Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (607 page)

The following “symbolical myth” about Louis Philippe is very characteristic of Heine’s manner:

“I remember very well that immediately on my arrival (in Paris) I hastened to the Palais Royal to see Louis Philippe.  The friend who conducted me told me that the king now appeared on the terrace only at stated hours, but that formerly he was to be seen at any time for five francs.  ‘For five francs!’ I cried with amazement; ‘does he then show himself for money?’  ‘No, but he is shown for money, and it happens in this way: There is a society of
claqueurs
,
marchands de contremarques
, and such riff-raff, who offered every
foreigner to show him the king for five francs: if he would give ten francs, he might see the king raise his eyes to heaven, and lay his hand protestingly on his heart; if he would give twenty francs, the king would sing the Marseillaise.  If the foreigner gave five francs, they raised a loud cheering under the king’s windows, and His Majesty appeared on the terrace, bowed, and retired.  If ten francs, they shouted still louder, and gesticulated as if they had been possessed, when the king appeared, who then, as a sign of silent emotion, raised his eyes to heaven and laid his hand on his heart.  English visitors, however, would sometimes spend as much as twenty francs, and then the enthusiasm mounted to the highest pitch; no sooner did the king appear on the terrace than the Marseillaise was struck up and roared out frightfully, until Louis Philippe, perhaps only for the sake of putting an end to the singing, bowed, laid his hand on his heart, and joined in the Marseillaise.  Whether, as is asserted, he beat time with his foot, I cannot say.’”

One more quotation, and it must be our last:

“Oh the women!  We must forgive them much, for they love much — and many.  Their hate is properly only love turned inside out.  Sometimes they attribute some delinquency to us, because they think they can in this way gratify another man.  When they write, they have always one eye on the paper and the other on a man; and this is true of all authoresses, except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who has only one eye.”

The study of men, as they have appeared in different ages and under various social conditions, may be considered as the natural history of the race.  Let us, then, for a moment imagine ourselves, as students of this natural history, “dredging” the first half of the eighteenth century in search of specimens.  About the year 1730 we have hauled up a remarkable individual of the species
divine
— a surprising name, considering the nature of the animal before us, but we are used to unsuitable names in natural history.  Let us examine this individual at our leisure.  He is on the verge of fifty, and has recently undergone his metamorphosis into the clerical form.  Rather a paradoxical specimen, if you observe him narrowly: a sort of cross between a sycophant and a psalmist; a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the “Last Day” and by a creation of peers, who fluctuates between rhapsodic applause of King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah.  After spending “a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets,” after being a hanger-on of the profligate Duke of Wharton, after aiming in vain at a parliamentary career, and angling for pensions and preferment with fulsome dedications and fustian odes, he is a little disgusted with his imperfect success, and has determined to retire from the general mendicancy
business to a particular branch; in other words, he has determined on that renunciation of the world implied in “taking orders,” with the prospect of a good living and an advantageous matrimonial connection.  And no man can be better fitted for an Established Church.  He personifies completely her nice balance of temporalities and spiritualities.  He is equally impressed with the momentousness of death and of burial fees; he languishes at once for immortal life and for “livings;” he has a fervid attachment to patrons in general, but on the whole prefers the Almighty.  He will teach, with something more than official conviction, the nothingness of earthly things; and he will feel something more than private disgust if his meritorious efforts in directing men’s attention to another world are not rewarded by substantial preferment in this.  His secular man believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as characteristic attire for “an ornament of religion and virtue;” hopes courtiers will never forget to copy Sir Robert Walpole; and writes begging letters to the King’s mistress.  His spiritual man recognizes no motives more familiar than Golgotha and “the skies;” it walks in graveyards, or it soars among the stars.  His religion exhausts itself in ejaculations and rebukes, and knows no medium between the ecstatic and the sententious.  If it were not for the prospect of immortality, he considers, it would be wise and agreeable to be indecent or to murder one’s father; and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave.  Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and the brute; the brute is to be humbled by being reminded of its “relation to the stalls,” and frightened into moderation by the contemplation of death-beds and skulls; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this world and exalting the next; and by this double process you get the Christian — “the highest style of man.”  With all this, our new-made divine is an unmistakable poet.  To a clay compounded chiefly of the worldling and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of Promethean fire.  He will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his
astronomical religion and his charnel-house morality, in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive: for this divine is Edward Young, the future author of the “Night Thoughts.”

