The Essays of "George Eliot" Part 13

"Where'er I torn, what claim on all applause!"

It is true that he sometimes-not often-speaks of virtue as capable of sweetening life, as well as of taking the sting from death and winning heaven; and, lest we should be guilty of any unfairness to him, we will quote the two pa.s.sages which convey this sentiment the most explicitly.

In the one he gives "Lorenzo" this excellent recipe for obtaining cheerfulness:

"Go, fix some weighty truth; Chain down some pa.s.sion; do some generous good; Teach Ignorance to see, or Grief to smile; Correct thy friend; befriend thy greatest foe; Or, with warm heart, and confidence divine, Spring up, and lay strong hold on Him who made thee."

The other pa.s.sage is vague, but beautiful, and its music has murmured in our minds for many years:

"The cuckoo seasons sing The same dull note to such as nothing prize But what those seasons from the teeming earth To doting sense indulge. But n.o.bler minds, Which relish fruit unripened by the sun, Make their days various; various as the dyes On the dove's neck, which wanton in his rays.

On minds of dove-like innocence possess'd, On lighten'd minds that bask in Virtue's beams, Nothing hangs tedious, nothing old revolves In that for which they long, for which they live.

Their glorious efforts, winged with heavenly hopes, Each rising morning sees still higher rise; Each bounteous dawn its novelty presents To worth maturing, new strength, l.u.s.tre, fame; While Nature's circle, like a chariot wheel, Boiling beneath their elevated aims, Makes their fair prospect fairer every hour; Advancing virtue in a line to bliss."

Even here, where he is in his most amiable mood, you see at what a telescopic distance he stands from mother Earth and simple human joys-"Nature's circle rolls beneath." Indeed, we remember no mind in poetic literature that seems to have absorbed less of the beauty and the healthy breath of the common landscape than Young's. His images, often grand and finely presented-witness that sublimely sudden leap of thought,

"Embryos we must be till we burst the sh.e.l.l, _Yon ambient azure sh.e.l.l_, and spring to life"-

lie almost entirely within that circle of observation which would be familiar to a man who lived in town, hung about the theatres, read the newspaper, and went home often by moon and starlight.

There is no natural object nearer than the moon that seems to have any strong attraction for him, and even to the moon he chiefly appeals for patronage, and "pays his court" to her. It is reckoned among the many deficiencies of "Lorenzo" that he "never asked the moon one question"-an omission which Young thinks eminently unbecoming a rational being. He describes nothing so well as a comet, and is tempted to linger with fond detail over nothing more familiar than the day of judgment and an imaginary journey among the stars. Once on Saturn's ring he feels at home, and his language becomes quite easy:

"What behold I now?

A wilderness of wonders burning round, Where larger suns inhabit higher spheres; Perhaps _the villas of descending G.o.ds_!"

It is like a sudden relief from a strained posture when, in the "Night Thoughts," we come on any allusion that carries us to the lanes, woods, or fields. Such allusions are amazingly rare, and we could almost count them on a single hand. That we may do him no injustice, we will quote the three best:

"Like _blossom'd trees o'erturned by vernal storm_, Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay.

"In the same brook none ever bathed him twice: To the same life none ever twice awoke.

We call the brook the same-the same we think Our life, though still more rapid in its flow; Nor mark the much irrevocably lapsed And mingled with the sea."

"The crown of manhood is a winter joy; An evergreen that stands the northern blast, And blossoms in the rigor of our fate."

The adherence to abstractions, or to the personification of abstractions, is closely allied in Young to the _want of genuine emotion_. He sees virtue sitting on a mount serene, far above the mists and storms of earth; he sees Religion coming down from the skies, with this world in her left hand and the other world in her right; but we never find him dwelling on virtue or religion as it really exists-in the emotions of a man dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his fireside of an evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little daughter, in courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the internal triumph of justice and pity over personal resentment, in all the sublime self-renunciation and sweet charities which are found in the details of ordinary life.

