Part 67 (1/2)
I look at it, that such ideas as are mixed straight away with all the other elements of life are powerful along with 'em. The slower the mixing, the less power they have. And as to the causes of social change, I look at it in this way--ideas are a sort of parliament, but there's a commonwealth outside and a good deal of the commonwealth is working at change without knowing what the parliament is doing.”
”But if you take ready mixing as your test of power,” said Pash, ”some of the least practical ideas beat everything. They spread without being understood, and enter into the language without being thought of.”
”They may act by changing the distribution of gases,” said Marrables; ”instruments are getting so fine now, men may come to register the spread of a theory by observed changes in the atmosphere and corresponding changes in the nerves.”
”Yes,” said Pash, his dark face lighting up rather impishly, ”there is the idea of nationalities; I dare say the wild a.s.ses are snuffing it, and getting more gregarious.”
”You don't share that idea?” said Deronda, finding a piquant incongruity between Pash's sarcasm and the strong stamp of race on his features.
”Say, rather, he does not share that spirit,” said Mordecai, who had turned a melancholy glance on Pash. ”Unless nationality is a feeling, what force can it have as an idea?”
”Granted, Mordecai,” said Pash, quite good-humoredly. ”And as the feeling of nationality is dying, I take the idea to be no better than a ghost, already walking to announce the death.”
”A sentiment may seem to be dying and yet revive into strong life,”
said Deronda. ”Nations have revived. We may live to see a great outburst of force in the Arabs, who are being inspired with a new zeal.”
”Amen, amen,” said Mordecai, looking at Deronda with a delight which was the beginning of recovered energy: his att.i.tude was more upright, his face was less worn.
”That may hold with backward nations,” said Pash, ”but with us in Europe the sentiment of nationality is destined to die out. It will last a little longer in the quarters where oppression lasts, but nowhere else. The whole current of progress is setting against it.”
”Ay,” said Buchan, in a rapid thin Scotch tone which was like the letting in of a little cool air on the conversation, ”ye've done well to bring us round to the point. Ye're all agreed that societies change--not always and everywhere--but on the whole and in the long run. Now, with all deference, I would beg t' observe that we have got to examine the nature of changes before we have a warrant to call them progress, which word is supposed to include a bettering, though I apprehend it to be ill-chosen for that purpose, since mere motion onward may carry us to a bog or a precipice. And the questions I would put are three: Is all change in the direction of progress? if not, how shall we discern which change is progress and which not? and thirdly, how far and in what way can we act upon the course of change so as to promote it where it is beneficial, and divert it where it is injurious?”
But Buchan's attempt to impose his method on the talk was a failure.
Lily immediately said--
”Change and progress are merged in the idea of development. The laws of development are being discovered, and changes taking place according to them are necessarily progressive; that is to say, it we have any notion of progress or improvement opposed to them, the notion is a mistake.”
”I really can't see how you arrive at that sort of cert.i.tude about changes by calling them development,” said Deronda. ”There will still remain the degrees of inevitableness in relation to our own will and acts, and the degrees of wisdom in hastening or r.e.t.a.r.ding; there will still remain the danger of mistaking a tendency which should be resisted for an inevitable law that we must adjust ourselves to,--which seems to me as bad a superst.i.tion or false G.o.d as any that has been set up without the ceremonies of philosophising.”
”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 pa.s.sage, and a new unfolding of life whereof the seed is more perfect, more charged with the elements that are pregnant with diviner form. The life of a people grows, it is knit together and yet expanded, in joy and sorrow, in thought and action; it absorbs the thought of other nations into its own forms, and gives back the thought as new wealth to the world; it is a power and an organ in the great body of the nations. But there may come a check, an arrest; memories may be stifled, and love may be faint for the lack of them; or memories may shrink into withered relics--the soul of a people, whereby they know themselves to be one, may seem to be dying for want of common action. But who shall say, 'The fountain of their life is dried up, they shall forever cease to be a nation?' Who shall say it? Not he who feels the life of his people stirring within his own. Shall he say, 'That way events are wending, I will not resist?' His very soul is resistance, and is as a seed of fire that may enkindle the souls of mult.i.tudes, and make a new pathway for events.”
”I don't deny patriotism,” said Gideon, ”but we all know you have a particular meaning, Mordecai. You know Mordecai's way of thinking, I suppose.” Here Gideon had turned to Deronda, who sat next to him, but without waiting for an answer he went on. ”I'm a rational Jew myself. I stand by my people as a sort of family relations, and I am for keeping up our wors.h.i.+p in a rational way. I don't approve of our people getting baptised, because I don't believe in a Jew's conversion to the Gentile part of Christianity. And now we have political equality, there's no excuse for a pretense of that sort. But I am for getting rid of all of our superst.i.tions and exclusiveness. There's no reason now why we shouldn't melt gradually into the populations we live among. That's the order of the day in point of progress. I would as soon my children married Christians as Jews. And I'm for the old maxim, 'A man's country is where he's well off.'”
