Daniel Deronda quotes

Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance?

Was the good or the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm?

… and spending it yet more showily—reflecting always that Providence had never manifested any disapprobation of his amusement, and dispassionate enough to leave off if the sweetness of winning much and seeing others lose had turned to the sourness of losing much and seeing others win.

For the vice of gambling lay in losing money at it.

In his bearing there might be something of the tradesman, but in his pleasures he was fit to rank with the owners of the oldest titles.

she was in that mood of defiance in which the mind loses sight of any end beyond the satisfaction of enraged resistance; and with the puerile stupidity of a dominant impulse includes luck among its objects of defiance.

Since she was not winning strikingly, the next best thing was to lose strikingly.

She controlled her muscles, and showed no tremor of mouth or hands. Each time her stake was swept off she doubled it.

he was young, handsome, distinguished in appearance—not one of these ridiculous and dowdy Philistines who thought it incumbent on them to blight the gaming-table with a sour look of protest as they passed by it.

The general conviction that we are admirable does not easily give way before a single negative; rather when any of Vanity’s large family, male or female, find their performance received coldly, they are apt to believe that a little more of it will win over the unaccountable dissident.

In Gwendolen’s habits of mind it had been taken for granted that she knew what was admirable and that she herself was admired. This basis of her thinking had received a disagreeable concussion, and reeled a little, but was not easily to be overthrown.

They had belonged to a chain once her father’s: but she had never known her father; and the necklace was in all respects the ornament she could most conveniently part with.

Who supposes that it is an impossible contradiction to be superstitious and rationalizing at the same time?

Roulette encourages a romantic superstition as to the chances of the game, and the most prosaic rationalism as to human sentiments which stand in the way of raising needful money.

and that prejudice in favor of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time.

The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

But this blessed persistence in which affection can take root had been wanting in Gwendolen’s life. It was only a year before her recall from Leubronn that Offendene had been chosen as her mamma’s home, simply for its nearness to Pennicote Rectory, and that Mrs.

“

Why did you marry again, mamma? It would have been nicer if you had not.

”

Mrs. Davilow’s worn beauty seemed the more pathetic for the look of entire appeal which she cast at Gwendolen, who was glancing round at the house, the landscape and the entrance hall with an air of rapid judgment.

Imagine a young racehorse in the paddock among untrimmed ponies and patient hacks.

“Well, dear, what do you think of the place,” said Mrs. Davilow at last, in a gentle, deprecatory tone.

I think saint’s noses never in the least turn up. I wish you had given me your perfectly straight nose; it would have done for any sort of character—a nose of all work.

Mine is only a happy nose; it would not do so well for tragedy.

”

“

Oh, my dear, any nose will do to be miserable with in this world,

” said Mrs. Davilow, with a deep, weary sigh, throwing her black bonnet on the table, and resting her elbow near it.

“

I don’t see why it is hard to call things by their right names, and put them in their proper places.

The hardship is for me to have to waste my time on her. Now let me fasten up your hair, mamma.”

and bitter observers—for in Wessex, say ten years ago, there were persons whose bitterness may now seem incredible—remarked that the color of his opinions had changed in consistency with this principle of action.

But cheerful, successful worldliness has a false air of being more selfish than the acrid, unsuccessful kind, whose secret history is summed up in the terrible words, “Sold, but not paid for.”

Gwendolen wondered that she had not better remembered how very fine a man her uncle was; but at the age of sixteen she was a less capable and more indifferent judge.

Gwendolen, who had a keen sense of absurdity in others, but was kindly disposed toward anyone who could make life agreeable to her, meant to win Mrs. Arrowpoint by giving her an interest and attention beyond what others were probably inclined to show.

But self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor, and those who are in the prime of life raise their voice and talk artificially to seniors, hastily conceiving them to be deaf and rather imbecile.

Gwendolen, with all her cleverness and purpose to be agreeable, could not escape that form of stupidity: it followed in her mind, unreflectingly, that because Mrs.

There is a sort of self-satisfied folly about every phrase of such melody; no cries of deep, mysterious passion—no conflict—no sense of the universal.

It makes men small as they listen to it.

Sing now something larger. And I shall see.”

“Yes, it is true: you have not been well taught,” said Herr Klesmer, quietly.

Woman was dear to him, but music was dearer.

“Still, you are not quite without gifts. You sing in tune, and you have a pretty fair organ. But you produce your notes badly; and that music which you sing is beneath you.

“

Exceedingly. There seems to be a little of everything and not much of anything.

”

“

Not with me. I like a little of everything; a little absurdity, for example, is very amusing. I am thankful for a few queer people; but much of them is a bore.

”

or, that a young man informed by theological reading would have reflected that he was not likely to meet the taste of a lively, restless young lady like Miss Harleth.

But are we always obliged to explain why the facts are not what some persons thought beforehand? The apology lies on their side, who had that erroneous way of thinking.

As for Rex, who would possibly have been sorry for poor Middleton if he had been aware of the excellent curate’s inward conflict, he was too completely absorbed in a first passion to have observation for any person or thing. He did not observe Gwendolen;

To her mamma and others her fits of timidity or terror were sufficiently accounted for by her “sensitiveness” or the “excitability of her nature”; but these explanatory phrases required conciliation with much that seemed to be blank indifference or rare self-mastery.

Heat is a great agent and a useful word, but considered as a means of explaining the universe it requires an extensive knowledge of differences; and as a means of explaining character “sensitiveness” is in much the same predicament.

But who, loving a creature like Gwendolen, would not be inclined to regard every peculiarity in her as a mark of preeminence? That was what Rex did.

For some of the goodness which Rex believed in was there.

Goodness is a large, often a prospective word; like harvest, which at one stage when we talk of it lies all underground, with an indeterminate future; is the germ prospering in the darkness?

at another, it has put forth delicate green blades, and by-and-by the trembling blossoms are ready to be dashed off by an hour of rough wind or rain.

“I don’t know. I can’t tell what I shall do till I get there.

Clairvoyants are often wrong: they foresee what is likely. I am not fond of what is likely: it is always dull. I do what is unlikely.

”

“Of course not; that comes from what other people do. But if the world were pleasanter, one would only feel what was pleasant.

Girls’ lives are so stupid: they never do what they like.

”

“

I don’t believe it. I never saw a married woman who had her own way.

”

The hastening of her toilet, the way in which Bugle used the brush, the quality of the shilling serial mistakenly written for her amusement, the probabilities of the coming day, and, in short, social institutions generally, were all objectionable to her.

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

However it might be, Rex saw an awful majesty about her as she entered and put out her hand to him, without the least approach to a smile in eyes or mouth.

“Of course. Everyone is of consequence in this dreary country,” said Gwendolen, curtly.

The perception that poor Rex wanted to be tender made her curl up and harden like a sea-anemone at the touch of a finger.

“Are you angry with me, Gwendolen? Why do you treat me in this way all at once?” said Rex, flushing, and with more spirit in his voice, as if he too were capable of being angry.

“

Pray don’t make love to me! I hate it!

” she looked at him fiercely.

… of anything that might be said, that he should like to go off to “the colonies” tomorrow, it lay in a deep fold of his consciousness that he ought to feel—if he had been a better fellow he would have felt—more about his old ties.

This is the sort of faith we live by in our soul sicknesses.

Rex got up from his seat, as if he held the conference to be at an end. “You assent to my arrangement, then?” said Mr. Gascoigne, with that distinct resolution of tone which seems to hold one in a vise.

In face of this fact that not one of the eligible young men already in the neighborhood had made Gwendolen an offer, why should Mr. Grandcourt be thought of as likely to do what they had left undone?

Perhaps because he was thought of as still more eligible; since a great deal of what passes for likelihood in the world is simply the reflex of a wish.

Mr. and Mrs. Arrowpoint, for example, having no anxiety that Miss Harleth should make a brilliant marriage, had quite a different likelihood in their minds.

No wonder she enjoyed her existence on that July day.

Preeminence is sweet to those who love it, even under mediocre circumstances.

Perhaps it was not quite mythical that a slave has been proud to be bought first;

but it must be admitted that our prevailing expression is not that of a lively, impassioned race, preoccupied with the ideal and carrying the real as a mere makeweight.

