The Essays of "George Eliot" Part 11

"My ancient gentleman here is still full of trouble, which moves my concern, though it moves only the secret laughter of many, and some untoward surmises in disfavor of him and his household. The loss of a very large sum of money (about 200_l._) is talked of; whereof this vill and neighborhood is full. Some disbelieve; others says, '_It is no wonder_, _where about eighteen or more servants are sometimes taken and dismissed in the course of a year_.' The gentleman himself is allowed by all to be far more harmless and easy in his family than some one else who hath too much the lead in it. This, among others, was one reason for my late motion to quit."

No other mention of Young's affairs occurs until April 2d, 1765, when he says that Dr. Young is very ill, attended by two physicians.

"Having mentioned this young gentleman (Dr. Young's son), I would acquaint you next, that he came hither this morning, having been sent for, as I am told, by the direction of Mrs. Hallows. Indeed, she intimated to me as much herself. And if this be so, I must say, that it is one of the most prudent Acts she ever did, or could have done in such a case as this; as it may prove a means of preventing much confusion after the death of the Doctor. I have had some little discourse with the son: he seems much affected, and I believe really is so. He earnestly wishes his father might be pleased to ask after him; for you must know he has not yet done this, nor is, in my opinion, like to do it. And it has been said farther, that upon a late application made to him on the behalf of his son, he desired that no more might be said to him about it. How true this may be I cannot as yet be certain; all I shall say is, it seems not improbable . . . I heartily wish the ancient man's heart may prove tender toward his son; _though_, _knowing him so well_, _I can scarce hope to hear such desirable news_."

Eleven days later he writes:

"I have now the pleasure to acquaint you, that the late Dr. Young, though he had for many years kept his son at a distance from him, yet has now at last left him all his possessions, after the payment of certain legacies; so that the young gentleman (who bears a fair character, and behaves well, as far as I can hear or see) will, I hope, soon enjoy and make a prudent use of a handsome fortune. The father, on his deathbed, and since my return from London, was applied to in the tenderest manner, by one of his physicians, and by another person, to admit the son into his presence, to make submission, intreat forgiveness, and obtain his blessing. As to an interview with his son, he intimated that he chose to decline it, as his spirits were then low and his nerves weak. With regard to the next particular, he said, '_I heartily forgive him_;' and upon 'mention of this last, he gently lifted up his hand, and letting it gently fall, p.r.o.nounced these words, '_G.o.d bless him_!' . . . I know it will give you pleasure to be farther informed that he was pleased to make respectful mention of me in his will; expressing his satisfaction in my care of his parish, _bequeathing to me a handsome legacy_, and appointing me to be one of his executors."

So far Mr. Jones, in his confidential correspondence with a "friend, who may be trusted." In a letter communicated apparently by him to the _Gentleman's Magazine_, seven years later, namely, in 1782, on the appearance of Croft's biography of Young, we find him speaking of "the ancient gentleman" in a tone of reverential eulogy, quite at variance with the free comments we have just quoted. But the Rev. John Jones was probably of opinion, with Mrs. Montagu, whose contemporary and retrospective letters are also set in a different key, that "the interests of religion were connected with the character of a man so distinguished for piety as Dr. Young." At all events, a subsequent quasi-official statement weighs nothing as evidence against contemporary, spontaneous, and confidential hints.

To Mrs. Hallows, Young left a legacy of 1000, with the request that she would destroy all his ma.n.u.scripts. This final request, from some unknown cause, was not complied with, and among the papers he left behind him was the following letter from Archbishop Secker, which probably marks the date of his latest effort after preferment:

"DEANERY OF ST. PAUL'S, July 8, 1758.

"Good DR. YOUNG: I have long wondered that more suitable notice of your great merit hath not been taken by persons in power. But how to remedy the omission I see not. No encouragement hath ever been given me to mention things of this nature to his Majesty. And therefore, in all likelihood, the only consequence of doing it would be weakening the little influence which else I may possibly have on some other occasions. _Your fortune and your reputation set you above the need of advancement_; _and your sentiments above that concern for it_, _on your own account_, which, on that of the public, is sincerely felt by

"Your loving Brother,

"THO. CANT."

The loving brother's irony is severe!

Perhaps the least questionable testimony to the better side of Young's character is that of Bishop Hildesley, who, as the vicar of a parish near Welwyn, had been Young's neighbor for upward of twenty years. The affection of the clergy for each other, we have observed, is, like that of the fair s.e.x, not at all of a blind and infatuated kind; and we may therefore the rather believe them when they give each other any extra-official praise. Bishop Hildesley, then writing of Young to Richardson, says:

"The impertinence of my frequent visits to him was amply rewarded; forasmuch as, I can truly say, he never received me but with agreeable open complacency; and I never left him but with profitable pleasure and improvement. He was one or other, the most modest, the most patient of contradiction, and the most informing and entertaining I ever conversed with-at least, of any man who had so just pretensions to pertinacity and reserve."

