the world. Each nation has its own work, and is a
member of the world, enriched by the work of each. But it is true, as
Jehuda-ha-Levi first said, that Israel is the heart of mankind, if we
mean by heart the core of affection which binds a race and its families
in dutiful love, and the reverence for the human body which lifts the
needs of our animal life into religion, and the tenderness which is
merciful to the poor and weak and to the dumb creature that wears the
yoke for us.”
“They’re not behind any nation in arrogance,” said Lily; “and if they
have got in the rear, it has not been because they were over-modest.”
“Oh, every nation brags in its turn,” said Miller.
“Yes,” said Pash, “and some of them in the Hebrew text.”
“Well, whatever the Jews contributed at one time, they are a
stand-still people,” said Lily. “They are the type of obstinate
adherence to the superannuated. They may show good abilities when they
take up liberal ideas, but as a race they have no development in them.”
“That is false!” said Mordecai, leaning forward again with his former
eagerness. “Let their history be known and examined; let the seed be
sifted, let its beginning be traced to the weed of the wilderness—the
more glorious will be the energy that transformed it. Where else is
there a nation of whom it may be as truly said that their religion and
law and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart and made
one growth—where else a people who kept and enlarged their spiritual
store at the very time when they are hated with a hatred as fierce as
the forest fires that chase the wild beast from his covert? There is a
fable of the Roman, that swimming to save his life he held the roll of
his writings between his teeth and saved them from the waters. But how
much more than that is true of our race? They struggled to keep their
place among the nations like heroes—yea, when the hand was hacked off,
they clung with their teeth; but when the plow and the harrow had
passed over the last visible signs of their national covenant, and the
fruitfulness of their land was stifled with the blood of the sowers and
planters, they said, ‘The spirit is alive, let us make it a lasting
habitation—lasting because movable—so that it may be carried from
generation to generation, and our sons unborn may be rich in the things
that have been, and possess a hope built on an unchangeable
foundation.’ They said it and they wrought it, though often breathing
with scant life, as in a coffin, or as lying wounded amid a heap of
slain. Hooted and scared like the unknown dog, the Hebrew made himself
envied for his wealth and wisdom, and was bled of them to fill the bath
of Gentile luxury; he absorbed knowledge, he diffused it; his dispersed
race was a new Phoenicia working the mines of Greece and carrying their
products to the world. The native spirit of our tradition was not to
stand still, but to use records as a seed and draw out the compressed
virtues of law and prophecy; and while the Gentile, who had said, ‘What
is yours is ours, and no longer yours,’ was reading the letter of our
law as a dark inscription, or was turning its parchments into
shoe-soles for an army rabid with lust and cruelty, our Masters were
still enlarging and illuminating with fresh-fed interpretation. But the
dispersion was wide, the yoke of oppression was a spiked torture as
well as a load; the exile was forced afar among brutish people, where
the consciousness of his race was no clearer to him than the light of
the sun to our fathers in the Roman persecution, who had their
hiding-place in a cave, and knew not that it was day save by the dimmer
burning of their candles. What wonder that multitudes of our people are
ignorant, narrow, superstitious? What wonder?”
Here Mordecai, whose seat was next the fire-place, rose and leaned his
arm on the little shelf; his excitement had risen, though his voice,
which had begun with unusual strength, was getting hoarser.
“What wonder? The night is unto them, that they have no vision; in
their darkness they are unable to divine; the sun is gone down over the
prophets, and the day is dark above them; their observances are as
nameless relics. But which among the chief of the Gentile nations has
not an ignorant multitude? They scorn our people’s ignorant observance;
but the most accursed ignorance is that which has no observance—sunk
to the cunning greed of the fox, to which all law is no more than a
trap or the cry of the worrying hound. There is a degradation deep down
below the memory that has withered into superstition. In the multitudes
of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the
confession of the divine Unity, the soul of Judaism is not dead. Revive
the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth
and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking toward a land
and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may
share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the
peoples of the East and the West—which will plant the wisdom and skill
of our race so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and
understanding. Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread
to the weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will vanish, not in
the lawlessness of the renegade, but in the illumination of great facts
which widen feeling, and make all knowledge alive as the young
offspring of beloved memories.”