The strong point of the English gentleman pure is the easy style of his figure and clothing; he objects to marked ins and outs in his costume, and he also objects to looking inspired.

Fancy an assemblage where the men had all that ordinary stamp of the well-bred Englishman, watching the entrance of Herr Klesmer—his mane of hair floating backward in massive inconsistency with the chimney-pot hat, which had the look of having been put on for a joke …

Arrowsmith’s, whose nullity of face and perfect tailoring might pass everywhere without ridicule?

One feels why it is often better for greatness to be dead, and to have got rid of the outward man.

Many present knew Klesmer, or knew of him;

but Grandcourt’s bearing had no rigidity, it inclined rather to the flaccid. His complexion had a faded fairness resembling that of an actress when bare of the artificial white and red; his long narrow gray eyes expressed nothing but indifference.

Attempts at description are stupid: who can all at once describe a human being? Even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing circumstances.

We recognize the alphabet; we are not sure of the language. I am only mentioning the point that Gwendolen saw by the light of a prepared contrast in the first minutes of her meeting with Grandcourt:

Attempts at description are stupid: who can all at once describe a human being? Even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing circumstances.

We recognize the alphabet; we are not sure of the language.

I am only mentioning the point that Gwendolen saw by the light of a prepared contrast in the first minutes of her meeting with Grandcourt: they were summed up in the words, “He is not ridiculous.”

“

Oh, then, you are a formidable person. People who have done things once and left them off make one feel very contemptible, as if one were using cast-off fashions.

I hope you have not left off all follies, because I practice a great many.”

“I am very glad to hear it. I should have felt that I was making myself too disagreeable—taking the best of everything,” said Gwendolen, quite easily.

It was impossible to be jealous of Juliet Fenn, a girl as middling as midday market in everything but her archery and plainness, in which last she was noticeable like her father: underhung and with receding brow resembling that of the more intelligent fishes.

(Surely, considering the importance which is given to such an accident in female offspring, marriageable men, or what the new English calls “intending bridegrooms,” should look at themselves dispassionately in the glass, since their natural selection of a mate prettier than themselves is not certain …

“

Why should I dance if I don’t like it, aunt? It is not in the catechism.

”

and, holding up the garment close to Gwendolen, he said, “Pray, permit me?” But she, wheeling away from him as if he had been a muddy hound, glided on to the ottoman, saying, “No, thank you.”

A man who forgave this would have much Christian feeling, supposing he had intended to be agreeable to the young lady

; but before he seized the burnous Mr. Lush had ceased to have that intention. Grandcourt quietly took the drapery from him, and Mr. Lush, with a slight bow, moved away. “You had perhaps better put it on,” said Mr.

What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind visions? They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting.

In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affections.

What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind visions?

They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting.

In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affections.

… Grandcourt pushed Fetch down without speaking, and, depositing Fluff carelessly on the table (where his black nose predominated over a saltcellar), began to look to his cigar, and found, with some annoyance against Fetch as the cause, that the brute of a cigar required relighting.

Fetch, having begun to wail, found, like others of her sex, that it was not easy to leave off; indeed, the second howl was a louder one, and the third was like unto it.

“Turn out that brute, will you?” said Grandcourt to Lush, without raising his voice or looking at him—as if he counted on attention to the smallest sign.

Since in his own opinion he had never done a bad action, it did not seem necessary to consider whether he should be likely to commit one if his love of ease required it.

Lush’s love of ease was well-satisfied at present, and if his puddings were rolled toward him in the dust, he took the inside bits and found them relishing.

This morning, for example, though he had encountered more annoyance than usual, he went to his private sitting-room and played a good hour on the violoncello.

“I don’t know. We women can’t go in search of adventures—to find out the Northwest Passage or the source of the Nile, or to hunt tigers in the East. We must stay where we grow, or where the gardeners like to transplant us.

We are brought up like the flowers, to look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining.

That is my notion about the plants; they are often bored, and that is the reason why some of them have got poisonous. What do you think?” Gwendolen had run on rather nervously, lightly whipping the rhododendron bush in front of her.

And Grandcourt himself? He seemed as little of a flaw in his fortunes as a lover and husband could possibly be.

Gwendolen wished to mount the chariot and drive the plunging horses herself, with a spouse by her side who would fold his arms and give her his countenance without looking ridiculous.

Certainly, with all her perspicacity, and all the reading which seemed to her mamma dangerously instructive, her judgment was consciously a little at fault before Grandcourt.

That absence of demonstrativeness which she was glad of, acted as a charm in more senses than one, and was slightly benumbing. Grandcourt after all was formidable—a handsome lizard of a hitherto unknown species, not of the lively, darting kind.

But Gwendolen knew hardly anything about lizards, and ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.

This splendid specimen was probably gentle, suitable as a boudoir pet: what may not a lizard be, if you know nothing to the contrary? Her acquaintance with Grandcourt was such that no accomplishment suddenly revealed in him would have surprised her.

Grandcourt after all was formidable—a handsome lizard of a hitherto unknown species, not of the lively, darting kind. But Gwendolen knew hardly anything about lizards, and ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.

This splendid specimen was probably gentle, suitable as a boudoir pet: what may not a lizard be, if you know nothing to the contrary?

Her acquaintance with Grandcourt was such that no accomplishment suddenly revealed in him would have surprised her. And he was so little suggestive of drama, that it hardly occurred to her to think with any detail how his life of thirty-six years had been passed:

But of the future husband personally Mr. Gascoigne was disposed to think the best.

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

But if Grandcourt had really made any deeper or more unfortunate experiments in folly than were common in young men of high prospects, he was of an age to have finished them.

For decision in itself began to be formidable. Having come close to accepting Grandcourt, Gwendolen felt this lot of unhoped-for fullness rounding itself too definitely.

When we take to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

Still there was the reassuring thought that marriage would be the gate into a larger freedom.

Is that surprising? It is to be believed that attendance at the opéra bouffe in the present day would not leave men’s minds entirely without shock, if the manners observed there with some applause were suddenly to start up in their own families.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing.

What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase!

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing.

What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!

What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

but so entirely without hurry that he was induced by the presence of some Russian acquaintances to linger at Baden-Baden and make various appointments with them, which, however, his desire to be at Leubronn ultimately caused him to break.

Grandcourt’s passions were of the intermittent, flickering kind: never flaming out strongly.

But a great deal of life goes on without strong passion: myriads of cravats are carefully tied, dinners attended, even speeches made proposing the health of august personages without the zest arising from a strong desire.

Grandcourt’s passions were of the intermittent, flickering kind: never flaming out strongly.

But a great deal of life goes on without strong passion: myriads of cravats are carefully tied, dinners attended, even speeches made proposing the health of august personages without the zest arising from a strong desire.

And a man may make a good appearance in high social positions—may be supposed to know the classics, to have his reserves on science, a strong though repressed opinion on politics, and all the sentiments of the English gentleman, at a small expense of vital …

“Why, you would easily cut out Grandcourt. A girl with her spirit would think you the finer match of the two,” said Sir Hugo, who often tried Deronda’s patience by finding a joke in impossible advice.

(A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.)

“I suppose pedigree and land belong to a fine match,” said Deronda, coldly.

Those writings were various, from volumes of travel in the brilliant style, to articles on things in general, and pamphlets on political crises; but to Daniel they were alike in having an unquestionable rightness by which other people’s information could be tested.

Who cannot imagine the bitterness of a first suspicion that something in this object of complete love was not quite right?

Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so:

The sense of an entailed disadvantage—the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite.

But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.

Deronda’s early-weakened susceptibility, charged at first with ready indignation and resistant pride, had raised in him a premature reflection on certain questions of life;

In fact, it’s a nicety of conversation which I would have you attend to—much quotation of any sort, even in English is bad. It tends to choke ordinary remark.

One couldn’t carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything had been said better than we can put it ourselves.

But talking of Dons, I have seen Dons make a capital figure in society; and occasionally he can shoot you down a cartload of learning in the right place, which will tell in politics. Such men are wanted;

He had his flashes of fierceness and could hit out upon occasion, but the occasions were not always what might have been expected. For in what related to himself his resentful impulses had been early checked by a mastering affectionateness.

