Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (610 page)

In the following July he writes:

“The old gentleman here (I may venture to tell you freely) seems to me to be in a pretty odd way of late — moping, dejected, self-willed, and as if surrounded with some perplexing circumstances.  Though I visit him pretty frequently for short intervals, I say very little to his affairs, not choosing to be a party concerned, especially in cases of so critical and tender a nature.  There is much mystery in almost all his temporal affairs, as well as in many of his speculative theories.  Whoever lives in this neighborhood to see his exit will probably see and hear some very strange things.  Time will show; — I am afraid, not greatly to his credit.  There is thought to be
an irremovable obstruction to his happiness within his walls
,
as well as another without them
; but the former is the more powerful, and like to continue so.  He has this day been trying anew to engage me to stay with him.  No lucrative views can tempt me to sacrifice my liberty or my health, to such measures as are proposed here. 
Nor do I like to
have to do with persons whose word and honor cannot be depended on
.  So much for this very odd and unhappy topic.”

In August Mr. Jones’s tone is slightly modified.  Earnest entreaties, not lucrative considerations, have induced him to cheer the Doctor’s dejected heart by remaining at Welwyn some time longer.  The Doctor is, “in various respects, a very unhappy man,” and few know so much of these respects as Mr. Jones.  In September he recurs to the subject:

“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, pronounced these words, ‘
God 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 manuscripts.  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 sex, 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 passing, 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 passages 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 substitutes 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 antithetic apothegm and rhapsodic climax.  The passages that arrest us in his tragedies are those in which he anticipates some fine passage 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 Cæsar; ‘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.”