Mordecai’s voice had sunk, but with the hectic brilliancy of his gaze
it was not the less impressive. His extraordinary excitement was
certainly due to Deronda’s presence: it was to Deronda that he was
speaking, and the moment had a testamentary solemnity for him which
rallied all his powers. Yet the presence of those other familiar men
promoted expression, for they embodied the indifference which gave a
resistant energy to his speech. Not that he looked at Deronda: he
seemed to see nothing immediately around him, and if any one had
grasped him he would probably not have known it. Again the former words
came back to Deronda’s mind,—“You must hope my hopes—see the vision I
point to—behold a glory where I behold it.” They came now with
gathered pathos. Before him stood, as a living, suffering reality, what
hitherto he had only seen as an effort of imagination, which, in its
comparative faintness, yet carried a suspicion, of being exaggerated: a
man steeped in poverty and obscurity, weakened by disease, consciously
within the shadow of advancing death, but living an intense life in an
invisible past and future, careless of his personal lot, except for its
possible making some obstruction to a conceived good which he would
never share except as a brief inward vision—a day afar off, whose sun
would never warm him, but into which he threw his soul’s desire, with a
passion often wanting to the personal motives of healthy youth. It was
something more than a grandiose transfiguration of the parental love
that toils, renounces, endures, resists the suicidal promptings of
despair—all because of the little ones, whose future becomes present
to the yearning gaze of anxiety.
All eyes were fixed on Mordecai as he sat down again, and none with
unkindness; but it happened that the one who felt the most kindly was
the most prompted to speak in opposition. This was the genial and
rational Gideon, who also was not without a sense that he was
addressing the guest of the evening. He said,
“You have your own way of looking at things, Mordecai, and as you say,
your own way seems to you rational. I know you don’t hold with the
restoration of Judea by miracle, and so on; but you are as well aware
as I am that the subject has been mixed with a heap of nonsense both by
Jews and Christians. And as to the connection of our race with
Palestine, it has been perverted by superstition till it’s as
demoralizing as the old poor-law. The raff and scum go there to be
maintained like able-bodied paupers, and to be taken special care of by
the angel Gabriel when they die. It’s no use fighting against facts. We
must look where they point; that’s what I call rationality. The most
learned and liberal men among us who are attached to our religion are
for clearing our liturgy of all such notions as a literal fulfillment
of the prophecies about restoration, and so on. Prune it of a few
useless rites and literal interpretations of that sort, and our
religion is the simplest of all religions, and makes no barrier, but a
union, between us and the rest of the world.”
“As plain as a pike-staff,” said Pash, with an ironical laugh. “You
pluck it up by the roots, strip off the leaves and bark, shave off the
knots, and smooth it at top and bottom; put it where you will, it will
do no harm, it will never sprout. You may make a handle of it, or you
may throw it on the bonfire of scoured rubbish. I don’t see why our
rubbish is to be held sacred any more than the rubbish of Brahmanism or
Buddhism.”
“No,” said Mordecai, “no, Pash, because you have lost the heart of the
Jew. Community was felt before it was called good. I praise no
superstition, I praise the living fountains of enlarging belief. What
is growth, completion, development? You began with that question, I
apply it to the history of our people. I say that the effect of our
separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation
unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality. That is
the fulfillment of the religious trust that moulded them into a people,
whose life has made half the inspiration of the world. What is it to me
that the ten tribes are lost untraceably, or that multitudes of the
children of Judah have mixed themselves with the Gentile populations as
a river with rivers? Behold our people still! Their skirts spread afar;
they are torn and soiled and trodden on; but there is a jeweled
breastplate. Let the wealthy men, the monarchs of commerce, the learned
in all knowledge, the skilful in all arts, the speakers, the political
counselors, who carry in their veins the Hebrew blood which has
maintained its vigor in all climates, and the pliancy of the Hebrew
genius for which difficulty means new device—let them say, ‘we will
lift up a standard, we will unite in a labor hard but glorious like
that of Moses and Ezra, a labor which shall be a worthy fruit of the
long anguish whereby our fathers maintained their separateness,
refusing the ease of falsehood.’ They have wealth enough to redeem the
soil from debauched and paupered conquerors; they have the skill of the
statesman to devise, the tongue of the orator to persuade. And is there
no prophet or poet among us to make the ears of Christian Europe tingle
with shame at the hideous obloquy of Christian strife which the Turk
gazes at as at the fighting of beasts to which he has lent an arena?
