Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/255

Rh  was a Charisi. When I came out as a singer we made it Alcharisi. But there had been a branch of the family who called themselves Deronda, and when I wanted a name for you. . . I thought of Deronda.

In the "Life and Writings of Isaac Disraeli," by his son, we read: —


 * My grandfather, who became an English denizen in 1748, was an Italian descendant from one of those Hebrew families whom the Inquisition forced to emigrate from the Spanish peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century. . . . His ancestors had dropped their Gothic surname on their settlement in the terra firma, and grateful to the God of Jacob who had sustained them through unprecedented trials and guarded them through unheard-of perils, they assumed the name of, a name never borne before or since by any other family, in order that their race might be forever recognized.

The revolt of Leonora, Princess Halm-Eberstein's proud, passionate nature against the restrictions and humiliations of her race may be illustrated by a few sentences taken from her confession to Deronda, not, however, strictly observing the order in which they are uttered: —

I was to be what is called "the Jewish woman" [she exclaims]: I was to feel everything I did not feel, and believe everything I did not believe. . . . I was to love the long prayers in the ugly synagogue, and the howling, and the gabbling, and the dreadful fasts, and the tiresome feasts, and my father's endless discoursing about Our People, which was a thunder without meaning in my ears. I was to care forever about what Israel had been, and I did not care at all. I cared for the wide world and all that I could represent in it. . . . I wanted to live a large life, with freedom to do what every one else did.

Might not such a speech as that have come from Mrs. Disraeli, thus described by her grandson? —


 * My grandmother, the beautiful daughter of a family who had suffered much from persecution, had imbibed that dislike for her race which the vain are too apt to adopt when they find that they are born to public contempt. The indignant feeling that should be reserved for the persecutor in the mortification of their disturbed sensibility, is too often visited on the victim. And the cause of annoyance is recognized, not in the ignorant malevolence of the powerful, but in the conscientious conviction of the innocent sufferer.

And not only in this comprehensive resentment against the humiliations and restrictions of their religion and their race, but in the peculiar warping and distortion given by this embittered feeling to their personal character and their domestic relations, do the ideal and the real Jewess resemble each other. The very dislike to her son which in the fictitious character we are apt hastily to pronounce "unnatural" existed in the real one, and sprang from the same cause. The mother of Isaac Disraeli never pardoned her husband for his name.


 * So mortified by her social position was she [says her grandson] that she lived until eighty without indulging a tender expression; and did not recognize in her only offspring a being qualified to control or vanquish his impending fate. His existence only served to swell the aggregate of many humiliating particulars. It was not to her a source of joy, or sympathy, or solace. She foresaw for her child only a future of degradation.


 * I am not a loving woman [cries George Eliot's princess to her son]. It is a talent to love — I lacked it. Others have loved me, and I have acted their love. . . . Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives or else to be a monster. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel — or say they feel for fear of being thought unlike others. . . . I did not wish you to be born. I parted with you willingly. . . . When you reproach me in your heart for sending you away from me, you mean that I ought to say I felt about you as other women say they feel about their children. I did not feel that. I was glad to be freed from you. . . . The bondage I hated for myself I wanted to keep you from. What better could the most loving mother have done? I relieved you from the bondage of having been born a Jew.

Leonora Charisi, in George Eliot's novel, banishes her child finally and forever as she intends and believes in order to free him from the trammels of race and religion. Isaac Disraeli's parents sent the future scholar and author to Amsterdam for some years to rouse him from the dreamy abstraction during which he had produced a poem, and thereby filled both father and mother with terror as to his prospects in life.

When fate and the dread of approaching death prove too powerful even for the princess's strong self-will, and she at last summons her son to her presence in Genoa in order to reveal their relationship, he hurries to the interview in a mood of high-wrought emotion; love, wonder, perplexity, enthusiasm all aflame within him. The two interviews between mother and son are, on both sides, at the same abnormal pressure throughout — though some of Leonora's taunts are not unlike "the tart remark and the contemptuous comment" with which, says Mr. Disraeli,