It would be extremely ill-bred in us to suppose that our readers are not acquainted with the facts of Young’s life; they are among the things that “every one knows;” but we have observed that, with regard to these universally known matters, the majority of readers like to be treated after the plan suggested by Monsieur Jourdain.  When that distinguished
bourgeois
was asked if he knew Latin, he implied, “Oui, mais faîtes comme si je ne le savais pas.”  Assuming, then, as a polite writer should, that our readers know everything about Young, it will be a direct
sequitur
from that assumption that we should proceed as if they knew nothing, and recall the incidents of his biography with as much particularity as we may without trenching on the space we shall need for our main purpose — the reconsideration of his character as a moral and religious poet.

Judging from Young’s works, one might imagine that the preacher had been organized in him by hereditary transmission through a long line of clerical forefathers — that the diamonds of the “Night Thoughts” had been slowly condensed from the charcoal of ancestral sermons.  Yet it was not so.  His grandfather, apparently, wrote himself
gentleman
, not
clerk
; and there is no evidence that preaching had run in the family blood before it took that turn in the person of the poet’s father, who was quadruply clerical, being at once rector, prebendary, court chaplain, and dean.  Young was born at his father’s rectory of Upham in 1681.  We may confidently assume that even the author of the “Night Thoughts” came into the world without a wig; but, apart from Dr. Doran’s authority, we should not have ventured to state that the excellent rector “kissed,
with dignified emotion
, his only son and intended namesake.”  Dr. Doran doubtless knows this, from his intimate acquaintance with clerical physiology and psychology.  He has ascertained that the paternal emotions of prebendaries have a sacerdotal
quality, and that the very chyme and chyle of a rector are conscious of the gown and band.

In due time the boy went to Winchester College, and subsequently, though not till he was twenty-two, to Oxford, where, for his father’s sake, he was befriended by the wardens of two colleges, and in 1708, three years after his father’s death, nominated by Archbishop Tenison to a law fellowship at All Souls.  Of Young’s life at Oxford in these years, hardly anything is known.  His biographer, Croft, has nothing to tell us but the vague report that, when “Young found himself independent and his own master at All Souls, he was not the ornament to religion and morality that he afterward became,” and the perhaps apocryphal anecdote, that Tindal, the atheist, confessed himself embarrassed by the originality of Young’s arguments.  Both the report and the anecdote, however, are borne out by indirect evidence.  As to the latter, Young has left us sufficient proof that he was fond of arguing on the theological side, and that he had his own way of treating old subjects.  As to the former, we learn that Pope, after saying other things which we know to be true of Young, added, that he passed “a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets;” and, from all the indications we possess of his career till he was nearly fifty, we are inclined to think that Pope’s statement only errs by defect, and that he should rather have said, “a foolish youth and
middle
age.”  It is not likely that Young was a very hard student, for he impressed Johnson, who saw him in his old age, as “not a great scholar,” and as surprisingly ignorant of what Johnson thought “quite common maxims” in literature; and there is no evidence that he filled either his leisure or his purse by taking pupils.  His career as an author did not commence till he was nearly thirty, even dating from the publication of a portion of the “Last Day,” in the
Tatler
; so that he could hardly have been absorbed in composition.  But where the fully developed insect is parasitic, we believe the larva is usually parasitic also, and we shall probably not be far wrong in supposing that Young at Oxford,
as elsewhere, spent a good deal of his time in hanging about possible and actual patrons, and accommodating himself to the habits with considerable flexibility of conscience and of tongue; being none the less ready, upon occasion, to present himself as the champion of theology and to rhapsodize at convenient moments in the company of the skies or of skulls.  That brilliant profligate, the Duke of Wharton, to whom Young afterward clung as his chief patron, was at this time a mere boy; and, though it is probable that their intimacy had commenced, since the Duke’s father and mother were friends of the old dean, that intimacy ought not to aggravate any unfavorable inference as to Young’s Oxford life.  It is less likely that he fell into any exceptional vice than that he differed from the men around him chiefly in his episodes of theological advocacy and rhapsodic solemnity.  He probably sowed his wild oats after the coarse fashion of his times, for he has left us sufficient evidence that his moral sense was not delicate; but his companions, who were occupied in sowing their own oats, perhaps took it as a matter of course that he should be a rake, and were only struck with the exceptional circumstance that he was a pious and moralizing rake.

