“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—
“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.’”