There is store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand,
simple, just, like the old—a republic where there is equality of
protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our
ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western
freedom amid the despotisms of the East. Then our race shall have an
organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the
outraged Jew shall have a defense in the court of nations, as the
outraged Englishmen of America. And the world will gain as Israel
gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which
carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its
bosom: there will be a land set for a halting-place of enmities, a
neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West. Difficulties? I
know there are difficulties. But let the spirit of sublime achievement
move in the great among our people, and the work will begin.”
“Ay, we may safely admit that, Mordecai,” said Pash. “When there are
great men on ’Change, and high-flying professors converted to your
doctrine, difficulties will vanish like smoke.”
Deronda, inclined by nature to take the side of those on whom the
arrows of scorn were falling, could not help replying to Pash’s
outfling, and said,
“If we look back to the history of efforts which have made great
changes, it is astonishing how many of them seemed hopeless to those
who looked on in the beginning.
“Take what we have all heard and seen something of—the effort after
the unity of Italy, which we are sure soon to see accomplished to the
very last boundary. Look into Mazzini’s account of his first yearning,
when he was a boy, after a restored greatness and a new freedom to
Italy, and of his first efforts as a young man to rouse the same
feelings in other young men, and get them to work toward a united
nationality. Almost everything seemed against him; his countrymen were
ignorant or indifferent, governments hostile, Europe incredulous. Of
course the scorners often seemed wise. Yet you see the prophecy lay
with him. As long as there is a remnant of national consciousness, I
suppose nobody will deny that there may be a new stirring of memories
and hopes which may inspire arduous action.”
“Amen,” said Mordecai, to whom Deronda’s words were a cordial. “What is
needed is the leaven—what is needed is the seed of fire. The heritage
of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in their veins
as a power without understanding, like the morning exultation of herds;
it is the inborn half of memory, moving as in a dream among writings on
the walls, which it sees dimly but cannot divide into speech. Let the
torch of visible community be lit! Let the reason of Israel disclose
itself in a great outward deed, and let there be another great
migration, another choosing of Israel to be a nationality whose members
may still stretch to the ends of the earth, even as the sons of England
and Germany, whom enterprise carries afar, but who still have a
national hearth and a tribunal of national opinion. Will any say ‘It
cannot be’? Baruch Spinoza had not a faithful Jewish heart, though he
had sucked the life of his intellect at the breasts of Jewish
tradition. He laid bare his father’s nakedness and said, ‘They who
scorn him have the higher wisdom.’ Yet Baruch Spinoza confessed, he saw
not why Israel should not again be a chosen nation. Who says that the
history and literature of our race are dead? Are they not as living as
the history and literature of Greece and Rome, which have inspired
revolutions, enkindled the thought of Europe, and made the unrighteous
powers tremble? These were an inheritance dug from the tomb. Ours is an
inheritance that has never ceased to quiver in millions of human
frames.”
Mordecai had stretched his arms upward, and his long thin hands
quivered in the air for a moment after he had ceased to speak. Gideon
was certainly a little moved, for though there was no long pause before
he made a remark in objection, his tone was more mild and deprecatory
than before; Pash, meanwhile, pressing his lips together, rubbing his
black head with both his hands and wrinkling his brow horizontally,
with the expression of one who differs from every speaker, but does not
think it worth while to say so. There is a sort of human paste that
when it comes near the fire of enthusiasm is only baked into harder
shape.
“It may seem well enough on one side to make so much of our memories
and inheritance as you do, Mordecai,” said Gideon; “but there’s another
side. It isn’t all gratitude and harmless glory. Our people have
inherited a good deal of hatred. There’s a pretty lot of curses still
flying about, and stiff settled rancor inherited from the times of
persecution. How will you justify keeping one sort of memory and
throwing away the other? There are ugly debts standing on both sides.”