Love has a habit of saying “Never mind” to angry self, who, sitting down for the nonce in the lower place, by-and-by gets used to it.

So it was that as Deronda approached manhood his feeling for Sir Hugo, while it was getting more and more mixed with criticism, was gaining in that sort of allowance which reconciles criticism with tenderness.

For a meditative interest in learning how human miseries are wrought—as precocious in him as another sort of genius in the poet who writes a Queen Mab at nineteen—was so infused with kindliness that it easily passed for comradeship. Enough.

In many of our neighbors’ lives there is much not only of error and lapse, but of a certain exquisite goodness which can never be written or even spoken

—only divined by each of us, according to the inward instruction of our own privacy.

“Oh, confound it!

You save an ugly mongrel from drowning, and expect him to cut a fine figure.

The poets have made tragedies enough about signing one’s self over to wickedness for the sake of getting something plummy; I shall write a tragedy of a fellow who signed himself over to be good, and was uncomfortable ever after.”

“Oh, confound it! You save an ugly mongrel from drowning, and expect him to cut a fine figure. The poets have made tragedies enough about signing one’s self over to wickedness for the sake of getting something plummy;

I shall write a tragedy of a fellow who signed himself over to be good, and was uncomfortable ever after.

”

But, for God’s sake, keep an English cut, and don’t become indifferent to bad tobacco! And, my dear boy, it is good to be unselfish and generous; but don’t carry that too far.

It will not do to give yourself to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow-trade; you must know where to find yourself.

However, I shall put no veto on your going. Wait until I can get off Committee, and I’ll run over with you.”

Deronda felt himself growing older this evening and entering on a new phase in finding a life to which his own had come—perhaps as a rescue; but how to make sure that snatching from death was rescue?

The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation as the moment of finding an idea.

“Oh—oh—oh!” cried Mab again, rising and stretching her arms. “

I wish something wonderful would happen. I feel like the deluge.

The waters of the great deep are broken up, and the windows of heaven are opened. I must sit down and play the scales.”

She lifted her eyes to his and said with reverential fervor, “The God of our fathers bless you and deliver you from all evil as you have delivered me.

I did not believe there was any man so good. None before have thought me worthy of the best.

You found me poor and miserable, yet you have given me the best.”

And perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world except for those phlegmatic 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 banishes them is the vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers.

How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near …

but the indiscriminate scorn of a race will often strike a specimen who has well earned it on his own account, and might fairly be gibbeted as a rascally son of Adam.

It appears that the Caribs, who know little of theology, regard thieving as a practice peculiarly connected with Christian tenets, and probably they could allege experimental grounds for this opinion.

Deronda could not escape (who can?) knowing ugly stories of Jewish characteristics and occupations;

Her voice, her accent, her looks—all the sweet purity that clothed her as with a consecrating garment made him shrink the more from giving her, either ideally or practically, an association with what was hateful or contaminating.

But these fine words with which we fumigate and becloud unpleasant facts are not the language in which we think.

Deronda’s thinking went on in rapid images of what might be: he saw himself guided by some official scout into a dingy street; he entered through a dim doorway, and saw a hawk-eyed woman, rough-headed, and unwashed, cheapening a hungry girl’s last bit of finery;

“Oh, yes, it was the earliest.

I think my life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face: it was so near to me, and her arms were round me, and she sang to me.

One hymn she sang so often, so often: and then she taught me to sing it with her: it was the first I ever sang. They were always Hebrew hymns she sang;

“You must expect some change after twelve years,” said Mrs. Meyrick, gently. “See my grey hair: ten years ago it was bright brown.

The days and months pace over us like restless little birds, and leave the marks of their feet backward and forward

; especially when they are like birds with heavy hearts—then they tread heavily.”

Is this world and all the life upon it only like a farce or a vaudeville, where you find no great meanings? Why then are there tragedies and grand operas, where men do difficult things and choose to suffer?

I think it is silly to speak of all things as a joke.

And I saw that his wishing me to sing the greatest music, and parts in grand operas, was only wishing for what would fetch the greatest price. That hemmed in my gratitude for his affectionateness, and the tenderest feeling I had toward him was pity.

He smiled at me, and his smile went through me with horror: I could not tell why he was so much worse to me than other men.

Some feelings are like our hearing: they come as sounds do, before we know their reason.

My father talked to me about him when we were alone, and praised him—said what a good friend he had been. I said nothing, because I supposed he had got my father out of prison. When the Count came again, my father left the room.

“Oh, I believe the mother’s good,” said Mrs. Meyrick, with rapid decisiveness; “or was good. She may be dead—that’s my fear. A good woman, you may depend: you may know it by the scoundrel the father is. Where did the child get her goodness from?

Wheaten flour has to be accounted for.

”

“Now, why are you glad of that?” said Amy, rather suspicious of this sentiment, and on the watch for Jewish peculiarities which had not appeared.

“Because I have always disliked men of high rank before.”

“Oh, Mr. Deronda is not so very high,” said Kate. “He need not hinder us from thinking ill of the whole peerage and baronetage if we like.”

Why? He gave himself several good reasons; but whatever one does with a strong unhesitating outflow of will has a store of motive that it would be hard to put into words.

Some deeds seem little more than interjections which give vent to the long passion of a life.

So Deronda soon took his farewell for the two months during which he expected to be absent from London, and in a few days he was on his way with Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger to Leubronn.

especially since, being a new man, he did not know her, and must conclude that she was not very high in the world. The vehicle—a dirty old barouche—was within sight, and was being slowly prepared by an elderly laborer.

Contemptible details these, to make part of a history; yet the turn of most lives is hardly to be accounted for without them.

They are continually entering with cumulative force into a mood until it gets the mass and momentum of a theory or a motive. Even philosophy is not quite free from such determining influences;

Events might turn out anyhow, and men were hateful. Yes, men were hateful. But in these last hours, a certain change had come over their meaning.

It is one thing to hate stolen goods, and another thing to hate them the more because their being stolen hinders us from making use of them.

Gwendolen had begun to be angry with Grandcourt for being what had hindered her from marrying him, angry with him as the cause of her present dreary lot.

and they were not without uneasiness concerning her persistence in declining suitable offers. As to the possibility of her being in love with Klesmer they were not at all uneasy—a very common sort of blindness.

For in general mortals have a great power of being astonished at the presence of an effect toward which they have done everything, and at the absence of an effect toward which they had done nothing but desire it.

Parents are astonished at the ignorance of their sons, though they have used the most time-honored and expensive means of securing it; husbands and wives are mutually astonished at the loss of affection which they have taken no pains to keep;

For in general mortals have a great power of being astonished at the presence of an effect toward which they have done everything, and at the absence of an effect toward which they had done nothing but desire it.

Parents are astonished at the ignorance of their sons, though they have used the most time-honored and expensive means of securing it; husbands and wives are mutually astonished at the loss of affection which they have taken no pains to keep; and all of us in our turn are apt to be astonished that our neighbors do not admire us.

In this way it happens that the truth seems highly improbable. The truth is something different from the habitual lazy combinations begotten by our wishes. The Arrowpoints’ hour of astonishment was come.

and all of us in our turn are apt to be astonished that our neighbors do not admire us. In this way it happens that the truth seems highly improbable.

The truth is something different from the habitual lazy combinations begotten by our wishes.

The Arrowpoints’ hour of astonishment was come.

Still less was it conceivable that Catherine would give him the slightest pretext for such daring. The large check that Mr. Arrowpoint was to draw in Klesmer’s name seemed to make him as safe an inmate as a footman.

Where marriage is inconceivable, a girl’s sentiments are safe.

Klesmer was eminently a man of honor, but marriages rarely begin with formal proposals, and moreover, Catherine’s limit of the conceivable did not exactly correspond with her mother’s.

“Ah, sir, you are under some mistake there,” said Klesmer, firing up. “

No man has too much talent to be a musician. Most men have too little.

A creative artist is no more a mere musician than a great statesman is a mere politician. We are not ingenious puppets, sir, who live in a box and look out on the world only when it is gaping for amusement.

“Is it the accusations you are afraid of?

I am afraid of nothing but that we should miss the passing of our lives together.

