There be who hold that the deeper tragedy were a Prometheus Bound not
_after_ but _before_ he had well got the celestial fire into
the _narthex_ whereby it might be conveyed to mortals: thrust by
the Kratos and Bia of instituted methods into a solitude of despised
ideas, fastened in throbbing helplessness by the fatal pressure of
poverty and disease--a solitude where many pass by, but none regard.
"Second-sight" is a flag over disputed ground. But it is matter of
knowledge that there are persons whose yearnings, conceptions--nay,
traveled conclusions--continually take the form of images which have a
foreshadowing power; the deed they would do starts up before them in
complete shape, making a coercive type; the event they hunger for or dread
rises into vision with a seed-like growth, feeding itself fast on
unnumbered impressions. They are not always the less capable of the
argumentative process, nor less sane than the commonplace calculators of
the market: sometimes it may be that their natures have manifold openings,
like the hundred-gated Thebes, where there may naturally be a greater and
more miscellaneous inrush than through a narrow beadle-watched portal. No
doubt there are abject specimens of the visionary, as there is a minim
mammal which you might imprison in the finger of your glove. That small
relative of the elephant has no harm in him; but what great mental or
social type is free from specimens whose insignificance is both ugly and
noxious? One is afraid to think of all that the genus "patriot" embraces;
or of the elbowing there might be at the day of judgment for those who
ranked as authors, and brought volumes either in their hands or on trucks.
This apology for inevitable kinship is meant to usher in some facts about
Mordecai, whose figure had bitten itself into Deronda's mind as a new
question which he felt an interest in getting answered. But the interest
was no more than a vaguely-expectant suspense: the consumptive-looking
Jew, apparently a fervid student of some kind, getting his crust by a
quiet handicraft, like Spinoza, fitted into none of Deronda's
anticipations.
It was otherwise with the effect of their meeting on Mordecai. For many
winters, while he had been conscious of an ebbing physical life, and as
widening spiritual loneliness, all his passionate desire had concentrated
itself in the yearning for some young ear into which he could pour his
mind as a testament, some soul kindred enough to accept the spiritual
product of his own brief, painful life, as a mission to be executed. It
was remarkable that the hopefulness which is often the beneficent illusion
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DANIEL DERONDA (Completed)
ClassicsDaniel Deronda is a novel by George Eliot, first published in 1876. It was the last novel she completed and the only one set in the contemporary Victorian society of her day. The work's mixture of social satire and moral searching, along with its sy...
