The Essays of "George Eliot" Part 12

In gay fatigues, this most undaunted chief, Patient of idleness beyond belief, Most charitably lends the town his face For ornament in every public place; As sure as cards he to th' a.s.sembly comes, And is the furniture of drawing-rooms: When Ombre calls, his hand and heart are free, And, joined to two, he fails not-to make three; Narcissus is the glory of his race; For who does nothing with a better grace?

To deck my list by nature were designed Such shining expletives of human kind, Who want, while through blank life they dream along, Sense to be right and pa.s.sion to be wrong."

It is but seldom that we find a touch of that easy slyness which gives an additional zest to surprise; but here is an instance:

"See t.i.tyrus, with merriment possest, Is burst with laughter ere he hears the jest, What need he stay, for when the joke is o'er, His _teeth_ will be no whiter than before."

Like Pope, whom he imitated, he sets out with a psychological mistake as the basis of his satire, attributing all forms of folly to one pa.s.sion-the love of fame, or vanity-a much grosser mistake, indeed, than Pope's, exaggeration of the extent to which the "ruling pa.s.sion"

determines conduct in the individual. Not that Young is consistent in his mistake. He sometimes implies no more than what is the truth-that the love of fame is the cause, not of all follies, but of many.

Young's satires on women are superior to Pope's, which is only saying that they are superior to Pope's greatest failure. We can more frequently pick out a couplet as successful than an entire sketch. Of the too emphatic "Syrena" he says:

"Her judgment just, her sentence is too strong; Because she's right, she's ever in the wrong."

Of the diplomatic "Julia:"

"For her own breakfast she'll project a scheme, Nor take her tea without a stratagem."

Of "Lyce," the old painted coquette:

"In vain the c.o.c.k has summoned sprites away; She walks at noon and blasts the bloom of day."

Of the nymph, who, "gratis, clears religious mysteries:"

"'Tis hard, too, she who makes no use but chat Of her religion, should be barr'd in that."

The description of the literary _belle_, "Daphne," well prefaces that of "Stella," admired by Johnson:

"With legs toss'd high, on her sophee she sits, Vouchsafing audience to contending wits: Of each performance she's the final test; One act read o'er, she prophecies the rest; And then, p.r.o.nouncing with decisive air, Fully convinces all the town-_she's fair_.

Had lonely Daphne Hecatessa's face, How would her elegance of taste decrease!

Some ladies' judgment in their features lies, And all their genius sparkles in their eyes.

But hold, she cries, lampooner! have a care; Must I want common sense because I'm fair?

O no; see Stella: her eyes shine as bright As if her tongue was never in the right; And yet what real learning, judgment, fire!

She seems inspir'd, and can herself inspire.

How then (if malice ruled not all the fair) _Could Daphne publish_, _and could she forbear_?"

After all, when we have gone through Young's seven Satires, we seem to have made but an indifferent meal. They are a sort of frica.s.see, with some little solid meat in them, and yet the flavor is not always piquant.

It is curious to find him, when he pauses a moment from his satiric sketching, recurring to his old plat.i.tudes:

"Can gold calm pa.s.sion, or make reason shine?

Can we dig peace or wisdom from the mine?

Wisdom to gold prefer;"-

plat.i.tudes which he seems inevitably to fall into, for the same reason that some men are constantly a.s.serting their contempt for criticism-because he felt the opposite so keenly.

The outburst of genius in the earlier books of the "Night Thoughts" is the more remarkable, that in the interval between them and the Satires he had produced nothing but his Pindaric odes, in which he fell far below the level of his previous works. Two sources of this sudden strength were the freedom of blank verse and the presence of a genuine emotion.

Most persons, in speaking of the "Night Thoughts," have in their minds only the two or three first Nights, the majority of readers rarely getting beyond these, unless, as Wilson says, they "have but few books, are poor, and live in the country." And in these earlier Nights there is enough genuine sublimity and genuine sadness to bribe us into too favorable a judgment of them as a whole. Young had only a very few things to say or sing-such as that life is vain, that death is imminent, that man is immortal, that virtue is wisdom, that friendship is sweet, and that the source of virtue is the contemplation of death and immortality-and even in his two first Nights he had said almost all he had to say in his finest manner. Through these first outpourings of "complaint" we feel that the poet is really sad, that the bird is singing over a rifled nest; and we bear with his morbid picture of the world and of life, as the Job-like lament of a man whom "the hand of G.o.d hath touched." Death has carried away his best-beloved, and that "silent land" whither they are gone has more reality for the desolate one than this world which is empty of their love:

"This is the desert, this the solitude; How populous, how vital is the grave!"

Joy died with the loved one:

"The disenchanted earth Lost all her l.u.s.tre. Where her glitt'ring towers?

Her golden mountains, where? All darkened down To naked waste; a dreary vale of tears: _The great magician's dead_!"

Under the pang of parting, it seems to the bereaved man as if love were only a nerve to suffer with, and he sickens at the thought of every joy of which he must one day say-"_it __was_." In its unreasoning anguish, the soul rushes to the idea of perpetuity as the one element of bliss:

"O ye blest scenes of permanent delight!- Could ye, so rich in rapture, fear an end,- That ghastly thought would drink up all your joy, And quite unparadise the realms of light."

