CHAPTER XXXIII.

"No man," says a Rabbi, by way of indisputable instance, "may turn the
bones of his father and mother into spoons"--sure that his hearers
felt the checks against that form of economy. The market for spoons
has never expanded enough for any one to say, "Why not?" and to argue
that human progress lies in such an application of material. The only
check to be alleged is a sentiment, which will coerce none who do not
hold that sentiments are the better part of the world's wealth.

Deronda meanwhile took to a less fashionable form of exercise than
riding in Rotten Row. He went often rambling in those parts of London
which are most inhabited by common Jews. He walked to the synagogues at
times of service, he looked 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 o