Mr. Langton, however, who was also a frequent visitor of Young's, informed Boswell-

"That there was an air of benevolence in his manner; but that he could obtain from him less information than he had hoped to receive from one who had lived so much in intercourse with the brightest men of what had been called the Augustan age of England; and that he showed a degree of eager curiosity concerning the common occurrences that were then pa.s.sing, which appeared somewhat remarkable in a man of such intellectual stores, of such an advanced age, and who had retired from life with declared disappointment in his expectations."

The same substance, we know, will exhibit different qualities under different tests; and, after all, imperfect reports of individual impressions, whether immediate or traditional, are a very frail basis on which to build our opinion of a man. One's character may be very indifferently mirrored in the mind of the most intimate neighbor; it all depends on the quality of that gentleman's reflecting surface.

But, discarding any inferences from such uncertain evidence, the outline of Young's character is too distinctly traceable in the well-attested facts of his life, and yet more in the self-betrayal that runs through all his works, for us to fear that our general estimate of him may be false. For, while no poet seems less easy and spontaneous than Young, no poet discloses himself more completely. Men's minds have no hiding-place out of themselves-their affectations do but betray another phase of their nature. And if, in the present view of Young, we seem to be more intent on laying bare unfavorable facts than on shrouding them in "charitable speeches," it is not because we have any irreverential pleasure in turning men's characters "the seamy side without," but because we see no great advantage in considering a man as he was _not_. Young's biographers and critics have usually set out from the position that he was a great religious teacher, and that his poetry is morally sublime; and they have toned down his failings into harmony with their conception of the divine and the poet. For our own part, we set out from precisely the opposite conviction-namely, that the religious and moral spirit of Young's poetry is low and false, and we think it of some importance to show that the "Night Thoughts" are the reflex of the mind in which the higher human sympathies were inactive. This judgment is entirely opposed to our youthful predilections and enthusiasm. The sweet garden-breath of early enjoyment lingers about many a page of the "Night Thoughts," and even of the "Last Day," giving an extrinsic charm to pa.s.sages of stilted rhetoric and false sentiment; but the sober and repeated reading of maturer years has convinced us that it would hardly be possible to find a more typical instance than Young's poetry, of the mistake which subst.i.tutes interested obedience for sympathetic emotion, and baptizes egoism as religion.

Pope said of Young, that he had "much of a sublime genius without common-sense." The deficiency Pope meant to indicate was, we imagine, moral rather than intellectual: it was the want of that fine sense of what is fitting in speech and action, which is often eminently possessed by men and women whose intellect is of a very common order, but who have the sincerity and dignity which can never coexist with the selfish preoccupations of vanity or interest. This was the "common-sense" in which Young was conspicuously deficient; and it was partly owing to this deficiency that his genius, waiting to be determined by the highest prize, fluttered uncertainly from effort to effort, until, when he was more than sixty, it suddenly spread its broad wing, and soared so as to arrest the gaze of other generations besides his own. For he had no versatility of faculty to mislead him. The "Night Thoughts" only differ from his previous works in the degree and not in the kind of power they manifest. Whether he writes prose or poetry, rhyme or blank verse, dramas, satires, odes, or meditations, we see everywhere the same Young-the same narrow circle of thoughts, the same love of abstractions, the same telescopic view of human things, the same appetency toward ant.i.thetic apothegm and rhapsodic climax. The pa.s.sages that arrest us in his tragedies are those in which he antic.i.p.ates some fine pa.s.sage in the "Night Thoughts," and where his characters are only transparent shadows through which we see the bewigged _embonpoint_ of the didactic poet, excogitating epigrams or ecstatic soliloquies by the light of a candle fixed in a skull. Thus, in "The Revenge," "Alonzo," in the conflict of jealousy and love that at once urges and forbids him to murder his wife, says:

"This vast and solid earth, that blazing sun, Those skies, through which it rolls, must all have end.

What then is man? The smallest part of nothing.

Day buries day; month, month; and year the year!

Our life is but a chain of many deaths.

Can then Death's self be feared? Our life much rather: _Life is the desert_, _life the solitude_; Death joins us to the great majority; 'Tis to be born to Plato and to Caesar; 'Tis to be great forever; 'Tis pleasure, 'tis ambition, then, to die."

His prose writings all read like the "Night Thoughts," either diluted into prose or not yet crystallized into poetry. For example, in his "Thoughts for Age," he says:

"Though we stand on its awful brink, such our leaden bias to the world, we turn our faces the wrong way; we are still looking on our old acquaintance, _Time_; though now so wasted and reduced, that we can see little more of him than his wings and his scythe: our age enlarges his wings to our imagination; and our fear of death, his scythe; as Time himself grows less. His consumption is deep; his annihilation is at hand."

This is a dilution of the magnificent image-

"Time in advance behind him hides his wings, And seems to creep decrepit with his age.

Behold him when past by! What then is seen But his proud pinions, swifter than the winds?"

Again:

"A requesting Omnipotence? What can stun and confound thy reason more? What more can ravish and exalt thy heart? It cannot but ravish and exalt; it cannot but gloriously disturb and perplex thee, to take in all _that_ suggests. Thou child of the dust! Thou speck of misery and sin! How abject thy weakness! how great is thy power!

