Daniel Deronda

“Why not? if a man is not born into public life by his position in the country, there’s no way for him but to embrace it by his own efforts. The business of the country must be done—her Majesty’s Government carried on, as the old Duke said. And it never could be, my boy, if everybody looked at politics as if they were prophecy, and demanded an inspired vocation. If you are to get into Parliament, it won’t do to sit still and wait for a call either from heaven or constituents.”

“I don’t want to make a living out of opinions,” said Deronda; “especially out of borrowed opinions. Not that I mean to blame other men. I dare say many better fellows than I don’t mind getting on to a platform to praise themselves, and giving their word of honor for a party.”

“I’ll tell you what, Dan,” said Sir Hugo, “a man who sets his face against every sort of humbug is simply a three-cornered, impracticable fellow. There’s a bad style of humbug, but there is also a good style—one that oils the wheels and makes progress possible. If you are to rule men, you must rule them through their own ideas; and I agree with the Archbishop at Naples who had a St. Januarius procession against the plague. It’s no use having an Order in Council against popular shallowness. There is no action possible without a little acting.”

“One may be obliged to give way to an occasional necessity,” said Deronda. “But it is one thing to say, ‘In this particular case I am forced to put on this foolscap and grin,’ and another to buy a pocket foolscap and practice myself in grinning. I can’t see any real public expediency that does not keep an ideal before it which makes a limit of deviation from the direct path. But if I were to set up for a public man I might mistake my success for public expediency.”

It was after this dialogue, which was rather jarring to him, that Deronda set out on his meditated second visit to Ezra Cohen’s. He entered the street at the end opposite to the Holborn entrance, and an inward reluctance slackened his pace while his thoughts were transferring what he had just been saying about public expediency to the entirely private difficulty which brought him back again into this unattractive thoroughfare. It might soon become an immediate practical question with him how far he could call it a wise expediency to conceal the fact of close kindred. Such questions turning up constantly in life are often decided in a rough-and-ready way; and to many it will appear an over-refinement in Deronda that he should make any great point of a matter confined to his own knowledge. But we have seen the reasons why he had come to regard concealment as a bane of life, and the necessity of concealment as a mark by which lines of action were to be avoided. The prospect of being urged against the confirmed habit of his mind was naturally grating. He even paused here and there before the most plausible shop-windows for a gentleman to look into, half inclined to decide that he would not increase his knowledge about that modern Ezra, who was certainly not a leader among his people—a hesitation which proved how, in a man much given to reasoning, a bare possibility may weigh more than the best-clad likelihood; for Deronda’s reasoning had decided that all likelihood was against this man’s being Mirah’s brother.

One of the shop-windows he paused before was that of a secondhand book-shop, where, on a narrow table outside, the literature of the ages was represented in judicious mixture, from the immortal verse of Homer to the mortal prose of the railway novel. That the mixture was judicious was apparent from Deronda’s finding in it something that he wanted—namely, that wonderful bit of autobiography, the life of the Polish Jew, Salomon Maimon; which, as he could easily slip it into his pocket, he took from its place, and entered the shop to pay for, expecting to see behind the counter a grimy personage showing that nonchalance about sales which seems to belong universally to the secondhand book-business. In most other trades you find generous men who are anxious to sell you their wares for your own welfare; but even a Jew will not urge Simson’s Euclid on you with an affectionate assurance that you will have pleasure in reading it, and that he wishes he had twenty more of the article, so much is it in request. One is led to fear that a secondhand bookseller may belong to that unhappy class of men who have no belief in the good of what they get their living by, yet keep conscience enough to be morose rather than unctuous in their vocation.

But instead of the ordinary tradesman, he saw, on the dark background of books in the long narrow shop, a figure that was somewhat startling in its unusualness. A man in threadbare clothing, whose age was difficult to guess—from the dead yellowish flatness of the flesh, something like an old ivory carving—was seated on a stool against some bookshelves that projected beyond the short counter, doing nothing more remarkable than reading yesterday’s Times; but when he let the paper rest on his lap and looked at the incoming customer, the thought glanced through Deronda that precisely such a physiognomy as that might possibly have been seen in a prophet of the Exile, or in some New Hebrew poet of the mediaeval time. It was a fine typical Jewish face, wrought into intensity of expression apparently by a strenuous eager experience in which all the satisfaction had been indirect and far off, and perhaps by some bodily suffering also, which involved that absence of ease in the present. The features were clear-cut, not large; the brow not high but broad, and fully defined by the crisp black hair. It might never have been a particularly handsome face, but it must always have been forcible; and now with its dark, far-off gaze, and yellow pallor in relief on the gloom of the backward shop, one might have imagined one’s self coming upon it in some past prison of the Inquisition, which a mob had suddenly burst upon; while the look fixed on an incidental customer seemed eager and questioning enough to have been turned on one who might have been a messenger either of delivery or of death. The figure was probably familiar and unexciting enough to the inhabitants of this street; but to Deronda’s mind it brought so strange a blending of the unwonted with the common, that there was a perceptible interval of mutual observation before he asked his question; “What is the price of this book?”

After taking the book and examining the fly-leaves without rising, the supposed bookseller said, “There is no mark, and Mr. Ram is not in now. I am keeping the shop while he is gone to dinner. What are you disposed to give for it?” He held the book close on his lap with his hand on it and looked examiningly at Deronda, over whom there came the disagreeable idea, that possibly this striking personage wanted to see how much could be got out of a customer’s ignorance of prices. But without further reflection he said, “Don’t you know how much it is worth?”

“Not its market-price. May I ask have you read it?”

“No. I have read an account of it, which makes me want to buy it.”

“You are a man of learning—you are interested in Jewish history?” This was said in a deepened tone of eager inquiry.

“I am certainly interested in Jewish history,” said Deronda, quietly, curiosity overcoming his dislike to the sort of inspection as well as questioning he was under.

But immediately the strange Jew rose from his sitting posture, and Deronda felt a thin hand pressing his arm tightly, while a hoarse, excited voice, not much above a loud whisper, said—

“You are perhaps of our race?”

Deronda colored deeply, not liking the grasp, and then answered with a slight shake of the head, “No.” The grasp was relaxed, the hand withdrawn, the eagerness of the face collapsed into uninterested melancholy, as if some possessing spirit which had leaped into the eyes and gestures had sunk back again to the inmost recesses of the frame; and moving further off as he held out the little book, the stranger said in a tone of distant civility, “I believe Mr. Ram will be satisfied with half-a-crown, sir.”

The effect of this change on Deronda—he afterward smiled when he recalled it—was oddly embarrassing and humiliating, as if some high dignitary had found him deficient and given him his conge. There was nothing further to be said, however: he paid his half-crown and carried off his Salomon