He may very well be settled in life as an agreeable clever
young fellow without passing a special examination on those heads. Later, when
he is getting rather slovenly and portly, his peculiarities are more distinctly
discerned, and it is taken as a mercy if they are not highly objectionable. But
any one wishing to understand the effect of after-events on Deronda should know
a little more of what he was at five-and-twenty than was evident in ordinary
intercourse.
    It happened that the very vividness of his impressions had often made him
the more enigmatic to his friends, and had contributed to an apparent
indefiniteness in his sentiments. His early-wakened sensibility and
reflectiveness had developed into a many-sided sympathy, which threatened to
hinder any persistent course of action: as soon as he took up any antagonism,
though only in thought, he seemed to himself like the Sabine warriors in the
memorable story - with nothing to meet his spear but flesh of his flesh, and
objects that he loved. His imagination had so wrought itself to the habit of
seeing things as they probably appeared to others, that a strong partisanship,
unless it were against an immediate oppression, had become an insincerity for
him. His plenteous, flexible sympathy had ended by falling into one current with
that reflective analysis which tends to neutralise sympathy. Few men were able
to keep themselves clearer of vices than he; yet he hated vices mildly, being
used to think of them less in the abstract than as a part of mixed human natures
having an individual history, which it was the bent of his mind to trace with
understanding and pity. With the same innate balance he was fervidly democratic
in his feeling for the multitude, and yet, through his affections and
imagination, intensely conservative; voracious of speculations on government and
religion, yet loath 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. And yet his fear of falling into an unreasoning narrow hatred
made a check for him: he apologised for the heirs of privilege; he shrank with
dislike from the loser's bitterness and the denunciatory tone of the unaccepted
innovator. A too reflective and diffusive sympathy was in danger of paralysing
in him that