In a man under the immediate pressure of a great sorrow, we tolerate morbid exaggerations; we are prepared to see him turn away a weary eye from sunlight and flowers and sweet human faces, as if this rich and glorious life had no significance but as a preliminary of death; we do not criticise his views, we compa.s.sionate his feelings. And so it is with Young in these earlier Nights. There is already some artificiality even in his grief, and feeling often slides into rhetoric, but through it all we are thrilled with the unmistakable cry of pain, which makes us tolerant of egoism and hyperbole:

"In every varied posture, place, and hour, How widow'd every thought of every joy!

Thought, busy thought! too busy for my peace!

Through the dark postern of time long elapsed Led softly, by the stillness of the night,- Led like a murderer (and such it proves!) Strays (wretched rover!) o'er the pleasing past,- In quest of wretchedness, perversely strays; And finds all desert now; and meets the ghosts Of my departed joys."

But when he becomes didactic, rather than complaining-when he ceases to sing his sorrows, and begins to insist on his opinions-when that distaste for life which we pity as a transient feeling is thrust upon us as a theory, we become perfectly cool and critical, and are not in the least inclined to be indulgent to false views and selfish sentiments.

Seeing that we are about to be severe on Young's failings and failures, we ought, if a reviewer's s.p.a.ce were elastic, to dwell also on his merits-on the startling vigor of his imagery-on the occasional grandeur of his thought-on the piquant force of that grave satire into which his meditations continually run. But, since our "limits" are rigorous, we must content ourselves with the less agreeable half of the critic's duty; and we may the rather do so, because it would be difficult to say anything new of Young, in the way of admiration, while we think there are many salutary lessons remaining to be drawn from his faults.

One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his _radical insincerity as a poetic artist_. This, added to the thin and artificial texture of his wit, is the true explanation of the paradox-that a poet who is often inopportunely witty has the opposite vice of bombastic absurdity. The source of all grandiloquence is the want of taking for a criterion the true qualities of the object described or the emotion expressed. The grandiloquent man is never bent on saying what he feels or what he sees, but on producing a certain effect on his audience; hence he may float away into utter inanity without meeting any criterion to arrest him. Here lies the distinction between grandiloquence and genuine fancy or bold imaginativeness. The fantastic or the boldly imaginative poet may be as sincere as the most realistic: he is true to his own sensibilities or inward vision, and in his wildest flights he never breaks loose from his criterion-the truth of his own mental state. Now, this disruption of language from genuine thought and feeling is what we are constantly detecting in Young; and his insincerity is the more likely to betray him into absurdity, because he habitually treats of abstractions, and not of concrete objects or specific emotions. He descants perpetually on virtue, religion, "the good man," life, death, immortality, eternity-subjects which are apt to give a fact.i.tious grandeur to empty wordiness. When a poet floats in the empyrean, and only takes a bird's-eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth for proximity to heaven. Thus:

"His hand the good man fixes on the skies, And bids earth roll, nor feels her idle whirl,"

may, perhaps, pa.s.s for sublime with some readers. But pause a moment to realize the image, and the monstrous absurdity of a man's grasping the skies, and hanging habitually suspended there, while he contemptuously bids the earth roll, warns you that no genuine feeling could have suggested so unnatural a conception. Again,

"See the man immortal: him, I mean, Who lives as such; whose heart, full bent on Heaven, Leans all that way, his bias to the stars."

This is worse than the previous example: for you can at least form some imperfect conception of a man hanging from the skies, though the position strikes you as uncomfortable and of no particular use; but you are utterly unable to imagine how his heart can lean toward the stars.

Examples of such vicious imagery, resulting from insincerity, may be found, perhaps, in almost every page of the "Night Thoughts." But simple a.s.sertions or aspirations, undisguised by imagery, are often equally false. No writer whose rhetoric was checked by the slightest truthful intentions could have said-

"An eye of awe and wonder let me roll, And roll forever."

Abstracting the more poetical a.s.sociations with the eye, this is hardly less absurd than if he had wished to stand forever with his mouth open.

Again:

"Far beneath A soul immortal is a mortal joy."

Happily for human nature, we are sure no man really believes that. Which of us has the impiety not to feel that our souls are only too narrow for the joy of looking into the trusting eyes of our children, of reposing on the love of a husband or a wife-nay, of listening to the divine voice of music, or watching the calm brightness of autumnal afternoons? But Young could utter this falsity without detecting it, because, when he spoke of "mortal joys," he rarely had in his mind any object to which he could attach sacredness. He was thinking of bishoprics, and benefices, of smiling monarchs, patronizing prime ministers, and a "much indebted muse." Of anything between these and eternal bliss he was but rarely and moderately conscious. Often, indeed, he sinks very much below even the bishopric, and seems to have no notion of earthly pleasure but such as breathes gaslight and the fumes of wine. His picture of life is precisely such as you would expect from a man who has risen from his bed at two o'clock in the afternoon with a headache and a dim remembrance that he has added to his "debts of honor:"

"What wretched repet.i.tion cloys us here!

What periodic potions for the sick, Distemper'd bodies, and distemper'd minds?"

And then he flies off to his usual ant.i.thesis:

"In an eternity what scenes shall strike!

Adventures thicken, novelties surprise!"

"Earth" means lords and levees, d.u.c.h.esses and Dalilahs, South-Sea dreams, and illegal percentage; and the only things distinctly preferable to these are eternity and the stars. Deprive Young of this ant.i.thesis, and more than half his eloquence would be shrivelled up. Place him on a breezy common, where the furze is in its golden bloom, where children are playing, and horses are standing in the sunshine with fondling necks, and he would have nothing to say. Here are neither depths of guilt nor heights of glory; and we doubt whether in such a scene he would be able to pay his usual compliment to the Creator: