The Essays of "George Eliot" Part 14

When the great soul buoys up to this high point, Leaving gross Nature's sediments below, Then, and then only, Adam's offspring quits The sage and hero of the fields and woods, a.s.serts his rank, and rises into man."

So, then, if it were certified that, as some benevolent minds have tried to infer, our dumb fellow-creatures would share a future existence, in which it is to be hoped we should neither beat, starve, nor maim them, our ambition for a future life would cease to be "lofty!" This is a notion of loftiness which may pair off with Dr. Whewell's celebrated observation, that Bentham's moral theory is low because it includes justice and mercy to brutes.

But, for a reflection of Young's moral personality on a colossal scale, we must turn to those pa.s.sages where his rhetoric is at its utmost stretch of inflation-where he addresses the Deity, discourses of the Divine operations, or describes the last judgment. As a compound of vulgar pomp, crawling adulation, and hard selfishness, presented under the guise of piety, there are few things in literature to surpa.s.s the Ninth Night, ent.i.tled "Consolation," especially in the pages where he describes the last judgment-a subject to which, with nave self-betrayal, he applies phraseology, favored by the exuberant penny-a-liner. Thus, when G.o.d descends, and the groans of h.e.l.l are opposed by "shouts of joy,"

much as cheers and groans contend at a public meeting where the resolutions are _not_ pa.s.sed unanimously, the poet completes his climax in this way:

"Hence, in one peal of loud, eternal praise, The _charmed spectators_ thunder their applause."

In the same taste he sings:

"Eternity, the various sentence past, a.s.signs the sever'd throng distinct abodes, _Sulphureous_ or _ambrosial_."

Exquisite delicacy of indication! He is too nice to be specific as to the interior of the "sulphureous" abode; but when once half the human race are shut up there, hear how he enjoys turning the key on them!

"What ensues?

The deed predominant, the deed of deeds!

Which makes a h.e.l.l of h.e.l.l, a _heaven of heaven_!

The G.o.ddess, with determin'd aspect turns Her adamantine key's enormous size Through Destiny's inextricable wards, _Deep driving every bolt_ on both their fates.

Then, from the crystal battlements of heaven, Down, down she hurls it through the dark profound, Ten thousand, thousand fathom; there to rust And ne'er unlock her resolution more.

The deep resounds; and h.e.l.l, through all her glooms, Returns, in groans, the melancholy roar."

This is one of the blessings for which Dr. Young thanks G.o.d "most:"

"For all I bless thee, most, for the severe; Her death-my own at hand-_the fiery gulf_, _That flaming bound of wrath omnipotent_!

_It thunders_;-_but it thunders to preserve_; . . . its wholesome dread Averts the dreaded pain; _its hideous groans_ _Join Heaven's sweet Hallelujahs in Thy praise_, Great Source of good alone! How kind in all!

In vengeance kind! Pain, Death, Gehenna, _save_" . . .

_i.e._, save _me_, Dr. Young, who, in return for that favor, promise to give my divine patron the monopoly of that exuberance in laudatory epithet, of which specimens may be seen at any moment in a large number of dedications and odes to kings, queens, prime ministers, and other persons of distinction. _That_, in Young's conception, is what G.o.d delights in. His crowning aim in the "drama" of the ages, is to vindicate his own renown. The G.o.d of the "Night Thoughts" is simply Young himself "writ large"-a didactic poet, who "lectures" mankind in the ant.i.thetic hyperbole of mortal and immortal joys, earth and the stars, h.e.l.l and heaven; and expects the tribute of inexhaustible "applause."

Young has no conception of religion as anything else than egoism turned heavenward; and he does not merely imply this, he insists on it.

Religion, he tells us, in argumentative pa.s.sages too long to quote, is "ambition, pleasure, and the love of gain," directed toward the joys of the future life instead of the present. And his ethics correspond to his religion. He vacillates, indeed, in his ethical theory, and shifts his position in order to suit his immediate purpose in argument; but he never changes his level so as to see beyond the horizon of mere selfishness.

Sometimes he insists, as we have seen, that the belief in a future life is the only basis of morality; but elsewhere he tells us-

"In self-applause is virtue's golden prize."

Virtue, with Young, must always squint-must never look straight toward the immediate object of its emotion and effort. Thus, if a man risks perishing in the snow himself rather than forsake a weaker comrade, he must either do this because his hopes and fears are directed to another world, or because he desires to applaud himself afterward! Young, if we may believe him, would despise the action as folly unless it had these motives. Let us hope he was not so bad as he pretended to be! The tides of the divine life in man move under the thickest ice of theory.

Another indication of Young's deficiency in moral, _i.e._, in sympathetic emotion, is his unintermitting habit of pedagogic moralizing. On its theoretic and perceptive side, morality touches science; on its emotional side, Art. Now, the products of Art are great in proportion as they result from that immediate prompting of innate power which we call Genius, and not from labored obedience to a theory or rule; and the presence of genius or innate prompting is directly opposed to the perpetual consciousness of a rule. The action of faculty is imperious, and excludes the reflection _why_ it should act. In the same way, in proportion as morality is emotional, _i.e._, has affinity with Art, it will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and action, and not as the recognition of a rule. Love does not say, "I ought to love"-it loves. Pity does not say, "It is right to be pitiful"-it pities.

Justice does not say, "I am bound to be just"-it feels justly. It is only where moral emotion is comparatively weak that the contemplation of a rule or theory habitually mingles with its action; and in accordance with this, we think experience, both in literature and life, has shown that the minds which are pre-eminently didactic-which insist on a "lesson," and despise everything that will not convey a moral, are deficient in sympathetic emotion. A certain poet is recorded to have said that he "wished everything of his burned that did not impress some moral; even in love-verses, it might be flung in by the way." What poet was it who took this medicinal view of poetry? Dr. Watts, or James Montgomery, or some other singer of spotless life and ardent piety? Not at all. It was _Waller_. A significant fact in relation to our position, that the predominant didactic tendency proceeds rather from the poet's perception that it is good for other men to be moral, than from any overflow of moral feeling in himself. A man who is perpetually thinking in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admonition, can have little energy left for simple emotion. And this is the case with Young. In his highest flights of contemplation and his most wailing soliloquies he interrupts himself to fling an admonitory parenthesis at "Lorenzo," or to hint that "folly's creed" is the reverse of his own.

Before his thoughts can flow, he must fix his eye on an imaginary miscreant, who gives unlimited scope for lecturing, and recriminates just enough to keep the spring of admonition and argument going to the extent of nine books. It is curious to see how this pedagogic habit of mind runs through Young's contemplation of Nature. As the tendency to see our own sadness reflected in the external world has been called by Mr. Ruskin the "pathetic fallacy," so we may call Young's disposition to see a rebuke or a warning in every natural object, the "pedagogic fallacy." To his mind, the heavens are "forever _scolding_ as they shine;" and the great function of the stars is to be a "lecture to mankind." The conception of the Deity as a didactic author is not merely an implicit point of view with him; he works it out in elaborate imagery, and at length makes it the occasion of his most extraordinary achievement in the "art of sinking," by exclaiming, _a propos_, we need hardly say, of the nocturnal heavens,

"Divine Instructor! Thy first volume this For man's perusal! all in CAPITALS!"

It is this pedagogic tendency, this sermonizing att.i.tude of Young's mind, which produces the wearisome monotony of his pauses. After the first two or three nights he is rarely singing, rarely pouring forth any continuous melody inspired by the spontaneous flow of thought or feeling. He is rather occupied with argumentative insistence, with hammering in the proofs of his propositions by disconnected verses, which he puts down at intervals. The perpetual recurrence of the pause at the end of the line throughout long pa.s.sages makes them as fatiguing to the ear as a monotonous chant, which consists of the endless repet.i.tion of one short musical phrase. For example:

"Past hours, If not by guilt, yet wound us by their flight, If folly bound our prospect by the grave, All feeling of futurity be numb'd, All G.o.dlike pa.s.sion for eternals quench'd, All relish of realities expired; Renounced all correspondence with the skies; Our freedom chain'd; quite wingless our desire; In sense dark-prison'd all that ought to soar; p.r.o.ne to the centre; crawling in the dust; Dismounted every great and glorious aim; Enthralled every faculty divine, Heart-buried in the rubbish of the world."

How different from the easy, graceful melody of Cowper's blank verse!

Indeed, it is hardly possible to criticise Young without being reminded at every step of the contrast presented to him by Cowper. And this contrast urges itself upon us the more from the fact that there is, to a certain extent, a parallelism between the "Night Thoughts" and the "Task." In both poems the author achieves his greatest in virtue of the new freedom conferred by blank verse; both poems are professionally didactic, and mingle much satire with their graver meditations; both poems are the productions of men whose estimate of this life was formed by the light of a belief in immortality, and who were intensely attached to Christianity. On some grounds we might have antic.i.p.ated a more morbid view of things from Cowper than from Young. Cowper's religion was dogmatically the more gloomy, for he was a Calvinist; while Young was a "low" Arminian, believing that Christ died for all, and that the only obstacle to any man's salvation lay in his will, which he could change if he chose. There was real and deep sadness involved in Cowper's personal lot; while Young, apart from his ambitious and greedy discontent, seems to have had no great sorrow.