“I justify the choice as all other choice is justified,” said Mordecai.
“I cherish nothing for the Jewish nation, I seek nothing for them, but
the good which promises good to all the nations. The spirit of our
religious life, which is one with our national life, is not hatred of
aught but wrong. The Master has said, an offence against man is worse
than an offence against God. But what wonder if there is hatred in the
breasts of Jews, who are children of the ignorant and oppressed—what
wonder, since there is hatred in the breasts of Christians? Our
national life was a growing light. Let the central fire be kindled
again, and the light will reach afar. The degraded and scorned of our
race will learn to think of their sacred land, not as a place for
saintly beggary to await death in loathsome idleness, but as a republic
where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order founded on the
old, purified and enriched by the experience our greatest sons have
gathered from the life of the ages. How long is it?—only two centuries
since a vessel carried over the ocean the beginning of the great North
American nation. The people grew like meeting waters—they were various
in habit and sect—there came a time, a century ago, when they needed a
polity, and there were heroes of peace among them. What had they to
form a polity with but memories of Europe, corrected by the vision of a
better? Let our wise and wealthy show themselves heroes. They have the
memories of the East and West, and they have the full vision of a
better. A new Persia with a purified religion magnified itself in art
and wisdom. So will a new Judea, poised between East and West—a
covenant of reconciliation. Will any say, the prophetic vision of your
race has been hopelessly mixed with folly and bigotry: the angel of
progress has no message for Judaism—it is a half-buried city for the
paid workers to lay open—the waters are rushing by it as a forsaken
field? I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human
choice. The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose
them. The Messianic time is the time when Israel shall will the
planting of the national ensign. The Nile overflowed and rushed onward:
the Egyptian could not choose the overflow, but he chose to work and
make channels for the fructifying waters, and Egypt became the land of
corn. Shall man, whose soul is set in the royalty of discernment and
resolve, deny his rank and say, I am an onlooker, ask no choice or
purpose of me? That is the blasphemy of this time. The divine principle
of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. Let us contradict the
blasphemy, and help to will our own better future and the better future
of the world—not renounce our higher gift and say, ‘Let us be as if we
were not among the populations;’ but choose our full heritage, claim
the brotherhood of our nation, and carry into it a new brotherhood with
the nations of the Gentiles. The vision is there; it will be fulfilled.”
With the last sentence, which was no more than a loud whisper, Mordecai
let his chin sink on his breast and his eyelids fall. No one spoke. It
was not the first time that he had insisted on the same ideas, but he
was seen to-night in a new phase. The quiet tenacity of his ordinary
self differed as much from his present exaltation of mood as a man in
private talk, giving reasons for a revolution of which no sign is
discernable, differs from one who feels himself an agent in a
revolution begun. The dawn of fulfillment brought to his hope by
Deronda’s presence had wrought Mordecai’s conception into a state of
impassioned conviction, and he had found strength in his excitement to
pour forth the unlocked floods of emotive argument, with a sense of
haste as at a crisis which must be seized. But now there had come with
the quiescence of fatigue a sort of thankful wonder that he had
spoken—a contemplation of his life as a journey which had come at last
to this bourne. After a great excitement, the ebbing strength of
impulse is apt to leave us in this aloofness from our active self. And
in the moments after Mordecai had sunk his head, his mind was wandering
along the paths of his youth, and all the hopes which had ended in
bringing him hither.
Every one felt that the talk was ended, and the tone of phlegmatic
discussion made unseasonable by Mordecai’s high-pitched solemnity. It
was as if they had come together to hear the blowing of the _shophar_,
and had nothing to do now but to disperse. The movement was unusually
general, and in less than ten minutes the room was empty of all except
Mordecai and Deronda. “Good-nights” had been given to Mordecai, but it
was evident he had not heard them, for he remained rapt and motionless.
Deronda would not disturb this needful rest, but waited for a
spontaneous movement.