”

Something of the same sort befell the authoress of Tasso, when what she had safely demanded of the dead Leonora was enacted by her own Catherine.

It is hard for us to live up to our own eloquence, and keep pace with our winged words, while we are treading the solid earth and are liable to heavy dining.

Besides, it has long been understood that the proprieties of literature are not those of practical life. Mrs. Arrowpoint naturally wished for the best of everything.

“I don’t deny that,” said Catherine, getting colder in proportion to her mother’s heat. “But one may say very true things and apply them falsely.

People can easily take the sacred word duty as a name for what they desire anyone else to do.

”

Any great achievement in acting or in music grows with the growth. Whenever an artist has been able to say, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered,’ it has been at the end of patient practice.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

Singing and acting, like the fine dexterity of the juggler with his cups and balls, require a shaping of the organs toward a finer and finer certainty of effect. Your muscles—your whole frame—must go like a watch, true, true to a hair.

Gascoigne and Anna to show Gwendolen an unmixed kindliness; and she herself felt very amiably about it, smiling at Anna, and pinching her chin, as much as to say, “Nothing is wrong with you now, is it?”

She had no gratuitously ill-natured feeling, or egoistic pleasure in making men miserable. She only had an intense objection to their making her miserable.

But when the talk turned on furniture for the cottage Gwendolen was not roused to show even a languid interest.

she had a confused state of emotion about Deronda—was it wounded pride and resentment, or a certain awe and exceptional trust? It was something vague and yet mastering, which impelled her to this action about the necklace.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

He gave a slight shrug with one shoulder, and was going to walk away, when Grandcourt, turning on his seat toward the table, said, as quietly as if nothing had occurred, “Oblige me by pushing that pen and paper here, will you?”

No thunderous, bullying superior could have exercised the imperious spell that Grandcourt did.

Why, instead of being obeyed, he had never been told to go to a warmer place, was perhaps a mystery to those who found themselves obeying him.

… called pain, but rather the absence of joy—that first rage of disappointment in life’s morning, which we whom the years have subdued are apt to remember but dimly as part of our own experience, and so to be intolerant of its self-enclosed unreasonableness and impiety.

What passion seems more absurd, when we have got outside it and looked at calamity as a collective risk, than this amazed anguish that I and not Thou, He or She, should be just the smitten one?

Yet perhaps some who have afterward made themselves a willing fence before the breast of another, and have carried their own heart-wound in heroic silence—some who have made their deeds great, nevertheless began with this angry amazement at their own smart, and on the mere …

… prompt her to look the unwelcome reasons full in the face until she had a little less awe of them, could not hinder her imagination from filling out her knowledge in various ways, some of which seemed to change the aspect of what she knew.

By dint of looking at a dubious object with a constructive imagination, one can give it twenty different shapes.

Her indistinct grounds of hesitation before the interview at the Whispering Stones, at present counted for nothing; they were all merged in the final repulsion.

But how could she arrest his wooing by beginning to make a formal speech—“I perceive your intention—it is most flattering, etc.”?

A fish honestly invited to come and be eaten has a clear course in declining, but how if it finds itself swimming against a net?

And apart from the network, would she have dared at once to say anything decisive? Gwendolen had not time to be clear on that point. As it was, she felt compelled to silence, and after a pause, Grandcourt said,

mysteriously; for the subtly-varied drama between man and woman is often such as can hardly be rendered in words put together like dominoes, according to obvious fixed marks.

The word of all work, Love, will no more express the myriad modes of mutual attraction, than the word Thought can inform you what is passing through your neighbor’s mind.

It would be hard to tell on which side—Gwendolen’s or Grandcourt’s—the influence was more mixed. At that moment his strongest wish was to be completely master of this creature—this piquant combination of maidenliness and mischief:

“Not in the least. I let him hang on me because he has always been a poor devil,” said Grandcourt, in an adagio of utter indifference. “They got him to travel with me when I was a lad.

He was always that coarse-haired kind of brute⁠—sort of cross between a hog and a dilettante.

”

“Then I will not be unreasonable,” said Gwendolen, taking away her hand and tossing her head saucily. “

I will not be told that I am what women always are.

”

But Grandcourt’s hair, though he had not much of it, was of a fine, sunny blonde, and his moods were not entirely to be explained as ebbing energy.

We mortals have a strange spiritual chemistry going on within us, so that a lazy stagnation or even a cottony milkiness may be preparing one knows not what biting or explosive material.

The navvy waking from sleep and without malice heaving a stone to crush the life out of his still sleeping comrade, is understood to lack the trained motive which makes a character fairly calculable in its actions;

yet anyone able to trace the folds of his character might have conceived that he would be more likely than many less passionate men to love a woman without telling her of it.

Sprinkle food before a delicate-eared bird: there is nothing he would more willingly take, yet he keeps aloof, because of his sensibility to checks which to you are imperceptible.

And one man differs from another, as we all differ from the Bosjesman, in a sensibility to checks, that come from variety of needs, spiritual or other.

… she was constantly feeling not only that he had nothing of the fool in his composition, but that by some subtle means he communicated to her the impression that all the folly lay with other people, who did what he did not care to do.

A man who seems to have been able to command the best, has a sovereign power of depreciation.

Then Grandcourt’s behavior as a lover had hardly at all passed the limit of an amorous homage which was inobtrusive as a wafted odor of roses, and spent all its effects in a gratified vanity.

Her anger toward Deronda had changed into a superstitious dread—due, perhaps, to the coercion he had exercised over her thought—lest the first interference of his in her life might foreshadow some future influence.

It is of such stuff that superstitions are commonly made: an intense feeling about ourselves which makes the evening star shine at us with a threat, and the blessing of a beggar encourage us.

And superstitions carry consequences which often verify their hope or their foreboding.

… of a dark yet mild intensity which seemed to express a special interest in everyone on whom he fixed them, and might easily help to bring on him those claims which ardently sympathetic people are often creating in the minds of those who need help.

In mendicant fashion we make the goodness of others a reason for exorbitant demands on them.

That sort of effect was penetrating Gwendolen.

… the question whether the indefensibleness of her marriage did not include the fact that she had accepted Grandcourt solely as a man whom it was convenient for her to marry, not in the least as one to whom she would be binding herself in duty.

Gwendolen’s ideas were pitiably crude; but many grand difficulties of life are apt to force themselves on us in our crudity.

And to judge wisely, I suppose we must know how things appear to the unwise; that kind of appearance making the larger part of the world’s history.

Gwendolen’s ideas were pitiably crude; but many grand difficulties of life are apt to force themselves on us in our crudity.

And to judge wisely, I suppose we must know how things appear to the unwise; that kind of appearance making the larger part of the world’s history.

In the morning there was a double excitement for her. She was going to hunt, from which scruples about propriety had threatened to hinder her, until it was found that Mrs.

but she found larger room for resistance to a disapproval of her marriage, because it is easier to make our conduct seem justifiable to ourselves than to make our ability strike others.

“How can I help it?” is not our favorite apology for incompetency.

But Gwendolen felt some strength in saying,

“

Perhaps because we need that you should be better than we are.

”

But he was really occupied with their interview and what it was likely to include.

Imagine the difference in rate of emotion between this woman whom the years had worn to a more conscious dependence and sharper eagerness, and this man whom they were dulling into a more neutral obstinacy.

“I expected to see you—it was so long since I had heard from you. I suppose the weeks seem longer at Gadsmere than they do at Diplow,” said Mrs. Glasher.

“No. Lush told me,” was the slow answer.

It was as if the thumbscrew and the iron boot were being placed by creeping hands within sight of the expectant victim.

“Good God! say at once that you are going to marry her,” she burst out, passionately, her knees shaking and her hands tightly clasped.

Amidst such caressing signs of mutual fear they parted.

The effect that clung and gnawed within Grandcourt was a sense of imperfect mastery.

“That’s unlucky talk for a wedding, Mrs. Girdle,” said the tailor. “

A quarrel may end wi’ the whip, but it begins wi’ the tongue, and it’s the women have got the most o’ that.

”

“Not gladly, mamma, no!” said Gwendolen, shaking her head, with a bright smile. “Willingly you would bear it, but always sorrowfully.

Sorrowing is your sauce; you can take nothing without it.