Yet, see how a lovely, sympathetic nature manifests itself in spite of creed and circ.u.mstance! Where is the poem that surpa.s.ses the "Task" in the genuine love it breathes, at once toward inanimate and animate existence-in truthfulness of perception and sincerity of presentation-in the calm gladness that springs from a delight in objects for their own sake, without self-reference-in divine sympathy with the lowliest pleasures, with the most short-lived capacity for pain? Here is no railing at the earth's "melancholy map," but the happiest lingering over her simplest scenes with all the fond minuteness of attention that belongs to love; no pompous rhetoric about the inferiority of the "brutes," but a warm plea on their behalf against man's inconsiderateness and cruelty, and a sense of enlarged happiness from their companionship in enjoyment; no vague rant about human misery and human virtue, but that close and vivid presentation of particular sorrows and privations, of particular deeds and misdeeds, which is the direct road to the emotions.

How Cowper's exquisite mind falls with the mild warmth of morning sunlight on the commonest objects, at once disclosing every detail, and investing every detail with beauty! No object is too small to prompt his song-not the sooty film on the bars, or the spoutless teapot holding a bit of mignonette that serves to cheer the dingy town-lodging with a "hint that Nature lives;" and yet his song is never trivial, for he is alive to small objects, not because his mind is narrow, but because his glance is clear and his heart is large. Instead of trying to edify us by supercilious allusions to the "brutes" and the "stalls," he interests us in that tragedy of the hen-roost when the thief has wrenched the door,

"Where Chanticleer amidst his harem sleeps _In unsuspecting pomp_;"

in the patient cattle, that on the winter's morning

"Mourn in corners where the fence Screens them, and seem half petrified to sleep _In unrec.u.mbent sadness_;"

in the little squirrel, that, surprised by him in his woodland walk,

"At once, swift as a bird, Ascends the neighboring beech; there whisks his brush, And perks his ears, and stamps, and cries aloud, With all the prettiness of feign'd alarm And anger insignificantly fierce."

And then he pa.s.ses into reflection, not with curt apothegm and snappish reproof, but with that melodious flow of utterance which belongs to thought when it is carried along in a stream of feeling:

"The heart is hard in nature, and unfit For human fellowship, as being void Of sympathy, and therefore dead alike To love and friendship both, that is not pleased With sight of animals enjoying life, Nor feels their happiness augment his own."

His large and tender heart embraces the most every-day forms of human life-the carter driving his team through the wintry storm; the cottager's wife who, painfully nursing the embers on her hearth, while her infants "sit cowering o'er the sparks,"

"Retires, content to quake, so they be warm'd;"

or the villager, with her little ones, going out to pick

"A cheap but wholesome salad from the brook;"

and he compels our colder natures to follow his in its manifold sympathies, not by exhortations, not by telling us to meditate at midnight, to "indulge" the thought of death, or to ask ourselves how we shall "weather an eternal night," _but by presenting to us the object of his compa.s.sion truthfully and lovingly_. And when he handles greater themes, when he takes a wider survey, and considers the men or the deeds which have a direct influence on the welfare of communities and nations, there is the same unselfish warmth of feeling, the same scrupulous truthfulness. He is never vague in his remonstrance or his satire, but puts his finger on some particular vice or folly which excites his indignation or "dissolves his heart in pity," because of some specific injury it does to his fellow-man or to a sacred cause. And when he is asked why he interests himself about the sorrows and wrongs of others, hear what is the reason he gives. Not, like Young, that the movements of the planets show a mutual dependence, and that

"Thus man his sovereign duty learns in this Material picture of benevolence,"

or that-

"More generous sorrow, while it sinks, exalts, And conscious virtue mitigates the pang."

What is Cowper's answer, when he imagines some "sage, erudite, profound,"

asking him "What's the world to you?"

"Much. _I was born of woman_, _and drew milk_ _As sweet as charity from human b.r.e.a.s.t.s_.

I think, articulate, I laugh and weep, And exercise all functions of a man.

How then should I and any man that lives Be strangers to each other?"

Young is astonished that men can make war on each other-that any one can "seize his brother's throat," while

"The Planets cry, 'Forbear.'"

Cowper weeps because

"There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart: _It does not feel for man_."

Young applauds G.o.d as a monarch with an empire and a court quite superior to the English, or as an author who produces "volumes for man's perusal."

Cowper sees his father's love in all the gentle pleasures of the home fireside, in the charms even of the wintry landscape, and thinks-