”That country's not so easy to find, Gideon,” said the rapid Pash, with a shrug and grimace. ”You get ten s.h.i.+llings a-week more than I do, and have only half the number of children. If somebody will introduce a brisk trade in watches among the 'Jerusalem wares,' I'll go--eh, Mordecai, what do you say?”
Deronda, all ear for these hints of Mordecai's opinion, was inwardly wondering at his persistence in coming to this club. For an enthusiastic spirit to meet continually the fixed indifference of men familiar with the object of his enthusiasm is the acceptance of a slow martyrdom, beside which the fate of a missionary tomahawked without any considerate rejection of his doctrines seems hardly worthy of compa.s.sion. But Mordecai gave no sign of shrinking: this was a moment of spiritual fullness, and he cared more for the utterance of his faith than for its immediate reception. With a fervor which had no temper in it, but seemed rather the rush of feeling in the opportunity of speech, he answered Pash:--
”What I say is, let every man keep far away from the brotherhood and inheritance he despises. Thousands on thousands of our race have mixed with the Gentiles as Celt with Saxon, and they may inherit the blessing that belongs to the Gentile. You cannot follow them. You are one of the mult.i.tudes over this globe who must walk among the nations and be known as Jews, and with words on their lips which mean, 'I wish I had not been born a Jew, I disown any bond with the long travail of my race, I will outdo the Gentile in mocking at our separateness,' they all the while feel breathing on them the breath of contempt because they are Jews, and they will breathe it back poisonously. Can a fresh-made garment of citizens.h.i.+p weave itself straightway into the flesh and change the slow deposit of eighteen centuries? What is the citizens.h.i.+p of him who walks among a people he has no hardy kindred and fellows.h.i.+p with, and has lost the sense of brotherhood with his own race? It is a charter of selfish ambition and rivalry in low greed. He is an alien of spirit, whatever he may be in form; he sucks the blood of mankind, he is not a man, sharing in no loves, sharing in no subjection of the soul, he mocks it all. Is it not truth I speak, Pash?”
”Not exactly, Mordecai,” said Pash, ”if you mean that I think the worse of myself for being a Jew. What I thank our fathers for is that there are fewer blockheads among us than among other races. But perhaps you are right in thinking the Christians don't like me so well for it.”
”Catholics and Protestants have not liked each other much better,” said the genial Gideon. ”We must wait patiently for prejudices to die out.
Many of our people are on a footing with the best, and there's been a good filtering of our blood into high families. I am for making our expectations rational.”
”And so am I!” said Mordecai, quickly, leaning forward with the eagerness of one who pleads in some decisive crisis, his long, thin hands clasped together on his lap. ”I, too, claim to be a rational Jew.
But what is it to be rational--what is it to feel the light of the divine reason growing stronger within and without? It is to see more and more of the hidden bonds that bind and consecrate change as a dependent growth--yea, consecrate it with kins.h.i.+p: the past becomes my parent and the future stretches toward me the appealing arms of children. Is it rational to drain away the sap of special kindred that makes the families of men rich in interchanged wealth, and various as the forests are various with the glory of the cedar and the palm? When it is rational to say, 'I know not my father or my mother, let my children be aliens to me, that no prayer of mine may touch them,' then it will be rational for the Jew to say, 'I will seek to know no difference between me and the Gentile, I will not cherish the prophetic consciousness of our nationality--let the Hebrew cease to be, and let all his memorials be antiquarian trifles, dead as the wall-paintings of a conjectured race. Yet let his child learn by rote the speech of the Greek, where he abjures his fellow-citizens by the bravery of those who fought foremost at Marathon--let him learn to say that was n.o.ble in the Greek, that is the spirit of an immortal nation! But the Jew has no memories that bind him to action; let him laugh that his nation is degraded from a nation; let him hold the monuments of his law which carried within its frame the breath of social justice, of charity, and of household sanct.i.ties--let him hold the energy of the prophets, the patient care of the Masters, the fort.i.tude of martyred generations, as mere stuff for a professors.h.i.+p. The business of the Jew in all things is to be even as the rich Gentile.”
Mordecai threw himself back in his chair, and there was a moment's silence. Not one member of the club shared his point of view or his emotion; but his whole personality and speech had on them the effect of a dramatic representation which had some pathos in it, though no practical consequences; and usually he was at once indulged and contradicted. Deronda's mind went back upon what must have been the tragic pressure of outward conditions hindering this man, whose force he felt to be telling on himself, from making any world for his thought in the minds of others--like a poet among people of a strange speech, who may have a poetry of their own, but have no ear for his cadence, no answering thrill to his discovery of the latent virtues in his mother tongue.
The cool Buchan was the first to speak, and hint the loss of time. ”I submit,” said he, ”that ye're traveling away from the questions I put concerning progress.”