 into shops, he observed faces: - a process not very promising of
particular discovery. Why did he not address himself to an influential Rabbi or
other member of a Jewish community, to consult on the chances of finding a
mother named Cohen, with a son named Ezra, and a lost daughter named Mirah? He
thought of doing so - after Christmas. The fact was, notwithstanding 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 Mary
Axe and Whitechapel were imaginatively transported to the borders of the Rhine
at the end of the eleventh century, when in the ears listening for the signals
of the Messiah, the Hep! Hep! Hep! of the Crusaders came like the bay of
blood-hounds; and in the presence of those devilish missionaries with sword and
firebrand the crouching figure of the reviled Jew turned round erect, heroic,
flashing with sublime constancy in the face of torture and death - what would
the dingy shops and unbeautiful faces signify to the thrill of contemplative
emotion? But the fervour of sympathy with which we contemplate a grandiose
martyrdom is feeble compared with the enthusiasm that keeps unslacked where
there is no danger, no challenge - nothing but impartial midday falling on
commonplace, perhaps half-repulsive, objects which are really the beloved ideas
made flesh. Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: - in the force of
imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among
cloud-pictures. To glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge covering the earth,
is an easier exercise of believing imagination than to see its beginning in
newspaper placards, staring at yon from a bridge beyond the corn-fields; and it
might well happen to most of us dainty people that we were in the thick of the
battle of Armageddon without being aware of anything more than the annoyance of
a little explosive smoke and struggling on the ground immediately about us.