” Then, clasping her mother’s shoulders and raining kisses first on one cheek and then on the other between her words, she said, gaily, “And you shall sorrow over my having everything at my beck—and enjoying everything glorious—splendid houses—and horses—and diamonds, I shall have diamonds—and …

Was it alone the closeness of this fulfilment which made her heart flutter? or was it some dim forecast, the insistent penetration of suppressed experience, mixing the expectation of a triumph with the dread of a crisis?

Hers was one of the natures in which exultation inevitably carries an infusion of dread ready to curdle and declare itself.

She fell silent in spite of herself as they approached the gates, and when her husband said, “Here we are at home!” and for the first time kissed her on the lips, she hardly knew of it:

but coming near herself you might have seen the tremor in her lips and hands. She sat so for a long while, knowing little more than that she was feeling ill, and that those written words kept repeating themselves to her.

Truly here were poisoned gems, and the poison had entered into this poor young creature.

After that long while, there was a tap at the door and Grandcourt entered, dressed for dinner. The sight of him brought a new nervous shock, and Gwendolen screamed again and again with hysterical violence.

He had expected to see her dressed and smiling, ready to be led down. He saw her pallid, shrieking as it seemed with terror, the jewels scattered around her on the floor. Was it a fit of madness?

In some form or other the furies had crossed his threshold.

What was the use of being exasperated at a tasteless joke?—only the exasperation comes before the reflection on utility.

Few friendly remarks are more annoying than the information that we are always seeming to do what we never mean to do.

Sir Hugo’s notion of flirting, it was to be hoped, was rather peculiar; for his own part, Deronda was sure that he had never flirted.

voracious of speculations on government and religion, yet loth to part with long-sanctioned forms which, for him, were quick with memories and sentiments that no argument could lay dead.

We fall on the leaning side; and Deronda suspected himself of loving too well the losing causes of the world.

Martyrdom changes sides, and he was in danger of changing with it, having a strong repugnance to taking up that clue of success which the order of the world often forces upon us and makes it treason against the common weal to reject.

To make a little difference for the better was what he was not contented to live without; but how to make it?

It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.

He found some of the fault in his birth and the way he had been brought up, which had laid no special demands on him and had given him no fixed relationship except one of a doubtful kind;

“I agree with Mirah,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “

Saint Anybody is a bad saint to pray to.

”

but she could never want me not to like those who are better to me than any of my own people I have ever known. I think I could obey in other things that she wished but not in that.

It is so much easier to me to share in love than in hatred.

I remember a play I read in German—since I have been here it has come into my mind—where the heroine says something like that.”

“Is it not wonderful how I remember the voices better than anything else? I think they must go deeper into us than other things.

I have often fancied heaven might be made of voices.

”

Their words are not just what everybody else says, though they may be spelled the same. If I were to live till my Hans got old, I should still see the boy in him.

A mother’s love, I often say, is like a tree that has got all the wood in it, from the very first it made.

”

“

It is easier to find an old mother than an old friend.

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude—roots that can be pulled up. Mother’s love begins deeper down.”

“At least, I will look about,” was his final determination. “I may find some special Jewish machinery. I will wait till after Christmas.”

What should we all do without the calendar, when we want to put off a disagreeable duty?

The admirable arrangements of the solar system, by which our time is measured, always supply us with a term before which it is hardly worth while to set about anything we are disinclined to.

… all his sense of poetry in common things, Deronda, where a keen personal interest was aroused, could not, more than the rest of us, continuously escape suffering from the pressure of that hard unaccommodating Actual, which has never consulted our taste and is entirely unselect.

Enthusiasm, we know, dwells at ease among ideas, tolerates garlic breathed in the middle ages, and sees no shabbiness in the official trappings of classic processions: it gets squeamish when ideals press upon it as something warmly incarnate, and can hardly face them without fainting.

Lying dreamily in a boat, imagining one’s self in quest of a beautiful maiden’s relatives in Cordova elbowed by Jews in the time of Ibn-Gebirol, all the physical incidents can be borne without shock. Or if the scenery of St.

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.

”

his phraseology was as little as possible like that of the Old Testament: and no shadow of a suffering race distinguished his vulgarity of soul from that of a prosperous, pink-and-white huckster of the purest English lineage.

It is naturally a Christian feeling that a Jew ought not to be conceited.

However, this was no reason for not persevering in his project, and he answered at once in adventurous ignorance of technicalities,

“It shows the Arrowpoints’ good sense, however, to have adopted the affair, after the fuss in the paper,” said Sir Hugo. “

And disowning your own child because of a mésalliance is something like disowning your one eye: everybody knows it’s yours, and you have no other to make an appearance with.

”

He longed to go to her and speak. Why should he not obey such an impulse, as he would have done toward any other lady in the room? Yet he hesitated some moments, observing the graceful lines of her back, but not moving.

If you have any reason for not indulging a wish to speak to a fair woman, it is a bad plan to look long at her back: the wish to see what it screens becomes the stronger.

There may be a very sweet smile on the other side.

“I don’t admit the justification,” said Deronda. “

I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves.

Else how can anyone find an intense interest in life? And many do.”

and an incautious person might have supposed it safe to telegraph secrets in front of him, the common prejudice being that your quick observer is one whose eyes have quick movements. Not at all.

If you want a respectable witness who will see nothing inconvenient, choose a vivacious gentleman, very much on the alert, with two eyes wide open, a glass in one of them, and an entire impartiality as to the purpose of looking.

If Grandcourt cared to keep anyone under his power he saw them out of the corners of his long narrow eyes, and if they went behind him he had a constructive process by which he knew what they were doing there.

If any had noticed her blush as significant, they had certainly not interpreted it by the secret windings and recesses of her feeling.

A blush is no language: only a dubious flag-signal which may mean either of two contradictories.

Deronda alone had a faint guess at some part of her feeling; but while he was observing her he was himself under observation.

“To most men their early home is no more than a memory of their early years, and I’m not sure but they have the best of it. The image is never marred.

There’s no disappointment in memory, and one’s exaggerations are always on the good side.

”

But at the end she was very weary of her assumed spirits, and as Grandcourt turned into the billiard-room, she went to the pretty boudoir which had been assigned to her, and shut herself up to look melancholy at her ease.

No chemical process shows a more wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we imagine to be going on in another.

Changes in theory, religion, admirations, may begin with a suspicion of dissent or disapproval, even when the grounds of disapproval are but matter of searching conjecture.

Her sense of being blameworthy was exaggerated by a dread both definite and vague. The definite dread was lest the veil of secrecy should fall between her and Grandcourt, and give him the right to taunt her.

With the reading of that letter had begun her husband’s empire of fear.

And her husband all the while knew it. He had not, indeed, any distinct knowledge of her broken promise, and would not have rated highly the effect of that breach on her conscience;

… superiority over this inert specimen of personal distinction into an amazed perception of her former ignorance about the possible mental attitude of a man toward the woman he sought in marriage—of her present ignorance as to what their life with each other might turn into.

For novelty gives immeasurableness to fear, and fills the early time of all sad changes with phantoms of the future.

Her little coquetries, voluntary or involuntary, had told on Grandcourt during courtship, and formed a medium of communication between them, showing him in the light of a creature such as she could understand and manage:

“

He delights in making the dogs and horses quail: that is half his pleasure in calling them his,

” she said to herself, as she opened the jewel-case with a shivering sensation.

But the coercion is often stronger on the one who takes the reverence.

Those who trust us educate us.

And perhaps in that ideal consecration of Gwendolen’s, some education was being prepared for Deronda.

But they make the thing, whatever it may be, seem worthy to be done. I can bear to think my own music not good for much, but the world would be more dismal if I thought music itself not good for much.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

”

“Those people are not to be pitied,” said Gwendolen, impatiently. “

I have no sympathy with women who are always doing right. I don’t believe in their great sufferings.

” Her fingers moved quickly among the edges of the music.

“Many things. Look on other lives besides your own. See what their troubles are, and how they are borne.

Try to care about something in this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires.

Try to care for what is best in thought and action—something that is good apart from the accidents of your own lot.”

What she would least like to incur was the making a fool of herself and being compromised. It was futile and irrelevant to try and explain that Deronda too had only been a monitor—the strongest of all monitors.