Now, emotion links itself with particulars, and only in a faint and secondary manner with abstractions. An orator may discourse very eloquently on injustice in general, and leave his audience cold; but let him state a special case of oppression, and every heart will throb. The most untheoretic persons are aware of this relation between true emotion and particular facts, as opposed to general terms, and implicitly recognize it in the repulsion they feel toward any one who professes strong feeling about abstractions-in the interjectional "Humbug!" which immediately rises to their lips. Wherever abstractions appear to excite strong emotion, this occurs in men of active intellect and imagination, in whom the abstract term rapidly and vividly calls up the particulars it represents, these particulars being the true source of the emotion; and such men, if they wished to express their feeling, would be infallibly prompted to the presentation of details. Strong emotion can no more be directed to generalities apart from particulars, than skill in figures can be directed to arithmetic apart from numbers. Generalities are the refuge at once of deficient intellectual activity and deficient feeling.

If we except the pa.s.sages in "Philander," "Narcissa," and "Lucia," there is hardly a trace of human sympathy, of self-forgetfulness in the joy or sorrow of a fellow-being, throughout this long poem, which professes to treat the various phases of man's destiny. And even in the "Narcissa"

Night, Young repels us by the low moral tone of his exaggerated lament.

This married step-daughter died at Lyons, and, being a Protestant, was denied burial, so that her friends had to bury her in secret-one of the many miserable results of superst.i.tion, but not a fact to throw an educated, still less a Christian man, into a fury of hatred and vengeance, in contemplating it after the lapse of five years. Young, however, takes great pains to simulate a bad feeling:

"Of grief And indignation rival bursts I pour'd, Half execration mingled with my pray'r; Kindled at man, while I his G.o.d adored; Sore grudg'd the savage land her sacred dust; Stamp'd the cursed soil; _and with humanity_ (_Denied Narcissa_) _wish'd them all a grave_."

The odiously bad taste of this last clause makes us hope that it is simply a plat.i.tude, and not intended as witticism, until he removes the possibility of this favorable doubt by immediately asking, "Flows my resentment into guilt?"

When, by an afterthought, he attempts something like sympathy, he only betrays more clearly his want of it. Thus, in the first Night, when he turns from his private griefs to depict earth as a hideous abode of misery for all mankind, and asks,

"What then am I, who sorrow for myself?"

he falls at once into calculating the benefit of sorrowing for others:

"More generous sorrow, while it sinks, exalts; _And conscious virtue mitigates the pang_.

Nor virtue, more than prudence, bids me give Swollen thought a second channel."

This remarkable negation of sympathy is in perfect consistency with Young's theory of ethics:

"Virtue is a crime, A crime of reason, if it costs us pain Unpaid."

If there is no immortality for man-

"Sense! take the rein; blind Pa.s.sion, drive us on; And Ignorance! befriend us on our way. . .

Yes; give the pulse full empire; live the Brute, Since as the brute we die. The sum of man, Of G.o.dlike man, to revel and to rot."

"If this life's gain invites him to the deed, Why not his country sold, his father slain?"

"Ambition, avarice, by the wise disdain'd, Is perfect wisdom, while mankind are fools, And think a turf or tombstone covers all."

"Die for thy country, thou romantic fool!

Seize, seize the plank thyself, and let her sink."

"As in the dying parent dies the child, Virtue with Immortality expires.

Who tells me he denies his soul immortal, _Whate'er his boost_, _has told me he's a knave_.

_His duty 'tis to love himself alone_.

_Nor care though mankind perish if he smiles_."

We can imagine the man who "denies his soul immortal," replying, "It is quite possible that _you_ would be a knave, and love yourself alone, if it were not for your belief in immortality; but you are not to force upon me what would result from your own utter want of moral emotion. I am just and honest, not because I expect to live in another world, but because, having felt the pain of injustice and dishonesty toward myself, I have a fellow-feeling with other men, who would suffer the same pain if I were unjust or dishonest toward them. Why should I give my neighbor short weight in this world, because there is not another world in which I should have nothing to weigh out to him? I am honest, because I don't like to inflict evil on others in this life, not because I'm afraid of evil to myself in another. The fact is, I do _not_ love myself alone, whatever logical necessity there may be for that in your mind. I have a tender love for my wife, and children, and friends, and through that love I sympathize with like affections in other men. It is a pang to me to witness the sufferings of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffering the more acutely because he is _mortal_-because his life is so short, and I would have it, if possible, filled with happiness and not misery.

