 indignation against wrong and that selectness of fellowship which
are the conditions of moral force; and in the last few years of confirmed
manhood he had become so keenly aware of this that what he most longed for was
either some external event, or some inward light, that would urge him into a
definite line of action, and compress his wandering energy. He was ceasing to
care for knowledge - he had no ambition for practice - unless they could both be
gathered up into one current with his emotions; and he dreaded, as if it were a
dwelling-place of lost souls, that dead anatomy of culture which turns the
universe into a mere ceaseless answer to queries, and knows, not everything, but
everything else about everything - as if one should be ignorant of nothing
concerning the scent of violets except the scent itself for which one had no
nostril. But how and whence was the needed event to come? - the influence that
would justify partiality, and make him what he longed to be yet was unable to
make himself - an organic part of social life, instead of roaming in it like a
yearning disembodied spirit, stirred with a vague social passion, but without
fixed local habitation to render fellowship real? To make a little difference
for the better was what he was not contented to live without; but how 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 given him no fixed relationship except one of a doubtful
kind; but he did not attempt to hide from himself that he had fallen into a
meditative numbness, and was gliding farther and farther from that life of
practically energetic sentiment which he would have proclaimed (if he had been
inclined to proclaim anything) to be the best of all life, and for himself the
only life worth living. He wanted some way of keeping emotion and its progeny of
sentiments - which make the savours of life - substantial and strong in the face
of a reflectiveness that threatened to nullify all differences. To pound the
objects of sentiment into small dust, yet keep sentiment alive and active, was
something like the famous recipe for making cannon - to first take a round hole
and then enclose it with iron; whatever you do keeping fast hold of your round
hole. Yet how distinguish what our will may wisely save in its completeness,
from the heaping of cat-mummies and the expensive cult of enshrined
putrefactions?
    Something like this was the common under-current in Deronda'