Grandcourt was contemptuous, not jealous; contemptuously certain of all the subjection he cared for.

Why could she not rebel and defy him? She longed to do it. But she might as well have tried to defy the texture of her nerves and the palpitation of her heart.

contemptuously certain of all the subjection he cared for. Why could she not rebel and defy him? She longed to do it. But she might as well have tried to defy the texture of her nerves and the palpitation of her heart.

Her husband had a ghostly army at his back, that could close round her wherever she might turn.

She sat in her splendid attire, like a white image of helplessness, and he seemed to gratify himself with looking at her. She could not even make a passionate exclamation, or throw up her arms, as she would have done in her maiden days.

She longed to do it. But she might as well have tried to defy the texture of her nerves and the palpitation of her heart. Her husband had a ghostly army at his back, that could close round her wherever she might turn.

She sat in her splendid attire, like a white image of helplessness, and he seemed to gratify himself with looking at her.

She could not even make a passionate exclamation, or throw up her arms, as she would have done in her maiden days. The sense of his scorn kept her still.

Certain words were gnawing within her. “The wrong you have done me will be your own curse.” As he closed the door, the bitter tears rose, and the gnawing words provoked an answer: “

Why did you put your fangs into me and not into him?

” It was uttered in a whisper, as the tears came up silently. But she immediately pressed her handkerchief against her eyes, and checked her tendency to sob.

The half-indignant remonstrance that vibrated in Deronda’s voice came, as often happens, from the habit of inward argument with himself rather than from severity towards Gwendolen; but it had a more beneficial effect on her than any soothings.

Nothing is feebler than the indolent rebellion of complaint; and to be roused into self-judgment is comparative activity.

For the moment she felt like a shaken child—shaken out of its wailing into awe, and she said humbly,

“

Take the present suffering as a painful letting in of light,

” said Deronda, more gently. “You are conscious of more beyond the round of your own inclinations—you know more of the way in which your life presses on others, and their life on yours.

He was under the baffling difficulty of discerning that what he had been urging on her was thrown into the pallid distance of mere thought before the outburst of her habitual emotion.

It was as if he saw her drowning while his limbs were bound.

The pained compassion which was spread over his features as he watched her, affected her with a compunction unlike any she had felt before, and in a changed and imploring tone she said,

“Then they are good ideally,” said Hans. “Agrippa’s legs were possibly bad; I idealize that and make them impossibly bad.

Art, my Eugenius, must intensify.

But never mind the legs now: the third sketch in the series is Berenice exulting in the prospects of being Empress of Rome, when the news has come that Vespasian is declared Emperor and her lover Titus his successor.”

“Perfectly,” said Hans, turning his face into a good-humored smile. “You have the very justifiable opinion of me that I am likely to shatter all the glass in my way, and break my own skull into the bargain. Quite fair.

Since I got into the scrape of being born, everything I have liked best has been a scrape either for myself or somebody else.

Everything I have taken to heartily has somehow turned into a scrape. My painting is the last scrape; and I shall be all my life getting out of it. You think now I shall get into a scrape at home. No; I am regenerate.

I would rather run my chance there and lose, than be sure of winning anywhere else. And I don’t mean to swallow the poison of despair, though you are disposed to thrust it on me.

I am giving up wine, so let me get a little drunk on hope and vanity.

”

But now he had noted with some indignation, all the stronger because it must not be betrayed, Hans’s evident assumption that for any danger of rivalry or jealousy in relation to Mirah, Deronda was not as much out of the question as the angel Gabriel.

It is one thing to be resolute in placing one’s self out of the question, and another to endure that others should perform that exclusion for us.

He had expected that Hans would give him trouble: what he had not expected was that the trouble would have a strong element of personal feeling.

… was conscious of that peculiar irritation which will sometimes befall the man whom others are inclined to trust as a mentor—the irritation of perceiving that he is supposed to be entirely off the same plane of desire and temptation as those who confess to him.

Our guides, we pretend, must be sinless: as if those were not often the best teachers who only yesterday got corrected for their mistakes.

Throughout their friendship Deronda had been used to Hans’s egotism, but he had never before felt intolerant of it:

… ideas had been as true and precious as those of Columbus or Newton, many would have counted this yearning, taking it as the sublimer part for a man to say, “If not I, then another,” and to hold cheap the meaning of his own life.

But the fuller nature desires to be an agent, to create, and not merely to look on: strong love hungers to bless, and not merely to behold blessing.

And while there is warmth enough in the sun to feed an energetic life, there will still be men to feel, “I am lord of this moment’s change, and will charge it with my soul.”

In this way Hans got food for his hope.

How could the rose help it when several bees in succession took its sweet odor as a sign of personal attachment?

“No; but I expected you to come down the river.

I have been waiting for you these five years.

” Mordecai’s deep-sunk eyes were fixed on those of the friend who had at last arrived with a look of affectionate dependence, at once pathetic and solemn.

what he felt was a profound sensibility to a cry from the depths of another and accompanying that, the summons to be receptive instead of superciliously prejudging.

Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude;

and this state of mind now gave Deronda’s face its utmost expression of calm benignant force—an expression which nourished Mordecai’s confidence and made an open way before him. He began to speak.

What reaches him, stays with him, rules him: he must accept it, not knowing its pathway. Say, my expectation of you has grown but as false hopes grow. That doubt is in your mind? Well, my expectation was there, and you are come.

Men have died of thirst. But I was thirsty, and the water is on my lips!

What are doubts to me? In the hour when you come to me and say, ‘I reject your soul: I know that I am not a Jew: we have no lot in common’—I shall not doubt. I shall be certain—certain that I have been deluded.

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;

“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.

“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.

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.

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:

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 was not Mirah to be there?

What furniture can give such finish to a room as a tender woman’s face?

—and is there any harmony of tints that has such stirrings of delight as the sweet modulation of her voice? Here is one good, at least, thought Deronda, that comes to Mordecai from his having fixed his imagination on me.

… moment when even an excellent husband who has dropped smoking under more or less of a pledge during courtship, for the first time will introduce his cigar-smoke between himself and his wife, with the tacit understanding that she will have to put up with it.

Mr. Lush was, so to speak, a very large cigar.

If these are the sort of lovers’ vows at which Jove laughs, he must have a merry time of it.

Mr. Lush was, so to speak, a very large cigar.

If these are the sort of lovers’ vows at which Jove laughs, he must have a merry time of it.

“Trust me, trust me,” said the little mother. “I shall have to persuade them so hard to be glad, that I shall convert myself.

When I am frightened I find it a good thing to have somebody to be angry with for not being brave: it warms the blood.

”

“You know, ma, Mirah hardly remembers her brother,” said Kate.

“People who are lost for twelve years should never come back again,” said Hans. “They are always in the way.”

“Hans!” said Mrs. Meyrick, reproachfully. “If you had lost me for twenty years, I should have thought—”

“It’s no use being one thing more than another if one has to endure the company of those men with a fixed idea, staring blankly at you, and requiring all your remarks to be small footnotes to their text.

If you’re to be under a petrifying wall, you’d better be an old boot. I don’t feel myself an old boot.

” Then abruptly, “Good night, little mother,” bending to kiss her brow in a hasty, desperate manner, and condescendingly, on his way to the door, “Good night, girls.”

Susceptible people, whose strength has been long absorbed by dormant bias, dread an interview that imperiously revives the past, as they would dread a threatening illness.

Joy may be there, but joy, too, is terrible.

Deronda felt the infection of excitement, and when he heard the ring at the door, he went out, not knowing exactly why, that he might see and greet Mirah beforehand.

but fewer perhaps may follow him in his contentment that his wife should be in a temper which would dispose her to fly out if she dared, and that she should have been urged into marrying him by other feelings than passionate attachment.

Still, for those who prefer command to love, one does not see why the habit of mind should change precisely at the point of matrimony.

Grandcourt did not feel that he had chosen the wrong wife; and having taken on himself the part of husband, he was not going in any way to be fooled, or allow himself to be seen in a light that could be regarded as pitiable.

But here too Grandcourt had his reserves, and would not have uttered a word likely to encourage Lush in an impudent sympathy with any supposed grievance in a marriage which had been discommended by him.