There is some irony in the fact that the two first poetical productions of Young, published in the same year, were his “Epistles to Lord Lansdowne,” celebrating the recent creation of peers — Lord Lansdowne’s creation in particular; and the “Last Day.”  Other poets besides Young found the device for obtaining a Tory majority by turning twelve insignificant commoners into insignificant lords, an irresistible stimulus to verse; but no other poet showed so versatile an enthusiasm — so nearly equal an ardor for the honor of the new baron and the honor of the Deity.  But the twofold nature of the sycophant and the psalmist is not more strikingly shown in the contrasted themes of the two poems than in the transitions from bombast about monarchs to bombast about the resurrection, in the “Last Day” itself.  The dedication of the poem to Queen Anne, Young afterward suppressed, for he was always
ashamed of having flattered a dead patron.  In this dedication, Croft tells us, “he gives her Majesty praise indeed for her victories, but says that the author is more pleased to see her rise from this lower world, soaring above the clouds, passing the first and second heavens, and leaving the fixed stars behind her; nor will he lose her there, he says, but keep her still in view through the boundless spaces on the other side of creation, in her journey toward eternal bliss, till he behold the heaven of heavens open, and angels receiving and conveying her still onward from the stretch of his imagination, which tires in her pursuit, and falls back again to earth.”

The self-criticism which prompted the suppression of the dedication did not, however, lead him to improve either the rhyme or the reason of the unfortunate couplet —

“When other Bourbons reign in other lands, And, if men’s sins forbid not, other Annes.”

In the “Epistle to Lord Lansdowne” Young indicates his taste for the drama; and there is evidence that his tragedy of “Busiris” was “in the theatre” as early as this very year, 1713, though it was not brought on the stage till nearly six years later; so that Young was now very decidedly bent on authorship, for which his degree of B.C.L., taken in this year, was doubtless a magical equipment.  Another poem, “The Force of Religion; or, Vanquished Love,” founded on the execution of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, quickly followed, showing fertility in feeble and tasteless verse; and on the Queen’s death, in 1714, Young lost no time in making a poetical lament for a departed patron a vehicle for extravagant laudation of the new monarch.  No further literary production of his appeared until 1716, when a Latin oration, which he delivered on the foundation of the Codrington Library at All Souls, gave him a new opportunity for displaying his alacrity in inflated panegyric.

In 1717 it is probable that Young accompanied the Duke of Wharton to Ireland, though so slender are the materials for his
biography that the chief basis for this supposition is a passage in his “Conjectures on Original Composition,” written when he was nearly eighty, in which he intimates that he had once been in that country.  But there are many facts surviving to indicate that for the next eight or nine years Young was a sort of
attaché
of Wharton’s.  In 1719, according to legal records, the Duke granted him an annuity, in consideration of his having relinquished the office of tutor to Lord Burleigh, with a life annuity of £100 a year, on his Grace’s assurances that he would provide for him in a much more ample manner.  And again, from the same evidence, it appears that in 1721 Young received from Wharton a bond for £600, in compensation of expenses incurred in standing for Parliament at the Duke’s desire, and as an earnest of greater services which his Grace had promised him on his refraining from the spiritual and temporal advantages of taking orders, with a certainty of two livings in the gift of his college.  It is clear, therefore, that lay advancement, as long as there was any chance of it, had more attractions for Young than clerical preferment; and that at this time he accepted the Duke of Wharton as the pilot of his career.