e 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
neutralize 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 loth 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 apologized
for the heirs of privilege; he shrank with dislike from the loser's
bitterness and the denunciatory tone of the unaccepted innovator. A too
ref