Who that has a confidant escapes believing too little in his penetration, and too much in his discretion?

Grandcourt had always allowed Lush to know his external affairs indiscriminately—irregularities, debts, want of ready money; he had only used discrimination about what he would allow his confidant to say to him;

she ought to understand that he was the only possible envoy. Grandcourt’s view of things was considerably fenced in by his general sense, that what suited him others must put up with.

There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns us to corresponding stupidity.

Mephistopheles thrown upon real life, and obliged to manage his own plots, would inevitably make blunders.

What was she to do? Search where she would in her consciousness, she found no plea to justify a plaint.

Any romantic illusions she had had in marrying this man had turned on her power of using him as she liked. He was using her as he liked.

She sat awaiting the announcement of Lush as a sort of searing operation that she had to go through. The facts that galled her gathered a burning power when she thought of their lying in his mind.

and curiously enough she rejected a handkerchief on which her maid had by mistake put the wrong scent—a scent that Grandcourt had once objected to.

Gwendolen would not have liked to be an object of disgust to this husband whom she hated: she liked all disgust to be on her side.

But to defer thought in this way was something like trying to talk without singing in her own ears. The thought that is bound up with our passion is as penetrative as air—everything is porous to it;

… as we know from the number of persons who make us aware of it in their own case by a clamorous unwearied statement of the reasons against their submitting to a situation which, on inquiry, we discover to be the least disagreeable within their reach.

Poor Gwendolen had both too much and too little mental power and dignity to make herself exceptional.

No wonder that Deronda now marked some hardening in a look and manner which were schooled daily to the suppression of feeling.

“I don’t mean to speak ill of myself,” said the princess, with proud impetuosity, “But I had not much affection to give you.

I did not want affection. I had been stifled with it.

I wanted to live out the life that was in me, and not to be hampered with other lives. You wonder what I was. I was no princess then.” She rose with a sudden movement, and stood as she had done before.

“I don’t mean to speak ill of myself,” said the princess, with proud impetuosity, “But I had not much affection to give you. I did not want affection. I had been stifled with it.

I wanted to live out the life that was in me, and not to be hampered with other lives.

You wonder what I was. I was no princess then.” She rose with a sudden movement, and stood as she had done before. Deronda immediately rose too; he felt breathless.

said the Princess, with a ring of something like sarcastic scorn. “When you are as old as I am, it will not seem so simple a question—‘Why did you do this?’ People talk of their motives in a cut and dried way.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel—or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others.

My father was on his deathbed when we were married: from the first he had fixed his mind on my marrying my cousin Ephraim.

And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

I meant to have my will in the end, but I could only have it by seeming to obey. I had an awe of my father—always I had had an awe of him: it was impossible to help it.

At first he thought I was not serious, but I convinced him, and he was never surprised at anything. He agreed that it would be for your good, and the finest thing for you.

A great singer and actress is a queen, but she gives no royalty to her son.

All that happened at Naples. And afterward I made Sir Hugo the trustee of your fortune. That is what I did; and I had a joy in doing it.

“But there is some other fear on your mind,” said Mrs. Meyrick not without divination—“a fear of something that may disturb your peace. Don’t be forecasting evil, dear child, unless it is what you can guard against.

Anxiety is good for nothing if we can’t turn it into a defense.

But there’s no defense against all the things that might be. Have you any more reason for being anxious now than you had a month ago?”

For where might my father be going? What may become of him? And his having a daughter who would own him in spite of all, might have hindered the worst.

Is there any pain like seeing what ought to be the best things in life turned into the worst?

All those opposite feelings were meeting and pressing against each other, and took up all my strength. No one could act that. Acting is slow and poor to what we go through within. I don’t know how I called a cab.

Is there any pain like seeing what ought to be the best things in life turned into the worst? All those opposite feelings were meeting and pressing against each other, and took up all my strength. No one could act that.

Acting is slow and poor to what we go through within.

I don’t know how I called a cab. I only remember that I was in it when I began to think, ‘I cannot tell Ezra; he must not know.’ ”

a point of view which Hans also had readily adopted.

It is a little hard upon some men that they appear to sink for us in becoming lovers.

But precisely to this innocence of the Meyricks was owing the disturbance of Mirah’s unconsciousness. The first occasion could hardly have been more trivial, but it prepared her emotive nature for a deeper effect from what happened afterward.

and whenever she threw more energy than usual into her singing, it was the energy of indignation against the shallowness of her own content. In that mood she once said, “Shall I tell you what is the difference between you and me, Ezra?

You are a spring in the drought, and I am an acorn-cup; the waters of heaven fill me, but the least little shake leaves me empty.

”

Hence he understood her repulsion for Lush. But how was he to understand or conceive her present repulsion for Henleigh Grandcourt?

Some men bring themselves to believe, and not merely maintain, the nonexistence of an external world; a few others believe themselves objects of repulsion to a woman without being told so in plain language.

But Grandcourt did not belong to this eccentric body of thinkers.

The embitterment of hatred is often as unaccountable to onlookers as the growth of devoted love, and it not only seems but is really out of direct relation with any outward causes to be alleged.

Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines all currents toward itself, and makes the whole life its tributary.

And the intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear, which compels to silence and drives vehemence into a constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary annihilation of the detested object, something like the hidden rites of vengeance with which the persecuted have made a dark vent …

It was a disgusting fact; that was enough; and no doubt she was well pleased.

A man out of temper does not wait for proofs before feeling toward all things animate and inanimate as if they were in a conspiracy against him, but at once threshes his horse or kicks his dog in consequence.

Grandcourt felt toward Gwendolen and Deronda as if he knew them to be in a conspiracy against him, and here was an event in league with them.

Deronda’s heart was pierced. He turned his eyes on her poor beseeching face and said, “I believe that you may become worthier than you have ever yet been—worthy to lead a life that may be a blessing.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

You have made efforts—you will go on making them.”

“I should despise myself for wishing it,” said Deronda. “How could I know what I was wishing?

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what we imagine might have been.

If I took to foolish wishing of that sort, I should wish—not that I had never seen you, but that I had been able to save you from this.”

Extension, we know, is a very imperfect measure of things; and the length of the sun’s journeying can no more tell us how life has advanced than the acreage of a field can tell us what growths may be active within it.

A man may go south, and, stumbling over a bone, may meditate upon it till he has found a new starting-point for anatomy; or eastward, and discover a new key to language telling a new story of races;

… his neighbors grumbling at the same parish grievance as before, or to see the same elderly gentleman treading the pavement in discourse with himself, shaking his head after the same percussive butcher’s boy, and pausing at the same shopwindow to look at the same prints.

If the swiftest thinking has about the pace of a greyhound, the slowest must be supposed to move, like the limpet, by an apparent sticking, which after a good while is discerned to be a slight progression.

Such differences are manifest in the variable intensity which we call human experience, from the revolutionary rush of change which makes a new inner and outer life, to that quiet recurrence of the familiar, which has no other epochs than those of hunger and the …

“Nannie, I will leave you to say everything to my father. If he wants me immediately, let me know. I shall stay in the shrubbery for ten minutes—only ten minutes.”

Who has been quite free from egoistic escapes of the imagination, picturing desirable consequences on his own future in the presence of another’s misfortune, sorrow, or death?

The expected promotion or legacy is the common type of a temptation which makes speech and even prayer a severe avoidance of the most insistent thoughts, and sometimes raises an inward shame, a self-distaste that is worse than any other form of unpleasant companionship.

But when this attaching force is present in a nature not of brutish unmodifiableness, but of a human dignity that can risk itself safely, it may even result in a devotedness not unfit to be called divine in a higher sense than the ancient.

Phlegmatic rationality stares and shakes its head at these unaccountable prepossessions, but they exist as undeniably as the winds and waves, determining here a wreck and there a triumphant voyage.

This sort of passion had nested in the sweet-natured, strong Rex, and he had made up his mind to its companionship, as if it had been an object supremely dear, stricken dumb and helpless, and turning all the future of tenderness into a shadow of …

what sour corners our mouths would get—our eyes, what frozen glances! and all the while our own possessions and desires would not exactly adjust themselves to our ideal.

