cultivate the fruits it offers.”—STERNE: Sentimental1 Journey.
To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior2 there was a fervor3 which made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of every-day life. And perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful4 as ever in the world except for those phlegmatic5 natures who I suspect would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope and even in railway carriages: what banishes6 them in the vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus7 of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament8 to the tender bosom9 of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe10 and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?
To Deronda this event of finding Mirah was as heart-stirring as anything that befell Orestes or Rinaldo. He sat up half the night, living again through the moments since he had first discerned Mirah on the river-brink, with the fresh and fresh vividness which belongs to emotive memory. When he took up a book to try and dull this urgency of inward vision, the printed words were no more than a network through which he saw and heard everything as clearly as before—saw not only the actual events of two hours, but possibilities of what had been and what might be which those events were enough to feed with the warm blood of passionate12 hope and fear. Something in his own experience caused Mirah’s search after her mother to lay hold with peculiar13 force on his imagination. The first prompting of sympathy was to aid her in her search: if given persons were extant in London there were ways of finding them, as subtle as scientific experiment, the right machinery14 being set at work. But here the mixed feelings which belonged to Deronda’s kindred experience naturally transfused15 themselves into his anxiety on behalf of Mirah.
The desire to know his own mother, or to know about her, was constantly haunted with dread16; and in imagining what might befall Mirah it quickly occurred to him that finding the mother and brother from whom she had been parted when she was a little one might turn out to be a calamity17. When she was in the boat she said that her mother and brother were good; but the goodness might have been chiefly in her own ignorant innocence18 and yearning19 memory, and the ten or twelve years since the parting had been time enough for much worsening. Spite of his strong tendency to side with the objects of prejudice, and in general with those who got the worst of it, his interest had never been practically drawn20 toward existing Jews, and the facts he knew about them, whether they walked conspicuous21 in fine apparel or lurked22 in by-streets, were chiefly of a sort most repugnant to him. Of learned and accomplished23 Jews he took it for granted that they had dropped their religion, and wished to be merged24 in the people of their native lands. Scorn flung at a Jew as such would have roused all his sympathy in griefs of inheritance; but the indiscriminate scorn of a race will often strike a specimen25 who has well earned it on his own account, and might fairly be gibbeted as a rascally26 son of Adam. It appears that the Caribs, who know little of theology, regard thieving as a practice peculiarly connected with Christian27 tenets, and probably they could
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