Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (613 page)

The odiously bad taste of this last clause makes us hope that it is simply a platitude, 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 Passion, 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 godlike 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 God 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 participation 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! 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, Asserts 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 passages 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 surpass the Ninth Night, entitled “Consolation,” especially in the pages where he describes the last judgment — a subject to which, with naïve self-betrayal, he applies phraseology, favored by the exuberant penny-a-liner.  Thus, when God descends, and the groans of hell are opposed by “shouts of joy,” much as cheers and groans contend at a public meeting where the resolutions are
not
passed 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, Assigns 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 hell of hell, a
heaven of heaven
! The goddess, 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 Hell, through all her glooms, Returns, in groans, the melancholy roar.”

This is one of the blessings for which Dr. Young thanks God “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 God delights in.  His crowning aim in the “drama” of the ages, is to vindicate his own renown.  The God of the “Night Thoughts”
is simply Young himself “writ large” — a didactic poet, who “lectures” mankind in the antithetic hyperbole of mortal and immortal joys, earth and the stars, hell 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 passages 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 —