Through my union and fellowship with the men and women I _have_ seen, I feel a like, though a fainter, sympathy with those I have _not_ seen; and I am able so to live in imagination with the generations to come, that their good is not alien to me, and is a stimulus to me to labor for ends which may not benefit myself, but will benefit them. It is possible that you may prefer to 'live the brute,' to sell your country, or to slay your father, if you were not afraid of some disagreeable consequences from the criminal laws of another world; but even if I could conceive no motive but my own worldly interest or the gratification of my animal desire, I have not observed that beastliness, treachery, and parricide are the direct way to happiness and comfort on earth. And I should say, that if you feel no motive to common morality but your fear of a criminal bar in heaven, you are decidedly a man for the police on earth to keep their eye upon, since it is matter of world-old experience that fear of distant consequences is a very insufficient barrier against the rush of immediate desire. Fear of consequences is only one form of egoism, which will hardly stand against half a dozen other forms of egoism bearing down upon it. And in opposition to your theory that a belief in immortality is the only source of virtue, I maintain that, so far as moral action is dependent on that belief, so far the emotion which prompts it is not truly moral-is still in the stage of egoism, and has not yet attained the higher development of sympathy. In proportion as a man would care less for the rights and welfare of his fellow, if he did not believe in a future life, in that proportion is he wanting in the genuine feelings of justice and benevolence; as the musician who would care less to play a sonata of Beethoven's finely in solitude than in public, where he was to be paid for it, is wanting in genuine enthusiasm for music."

Thus far might answer the man who "denies himself immortal;" and, allowing for that deficient recognition of the finer and more indirect influences exercised by the idea of immortality which might be expected from one who took up a dogmatic position on such a subject, we think he would have given a sufficient reply to Young and other theological advocates who, like him, pique themselves on the loftiness of their doctrine when they maintain that "virtue with immortality expires." We may admit, indeed, that if the better part of virtue consists, as Young appears to think, in contempt for mortal joys, in "meditation of our own decease," and in "applause" of G.o.d in the style of a congratulatory address to Her Majesty-all which has small relation to the well-being of mankind on this earth-the motive to it must be gathered from something that lies quite outside the sphere of human sympathy. But, for certain other elements of virtue, which are of more obvious importance to untheological minds-a delicate sense of our neighbor's rights, an active partic.i.p.ation in the joys and sorrows of our fellow-men, a magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffering for ourselves when it is the condition of good to others, in a word, the extension and intensification of our sympathetic nature-we think it of some importance to contend that they have no more direct relation to the belief in a future state than the interchange of gases in the lungs has to the plurality of worlds.

Nay, to us it is conceivable that in some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality-that we are here for a little while and then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones and to our many suffering fellow-men-lies nearer the fountains of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence. And surely it ought to be a welcome fact, if the thought of _mortality_, as well as of immortality, be favorable to virtue. Do writers of sermons and religious novels prefer that men should be vicious in order that there may be a more evident political and social necessity for printed sermons and clerical fictions? Because learned gentlemen are theological, are we to have no more simple honesty and good-will? We can imagine that the proprietors of a patent water-supply have a dread of common springs; but, for our own part, we think there cannot be too great a security against a lack of fresh water or of pure morality. To us it is a matter of unmixed rejoicing that this latter necessary of healthful life is independent of theological ink, and that its evolution is insured in the interaction of human souls as certainly as the evolution of science or of art, with which, indeed, it is but a twin ray, melting into them with undefinable limits.

To return to Young. We can often detect a man's deficiencies in what he admires more clearly than in what he contemns-in the sentiments he presents as laudable rather than in those he decries. And in Young's notion of what is lofty he casts a shadow by which we can measure him without further trouble. For example, in arguing for human immortality, he says:

"First, what is _true ambition_? The pursuit Of glory _nothing less than man can share_.

The Visible and Present are for brutes, A slender portion, and a narrow bound!

These Reason, with an energy divine, O'erleaps, and claims the Future and Unseen; The vast Unseen, the Future fathomless!