Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (612 page)

“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 space 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 factitious 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, pass 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 assertions 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 associations 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 repetition cloys us here! What periodic potions for the sick, Distemper’d bodies, and distemper’d minds?”

And then he flies off to his usual antithesis:

“In an eternity what scenes shall strike! Adventures thicken, novelties surprise!”

“Earth” means lords and levees, duchesses 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 antithesis, 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:

“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 passages 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 passion; 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 passage 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 nobler 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, lustre, 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 shell,
Yon ambient azure shell
, 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 gods
!”

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 passages 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 superstition, 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 God 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
.”