Brother Jacob | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email [email protected]

BROTHER JACOB
by George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans]
CHAPTER I

Among the many fatalities attending the bloom of young desire, that of
blindly taking to the confectionery line has not, perhaps, been
sufficiently considered. How is the son of a British yeoman, who has
been fed principally on salt pork and yeast dumplings, to know that
there is satiety for the human stomach even in a paradise of glass jars
full of sugared almonds and pink lozenges, and that the tedium of life
can reach a pitch where plum-buns at discretion cease to offer the
slightest excitement? Or how, at the tender age when a confectioner
seems to him a very prince whom all the world must envy--who
breakfasts on macaroons, dines on meringues, sups on twelfth-cake,
and fills up the intermediate hours with sugar-candy or
peppermint--how is he to foresee the day of sad wisdom, when he will
discern that the confectioner's calling is not socially influential, or
favourable to a soaring ambition? I have known a man who turned out
to have a metaphysical genius, incautiously, in the period of youthful
buoyancy, commence his career as a dancing- master; and you may
imagine the use that was made of this initial mistake by opponents who
felt themselves bound to warn the public against his doctrine of the
Inconceivable. He could not give up his dancing-lessons, because he
made his bread by them, and metaphysics would not have found him in
so much as salt to his bread. It was really the same with Mr. David
Faux and the confectionery business. His uncle, the butler at the great
house close by Brigford, had made a pet of him in his early boyhood,

and it was on a visit to this uncle that the confectioners' shops in that
brilliant town had, on a single day, fired his tender imagination. He
carried home the pleasing illusion that a confectioner must be at once
the happiest and the foremost of men, since the things he made were
not only the most beautiful to behold, but the very best eating, and such
as the Lord Mayor must always order largely for his private recreation;
so that when his father declared he must be put to a trade, David chose
his line without a moment's hesitation; and, with a rashness inspired by
a sweet tooth, wedded himself irrevocably to confectionery. Soon,
however, the tooth lost its relish and fell into blank indifference; and all
the while, his mind expanded, his ambition took new shapes, which
could hardly be satisfied within the sphere his youthful ardour had
chosen. But what was he to do? He was a young man of much mental
activity, and, above all, gifted with a spirit of contrivance; but then, his
faculties would not tell with great effect in any other