Thou crawler on earth, and possible (I was about to say) controller of the skies! Weigh, and weigh well, the wondrous truths I have in view: which cannot be weighed too much; which the more they are weighed, amaze the more; which to have supposed, before they were revealed, would have been as great madness, and to have presumed on as great sin, as it is now madness and sin not to believe."

Even in his Pindaric odes, in which he made the most violent efforts against nature, he is still neither more nor less than the Young of the "Last Day," emptied and swept of his genius, and possessed by seven demons of fustian and bad rhyme. Even here his "Ercles' Vein" alternates with his moral plat.i.tudes, and we have the perpetual text of the "Night Thoughts:"

"Gold pleasure buys; But pleasure dies, For soon the gross fruition cloys; Though raptures court, The sense is short; But virtue kindles living joys;-

"Joys felt alone!

Joys asked of none!

Which Time's and fortune's arrows miss: Joys that subsist, Though fates resist, An unprecarious, endless bliss!

"Unhappy they!

And falsely gay!

Who bask forever in success; A constant feast Quite palls the taste, _And long enjoyment is distress_."

In the "Last Day," again, which is the earliest thing he wrote, we have an antic.i.p.ation of all his greatest faults and merits. Conspicuous among the faults is that attempt to exalt our conceptions of Deity by vulgar images and comparisons, which is so offensive in the later "Night Thoughts." In a burst of prayer and homage to G.o.d, called forth by the contemplation of Christ coming to judgment, he asks, Who brings the change of the seasons? and answers:

"Not the great Ottoman, or Greater Czar; Not Europe's arbitress of peace and war!"

Conceive the soul in its most solemn moments, a.s.suring G.o.d that it doesn't place his power below that of Louis Napoleon or Queen Victoria!

But in the midst of uneasy rhymes, inappropriate imagery, vaulting sublimity that o'erleaps itself, and vulgar emotions, we have in this poem an occasional flash of genius, a touch of simple grandeur, which promises as much as Young ever achieved. Describing the on-coming of the dissolution of all things, he says:

"No sun in radiant glory shines on high; _No light but from the terrors of the sky_."

And again, speaking of great armies:

"Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn Rous'd the broad front, and call'd the battle on."

And this wail of the lost souls is fine:

"And this for sin?

Could I offend if I had never been?

But still increas'd the senseless, happy ma.s.s, Flow'd in the stream, _or shiver'd in the gra.s.s_?

Father of mercies! Why from silent earth Didst thou awake and curse me into birth?

Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night, And make a thankless present of thy light?

Push into being a reverse of Thee, And _animate a clod with misery_?"

But it is seldom in Young's rhymed poems that the effect of a felicitous thought or image is not counteracted by our sense of the constraint he suffered from the necessities of rhyme-that "Gothic demon," as he afterward called it, "which, modern poetry tasting, became mortal." In relation to his own power, no one will question the truth of this dictum, that "blank verse is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse reclaimed, reinthroned in the true language of the G.o.ds; who never thundered nor suffered their Homer to thunder in rhyme." His want of mastery in rhyme is especially a drawback on the effects of his Satires; for epigrams and witticisms are peculiarly susceptible to the intrusion of a superfluous word, or to an inversion which implies constraint. Here, even more than elsewhere, the art that conceals art is an absolute requisite, and to have a witticism presented to us in limping or c.u.mbrous rhythm is as counteractive to any electrifying effect as to see the tentative grimaces by which a comedian prepares a grotesque countenance. We discern the process, instead of being startled by the result.

This is one reason why the Satires, read _seriatim_, have a flatness to us, which, when we afterward read picked pa.s.sages, we are inclined to disbelieve in, and to attribute to some deficiency in our own mood. But there are deeper reasons for that dissatisfaction. Young is not a satirist of a high order. His satire has neither the terrible vigor, the lacerating energy of genuine indignation, nor the humor which owns loving fellowship with the poor human nature it laughs at; nor yet the personal bitterness which, as in Pope's characters of Sporus and Atticus, insures those living touches by virtue of which the individual and particular in Art becomes the universal and immortal. Young could never describe a real, complex human being; but what he _could_ do with eminent success was to describe, with neat and finished point, obvious _types_, of manners rather than of character-to write cold and clever epigrams on personified vices and absurdities. There is no more emotion in his satire than if he were turning witty verses on a waxen image of Cupid or a lady's glove. He has none of these felicitious epithets, none of those pregnant lines, by which Pope's Satires have enriched the ordinary speech of educated men. Young's wit will be found in almost every instance to consist in that ant.i.thetic combination of ideas which, of all the forms of wit, is most within reach of a clever effort. In his gravest arguments, as well as in his lightest satire, one might imagine that he had set himself to work out the problem, how much ant.i.thesis might be got out of a given subject. And there he completely succeeds. His neatest portraits are all wrought on this plan. "Narcissus," for example, who

"Omits no duty; nor can Envy say He miss'd, these many years, the Church or Play: He makes no noise in Parliament, 'tis true; But pays his debts, and visit when 'tis due; His character and gloves are ever clean, And then he can out-bow the bowing Dean; A smile eternal on his lip he wears, Which equally the wise and worthless shares.