We must have some comradeship with imperfection; and it is, happily, possible to feel gratitude even where we discern a mistake that may have been injurious, the vehicle of the mistake being an affectionate intention prosecuted through a lifetime of kindly offices.

Deronda’s feeling and judgment were strongly against the action of Sir Hugo in making himself the agent of a falsity—yes, a falsity: he could give no milder name to the concealment under which he had been reared.

and Deronda, with all his keen memory of the painful inward struggle he had gone through in his boyhood, was able also to remember the many signs that his experience had been entirely shut out from Sir Hugo’s conception.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness, the most remote from Deronda’s large imaginative lenience toward others.

And perhaps now, after the searching scenes of the last ten days, in which the curtain had been lifted for him from the secrets of lives unlike his own, he was more than ever disposed to check that rashness of indignation or resentment which has …

He said, ‘Let us bind ourselves with duty, as if we were sons of the same mother.’ That was his bent from first to last—as he said, to fortify his soul with bonds. It was a saying of his, ‘

Let us bind love with duty; for duty is the love of law; and law is the nature of the Eternal.

’ So we bound ourselves. And though we were much apart in our later life, the bond has never been broken. When he was dead, they sought to rob him; but they could not rob him of me.

He had an iron will in his face: it braced up everybody about him. When he was quite young he had already got one deep upright line in his brow. I see none of that in you. Daniel Charisi used to say, ‘

Better, a wrong will than a wavering; better a steadfast enemy than an uncertain friend; better a false belief than no belief at all.

’ What he despised most was indifference. He had longer reasons than I can give you.”

But I think I can maintain my grandfather’s notion of separateness with communication. I hold that my first duty is to my own people, and if there is anything to be done toward restoring or perfecting their common life, I shall make that my vocation.”

It happened to Deronda at that moment, as it has often happened to others, that the need for speech made an epoch in resolve.

His respect for the questioner would not let him decline to answer, and by the necessity to answer he found out the truth for himself.

“Not bad for anybody we care much about,” said Hans, quickly; “rather uncommonly lucky, I think. I never knew anybody die conveniently before.

Considering what a dear gazelle I am, I am constantly wondering to find myself alive.

”

… had called forth a flash of revelation from Mirah—a betrayal of her passionate feeling on this subject which had made him melancholy on her account as well as his own—yet on the whole less melancholy than if he had imagined Deronda’s hopes fixed on her.

It is not sublime, but it is common, for a man to see the beloved object unhappy because his rival loves another, with more fortitude and a milder jealousy than if he saw her entirely happy in his rival.

At least it was so with the mercurial Hans, who fluctuated between the contradictory states of feeling, wounded because Mirah was wounded, and of being almost obliged to Deronda for loving somebody else.

… while she moved about and spoke as usual, a close observer might have discerned a difference between this apparent calm, which was the effect of restraining energy, and the sweet genuine calm of the months when she first felt a return of her infantine happiness.

Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.

Mirah felt no such surprise when familiar Sorrow came back from brief absence, and sat down with her according to the old use and wont.

… self, and thought of all that this inscription signified with an unemotional memory, which was like the ocular perception of a touch to one who has lost the sense of touch, or like morsels on an untasting palate, having shape and grain, but no flavor.

Among the things we may gamble away in a lazy selfish life is the capacity for ruth, compunction, or any unselfish regret

—which we may come to long for as one in slow death longs to feel laceration, rather than be conscious of a widening margin where consciousness once was.

The surroundings were of Brompton, but the voice might have come from a Rabbi transmitting the sentences of an elder time to be registered in Babli—by which (to our ears) affectionate-sounding diminutive is meant the voluminous Babylonian Talmud.

“The Omnipresent,” said a Rabbi, “is occupied in making marriages.”

The levity of the saying lies in the ear of him who hears it; for by marriages the speaker meant all the wondrous combinations of the universe whose issue makes our good and evil.

and he was ready to laugh at his own impetuosity when, as he neared England on his way from Mainz, he felt the remaining distance more and more of an obstruction.

It was as if he had found an added soul in finding his ancestry

—his judgment no longer wandering in the mazes of impartial sympathy, but choosing, with that partiality which is man’s best strength, the closer fellowship that makes sympathy practical—exchanging that bird’s eye reasonableness which soars to avoid preference and loses all sense of quality for the …

“Come! come!” said Mordecai, immediately rising with an irradiated face and opened eyes—apparently as little surprised as if he had seen Deronda in the morning, and expected this evening visit; while Mirah started up blushing with confused, half-alarmed expectation.

Yet when Deronda entered, the sight of him was like the clearness after rain: no clouds to come could hinder the cherishing beam of that moment.

As he held out his right hand to Mirah, who was close to her brother’s left, he laid his other hand on Mordecai’s right shoulder, and stood so a moment, holding them both at once, uttering no word, but reading their faces, till he said …

It was not many days after her mother’s arrival that Gwendolen would consent to remain at Genoa. Her desire to get away from that gem of the sea, helped to rally her strength and courage.

For what place, though it were the flowery vale of Enna, may not the inward sense turn into a circle of punishment where the flowers are no better than a crop of flame-tongues burning the soles of our feet?

“I shall never like to see the Mediterranean again,” said Gwendolen, to her mother, who thought that she quite understood her child’s feeling—even in her tacit prohibition of any express reference to her late husband.

… ourselves if we were secure from judgment by another whose opinion is the breathing-medium of all our joy—who brings to us with close pressure and immediate sequence that judgment of the Invisible and Universal which self-flattery and the world’s tolerance would easily melt and disperse.

In this way our brother may be in the stead of God to us, and his opinion which has pierced even to the joints and marrow, may be our virtue in the making.

That mission of Deronda to Gwendolen had begun with what she had felt to be his judgment of her at the gaming-table.

Would her remorse have maintained its power within her, or would she have felt absolved by secrecy, if it had not been for that outer conscience which was made for her by Deronda?

It is hard to say how much we could forgive ourselves if we were secure from judgment by another whose opinion is the breathing-medium of all our joy

—who brings to us with close pressure and immediate sequence that judgment of the Invisible and Universal which self-flattery and the world’s tolerance would easily melt and disperse.

Of course all this thinking on Sir Hugo’s part was eminently premature, only a fortnight or so after Grandcourt’s death.

But it is the trick of thinking to be either premature or behindhand.

However, he sent the note to Deronda’s chambers, and it found him there.

He paused a little between his sentences, feeling a weight of anxiety on all his words. “Other duties will spring from it. Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be so.

What makes life dreary is the want of motive

: but once beginning to act with that penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions—there will be newly-opening needs—continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant.”

What makes life dreary is the want of motive: but once beginning to act with that penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions—there will be newly-opening needs—continually coming to carry you on from day to day.

You will find your life growing like a plant.

”

think that a severe angel, seeing you along the road of error, grasped you by the wrist and showed you the horror of the life you must avoid. And it has come to you in your springtime.

Think of it as a preparation. You can, you will, be among the best of women, such as make others glad that they were born.

”

The words were like the touch of a miraculous hand to Gwendolen. Mingled emotions streamed through her frame with a strength that seemed the beginning of a new existence, having some new power or other which stirred in her vaguely.

So pregnant is the divine hope of moral recovery with the energy that fulfills it.

So potent in us is the infused action of another soul, before which we bow in complete love. But the new existence seemed inseparable from Deronda: the hope seemed to make his presence permanent.

Mighty Love had laid his hand upon her; but what had he demanded of her? Acceptance of rebuke—the hard task of self-change—confession—endurance. If she cried toward him, what then?

She cried as the child cries whose little feet have fallen backward⁠—cried to be taken by the hand, lest she should lose herself.

The cry pierced Deronda. What position could have been more difficult for a man full of tenderness, yet with clear foresight? He was the only creature who knew the real nature of Gwendolen’s trouble:

Is it any wonder that she saw her own necessity reflected in his feeling? She was in that state of unconscious reliance and expectation which is a common experience with us when we are preoccupied with our own trouble or our own purposes.

We diffuse our feeling over others, and count on their acting from our motives.

Her imagination had not been turned to a future union with Deronda by any other than the spiritual tie which had been continually strengthening; but also it had not been turned toward a future separation from him.