Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (614 page)

“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,
à 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 attitude 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 passages makes them as fatiguing to the ear as a monotonous chant, which consists of the endless repetition 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 godlike passion 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; Prone 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 anticipated 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 circumstance!  Where is the poem that surpasses 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 unrecumbent 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 passes 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 compassion 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 breasts
. 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 God 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 —

“Happy who walks with him! whom what he finds Of flavor or of scent in fruit or flower, Or what he views of beautiful or grand In nature, from the broad, majestic oak To the green blade that twinkles in the sun,
Prompts with remembrance of a present God
.”

To conclude — for we must arrest ourselves in a contrast that would lead us beyond our bounds.  Young flies for his utmost consolation to the day of judgment, when

         ”Final Ruin fiercely drives Her ploughshare o’er creation;”

when earth, stars, and sun are swept aside,

“And now, all dross removed, Heaven’s own pure day, Full on the confines of our ether, flames: While (dreadful contrast!) far (how far!) beneath, Hell, bursting, belches forth her blazing seas, And storms suphureous; her voracious jaws Expanding wide, and roaring for her prey,”

Dr. Young and similar “ornaments of religion and virtue” passing of course with grateful “applause” into the upper region.  Cowper finds his highest inspiration in the Millennium — in the restoration of this our beloved home of earth to perfect holiness and bliss, when the Supreme

“Shall visit earth in mercy; shall descend Propitious in his chariot paved with love; And what his storms have blasted and defaced For man’s revolt, shall with a smile repair.”